The Pursuit of Joy

Last week, my writing partner on this blog and I enjoyed a cold winter evening with a group of friends––eating, drinking, and being merry. We laughed so much that by the end of the evening our sides and faces hurt. As I drove home, I realized how important laughter is and how often we forget to put joy first in our lives.

That night, I dreamt about driving along a narrow, icy road bordered on both sides by snow banks twice my height––an apt symbol for my currently restricted life. Finally I emerged at a beautiful beach, where I saw windsurfers riding the waves. Even though the ocean was pretty rough, the surfers seemed to be having a good time gliding up and down the watery peaks and valleys. Watching them, I thought, “That looks like fun. I could do that.”

Of course, most of you know that water symbolizes the emotions. Waves represent the ups and downs, the crests and troughs, of our emotional lives. The windsurfers in my dream enjoyed riding those waves––even when they capsized they laughed, then got back on their boards and tried again.

Since then, I’ve thought a lot about joy. What’s its source? Where can we find it? Why is it lacking in so many people’s lives? Why do some of us seem to connect with it naturally, while others seek it desperately, yet unsuccessfully? How can we recapture it when things go wrong, rather than giving up?

I’ve thought a lot about my related dream, too. How succinctly and vividly our dreams speak to us, and how often they give us hope. My dream showed me that peaks and valleys are all part of the ride––you can’t surf on calm seas. It also said I don’t have to stand on the sidelines observing joy. Fun needn’t be an occasional experience, it’s available to us anytime, all the time.

Where do you find joy? What prevents you from embracing it? What can you do to experience more joy in your life? We invite you to share your thoughts and dreams.

The Watcher, continued

I really hope you’ll humor me on this one because I’m still stuck on the theme of my last post about “The Watcher.”

As I mentioned previously, many of us are able to wake up at whatever time we designate (right down to the minute) without an alarm clock. The question that’s been keeping me awake lately is that if time is a man-made concept and our conscious minds are asleep, who’s actually watching the clock for us?

Articles I’ve researched on the subject say only that yes, it’s been determined in controlled studies that this is something we should all be able to do. A statement which is always followed by “but it is unclear how the brain keeps track of time,” or “how the brain manages to keep track of the hours is unknown.” Well, my point exactly.

I’m having trouble believing that it’s the brain keeping track of hours via circadian rhythms or hormone levels or whatever. If that were true, how is it that it still works even on the first night of daylight savings time (yet another contrived human invention)?

But now there’s a new twist – instead of just waking up at the prescribed time, the characters in my dreams have started telling me it’s time to get up. They’ll interrupt whoever is speaking to announce “it’s 5:30” (my normal wake-up time). Or if I lie down to take a short nap, I’m warned by a disembodied voice that “okay, it’s been 45 minutes.” I half expect to see an etheric someone standing there with squinty eyes, giving me a motherly finger wag …

If I can learn to compose myself before my eyes pop open – my next step is to unearth some personal information about these timekeepers. Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from? Do you have a name? But most importantly, how did you end up with this thankless job anyway? ;-)

Meditation and Insomnia

Using meditation and yoga to relax during the daytime helps you sleep better at night, showed a study directed by Ramadevi Gourineni, MD, director of the insomnia program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Evanston, Illinois (published in ScienceDaily in June 2009). According to Dr. Gourineni, if you suffer from insomnia it’s likely you are in a state of hyperarousal 24/7. 

The study divided participants into two groups. One group practiced Kriya Yoga, which uses meditation to focus attention; the control group didn’t. At the end of the two-month-long trial, the patients who practiced yoga/meditation experienced improved sleep quality and sleep time.

The results of Dr. Gourineni’s study didn’t surprise me, but they did remind me to spend more time relaxing during the daytime. Over the years, I’ve noticed that when I do yoga and meditate regularly I sleep better. When I don’t, I lie awake for hours worrying about things I can’t or won’t change, rehashing the day’s most meaningless and miniscule details, and sometimes even gaining what seem to be genuine insights.

One of reasons people meditate is to stop the squirrelly chatter that runs rampant through our minds most of the day. For those of us who suffer from sleep dysfunction, the chatter doesn’t stop when we go to bed. A daily dose of meditation trains us, over time, to turn off the chatter, or at least turn it down.

Here’s another thing I’ve noticed about meditation and sleep: When meditating, I frequently recall my dreams, even those that occurred long ago. Perhaps that’s because during meditation our brainwave frequencies slow from the usual 13–30 cycles per second (when we’re awake and active) to 8–13 cps, closer to the dream state’s 5–8 cps.

Has anyone else experienced this? Do those of you who meditate and/or do yoga find it helps you sleep better? Is it more effective than other forms of relaxation? We invite you to share your thoughts.

Overlapping Worlds

Lately I’ve been wondering how much our waking and dream worlds overlap. Of course, we're all familiar with the nightly processing of our daytime issues and how the subconscious communicates advice via dream scenarios. Occasionally we experience dreams that foreshadow things to come in our everyday lives, or journey in our dreams to places that actually exist here on earth––even though we may never have gone there except during sleep.

But a few nights ago, I experienced something new (for me anyway) that caused me to look at the idea from yet another angle. I dreamt a tarantula was in the bedroom and my cat was playing with it. When I awoke in the morning, I noticed she’d pulled out a patch of her fur. Looking closer, I saw about a dozen spider bites on her bare skin!

How much of what’s going on around us are we aware of while we’re asleep? What part of us keeps watch over the waking world and how does it communicate with the dreaming part? Anybody have thoughts or experiences to share about such things? 

Dream Journeys

Where do we go when we dream? The idea has intrigued and baffled us since before recorded time.

Usually we think of dreams, and the arena where they’re acted out, as being subjective and imaginary––personal fantasies concocted by the unconscious in order to convey information to us while we sleep. And indeed, it appears there’s some truth to this, but it’s only a partial truth. According to some researchers, the level at which nocturnal problem-solving and self-analysis take place is but one neighborhood in the complex landscape of dreams.

Shamans suggest the realm of dreams is actually an alternate reality, a place every bit as “real” as the physical world we inhabit by day. In his book The Art of Dreaming, Carlos Castenada talks about different dream worlds, including the world of inorganic beings. In Dreamscape, Bruce Vance describes the dream environment as an objective territory with its own inherent laws. He says it remains essentially the same when viewed by any dreamer––an idea that contradicts what we’ve been led to believe about the individual nature of dream experiences.

Some of us also journey via dreams to places that exist here on earth––an instantaneous way to travel that eliminates security checks, passports, and jet lag. Several years ago I took a dream trip to what I believed was Africa (even though I’d never been to Africa in waking life). In the dream, which seemed incredibly realistic and vivid, I stood on a plateau overlooking a green lake. When I described what I’d witnessed to globe-trotting friends, they immediately recognized the place as an area of Zimbabwe.

Journeying in the Dreamscape is an option open to anyone who chooses to pursue it. All it takes is intention and a little practice. In fact, you may have already done some dream traveling without realizing it. Have you journeyed in your dreams? What worlds have you visited? What experiences did you bring back? Please share your adventures with us––pictures anyone?

Who is The Watcher?

For the past four nights I have awoken at 4:44. Nothing particularly noteworthy about that other than – how does that happen? How can someone wake at precisely the same hour and minute four nights in a row?

All of my life I have had the ability to wake up at exactly the time I intended; I’ve never needed an alarm clock. How does that happen? As far as I know, only my waking consciousness understands the man-made concept of time – so what part of me is lying awake watching the clock?

There are nights when I’ve attempted to trick the clock-watcher by choosing randomly odd times to awake, like, 1:27. Didn’t matter – the watcher was not amused. I don’t know about you, but I find this a fascinating phenomenon. Since I know I’m not the only one who can do this I have to wonder, has anyone ever done a study on this? Is there a sleep institute somewhere handing out grants?

Do you suppose this task falls under the job description of guardian angels? Page 2,037, paragraph 3, second sentence, “become familiar with the peculiarity of the human race called “time” and whatever you do, do not allow your human to sleep past their arbitrarily-appointed hour and minute.” With everything else mine has to deal with during the night like making sure I don’t walk into the closet by mistake, steering my bare feet away from the big ugly bug by the bed, or holding onto me so I don’t fall into the toilet in the dark, I would think she’s much too busy for clock watching.

If anyone would like to share their thoughts on this, try me tomorrow morning – say, 4:44?

Deja Vu Dreams

Dreams enable us to transcend the boundaries of time and space to peek into the future. Seers often report that their dreams convey information about upcoming events, and we find many examples of dream prophecy in spiritual texts. In fact, precognitive dreams aren’t particularly rare––lots of us have them, yet we may be baffled or unnerved by their appearance. How can we know about things that haven’t happened yet?

Einstein’s work showed that time isn’t linear. Rather than being like an expressway from the past to the future, time more closely resembles a winding mountain road that bends around and occasionally curves back on itself, so that you periodically catch glimpses of the same scenery in the course of your journey––hence, the experience we call déja vu or “already seen.” Some Eastern spiritual traditions believe that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, like a mountain range with peaks and valleys.

One night I dreamt I found a black cat on the side of the road. At first I thought it was dead, but when I touched it the cat woke up. I took it to a vet who told me the cat had distemper and suggested performing surgery immediately. The cat didn’t seem particularly ill to me, so I refused to let him operate.

The next day while I was out walking I spotted a black cat lying in the gutter. It appeared to be paralyzed and I thought it had been hit by a car, although I saw no sign of injury and it didn’t seem to be in pain. I knocked on the doors of all the houses in the area, but no one answered, so I took the cat to a vet. The vet surmised that the cat must be near death and recommended doing an autopsy to see if it had a contagious disease that might infect my cats.

Remembering my dream, I refused and took the cat home instead. Later I returned to the neighborhood where I’d found the cat and again knocked on doors until I located the cat’s confused owner. She told me she had no idea how the cat had gotten out––it had been paralyzed from birth because its mother had contracted distemper during pregnancy.

When I related my dream, she grew even more amazed. The previous night she’d dreamt her cat had disappeared!