Dreams and Imagination
Dreams come to us in the most brilliant message delivery system in existence — pictures. Think about it. Words are limited to the skill of the person conveying the words, not to mention that it takes a whole lot of words to communicate over several minutes, a simple picture can do in a few seconds.
Think of a political cartoon, or better yet, the Far side by Gary Larson. Although it was common for Larson to use words throughout his cartoons, the pictures he drew were the substance, words were only involved to accent what was so brilliantly communicated through pictures.
Imagine with me for a moment that dreams came to us in straight lines of written text. Boring! Even for people who love to read, reading lines of dead text can’t compare to experiencing something so emotionally powerful like a picture dream.
Have you ever had a short dream that seemed to last only a minute or two? But when you sat down to write out the dream it took thirty, even forty five minutes? We are often shocked how many words it takes to convey the wealth of information contained in even the simplest of dreams.
Take a chasing dream, for example. When someone is chasing you, especially with the intent to do you harm, all kinds of things start to go through your head. Why is this person chasing me? What did I ever do to them? How will it end? Will I get away? All these questions arise, and even more from one act of intense pursuit.
In addition to all this, pictures have a way of accessing the deep parts inside of us by accessing our imagination. The things we imagine in our hearts are powerful because they create imprints inside us that very often last a lifetime. We’ve all been affected by this principle. When we’ve been labeled by someone with negative attributes as children, we take that label into our hearts through our imagination. We picture ourselves as that thing they’ve called us, internalize it and believe it.
When those situations have come up in my life, I’ve dealt with it by watching movies. The knock down drag out action flicks that have lots of car chases and death-defying stunts. I’ve watched lots and lots of those kinds of movies over the years because they’ve gotten my mind off my problems by presenting even bigger problems. By doing this I was in a sense piling lots of visual information on top of what I imagined in my heart. Sometimes scenes from these movies would stay with me over a day or two and replay themselves in my imagination as I went on with my day. Dreams can often do that exact same thing to us.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever considered your dreams as an imagination stimulant, but that’s one aspect of what they are. Instead of activating your imagination to simply entertain you, dreams often capture your imagination and intrigue you in order to get you to investigate their meaning. They deal with matters of the heart and can often show us a bit of a course correction at times. It’s all in paying attention and following the path of intrigue dreams set before our imaginations.
EB
Photo credit: AlicePopkorn / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND
