DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Morning Pages has helped me relish the magic of my dream consciousness. I am learning to trust more in my dreams. Last night I dreamt randomly that I was dancing passionately at Nalanda, supporting a woman I barely know. Today I went to that woman's thesis performance at Nalanda, and the human spark of connectedness and vigor was reignited in me. Gratitude for listening. 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
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DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

I have always known that I needed morning pages.

When I was younger I used to keep a dream journal... scraps of paper, napkins, and secret spiral notebooks became home to my dream-state consciousness. When I woke, I captured the details that surrounded me moments before when my mind hallucinated my reality during rapid eye movement.

 

The act of writing these dissolving memories immediately upon waking allowed me to delve deeper into the meaning of my dreams; the mystery of the unknown and unexplained. To this day I remember snippits of dreams I had half a decade ago because my muscle memory of writing them down helped myelinate the dream in a way that never would have happened had I just woken up, forgotten, and distracted myself with life’s demands.

 

My dreams are full of intense emotions that my body and mind must process, express, and experience in order to stay balanced and healthy. I do not always allow myself to feel my emotions to their fullest capacity in waking life. Like a body that twitches itself into sleep every night, discharging an activated nervous system as soon as it gets the chance to rest, my emotional mind and spirit let me complete reactions and cycles that I stop short during the day. They could be emotions that were triggered but not allowed to flourish hours before I drifted into sleep, or they could be built up from weeks, months, years ago: forgotten by my waking mind, but remembered very clearly by my dreaming mind and body.

 

Writing after waking is not only a powerful way to examine my dreams, but an opportunity for me to discover the clarity in my needs and feelings that so easily become clouded and scattered as I become distracted and busy within my day.

 

Free-writing is a great passion of mine. I rarely provide myself the short time necessary to free-write, but when I do I always walk away from my honest self-reflective regurgitation with a deep sense of relief. I may not understand my life or situation much better than before I free-wrote (though oftentimes I do), but I do always feel better knowing that I have shared (albeit virtually) what is happening for me on the inside. The act of putting some of my feelings, needs, thoughts, confusions, or streams of consciousness onto paper makes me feel like I do not have to carry them all on my own. The complex constellations, webs, and wells of nonsensical discovery within myself are much easier to examine, understand, or make sense of when they are on paper: when I can see them from the perspective of an outsider instead of a trapped insider.

I am grateful for morning pages.

 

 

Writing after waking this morning helped me discover the many different threads that were connected to the intense anger I experienced in my dream last night. When I awoke it seemed as if it had come out of nowhere… I could not see how the anger was rooted in my waking life. When I wrote without filter or judgement, though, it became much more clear to me why I had needed to experience this intense emotion during my dream, and how I had been shutting it out when I was awake.

 

Morning pages helped me remember that I need to be gentle with myself and my process, now and always. Expressing myself reminded me that within the delicate relationships I am struggling to maintain, there is always room for grounded, strong, powerful, clear, and confident expression of my needs.

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

 

 

 

My dreams are becoming more visceral and vivid. They are more connected to my waking life every day. They are alive as I am.

 

A couple days ago I dreamt that my friend suffered a heavy blow on the back of his head, and broke his knee trying to escape. 

The next day, in waking life, the same friend watched my best friend get hit by a car crossing Arapahoe Ave. She had a concussion and a bruised knee.

 

Before that, I dreamt that I was dancing wildly with a friend I hardly ever see in a rehearsal studio at Nalanda. Within 24 hours I found myself in a rehearsal studio at Nalanda witnessing the most earth-shaking heart-opening love-filling dance performance of that very friend.

 

Morning pages has shifted my lens, my approach to life. Giving attention to the moments in between dreaming and waking has allowed me to feel how the ineffable, dream-like, spiritual existence of life permeates my daily happenings.

 

Challenging myself to focus on the small within the large, the simple within the confusing, I am able to gain awareness of where I am right now in time and space. I am always floating, but when I focus on how I interact with the world, I feel a little more grounded.

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.