Susan Boyle “I Dreamed A Dream” took dream to new heights in the world as recent as last year. It’s a shift in paradigm which Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat has espoused. That we as individual in this era can be as poweful as we can be with the introduction of the internet. You dream and as you dream you become a powerful voice & an empowered individual.
We saw that with Susan Boyle, we saw that with Barack Obama. All you have to do is DREAM (a worthy dream)! Disney told us a dream is a wish your heart makes and all of us have dreamt in our lives. Be it consciously, subconsciously or even unconsciously!
In the real sense of the definition of what a dream is, it is what happened during your sleep, in the
REM mode. REM is Rapid Eye Movement. This happens many times (on average, five) in the course of sleep which is done mostly in the night (I assume). This is not the definition found in the dictionary. This is what I was taught in Psy 101 in the university. REM sleep is where most of our vividly recalled dreams occur. So, we have dreamt a great many dreams in our lives. The question is how much we remember of them when we woke up! It is thus a common thing for every individual, not something from outer space. WE DREAM! How wonderful is that?! :-)
As interesting as that sounds, I wonder if your dreams in the night have affected your concious and awake (what we term as real) life? Have you been awaken by dreams (enlightenment, perhaps)? By that I don’t mean nightmares where you were woken up by fright. Rather, that your life itself was awaken by dreams which you dreamt in your subconscious state? Has something that seems like illusion spilt into the real world for you? I HAVE!
My choice of belief is in fact very much influenced by the dreams I’ve had. You may say I had my callings (not once, but about 3x) in my sleep. It was very real at that time and don’t appear to be like a dream at all (which I suppose most dreams are like that anyhow). It happened over the course of ten years. I told some friends and former colleagues about them but I’ve never really penned them down until now. Perhaps this is as good a time as any :-)
Dream #1: I was a young adult when I dreamt about this. But in my dream I was a young girl back in my primary school in Indonesia. All alone. Trapped in the school (haha, how many have felt that even in real life!). In my dream, the classrooms are in four buildings, all perpendicular to one another, so it’s like I’m in the center of a courtyard. I tried very hard to find a door out of the school but couldn’t. No way out! And there were evil spirits all around, I couldn’t see them but I could feel the chill in my bones. And, I was extremely frightened and with each failure (of looking for a door out of the school compound), I got frantic. The fear was real. Ultra real. It’s like in a Stephen King’s movie. I ran and ran and still to no avail. After a LONG time, out of nowhere, there was a voice that called out to me and it said “Call out to Jesus and you’ll be saved!” And that’s in English but that’s not what I learned or was capable of speaking when I was living in Indonesia. I didn’t picked up English until I was eleven, after I was sent to Singapore for my education. It’s all a dream (well, in a way, it’s more of a nightmare then) so I didn’t make much of it. I wasn’t a believer afterall and I simply put it down to one of those weird dream I’ve had.
Dream #2: I don’t have much recollection of this now. In fact, it’s been many years since Dream #1 and I didn’t make a connection between the two at all. It happened in a place which I’ve no idea of where. But what I remember till today is that it was in this dream that I see Jesus Christ and God. And they don’t appear as human or form which you can think of as human. Rather, I see a ray of white light. Not sunlight but a very distinctive white light. It was God showing HIMSELF to me. And that’s all I remembered now. The dream was very distinct when I woke up but since I still wasn’t a believer when I dreamt about it, I simply didn’t take much notice of it. I did however thought it an awesome experience then. It’s like, wow… God shows HIMSELF to me! I think anyone would have been amazed & dumbfounded, even if chalking it up all to a dream!
Dream #3: Well, let’s just said as with the first dream, it’s God & savior related. I’d rather keep the details personal until as and when I feel it’s time to let the world know about it. One is entitled to some secrets of her own, right?
So, a testimony? Well, you perceive it as you wish.
For me, it was a series of dreams which led me to open my heart to Christianity. You know, I was brought up in a Muslim country with a Buddhist family background but God appears to me consistently in Christianity. And even though I don’t think myself a religious person, I’m highly spiritual for some reasons. God certainly opens HIS door wide to me. During my years of travel, churches and cathedrals could be closed for that day and yet when I arrived, for some reasons they were simply opened! In Peru, the most miraculously thing happened that when an American friend and me were standing in front of a cathedral, it was closed and my friend told me to leave. But I told her let’s wait a few minute and see. Voila! It did opened within 3 mins!!! How miraculous that can be? You think it’s coincidence? I think not!
I’ve tested God a few occasions before I was converted and I was convinced. That’s how each of us function. Show me and I’ll believe.This is not a review about God but about dreams and how that had affected my decision and life itself since. Perhaps one day I’d write more about God but for now this is what I’m sharing.
About dreams that go beyond gravity and once’s comprehension of reality. Here are some interesting dreams I’ve had of myself.
- I was a bird (yes, literary a bird, not a human) trying to take fllight into far far away land.
- I was a lady from the victorian age dressing with a full corset and all, somewhat like Mary Poppins and yet was in Canada in the middle of a freezing winter!
- I was a human but one who lives in the ocean, can swim in the water without any gears, like the Man from Atlantis and a whole series of events which happened all under water.
How strange is all that?
Our world in the sleep mode is indeed interesting and full of possibilities. In that sense, at times when I’m having a nice dream, I could wake up and then go back to sleep and continued with the same dream! How wonderful is that?!
So, for dreams, you’ve to dream them and let yourself indulge in this “out of body” experience. As long as it’s not a nightmare, I love to dream. In reality though what you choose to do with it or them is truly up to you. Dreams are uplifting. They are energizer to your life and to share a dream with someone you love is the ultimate, I believe.
There are scientists who study dream and others who interprete dreams. What is powerful about dreams I believe is not in scientific research or in its interpretations but its possibilities rather than what we all understand about it. As Richard Bach said so well:
""Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there.
What you choose to do with them is up to you."
And so,
a dream is a wish your heart makes!
A dream is a wish your heart makes
