Adapted from: RADICAL DREAMING:
Use Your Dreams to Change Your Life

On one overcast, windy morning I decided to stop wearing my glasses and as I walked down the hill and toward the street I noticed the colors were more vibrant and, without my eyeglasses on, it felt like I was about a foot taller. I realized that my glasses helped me to see better but they also distorted my perception of the world.

So I'm walking along and I'm thinking how we all see the world through glasses of some sort: we put on our religious lenses that see life through a particular religious viewpoint; or we put on our political glasses and see the world through one political viewpoint; or we put on our familial glasses and see life through the expectations of our parents; or we put on societal glasses and live our life by adapting to social pressure to conform to popular ideas. Or we interpret our dreams through the thick dark lenses of some theory. Our dreams carry the awesome potential to help us to see clearly who we really are, our natural, inborn potential and unique character without anything "put on" us.

Our family's hopes and expectations for us, while usually well-intended, become one of the "things" we put on. For example, not long after the September 11th tragedy, a good friend, clearly upset, told me about a dream that appears to have a literal warning. Aaron, a soft-spoken young man in his late twenties was in the midst of struggling with what to do with his life. His dream appeared to be predicting a terrorist attack:

The Time Bomb

Aaron's family, particularly his mother, wanted him to follow family tradition and go into the medical field. But he had always loved art and architecture and felt a frustrating split between giving in to his family's expectations and following his own passion.

Dream images constantly clarify what belongs to the dreamer's Authentic Self or essential nature and what symbolizes outside influences. I asked Aaron to describe what it would be like to imagine being that part of the country, and, as the land and the waters, what had happened. "The water has been polluted," he replied. "And if I'm that land, I've been overrun by civilization, covered up." Then I asked him to describe what it would be like, from the land's viewpoint, to experience a nuclear explosion? He explained, with an sudden smile of realization, "Everything that's been put on me is gone!" A few days later I received an excited call from Aaron, who couldn't wait to tell me that November 1^st was the final deadline for him to enroll in dental school and that he had just decided not to register.

Aaron's dream, one week before the school deadline, dramatically showed him the power of this decision on November 1st. It had the potential to clear away all the attitudes and expectations from his family that were preventing him from living his life-everything that had been "put on" him, that had "overrun" and "polluted" his original, natural landscape. His "nuclear" family's influence was about to be exploded. Moreover, atomic fission, a nuclear reaction, promised to release tremendous energy, energy that would now be available to begin a new life-energy no longer tied up the exhausting effort to conform and to live someone else's life. And his dream also warns him to keep his distance from this event, to be aware of the "fallout"-the reaction from his mother and his family to his decision. Aaron avoided making a disastrous career choice.