No B.S Friday: Dreams are very weird. But then so is the waking world.
“Oww! Get off me. Guys!”
I had just gobbled up a weak header off a corner kick, playing goalie for my local team of legends. But then someone had tripped over me. And another. And before I knew it, I was lying at the bottom of a scrum, with my arm pinned painfully behind my back.”
“Guys. Stop! You’re breaking my arm! Ref! What the hell are you doing?”
And then I woke up.
I woke up to find that I’m sleeping on my own arm.
So now my arm’s asleep and I’m awake. And while I’m laying there, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the blood to painfully trickle back in to my arm, I’m thinking, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened.
Like that dream where my shoes were too tight and I woke up and found that the sheets had been tucked in extra tight and were crimping my toes.
Or the telephone ringing in your dream just before it starts ringing in the waking world. Or the smell of bacon cooking in the café of your dreams, to find it’s someone cooking up in your own kitchen.
This is the pattern. While I’m asleep, something happens to my physical body, and my dreams construct a story to make sense of the physical experience.
I also know that I do this in the real world.
For example, if I have a coffee and my adrenals fire off, then I’m convinced that I’m having a great time doing whatever I’m doing. Checking emails. Whee.
Or if I haven’t been sleeping so well, or I’m a bit sick, or a bit hungover, suddenly I’m surrounded by jerk-offs. And I’m not the one being unreasonable, they started it.
The causality flows the opposite way to the way we’d expect.
We think that outside world events create our moods.
But often our moods create outside world events – or at least the meaning we attach to them; the way we interpret them.
But my sense is that this is more than a story about perception and meaning – a glass half full or a glass half empty kind of thing.
It’s not just about the way we layer subjective interpretation over a singular objective truth.
It’s that the causality sometimes actually just does run the other way – like a river flowing backwards.
We feel. We create a reality consistent with that feeling.
We get a very fast and fluid version of it in our dreams. My arm is hurting, I create a reality where it makes sense that my arm is hurting.
I wonder if what we are experiencing in the waking world is just a very dense and slow version of the dreamscape.
And if this is true – and who am I to say – but if this is true, then it means that we have work to do at the level of feeling.
It might be why things like gratitude practices can be so powerful. Not only do they put us in a more positive frame of mind which means we have a more positive experience of being alive.
But we are subtly changing the inputs we are putting into the consistency engine as well.
I’m not sure there’s anyway to know for sure.
But if it changes your experience, and potentially changes your reality as well, why wouldn’t you give it a crack?
JG.