The Task Is To Wake Up

And then wake up again.

A few years ago, I had a nightmare. In this nightmare, I tried to tell Del something but couldn’t speak. In the dream, I knew I was dreaming, so my “task” was to wake up.

So I did. I woke myself up. But I still couldn’t move.

As I lay there, I worried about how I would live without being able to move. How would I help my clients, write my books, and be present for my family?

It took time before I realized I hadn’t woken up at all. I was still dreaming.

So, I forced myself to wake up again. And this time, when I woke, I wasn’t paralyzed. The nightmare was over.

Later, I pondered the lesson of the nightmare.

Within the second layer of the nightmare, I didn’t bother to declare the truth that I wasn’t paralyzed. I accepted it and tried to figure out how I would live with it.

I had fought my way to wake up from the first lie but not the second.

How often do we do that in life? Settle for only a partial healing.

Settle for only a partial awakening.

Perhaps we realize that something we are dealing with isn’t true or at least solvable, so we do something to “wake up” from the problem, which then dissolves because we…