How Would You Play Out Your Dream?

I had a dream this morning that has me thoughtful. I dreamed I followed a young Goth fellow to an apartment. It was where his aunt, a woman in her late thirties with short dark hair and clad in a sleeveless dress with dazzling jewelry and high heels, lived. She welcomed him with pleasure, then ushered him back to a living room. They had a gray cat who seemed as bent on some activity as they. While this cat capably and enthusiastically shut sliding doors the young fellow propped himself in a wing back chair and started reading a book. In the meantime the aunt turned on and off lights to create an atmosphere similar to a cabaret. She picked up a microphone and started to sing a jazz tune.

It was then I understood two things. She was playing at one of her personal dreams, to be a cabaret singer. But perhaps more significant, as I wondered why she did not do more to make the living room look like a cabaret, I realized she didn't need to. She had what she wanted and needed, a chance to play at her dream. After that, her imagination could fill in the rest. It came to me during the dream and when I awoke that we all can do the same. We can find the elements of a dream, assemble them, then fill in the rest with our creative and inventive minds.

This reminds me of Barbara Sher's book Wishcraft: How To Get What You Really Want which I read about 25 years ago. The wisdom in that book boils down to "Figure out what it is about your dream that you want, then find the ways you can create that." Part of Sher's contention is that we seem to believe that dreams are always beyond our reach. She gave the example of a woman who dreamed to become an opera star. At her age it was far too late to start voice lessons. But working with Sher the woman identified what she wanted in her life that she interpreted as the operatic ball of wax. It came down to the lights, artistry, excitement and pomp. The woman realized she could get this simply by working with the opera and wound up getting a job as a scenery painter. She was deliriously happy. I achieved my own dream through acting on what I learned from that book. Within a year and a half of reading it, my first book, Loving the Goddess Within, was published and in the window of a new age bookstore. Soon after I fulfilled the essence of my dream, i.e. taking a book I wrote out of the library.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

This quote from John Lennon is part of the message of my dream, but it is more insightful even that that. The kernel of this idea is that we don't realize how esy it can be just to get into reality what it is we really wanted. The aunt in my dream wanted the experience of b eing cabaret singer, so she made it happen. Her unlikely confederate, her Goth nephew, "got it". What surprised me about my dream once I knew that was what it was, is that I realized even as I was watching the woman that the added elements I thought she could have managed.. more of a spotlight type light on her, a piano, cabaret props, was my idea of what she needed, not hers!

Of course now that has me wondering what it is I really want. I have achieved more than most people, and I don't mean that in terms of some level of success. Through my own determination I have two books I can take out of the library, among other fulfilled dreams. Is there something I am longing for now that I have overlooked or thought required some difficult to achieve step? Could it be my desire to live in County Wicklow in Ireland? Is it wanting to build an Anglo Saxon village? Could it be to go to England and do all the research my little heart longs to do?

I see my tasks as whittling down my list to just one or perhaps looking for what the common thread is in them, then figuring out how to achieve the essence of my dream.

It occurred to me as well that the aunt in my dream might be able to achieve her own with the help of others. The Wishcraft book was also about setting up groups to help each other explore one's dreams, but think also how we can make them happen. What if the aunt had a group who would come to her living room and enjoy the cabaret along with her Goth nephew?

I have two questions for you:

1. What are the elements of your own dream you can make happen yourself, so you can play at it rather than denying it to yourself thanks to unrealistic goals?

2. Want to help me and others like us explore the same questions?

Who knows what we could accomplish!