Rhena Writes

Tag: dreams

  • The impossible chocolate bar.

    Daily writing prompt
    Describe your dream chocolate bar.
    View all responses

    I am a study in contrasts. Or perhaps extremes is the word I mean.

    I enjoy an Aero bar. Which is a bit confounding as it’s the pockets of air — the absence of chocolate — that make it appealing to me. Or perhaps it’s the combination of that which is there and that which is not that makes it unique.

    Or that here, in the States, it’s hard to come by British candy bars. Perhaps it’s that the Aero bar is a treat here in the land of Hershey and Mars.

    Certainly, my other favorite chocolate (are we meant to just describe one?) is the chocolates that I’ve only had from Narita Airport. And these Royce chocolates aren’t airy at all. They are dense and rich and I can’t really eat more than one or two in a sitting. OK, who am I kidding? I could eat an entire box but I restrain myself because I know it won’t be until another trip through Japan that I’ll be able to enjoy them again. (Needless to say, these chocolates, are, like most things these days readily available on-line, but I choose to ignore this ready availability. Convenience kills flavor and my enjoyment. This is about the dream chocolate bar and I prefer to live in the fantasy.) They are a velvety smooth ganache. Simple and elegant.

    They are, in other words, at the other end of the spectrum from the Aero bar.

    Would it be possible to combine these two into one chocolate bar? The pockets of air with the heavy denseness of the Royce chocolates? Perhaps.

    Or perhaps the idea behind a dream is that it is imagining the impossible. Perhaps having conceived of the idea of the dream chocolate bar is as good as having experienced it.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • Myself.

    Daily writing prompt
    Who would you like to talk to soon?
    View all responses

    I wrote last week about three books about dreams and dreaming and an experience I had with learning more about myself and creative problem solving through my dreams.

    I’ve been writing down my dreams when I remember them. From time to time, I’ll think about what I want to dream about and remind myself to try to write them down after I turn out the light and as I’m falling asleep.

    I’ve wanted to lucid dream and I’ve tried a few practices towards that goal. A few times a day, I checked in to ask myself, “am I dreaming?” The goal here is to prime my brain to ask myself that question in a dream state. I also read that one way that people lucid dream is that they prime their brains to recognize that they are in a dream. Things are often “off” in dreams and if we can recognize that things are not quite right, then we can recognize that we are in a dream and assume control of the dream. As for the things that are commonly off in dream (apparently, according to what I read) is that dreamers are in buildings that no longer exist, they are conversing with people who had already died, or their hands aren’t quite right — they might have too many fingers or not enough or they might just look a bit wrong. (Apparently, hands are so complex that we have a hard time recalling them in all of their detail.)

    I often dream of my childhood home, which has since been torn down. I thought that this was the perfect way to get myself into lucid dreaming. And I tried to prime my brain to remember that when I see that home, it’s not real and therefore must be a dream. Several mornings, when I wrote down my dreams from the night before, I described dreaming of my childhood home followed by the question, “Why didn’t I recognize that was a dream???” I was getting a bit frustrated.

    So I set aside all of that. I didn’t really set aside the “goal” of lucid dreaming but, rather, I decided to trust that my mind was doing what it needed to do whilst dreaming regardless of whether I remembered or not and regardless of whether or not I knew I was dreaming. I still was writing down dreams when I remembered them, but I wasn’t letting it bother me when I didn’t. I was confident that I was still dreaming. I was confident that my mind was still doing what it needed to do to take care of me regardless of whether or not I could put the experiences into language.

    In other words, I let go.

    This letting go, this distinct feeling of ungrasping, this trust in myself …. all of that is central to what happened to me next.

    Last night, I dreamt that I was in the driveway of my home. There was a lot going on. Different people visiting, all these cars parked all over the place, more people arriving with camping chairs. I was getting progressively annoyed by all of this. In the dream, I was talking to a few people. As I’ve mentioned before, it doesn’t really matter who these people are in waking life. They are all dream representations of different parts of my personality or different things on my mind. I was talking to one person and suddenly I looked up at my house. We renovated our house a few years ago but in the dream, the house looked like it did PRE renovation.

    I started to say that to the person I was talking to, “look, my house looks….” and then I’m pretty sure I gasped in the dream. “That means I’m dreaming!” I said. Even though I was dreaming I still said “excuse me” to the person I was talking to and then I launched myself into the air and started to fly.

    Especially when I was younger, I’d often have flying dreams, but they involved a fair amount of effort. And I was often flying to get away from something threatening. In this dream, it was completely effortless and exhilarating. I wasn’t trying to escape. I was simply being.

    In fact, I think that I was SO excited that my excitement woke me up.

    Dreams in general feel like I am speaking to myself. I’m having conversations with different parts of myself often towards getting to know them all better and, as I mentioned before, often towards some sort of problem solving.

    Prior to this experience, I wasn’t even aware that I felt that part of me was unavailable to myself. I think that this is a very western freudian belief system — that we have a “deeper” self that is actually controlling us. In other words, this whole idea of repressing our true selves and feelings.

    I woke up realizing that this isn’t true. It was as if this dream dug out and released this false belief system that had been implanted in there by western “culture”.

    Last night, my lucid dream felt like a “break through” in the sense that I can talk to myself, my WHOLE self without words or language. I experienced a sense of wholeness in the lucid dream, a feeling that has carried over into my waking self.

    I am not a mystery to myself.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post about daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • A map towards myself

    Daily writing prompt
    What gives you direction in life?
    View all responses

    I am a cartographer, constantly looking for the streets and paths, coastlines and rock formations that both define me and are markers to the paths into a deeper understanding of myself. All roads lead to me and I’m currently bouncing between three often intersecting passageways on my journey to myself: body, mind, and spirit.

    Body: I listen to my body. Here’s how. I lie or sit in relative stillness or whatever type of stillness my body is asking for. I focus on my breath. The depth. The texture. The smoothness or bumpiness. I do this without judgment. My breath communicates a lot to me about the state of my body. Where is there tension? I center my body.

    Here’s an example from my morning walk with my dog of prioritizing my body. It’s very hot here right now. In spite of my light clothes and my hat and it still being relatively early in the day, I was sweating and uncomfortable as I walked along the sunny sidewalk to the nearby park. I was looking forward to walking through the cool freshly cut grass in a shady spot of the field. There was a couple already at the park with their dog off leash. Past mornings, when I have seen an off-leash dog in the park, I have gone another way even if that other way is less comfortable or convenient for me. But today, my body was insistent, craving the shady spot on the field, so I continued on. I listened to my body. There was no run in with the other dog or her owner’s. My dog and I got to enjoy the cool air of the part of the field lined with trees. The people there watched me the entire time I was walking through the field, but I just kept doing what I was doing. And here’s what I learned: I am allowed to take up space with my body. I am allowed to enjoy a walk through the park. And I can trust myself and my body.

    Mind: My mind is curious. I keep it engaged with reading and learning. And lately, I’ve been learning more about my mind by engaging more actively with my sleeping dreams. Here’s how I do it.

    1. I prime my mind both during the day and right before I go to sleep, telling myself that I am going to remember my dreams.
    2. I keep a notebook and pen next to my bed.
    3. When I wake up — whether that’s in the middle of the night — or in the morning, I jot down a few notes about any dreams that I remember.
    4. Later in the day, I use the notes to write a more detailed description of the dream. I focus on both the images and the feelings. And then I free write about what the dream is revealing to me about me. It’s both a very informative and liberating practice. And it turns out, I’m pretty fascinating.

    There are variations to this practice including priming myself to lucid dream (in other words to realizing that I’m dreaming and to consciously control the dream) and to posing a question or a problem to my dream self. It’s pretty remarkable the answers and the solutions that have come up in my dreaming state.

    Spirit: My body has created life and now I offer my spirit opportunities to be creative too. I write. I make music. I create art. I create moments and myself too. I daydream. And I return to my body, my breath, my dreams. Yes, I know that those are pathways I’ve mentioned above under “body” and “mind”. But these three parts are always connected, like a three-legged stool creating a solid base for the center of myself.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. My writing is offered freely here and I’m also grateful for financial support.