"The Better Dream"

Again last night I dreamed the sweet satisfactions I knew in the arms of a certain woman long ago were never again to be mine. But this time the dream went forward from that pain, which always before caused me to awake in the night with a wrenching heart. This time there was a sequel. This new dream was long in coming — hard won. It is the better dream.

In this dream I discovered the life I left behind was not mine. It was the life of somebody who didn't know he was me. I never did have a root into that life, that love. I never had grown forward from it. No… It was the pain… It was all those lost years without love or solace that gave me true foundation.

I never betrayed the old love. But straying so far afield all these long years, I am finally stumbling into it's greater source. I am only now coming upon my true root. It never had belonged where I sought so foolishly to dig it in. No, the life that is mine I am only now beginning to discover.

The absence of sweetness is itself a greater, more subtle sweetness that can't be taken away, that isn't dependent upon the approval or continuing love of any woman, that doesn't require me to have position in the world, or to be rich or intelligent. No, isn't that amazing! I don't even have to be smart — only receptive. There is an intelligence in the way things unfold that more than suffices.

To rely on a love that is lesser like I did all those years was blindness when there is one so much greater, like the ocean to the drop. Oh yes! She was sweet. There is no denying. The way I felt lying there in the sheets with her afterwards. How can I forget! But it never led anywhere in the end. It was a barren love. Whereas being without her, after these many painful and dark and lost years, is finally leading me faithfully into that which is fruitful, ubiquitous and overflowing.

We sit around working on dreams thinking it is all such deep stuff. But there is a kind of work that is greater — a job that life itself has to do on the dreamer before he or she is capable of receiving, sustaining, and realizing "the better dream". And that kind of dream doesn't need to be tampered with, gone presumptuously into to have its various strands teased intelligently out into meaning. It doesn't need anything. It is complete in itself and the moment the dreamer is ready — softened up so to speak by life — then it can work it's immediate and catalytic magic.

We don't hear a lot about this sort of thing because it can't be packaged and marketed. Hence dreamworkers, whose profession necessarily revolves around what is salable about dreams, pay it scant attention. What is lesser predominates because it can be promoted, it can be bought and it can be sold. But the truth is, our dreams and our dreamwork get more real when we get them out of the marketplace. Both have a chance then to realign according to deeper and truer principles. Both begin to change in a way that is wondrous and amazing the moment we quit allowing them to be exploited or trying to exploit them ourselves.

We have to submit ourselves to a higher kind of work that it is the dream's function to do on us. In the end this happens beyond anything we know or can know to do with dreams.

It is a blessing when life's afflictions manage to chip away at us, whittling down the barrier of illusions between what we are and what our dream is. What emerges is a better dreamer and it is to him or her that there comes, in its own time, the better dream.