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Lucid Living

Are you a dreamer? Do you dream? I am, and I do. Yesterday I had a dream. It was during a nap that I took and I want to share with you what that dream was about because I found it quite significant.

I dreamt that I was imprisoned. I found myself in a house that was familiar to me. I knew that I was imprisoned—I knew that I had done something to be there. However, I did not know exactly what I had done. I found myself sitting in a chair along with other people, none of whom I recognized, and we were watching TV. The room was drab, dreary and boring.

Then, out of the corner, walked up this amazingly beautiful woman with an angelic presence. She was coming towards me—I knew she was coming for me. Somehow I had recognized her, even though I’d never seen her before. She came up to me and I stood up, and she kissed me. It was the most amazing, glorious, sensational, passionate kiss I’ve ever experienced. Then, as suddenly as she appeared, she walked away. I followed her. I searched for her.

Next in the dream, I found myself outside and there she was. I recognized that I was on the back porch of the house that I grew up in. I wanted to be with her, I wanted to go with her and follow her but I knew that I couldn’t because I was in prison. She said, “You’ve been here a long time.” I asked her how long I had been here and she did not say anything. She just looked at me. So I looked at my phone, as if there were a calendar on there, and I realized it had been thirteen years that I had been in this place.

In that moment I was filled with shock, and I woke up. I woke up inside of my dream and I knew that I was in a dream. I recognized that all this time had passed and I did not realize it. I was aware that I had made up some story as the reason for why I was imprisoned. I believed in that story and that kept me imprisoned in this place. In that moment, while I was conscious of being aware of being in a dream, I chose to believe something else was possible. I took her hand and we stepped off the porch and into some other place, some beautiful place. And I woke up out of the dream.

I immediately knew there was some significance to this dream and how it had played out. I realized something. How often have I done this inside of my own life? How often have I believed in some story and allowed myself to feel imprisoned within my own mind? How often have I trapped myself within my own belief in limitations? How often have I boxed myself into some experience and then operated on automatic pilot, out of conditioned patterns and habits, only to wake up and realize that years have gone by?

This has happened to me throughout my life. I believe it may have happened to all of us. I once believed that I was not available for love. I believed that love was not meant for me. I believed this so much that I found myself inside my own prison in my life, trapping myself and cutting myself off from the possibility of a greater experience of love. And years passed before I realized the illusion that I’d been living under.

In some way, this life is also a dream. I look back on my life and I remember things from the past, different lifetimes that I’ve lived during this life. Maybe you’ve had the experience of saying, “Oh yes, that was me in a past lifetime, so many years ago, when I was different.” It feels like it was a dream, a memory that seemed so real at that moment, and yet now everything is different. I believe that I will come to a point where my life force and my conscious awareness is withdrawn from this body and I will look back and review my life as if it were a dream, and yet it seemed so real in those moments when I was experiencing it. In some way, I already do this all the time with my memory.

How often am I living in an illusion and completely convinced that it’s reality? How can I wake up enough to see it when it’s happening, rather than only in hindsight?

Inside of the dream I shared, there was a point when I woke up and I was aware that I was dreaming inside the dream—they call that lucid dreaming. But how about lucid living? We can become consciously aware that we’re in a dream while we’re dreaming, and we can also become spiritually aware that we’re living while we’re in a lifetime. To be so awake that we are consciously choosing with awareness in each moment. We can choose what truths we decide to hold for ourselves that create the dream of a reality, the experience that we’re having. So often this goes on unconsciously and time passes as we run on automatic pilot. And then we wake up again a little more.

Love never fails. No matter how far we have gone into our own imprisonment and no matter how long we have been operating unconsciously, there are always moments when love will step in to wake us up again. The question is, what we do with those moments? When we have a moment of awakening and experience the bliss of the kiss of spirit calling us back to the true nature of ourselves, what do we do? Do you follow the spirit, letting go of the illusion you have been living? Or, do you let yourself fall back into the familiar patterns? I’ve done both and I know which one has a more pleasing outcome.

This life is my dream and I want it to be glorious. I dream for myself a life of honor and integrity, a life full of beautiful things, of brotherhood and fellowship, of possibility and creativity. And I must be lucid in order to bring that dream of reality into my experience of life. I must believe it and live into it or I will end up falling asleep again, and even more time will simply pass by.

There are truths that we hold that are personal truths, ones that are based on perception, things that I believe today that are true. There may come a day when I won’t believe it—I will find something else that I hold to be true, as my truth. I’ve had times where I’ve believed something about myself or another so adamantly that I would have fought to protect that belief and sworn that it was accurate, only to come to find out later that I was wrong. That was just my perception. It was my truth that I was holding, but it was only my truth—it wasn’t the truth. It was an illusion!

There is, however, an absolute Truth that is available, one that is unshifting and unchanging. It comes from a place of Love, and it dwells in a realm of eternal reality. We have access to that type of truth also, and we can source our personal truth from the absolute Truth. We can release ourselves from the boxes and limitations of what we believed as possible or not possible for our lives. In fact, it is from those beliefs that we create our personal reality, the experiences that we have in our own life.

So often I have personally lived in limitation. Many times I have stepped out of those limitations. And I desire now to continue to live outside of the limitations. Anything is possible. If I can dream it, I can live it. This dream that I have shared may not appear as a super inspiring story, but it is one that showed me an absolute Truth: that I create my experience of reality, and therefore I can change it. The illusion is that something was oppressing me from outside myself; that my experience was dictating what it is that I believed was possible. In fact, what I believed was possible was dictating what my experience would be.

I will step into a new place within myself and bring forth new realms of possibility into my life, as we all have the potential to do. We are dreaming, we are creating, forever and always. I am a creator, creating the creation of my reality. I am a dreamer, dreaming the dream of my life. The question being posed to both you and me now is, what will we choose?

Gary Goodhue
Sunrise Ranch

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Gary Goodhue is a student and teacher of consciousness and creation. He focuses on bringing deep principles of Truth and Love into practical, every day application. The results are increased presence, clarity, peace, focus and power.

 

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