How can you give that one little dream just a little bit more space in your life?

What is that thing that makes you light up at the idea of doing it?

What kind of activity do you feel that itch-under-your-skin to get done, and done right?

When you’re feeling idle or delayed by some part of the day-to-day, what is it you daydream about accomplishing?

How could you pursue that thing, just a little more?

How could you fit a few more minutes, or perhaps an hour, into your day or week?

How much brighter might your life be with more of your dreams alive in it?

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If dreams help us through creative problem-solving, I’m wondering if I could replicate that integrative process while awake and working.

Today was a bit of a haze as three nights’ difficulty sleeping caught up with me. However, I was particularly productive in a bit of analysis I’d been working on for a couple of days, as a bigger picture started clicking into place.

It made me think of how useful dreams can be for working out what’s been facing us during the day. Since I was feeling almost half-asleep, I’m wondering whether I had a bit of that dreamstate at work there, helping me through.

I don’t plan to stay sleep-deprived to test this theory out. Still, perhaps I can get one of the “brainwave frequency” music files playing that purports to support Theta Waves to try out while working. I tend to be fairly susceptible to sound frequencies, so I’m curious whether it will make me sleepy, introspective, or just relaxed as I enjoy the sounds!

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It’s not only a question of what dreams may come. More importantly, will we know the difference?

I’ve been up for over eighteen hours, and so much of them seem to have been the same one. Before slipping off to sleep, I’m pausing to recognize how very dreamlike this day and night have been.

Now that I’m going into “real” dreams, I wonder… will they feel like I’ll have been awake the whole time?

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I figure it’s time to give another go at lucid living.

I’ve been thinking again about lucid dreaming, and of how my dreams tend to get bogged down in the same distracting tedium in the ways that can get my days off-track.  (Hence me not doing things like posting in a blog…)  It’s more than a bit annoying, and I’m done with it.

So last night, I said that I wanted to see if perhaps the hard boundaries between dreaming and wakefulness might be shifted around a bit, since they haven’t been that far different in theme.  I wanted to see about having more of the conscious world in my dreams, and bring more of my dreamtime into my waking world.

I don’t quite remember my dreams last night, but they did feel particularly mundane.  And my day today, while busy, remained distinctly dreamlike.  In a comforting, almost blissful way at times, now that I stop to think about it.

So no, how about seeing if I can bring out more of the comforting peace and focus, and less of the distracting tedium in both my conscious and subconscious states?

I think it’s worth a shot.

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ALL journeys begin with a single step.

I was re-reading this article the other day about steps to transform one’s approach to homemaking into something completely self-sufficient and sustainable. The author was describing a time when she gave a talk before a group that was very much “on the grid“, and at the end of it the host asked if she could distill it down to just a couple things that people could start with if they couldn’t make the full switch.

Her condescension dripped even in the recollection. She was apparently somewhat offended at the idea, but managed to rattle off three things including using a clothesline rather than a dryer. The audience was polite, but she didn’t seem to feel they were really engaged with her concept.

Then one person remained behind and said that he’d like to do more, but he can’t hang laundry out. In their part of the world, such things were banned by housing ordinances or homeowners associations. She seemed a little understanding, but not really. Her goals for peoples’ adoption of her ideals came across as just too big to her for her to be able to see around them.

I’m not recounting this to run her down, but as a framing for what’s been on my mind. You can’t do it all. You won’t likely do it all. So do what you can.

Take a step today, just anything that’s closer to where you’d like to be. Try it for two weeks at least, or however long it takes to get it going. Then pick the next step, then the next.

Yeah, it’d be great if we could all dive right in and do everything we feel we ought to. But that’s not usually how life works, and the thought that we have to do that in order to be true to our goals just seems to be keeping us all, collectively, from even starting to move forward.

So… move forward. Then keep moving.

You’ll get there.

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There’s something distinctly wrong with raising whole generations to deny our truest necessities.

I’ve got some words from Cary Tennis that I just ran into again, from his advice column on Sunday. Someone was asking about whether it was better to stay in a relationship that wasn’t really feeding her personal happiness, but his response is, as usual, very much broader than just the question asked.

I think it’s a great reminder to keep in touch with what, deep down, we truly want and need. And to acknowledge them and work with them without condemnation. It’s not selfish to be happy and cared for. It’s our job, because the world needs us at our best, and nobody else can do for us what we need to do for ourselves.

I think it is legitimate to act according to your deepest and truest necessities, because your deepest and truest necessities do not spring from you and are not controlled by you; they spring from where you exist in the world; they come to you as instructions from the world and are thus not selfish and narrow as you might fear; they are broad and universal and thus poetic and heroic.

They are bigger than any narrowly conceived right-or-wrong principle.

– Cary Tennis, Since You Asked 10/25/09

How to do that, you may ask? Well since I’m actually putting this up onto the blog a good while after I first shared it, I’m going to continue the quote with a really great paragraph:

This framework I suggest says: Trust in the community of things beyond you; be in harmony with your deepest self, because that is the bigger way of truth; it is the bigger way; it may seem full of tragedy and apparent misstep, of apparent moral failing; it may bring down upon your head the judgment of others, of family and loved ones and later your own offspring; it may make you seem to be a person of questionable judgment; it may cause you to be an outcast. But if it is true to your destiny in this deep sense — which can only be discovered by relentless self-inquiry and relentless allowing-in of the necessary, by allowing the earth to move you toward the place you belong, by trusting that it’s not just about you and your decision but about where the world requires you to be — then I think in the end there is some justice in whatever decision you might make.

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The trouble can also be finding the right questions to begin with.

Time enough for a quick thought about not getting caught up in trying to settle on the perfect answer…

The trouble with life isn’t that there is no answer, it’s that there are so many answers.
– Ruth Benedict

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Acceptance and gratitude for where you’re at doesn’t close the door to where you want to be — it opens it.

I was thinking today about how people can get caught up in thoughts of the life they want. Some people just imagine being able to spend all day every day lounging by the beach with perpetually refreshed drinks, true. Yet I think most people have dreams and aspirations they truly hope to someday realize, but aren’t in a place yet to do that.

The problem comes when jump from the ideal to the real seems to be across such a deep, deep gulf that we end up feeling farther away from them than is really fair. As a result, in wishing for the ideal, we can feel a harsh separation from the real, or at least wanting to be separated from it. And that’s the problem, because that wish would separate us from where we actually are, when we’re actually there, and able to take actual action to move to where we want to go.

There’s no other way to get where we want to go without first moving our feet where they’re at. To live the lives we want, we must live the lives we have. As much as we can, it only helps us to take a moment and see and appreciate where we’re at, so we can better see how it will help us along.

Of course, Leo Tolstoy put it far more succinctly: “If you want to be happy, be.”

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Take extra care before hocking your dreams.

Never, ever, ever make a decision about something dear to you out of weariness. Ever. Only ill can come of it. Anything worthy of a place in your heart is worthy of enough time and patience to do right by it.

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I thought about offering up some answers, but I just couldn’t justify them.

I recently read about a study that talked about how we rationalize our lives. It concluded that we didn’t necessarily make the choices we preferred, but the ones we were able to rationalize to our satisfaction. One of the researchers put it this way:

Everyone feels that as a rational creature he must be able to give a connected, logical, and continuous account of himself, his conduct, and opinions, and all his mental processes are unconsciously manipulated and revised to that end.

– Ernest Jones

That is, we’ll choose what we can rationalize, and barring that, we’ll find a way to rationalize what we already chose.

Rationalization can be fairly harmless, especially if we apply TRUE rationality and really examine what we want and why — that can even be beneficial. But there’s things we’ll think, do, say, desire, and so on… that don’t have what we’ll feel comfortable calling a “good reason”. What’ll we do then? What will we think of ourselves? How will we move forward?

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