The bigger picture continuously created by our unconscious awareness is not a huge masterpiece set in a gilt frame hanging flatly on a wall to be contemplated from a distance. Instead, we naturally construct an immersive and dynamic world from the countless tiny pictures that we unconsciously notice and absorb in waking and dreaming. These tiny pictures are not discrete and isolated data points but deeply connected fragments that we hold as meaningful patterns in our memories, stories and rhythms.

We have evolved to store patterns rather than data points because most data is meaningless without a specific context. In our constant drive to make sense we are constantly looking for meaning in everything we encounter. A pattern gives context and connection to our experience and awareness and so gives us meaning. This pattern matching is a strategic survival strategy that gives an evolutionary edge and we learn best by analogies and metaphors.

Most of this sense making occurs at an unconscious level and we usually try to make sense of unfamiliar patterns by comparing them to familiar patterns that we have already experienced. This is how we make just about all our decisions. We try and fit the newness we are encountering to a pattern that we have seen before. Our unconscious awareness plays out these patterns for us, and all these characters, events, places and objects that we become aware of are constantly fitted into previously dreamt patterns.

However, because of our instinctual human drive to detect meaningful patterns in every situation that we encounter, we are open to pareidolia and the associated risks of seeing patterns or connections in random and meaningless data. We would rather make patterns out of nothing than appear to have no meaning at all in what we perceive. We unconsciously try to see patterns in any natural phenomena, in clouds, in flames and in scatter graphs of data. Much of our time can be spent trying to make meaning from the meaningless and trying to convince ourselves and others that we have a meaningful existence.

As well as giving us a strategic edge, patterns can limit us. The fluid patterns of our dreaming can become the fixed patterns of ritual as we try to control our dreams and set limits and boundaries. Many of the established patterns that are offered to us are a meaningless psycho tartan of dogma in reality. If we allow ourselves to get stuck in patterns of ritualised meanings we will keep finding ourselves in the same meaningless situation again and again. The stone tablets of ancient stories and rutted rituals of old patterns will become a calcified recurring nightmare.

Our unconscious awareness can meaningfully connect disparate patterns and detect hidden resonances between two apparently different systems. We can hear old rhythms in new variations and improvise our original songs upon them. As we contrast and compare all these patterns we are actively searching for what really matters to us and that is where we find meaning. We are looking for who we are, what we value, and what we believe, where we experience our beauty, love and truth. That’s what we are searching for when we dream. Beauty. Love. Truth.

As we unconsciously search for our identities and gravitate towards what we value, we find ourselves on a journey that transports us through a variety of different viewpoints and perspectives. By shining our awareness out from these vantage points we begin to form beliefs about what we see being reflected back to us. So much of what we see can be confusing and conflicting so rather than trusting our own judgement we become filled with self doubt and uncertainty.

Instead of exploring our own uncertainties we often copy the beliefs of others because they seem more certain and tangible. Some beliefs are small; that if we cross our fingers we will have a favourable outcome. Some are bigger; such as believing that the Earth was once called Teegeeack and was used as an intergalactic holiday camp by Lord Xenu. Some people believe that the Earth is flat. Some people believe that pretending to think the Earth is flat will make them seem more interesting to others.

But our unconscious searching for what we truly believe in continually takes us beyond the flatlands of the adopted beliefs of others. In our waking lives we frequently use landscape metaphors as we describe our progress. ‘We have a mountain to climb’, ‘It’s all downhill from here’, ‘Oceans of experience’, ‘Beyond the horizon’. In our night time dreams we are often travelling around our inner landscapes and trying out different viewpoints; on an island; up a cliff; out at sea; in outer space. In the same way that science progresses, we move forward by evolving our views based on our observations.

As we journey through our dreamscapes our unconscious awareness transports us across whole ranges of opinions and fields of knowledge to build up a bigger picture. In waking life we are often expected to stick to one dogmatic viewpoint, but our unconscious awareness is constantly searching for that big picture that embraces all our views and beliefs. Depending on the circumstances, some of these beliefs may seem right to us and some may seem wrong to others. Trying to reconcile these beliefs to find out which ones reflect our own truths can be contradictory and paradoxical.

Our unconscious awareness can do something that our conscious intellect cannot; it can perceive and embrace an apparent paradox, moving beyond mere black and white beliefs into a wider and deeper awareness. As the 13th century Persian poet Rumi said ‘There is a field out beyond ideas of right and wrong. I will meet you there’. In that high field with its sweeping panoramic views is where we finally see and meet the truth of our own self. This is the promised land that so many of us search for.

All our travelling and all our searching is done with one destination in our hearts; to know our own truth. Our dreams are our most honest and authentic expression and they tell us truths that we would find unacceptable from any other source. They also make us aware of the truths of others. If we never listen to the truths of others and open ourselves to their possibilities, then we will never hear our own truths. To paraphrase Nietzsche, what we want to believe often prevents us from realising what we truly know.

As we become more aware of our actions and the purpose that emerges from them, we begin to realise that we find some intentions and identities more meaningful than others. The more meaningful something is to us, the more we need it. And the more we need something, the more we value it. In the same way that our identities reflect our intentions, what we value reflects our needs.

Like our identities and intentions, our needs and values are usually experienced unconsciously and so we often become disengaged from what we really need and truly value. Instead, we allow pervasive advertising to convince us that our lives are empty and only a market driven solution can truly fulfil our needs. And the disconnected values that we are expected to live and work by are often deciphered from some ancient dusty shrine or workshopped out from a windowless boardroom.

Our needs and values are also contextual, rather than being some fixed hierarchical pyramid as suggested by Abraham Maslow. Our need for self actualization often diminishes as meal times approach and the need to eat becomes more prevalent. Just before lunch, our need for a sandwich may seem to be more valuable than a potential miraculous encounter with a deity. And then after lunch, we continue our ascent up the pyramid to self transcendence. Or fulfil the need for a post-prandial snooze.

The more we become disconnected and disengaged from our real needs and values, the more worthless we feel and the needier we become. No matter how much glittering treasure we accumulate, it seems like we always need more. And no matter how often we try to display our valuables to the world, it never seems like we are valuable enough. From a billionaire’s superyacht to a flash of crimson lipstick, our true needs and values become trapped and unspoken in the shouted trappings of success.

Our real needs unconsciously attract us towards what we truly value. Even as we chase our lifestyle dreams we find ourselves being drawn to glimpses of a bigger dream. A dream where we can give voice to our genuine needs and genuinely value our own worth. And what we all need most and value most is to love and be loved. If the L word seems too heavy, emotional or sensitive, we can use the word respect instead. Our biggest conquest is to respect ourselves and love ourselves.

As Victor Hugo said ‘The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved – loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves’. The more we respect others, the more respect we have for ourselves. The more love we give others, the more we love ourselves. The more we love and respect ourselves, the more aware we become of our value and self worth. Although there seem to be tempting correlations, our self worth doesn’t depend on our net worth; self worth is infinitely more valuable. All need is unrequited love for the self.

As your unconscious sweeps your beams of awareness into the rich unspoken spaces all around you, you are just not shining randomly. You are looking for something unique that is of great significance and uniquely meaningful to you. In all that apparent mystery and confusion you are looking to find your own self. To make sense of who you really are. To truly identify yourself.

Your identity rarely reveals itself by just passively waiting to be discovered in a random sweep of awareness. Instead you actively discover your identity through your intentions and actions. Depending on our small talk skills and social etiquette, one of the first questions we want to ask when we meet someone new is ‘Who are you?’ and ‘What do you do?’ We identify each other by our actions and we are known by our deeds. And the more honest and heartfelt our actions are, the more intensely our identities are illuminated.

However, like the symbols that we use to represent meaning, our intentions and identities are contextual. We show up in different identities and with different intentions depending on what context we might find ourselves in. One moment we have to show up as a gimlet-eyed chief executive, all ruthless and unyielding, and then in the next moment we have to be a nurturing parent, full of compassion and love. Every individual one of us sustains a unique family of our own contextual identities.

From a rational perspective, this makes no sense at all, and so we usually try to ignore our multiple identities. But then they begin to appear in our dreams at night to express their identities there. And in our waking lives, we shine our ignored identities on to others. People who we are attracted to are often reflecting positive qualities that we possess ourselves but are consciously unaware of. Others who we dislike or vilify usually reflect behaviours that we unconsciously exhibit ourselves, but that our rational selves will not allow us to consciously own.

We are also unconsciously aware that we reflect the identities of other people, and we often hide our real identities behind masks to appear as powerful and beautiful as possible to others. This often may seem to be an overt strategy to exert more influence over others. But usually we are indirectly trying to see our own beauty in the reflection of our reflection, rather than having the courage to own it directly.

The possibility that we have an unspoken inner beauty often scares us. That’s why we try to hide it, usually by attempting to conform to some norm of conventional beauty. But that’s what we are looking for when we illuminate our awareness with our intentions. We are trying to experience our own beauty in meaningful intention and identity. We discover who we are by what we do. So to become who you want to be, do what you want to do. Not what you think you should do so you can keep hiding behind a mask. Step out from behind your mask and face up to your own beauty. The more beautiful work that you do, the more that you will illuminate your own inner beauty. And the more beautiful that you are on the inside, the more beautiful you will be on the outside.

For thousands of years we have been trying to make sense of what is unconsciously reflected back to us in our dreams and our waking lives. But as we attempt to rationalise our unconscious reflections we lose much of the meaning that we instinctively sense. It is difficult to describe the seemingly irrational using only rational language, and so in all our cultures and all our creeds we have evolved symbols as a way to try and objectively define the indefinable.

A symbol is a thing or an image that is a definite representation of an indefinable meaning that cannot be expressed by our conscious awareness. But a symbol is only a symbol. It doesn’t contain any meaning or deeper truth, it only reflects it. Like how a mirror represents our face but cannot smile or cry on its own. Symbols acquire their symbolic value through the awareness of meaning that they evoke in us. Illuminated by our dreams, they tangibly reflect back our search for meaning.

Symbols may seem like an abstract concept but we are constantly surrounded by them, from swooshes to golden arches, from partially eaten fruit to black mouse ears, from crescents to crosses. We become immersed in symbolic shorthand and frequently begin to value the symbols more than the meaning that they originally represented. Our once meaningful and evocative symbols often become meaningless and empty signs, hollow designer label shells of the significance that they once reflected.

Many academics and marketeers study semiotics, the science of signs and symbols, in an attempt to understand our behavioural patterns and deeper motivations. But as our semioticians rationalise our symbols, they quickly become reduced to deconstructed definitions that simply state ‘this means that’, and so lose their richer meaning. A bull in a wide green pasture probably means something different to us than a bull in a china shop, but is usually semiotically reduced to just some bull.

But semiotics only gets half the picture; it only analyses the symbol and not the space around the symbol. The space around it is what gives the true context and meaning to the symbol. A symbol without a space is an empty ritual and as a reflection of meaning, a symbol is only half the story. It has no significance. It is in the space around those symbols where we find meaning. Our unconscious awareness goes beyond the half truths of semiotics and works in the holotic space where the symbol and the meaningful space around it remain connected.

In our dreams, the spaces are as important as the symbols, because without the spaces, symbols cannot attract and reflect meaning. It’s like when we know we are really beginning to learn or understand a foreign language because we can hear the gaps between the words rather than the individual words themselves. In the same way, the space between two people is never empty. It is filled with meaning in their gestures, their vocal tone, their body shapes. It cannot be isolated to either one. It is their connection, their relationship.