I've been thinking about dreams lately. Where they come from, how we interact with them, how we can allow or block them, depending on what we need at the time. Even the grandest of dreams are simple at their core, stemming from a desire for connection, creation, love, healing, impact. Most dreams, when you tunnel down to their essence, land on this Venn diagram.
Dreams can get blocked. For a long time, I thought I could wrench myself into productivity. But I'm learning that when things aren't flowing or my energy is low - that's a message. I can try to blast through the message, placate my brain's need to make things happen with new systems or schedules. But that never works for long - a few days, or a few weeks at the most. In the end, if I want to get where I'm going, I have to listen to what's coming to me.
My body gives me information. It's a brilliant tuning fork for my emotional and spiritual state. If there's some feeling I'm trying to repress, my body won't let me go anywhere until I figure it out and process it. If there's a lesson I need, everything will conspire to take me down until I learn it. It's a marvelous and deeply annoying system. It's marvelous how profound it is, when you peer into it. Marvelous that doing what my body and spirit needs has been prioritized over impressive achievements or success or any of the other things my ego finds desperately important.
But when I look at it from a larger perspective - one that doesn't pay any mind to my own admittedly arbitrary goals or schedules - it's a beautiful, shifting network guiding me where I ultimately want to go, passing up things I thought I needed or wanted so it can take me toward what will truly fill me up. The world is a brilliant system of information and if you trust the random influx of messages that come to you, they can lead you like fireflies in the dark toward what you most want. But you have to trust what comes and, most of all, you have to trust yourself.
Last week, a woman on Twitter wanted a book. I read her tweet and thought, "I can afford that. Should I do it? I should." So I did. I got this in the mail from the author of the book a few days later. Twitter is its own brand of magic.
Dreams will reshuffle and reform. My dreams center most around love and creation. If I try to force those dreams, they skitter away. But if I sink into the messages that my body and my soul and the world around me send, I am pulled onto a path I didn't expect but feels bigger and lighter than any path I could have dreamed on my own.