Somewhere in My Dreams

The Color of Dreams

Somewhere in my dreams, an hour or two ago perhaps, I dreamt I had a crystal. 

It was pure.  It was the color of liquid silver.  It was buried in my heart.  I also had another crystal.  It, too, was pure.  But its color was of the finest gold.  I dreamt I had a third crystal.  It was not pure.  But it was a beautiful color.  It was the color of dreams. 

I had all of them in my heart, but the one that stood out was the one that was the color of dreams.

The color of dreams is not a color that is real.  But it is something that wants to become real, to be brought to fulfillment and to be desired profoundly.  Something bubbling up from the unconscious, something that purifies the good qualities of life, something that makes us a brilliant species is the color of dreams. 

It is not only our baser instincts that bubble up from the unconscious.  It is also what brings joy, beauty, love, grandeur, wonder, and awe.  What brings stillness, quietude, peace, and tranquility bubbles up also.  It is what frames the world, builds bridges and communities, what seals the tribal connections. 

 

What would you say if I told you that there are two kinds of purity:  conscious and unconscious?  Sometimes we experience one, sometimes the other.  A conscious purity is like a pure crystal, like a perfect diamond or emerald or sapphire.  An unconscious purity is one where we can’t see it yet, can’t feel it yet, can’t measure it yet, but we know it is there, illuminating humankind.  All things truly sublime are in this category.  The things we search for all our lives are in this category.  The unconscious holds our dearest beliefs, our quietest peace, our deepest loves, our most profound life goals – the ones that we dare not admit to ourselves, the stuff of the soul.

Tranquility

So what is the soul?  The soul is like a marvelous packet of information and energy.  The soul lives with us throughout our lives.  Imagine it to be like spiritual DNA, carrying the information we will need to survive.  Just like we need bones and blood and a heart and a brain, among other organs, we also need love.  We need justice.  We need freedom.  We need beauty.  We need joy.  We need a sense of wonder and awe.  We need experiences of grandeur.  We need tranquility, rest, a sense of calm, time to restore ourselves.  We need goals that uplift us, that inspire us, that connect us with others.  We need communities to dwell in, we need bridges between communities, we need a frame, a way of thinking about life that nurtures us.

The soul provides the information about the relative importance of each of these as well as about our deepest goals for our lives.  We begin life with little awareness of what our goals are nor how we can achieve them.  We stumble into this awareness little by little over the course of many years.  The marvelous part about dreams is that from time to time they bring us little tidbits from the unconscious aspects of our souls that help us figure out where we are going  and tips on how to get there.  When we go in this direction, using these tips, somewhere down the line, the next ones show up.

 

I had one of these experiences quite long ago now.  My mother came to me in a dream.  She was dead, and I knew she was dead.  She was accompanied by my grandma, her mother, who was also dead, and I knew she, too, was dead.  I arrived at a spot on a road, and then they arrived.  My mother was not in the shape of a human being, rather that of a spirit, an amorphous being of light.  Still I recognized her almost instantaneously, though I had not seen her for the previous 21 years as she died while I was still an infant.  She spoke very lovingly to me, telling me many things I needed to know.  Many of those things I would not remember when I awoke, but the thing I remembered most clearly was that when we hugged each other, I felt, for the first time since her death, that I was a fully loved and fully mothered person.  Not just someone who had been loved partially by two different mothers, but rather someone who was wholly and completely loved by my mother. 

I was about to enter graduate school in a few months when this dream happened. Even when this dream happened, I felt a part of me was restored, a part that I think of as soulful.  For years I had had to pretend to be someone else’s daughter, or at least act like it.  My mother gave me back my essence, and I was going to need my essence to get through graduate school and through life.  And with that essence came my memories of her, bits and pieces at first, but more and more over the years.  I had a great deal of healing to do, and that healing would begin in earnest in graduate school.  Her presence in a dream served as an arrow pointing me in the right direction as to where I would find healing.  It also showed me what I would need to study in graduate school.  Her presence taught me that I would need to learn to understand the soul.  The whole experience inspired me hugely.

 

Pointing the Way

 

One’s essence is the place inside, if you will, that can receive the soul, its wisdom and its instructions. 

Essence is who we are when we are born. 

For me, that essence resides in my heart, although for others it is possible it resides elsewhere. 

One’s essence recognizes one’s soul, makes room for the soul in one’s life, aligns the personality with the soul as much as possible, and brings the unconscious tidbits to the surface. 

For the baser parts of ourselves, the essence brings them up to refine them, to purify what is too base for the rest of one’s life. 

The essence also brings to bear on our lives that which is already pure: love, joy, beauty, grandeur, wonder, and awe. 

It guides us toward tranquility and rest when these are needed.  

It connects us with our deepest goals, with our community, with beliefs that are beneficial for our lives. 

It also helps us build bridges.  The essence is our point of connection with our soul, a point that exists and then evolves in the very earliest part of life.

 

What is the color of your dreams? 

Have you ever had dreams that guided you? 

Have you ever had other soulful types of events that have given you direction or tips? 

Do you recognize your essence? 

How about your soul?

Delicious Peace