That Fragile & Membraneous Passageway Between Dreams and Waking Life

Sometimes people tell me that they don't have dreams, and I don't always tell them this, but I always think it:

"it's not that you don't have dreams, it's just that you don't remember them."

Most times I don't tell them because 1.) they weren't looking for advice, 2.) it's like blaming a victim, only 3.) they don't understand what a victim them are.  A dreamless person feels to me like the mark of Cain - a perennial homelessness.

The good news is that you have dreams, you just aren't accessing them.

One of the things that I have become meticulous about in my midlife is cultivating that fragile & membraneous passageway between dreams and waking life.

I do all that I can to make sure that the passageway stays open, and is carefully attended to.  The thing is there isn't just one passageway.  There are many.  Sometimes dreams can make their ways into waking life by way of their similarity to other dreams (the genre passageway) often it's the miraculous deja vu passageway that they wander through, but some lesser known passages are "active imagination" and "seeding the dream."

I'm not trying to write a tutorial here, but instead just praising the good work of attending to your dreams.  It's the kind of reprocessing that heals you a little bit so if you can make room for it, perhaps you should.

One parting story - in a big dream I had this past year there was one passage where I called my parents because I realized that I was stuck in a dream and couldn't get out, but my kids were in waking life and needed to be woken up for school.  My parents answered the phone but it turns out that they were already in the same building that I was (another local school, not the ones that my kids were in) and when I heard them talking on the phone it was that weird double audio with a slight delay when you talk to someone on the phone who is in the same room as you?  Has that happened to you?  Well I realized that they were in the room and I COULD SEE THEM because I was in a dream where reality is more flexible and fluid but THEY COULDN'T see me because they were in waking life.  I finally had to walk right past them and move my dad's blue windbreaker so they could realize that I was not just pulling some kind of prank on them.

(Sometimes those passageways may loop us back into realities we may not expect, but no regrets anyway, right?  Because a life rich in stories is the best kind of wealth.)