photo courtesy of marieclaire.com
Our dreamer this week is an upwardly-mobile entrepreneur who
is working hard at his own business. Until he is more established, he tends
to look for bargains in order to keep his expenses down. Recently, while
waiting in line for a Goodwill store to open in the morning, he found himself
in an uncomfortable situation. Here is his story—a classic waking dream:
A cannabis
confrontation
I was waiting for the
local Goodwill outlet store to open. It was early in the morning, but there
were already several people in line, including a woman with a little girl.
There was also this guy standing right there in the middle of us, smoking a
joint. I couldn’t believe it! He seemed to have no clue that he was doing anything
inappropriate. I mean, if it were even just a regular cigarette, most people
would be courteous enough to go stand off to the side somewhere. But not this
guy. He was treating us all to his secondhand pot smoke, including the little
girl. Well, I just lost it. I went right up to him and confronted him about it.
I was really in his face, both verbally and physically. Well, he didn’t even
flinch. He stood his ground and started yelling right back at me. This went on
for a while, but then the store opened and we all went in and fanned out. That was
the end of the confrontation, but I was furious the whole day. I still can’t
believe he did that.
Initial thoughts
Fortunately, the man who experienced this unpleasantness is
well aware of the waking dream and how it works. This confrontation—something that
happened in broad daylight while the “dreamer” was wide awake—fit into two of
the categories that define an important waking dream. First, it was an
experience that was out of the ordinary; it was unsavory and bizarre, and ought
not to have happened. Second, it didn’t end with a satisfactory resolution; there
were loose ends because nothing got settled. For the dreamer, the experience “wouldn’t
go away.” It lingered on in his consciousness throughout the day.
Those are classic waking dream characteristics. And by the
way, the experience need not be unpleasant. It could be something that causes
elation instead of anger. It might be a spectacular and gratifying surprise.
But like an annoying experience, such a happy event would be out of the ordinary, and it would linger
in the dreamer’s mind.
The trouble with happy waking dreams, is that we usually don’t
stop to think about them as being cosmic messages designed to teach us. We are
enjoying them so much at face value that we stop right there in our analysis
of them.
That is not true with the unpleasant dreams. It is the
aggravating dreams that we are willing to analyze, simply because we feel so
maligned and will do anything to make the memory and bad feelings “go away.”
We’ll start helping our dreamer do just that on Wednesday.
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