Asking for dreams

My dream life has gone blank recently so last night I asked for a dream. How do you ask for a dream? Politely. Be specific. “I would like a dream, please, about _____.”  But don’t be surprised if you get a dream that doesn’t exactly address the issue.

Last night I asked for a dream about love, fear, and anger, the topic I started writing on yesterday. I was secretly hoping for profound wisdom on that topic, something I didn’t already know. I wanted to demonstrate to you, dear readers, how dreams collaborate with conscious thought and daily life to take us beyond what we can manage on our own. It was kind of a show-offy request.

Instead I got a dream that told me, in no uncertain terms, something I already knew.

A woman is hugely pregnant. She gives birth so quickly and easily that I don’t see it happening. The baby girl is short and sturdy, with very short and strong legs. She hits the ground walking. Wet and naked and quite self-sufficient, she toddles through the house..

This all seemed real and quite miraculous, as it would in conscious life.

When I was fully awake I made the associations. “Baby” in my personal dream vocabulary often signals a new creative enterprise. Duh, that refers to this recent writing. And I was “overdue” to start something like this and so I gave birth quickly and easily to these short, sturdy blogs. And it really does seem miraculous, as I wrote a few days ago.

So I knew this. I even wrote about it. Why, then, the dream? Well, for one thing, my subconscious is a slow learner. It often brings up events and insights of the recent past as if it hadn’t yet gotten around to processing them. It has its own pace.

But the other thing I know from long experience is that the Dreamgiver often wants to put its own stamp of importance on something that I already understand, or think I understand with my conscious mind. The message is, Yes, this is really important, this is really the way it is. Keep paying attention. It is the Dreamgiver’s Seal of Approval on conscious knowledge, and it is worth waiting for.

Maybe we don’t really know something until we dream about it. And maybe I’ll wait to write more about love, fear, and anger until I dream about it. Maybe this was the first in a series that really is about that—the love part. Who knows? Wait and see.

In any case, the final thing you do if you ask for a dream and get one is to say thank you.