Your Elaborate Dreams, For When Real Life Is Very Hard

May 17, 2019,

We all remember that point in time.

Where we were standing. Who we were with. Our thought process and most important?

The eventual outcome of our decision.

It is that moment in time where your life, at least at that point forward, permanently changed.

You can savor it if it changed for the much better. Some even say that getting fired from a job was the best thing for them because afterwards they embarked upon their new journey that brought them closer to what they wanted out of life.

Even helped them to make more money.

If that is your life experience, feel very, very fortunate. You certainly appreciate how things could have gone differently. Sideways. But it didn’t and now you are living closer to the life that you want.

If that is your major life intersection story, congratulations.

Then there are the rest of us who fall into the other category.

As we often do, because we feel it is the most powerful story teller, we speak to the personal experiences of those in our circle. Very real life stories.

We have a friend, when he was in his twenties contemplated three possible futures and clearly chose the wrong one.

At that point in time he was single, free, had money in the bank, was in good health, employed with a media company and most of all was very happy.

He then married the wrong person and joined the wrong religion and his life slowly and excruciatingly went downhill and he has never been happy or healthy since.

Without dwelling on his plight, which seems to get worse with age, we pose the question, if you are trapped in a situation that is complex, since it sometimes involves children and long-term relationships and are miserable, what can you temporarily do to ease the pain?

Dream.

Dream powerfully.

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Why? It temporarily allows you to escape the regrets and pain. It possibly offers another benefit that we’ll briefly speak to later.

Where can we get comparisons? As we so often do, let’s turn to film.

Pan’s Labyrinth is a 2006 dark fantasy drama film written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, and starring Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Doug Jones, and Ariadna Gil. It was produced and distributed internationally by Esperanto Filmoj and Warner Bros., while Picturehouse handled US distribution rights.

The story takes place in Spain during the summer of 1944, five years after the Spanish Civil War, during the early Francoist period.

The narrative intertwines this real world with a mythical world centered on an overgrown, abandoned labyrinth and a mysterious faun creature, with whom the main character, Ofelia, interacts.

Ofelia’s stepfather, the Falangist Captain Vidal, hunts the Spanish Maquis who fight against the Francoist regime in the region, while Ofelia’s pregnant mother Carmen grows increasingly ill. Ofelia meets several strange and magical creatures who become central to her story, leading her through the trials of the old labyrinth garden.

You see, Pan’s real life is awful, growing worse and there seems to be no escape. So our sweet star does what many children would do under dire circumstances.

Retreat into a dream world.

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Her imagination is incredible and the labyrinth that she has created is her only means to escape.

Sometimes we really need that.

In her November 11, 2009 article in Psychology Today, Ms. Ilana Simons Ph.D. shares, “Freud essentially called dreams those poems we tell ourselves at night in order to experience our unconscious wishes as real. Dreams allow us to be what we cannot be, and to say what we do not say, in our more repressed daily lives.”

In our friend’s real life story, one of the ways he has chosen to escape is to dream during his acupuncture sessions which hopefully will improve his health and temporarily his state of mind.

When he is awake, so many aspects of life remind him of his regrets and failures and they are hard to dismiss.

Dreams typically involve elements from our waking lives like known people or familiar locations but, similar to Pan’s Labyrinth, they often take on a fantastical feel.

In our friend’s case, though waking meditative dreams, they allow him to act out certain scenarios that would never be possible in real life.

“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience.”…Robert Fulghum

During his dreams, he can dream the about the life that he lost, before he made his life altering decision.

There he goes back to the point in time at that intersection and makes a different decision. He then takes the dream a step further and begins to imagine the different people he would have met, the alternate woman that he would have mutually fallen in love with and the life that grew out of that.

He then cascades towards the children they have together and, unlike his real wife, the wife in his dreams is often on the same page with him in terms of raising children.

Mostly he enjoys observing all of them sitting down at their favorite restaurants and dining on the food that they love while sharing stories together and laughing profusely.

What a dream.

So what can be another benefit of dreaming while you are awake, deep in meditation?

In some cases they can provide you with a vision of a future life that you would like to have and, especially if you are young enough, provide you with a road map as to how you can take more risks so that you begin to transition into that new life.

It is important to dream about the life you want and keep taking steps to get there.

We wish that our friend’s story had a happy ending, but it doesn’t.

He now has a permanent affliction that limits his dining experience. He will never have the family life that he wanted and he has found it impossible to escape his feelings of extreme underachieving and failure.

Yes you can change your future but it is impossible to devoid yourself of living a life that you were never supposed to live.

He can’t escape to his memories because so many of them are unpleasant.