[kml_flashembed movie="http://ianwallacedreams.com/wp-content/uploads/flash/low-slow-clouds.swf" height="180" width="240" /]Dreams. We all have them. Every single one of us. We dream of brighter futures, better jobs, bigger rewards, beguiling lovers. Dreams of contentment, appreciation, power, intimacy, recognition. Dreams where we are always happy, and rich and loved. We all want to live the dream. But often our dreams seem so far away and unobtainable. No matter how hard we work, how much we sacrifice, no matter how many self help books we read, our dreams always seem just out of reach.

And there are those other dreams as well. Those strange and often confusing experiences we have when we sleep. Bizarre stories that appear to make no sense then just fade away in the light of a new morning. Those dreams that just seem to be something that happens to us. A random activity that fills the emptiness of sleep as we rest and recover. So we can wake refreshed the next morning and start chasing the dream again.

Like our night time dreaming, our waking lives often just seem to be something that happens to us. A loosely connected series of unfulfilled intentions and random incidents that fill our days and prevent us from making our dreams come true. Our waking realities and our dreams of fulfilment often seem to be so different. It seems like that we can spend all our lives planning and hoping that the dream and the reality will connect at some point in our future. We can live our whole lives searching for that person, that event, that place, that thing that will make all our dreams come true.

The dreams that we consciously pursue during our waking hours and the dreams that unconsciously happen to us as we sleep seem to have absolutely no connection. But they are intimately connected with each other. Our dreams are the language of our unconscious awareness and they constantly try to express themselves both in waking life and when we sleep.

Most of our waking activities and intentions are driven by our unconscious awareness, but as rational and objective human beings we consciously filter out that awareness and push it back into our unconscious. Our unconscious awareness becomes like the blurred and half remembered ghost of who we could be. It returns again and again to haunt us both in our waking lives and our night time explorations. Our dreams are answering the questions that we are not even consciously aware that we are asking.

By becoming more aware of our dreams and how they express our unconscious awareness, we can bring them into the reality of our waking lives and begin to live our dreams, rather than constantly searching for them. Dreaming is the most natural and powerful way for us to connect with our purpose and potential. It is something that we all naturally know how to do but that we seem to have forgotten in our hectic and busy lives. So that’s what we’re going to remember how to do. We are going to remember how to dream.