Dream Theories: The Fantasies You Hide From

Can we impact our waking worlds through dreams? Does being conscious while we sleep make us more aware when we wake? Does what we imagine challenge what is real? According to lucid dreaming concepts–yes. Dream stories reflect our waking emotions and hopes and fears. Embracing our fantasies inspires us to resolve our real-world challenges. It’s all connected. It’s all “truth.” It’s all us.

In Secret Legacy and Dark Legacy, I take this concept to the extreme. I send psychics into unsuspecting innocents minds to program and test dream behavior the sleeper is unaware is taking place, laying the seeds for homicidal daydreams to later be remote-triggered, making  the “host” mind a walking, untracable time bomb.

dangerous dreams

Not so uplifting a concept, but it was a totally cool variation to write ;o) And in both books, Sarah and Maddie Temple’s dream work is not only personal, but spinning out of control. They can’t save their waking minds, their legacy, or an innocent child whose gifts are being manipulated by government scientists, until Sarah confronts and conquers the deadly dream images she’s run from since she was a little girl.

Luckily, the challenges we face are less dire, but there’s still power in our dreams. There’s power in being aware and in control of our sleeping minds’ journeys and messages. Realistic or normal or fantastical, there’s the potential for great revelations waiting for us in our sleeping worlds. Plugging into our dreams more lucidly can be exhilarating.

I’m one of those people who realized early in life that I could be conscious in dreams. There were times, even as a child, when I knew I was thinking and feeling in an altered, virtual place that was only a reflection of my waking life, and all the while I somehow knew I was asleep.It started out as fun. Freeing. There was a dreamlike quality to everything, and for a girl with a vivid, overactive imagination, what could be better!

Then, around the time I was in college and my computer programming and math classes kept me up late most nights with advanced algorithms and problem sets to puzzle through, I realized that my dreams were working overtime for me even after my conscious mind turned off.I’d fall asleep with an unsolved problem on my mind, and too often to be a coincidence would wake the next morning with the next piece of the puzzle waiting for me.

advanced math

Not every time, and at this point I was too tired and over scheduled to be aware of what my mind was doing. I didn’t remember the dreams, but that part wasn’t important.I began to believe in what was happening, and it became part of my process–shutting down when I was too wired to do any more conscious good, and trusting that the process would keep working unconsciously while my brain rested.

It was an emotional connection, that trust. And it’s become part of my creative routine for novel writing now. I feed my mind while awake and believe in whatever new ideas are waiting for me on the other side of sleep. And now, years later, I write about the same type of emotional connection between the conscious and the unconscious mind in the first two books of my Legacy series. Who knew that’s where all of this was headed, back when I was a little girl, dreaming of oceans and waterfalls and flying free above crystal clear waves?

I will forever take the time to embrace the imagination and creativity that it takes to harness my dreams. There will never be a time when I’m not aware of all that is unseen and yet infinitely powerful around me. Because I’ve experienced how powerful they can be–I work to remember and participate actively in my dreams. Fears and anxieties and hopes and desires and warnings come to me as I sleep. And my lifelong comfort level with my unconscious, dreaming mind allows me to process them.

Just like my Legacy Series characters learn to, I tell myself that the fantasies that come to me when I sleep aren’t real, even though they’re valuable. I watch them unfold and participate and even guide their progress as much as they’ll let me, through the emotions and the unknown that I’m not always capable of dealing with when I’m awake. And through it all, I ask questions and experiment, confident the whole time that the journey will end with me safely on the other side, back in the reality waiting for me there.

I don’t hide from the magic waiting for me when my conscious mind rests.

I’ll get more technical about lucid dreaming in my next Dream Theory post. Both about the dreaming techniques I created for the Legacy Series, and their foundation in modern parapsychology. But for today, I’m challenging you to think about your own dream work. Your connection to your sleeping mind’s power. Your awareness that there’s more feeding your conscious behavior than you’re aware of.

What’s holding you back from exploring the amazing worlds waiting for you as you dream?

dream tree

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2 Responses to “Dream Theories: The Fantasies You Hide From”

  1. Advanced algorithms? I couldn’t even work out the most basic algebra! I could never get it through my head how a letter could equal a number.

    The books sound great :)

  2. This reminds me that last night I dreamed I had a pet butterfly, and I was walking around at a party with fabulous handmade treats wondering which one to take for my butterfly, because I’d forgotten to feed it in a long time. And I kept eating them myself… Calling Dr. Freud!

    Your new series sounds fascinating!

    Jen

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