Aliyah Marr: Making The Dream Real

When I first explored the practice of lucid dreaming, I tried to define the difference between waking reality and dreaming. It was a little difficult for me because my dreams were by then extraordinarily vivid — I dreamt in full color and experienced every other sense: touch, taste, hearing and smell. After a few weeks, I finally realized the one really astounding difference between waking reality and dreaming — the time differential between having a thought and its ultimate manifestation.

In dreams, if we think about something, it immediately manifests to us — our thoughts become real, perhaps because our thoughts are our reality in our dreams. We accept abrupt manifestations very readily, carried along in a present that has very little immediate history. We cannot seem to remember much of what just happened, and so are not upset at sudden changes in reality.

However, in a waking state there is usually a time lag between our thoughts and their manifestation. Carolyn Myss states that the length of the time lag between our thoughts and their manifestation is directly proportional to the amount that we have invested in our past.

We have all had the experience of thinking of someone that we haven’t heard from for a while, only to have the phone ring in the next second. When we discover that the friend we just envisioned is suddenly on the phone talking to us, it just seems like a pleasantly odd coincidence. Since we have no opposition to this kind of thought becoming reality —because we have no problem receiving this kind of small miracle — the event can happen. Our thoughts and the history formed by our habits of thought define what is possible in our daily awareness.

I am convinced that the time lag between a thought and its manifestation in our daily awareness is both a safety valve, and a self-imposed limitation. What if whatever we thought could instantly manifest in our lives? Most of us would need a great deal more self-discipline to keep us from getting swamped by our own mental aberrations.

So it seems to me that one of the ways to shorten the lag time between a thought and its manifestation is to remove the need for the safety valve. We need to be able to control our mental processes. I have discovered that the magic of manifestation does not distinguish a "good" dream or thought from a "bad" one. Like the story of a genie in the proverbial fairy tale, we have to be careful what we wish for.

Most of our daily thoughts are very chaotic and even damaging — these thoughts are very self-centered, and most of them are actually subversive to the stated goals and intent of the mind that thinks them. It is important to catch these thinking habits so that you can examine them. It is an interesting exercise to simply record all your thoughts for a day. I have done this and discovered a mind-numbing chatter of petty judgements and "negative" thinking.

Observing the chatter is the first part of this exercise: the second is to find a method of changing it into a less damaging form. The final goal of most meditative practices is to silence the monkey mind that chatters incessantly in everyone’s head. At last we may be able to achieve inner silence (see my article called "Dark Night of the Soul" for one possible exercise).

After we have cleaned up most of the mental clutter and quieted our thoughts we can better focus on what is at the base of our reality — our personal story. I am convinced that it is our attachment to this internal story that prevents us from manifesting our dreams

Our personal story begins in our youth and usually carries through the rest of our lives. We are shaped not so much by the events of our lives but by our thoughts and reactions to those events. If you meditate deeply on events in your life, you may discover a common thread linking your memories — a mood or feeling that seems to color your life.

Examining your reality through deep meditation in this way is a Toltec device called the recapitulation. The function of the recapitulation is to release emotional attachments — it enables us to dump the personal history that is burdening us and clears the path for creative visualization. Eventually we have the ability to decrease the time differential between our dreams and their manifestation — we can make our dreams real.

Aliyah Marr is a multimedia artist, interactive designer, published author, teacher, transformative coach, personal trainer, and motivational speaker. She is the author / artist of the Transformational Tarot.

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