Dreams, High Performance, and Mental Health ($)

Dreams are a necessary part of reality. They fasten you to your mental health.

“The real life of knowledge and understanding is played out
on the borderline between the ascertainable and the unascertainable.”
— Carl Jung, from Atom and Archetype (111-117).

Dreams

All dreams are premonitory, a combination of predictive and creative. They are predictive of how you’ll feel given what’s going on, not predictive of what’s going to happen. But how you act and react affect what will happen, so dreams are predictive in that regard.

We confuse what’s going on inside us with what’s going on outside, and I suspect that’s why we forget our dreams. If we remembered dreams too well, then we’d confuse our dream memories with the recollections of real events. After all, it’s more our feelings that we remember about real events than the events themselves, and feelings are what we remember from our dreams.

I tell my clients to pay attention to their dreams, but most people’s lives are not dream friendly. To be dream friendly, you must sleep frequently. You must have many awakenings, not just one each morning. You must weave your dreams into your life.

I meet and comment on my clients’ lives once every week or two. This gives them a chance to adjust their directions. Their directions are set in the periods of their dreams, as dreams are the consolidation of our inclinations.

The most creative person dreams a lot. You might even equate creativity with dreaming, though we normally think of productive creativity as something that’s more attached to reality than dreams. But this is a mistake.

Dreams are quite attached to reality, but indirectly. They are a hybrid thought-form that combines real symbols with evoked emotions. Dreams symbolize our chaotic emotional reality. Our emotional reality defines our feelings, and our feelings guide our actions and create our reality.

Achievement

I tend to work with high-achievers. To me, a high achiever is anyone who strives to resolve old issues and redefine themselves. A high achiever could be entrepreneurial in building a new product, or psychological in building a new reality. The issues will differ, but the courage and convictions are similar.

The entrepreneur has less psychological material to work with, as he or she believes their struggle is external. This person is analytical because analysis works best when applied to the world of narrow causes, intentional events. Their emotional problems are internal, so personal change focuses on getting them to see things from an internal perspective.

Confusion

The emotionally challenged person—which could be anyone but is primarily one who recognizes the internal aspects of their struggle—is navigating a landscape that makes little sense and, to bend the metaphor, is not sense-able. They do not connect their internal landscape with their external sense perceptions. They do not see their confusions as signs they have built into the real world.

Those of us in the external world encourage this delusion. We don’t feel responsible for the psychopath’s paranoia or the neurotic’s depression. We offer solace and support, but we don’t take responsibility for what drives other people crazy. This creates the unstable situations we see all around us, where perfectly rational people create perfectly unworkable situations.

When people act irrationally, we say, “What are they thinking? What are they trying to accomplish?” That’s the wrong question because irrational actions are not designed to achieve a solution, they’re designed to realize a problem, and the problem is larger than what we consider is reasonable.

Illusion

The exception is psychopathy, which, though somewhat of a spectrum condition, can be considered a class unto itself. The psychopath projects their internal dysregulation onto the world and mistakes their projection for reality, rather than a reflection of it. The psychopath is like the wild turkey I watched attacking its reflection in a window. In the human world, we are the reflection in the psychopath’s window.

This can be the “shoot the messenger” syndrome, as we often do this. But in real life, the messenger is a righteous, willing actor who deserves the heat, such as a soldier, teacher, or boss. The situation is pathological when the agent is your own fantasy.

We all weave our reality from the threads of our illusions. Our identity is a composite of what we’ve been told, learned, and shown ourselves to be. Like the tip of a growing vine, we climb a trellis without knowing how we got here or exactly where we’re going. Built into the vine’s genetics is an attraction to light and a sense of reward in movement, but it doesn’t know why. We don’t know why either, which is where dreams fit in.

Dreams will tell you what you’re going to feel. Not what you felt, but what you might in a kaleidoscope of possibilities. Dreams show you combinations of situations and emotions. What you rarely realize is that these dream scenarios are choices for the future, not simply reflections of the past. They’re built of memories, but they’re premonitions of what may come.

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If you’d like more peace in the world, reconsider your paths and goals.
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