It started with me flunking a test. Yes, that’s right, a glaring big “F” at the top of my test. I burst into tears in my dream, and my professor (who is not an IRL professor) came to ask what happened, that my work was not up to my usual standard of work. I explained that I ran out of time. The dream morphed, as they all do, and I was explaining about test-taking strategies, how I know that I should answer the easiest questions first, but somehow I got caught up in the most difficult question first and that’s why I ended up with so many unanswered questions. I really did know all this material. The professor offered to let me retake the exam orally that afternoon, and I gratefully accepted.
The dream morphed again, and I was sitting in my car in a parking lot, reviewing my notes just prior to taking the oral exam. I looked up and noticed a suspicious-looking person walking through the parking lot with a little girl. The parking lot had morphed from the bucolic parking lot of my IRL University to what looked like an inner-city lot, and I realized that I had the passenger door open and unlocked, as well as my driver side door. I couldn’t reach the door to shut it by leaning across the front seat, so I jumped up and ran around the car to shut the passenger side door, managed to run back around to my seat and leap in, but didn’t get the doors locked.
Much to my horror, the creepy man reached in the back door, and the little girl was magically being shoved in with her booster car seat, next to my own two girls. S. was shoved into the middle, M. on the right side, and this little girl was being shoved into the left side, and the guy was threatening me to let them both in.
The dream morphed again. Somehow the little girl was gone, and I had slammed the car into reverse, trying to back away from this nightmare guy. But he was suddenly keeping pace with me from his car, reaching through the door, trying to rip S. out of the car. Luckily, there were no cars behind us, and we could just fly backwards without anything to crash into. I was screaming at S., “Get your seatbelt on, do you have your seatbelt on? I’m going to slam on my brakes, I don’t want you to fall out!” when I woke up in a cold sweat.
I can’t shake the dread in my heart. Ironically, I spent the evening last night at a friend’s house for Thanksgiving, talking about Theta therapy, past lives, reincarnation, and living in the moment with a very interesting gentleman. The entire conversation was fascinating, and he gave me a good tool for helping me remember to live in the present. He recommended that when I realize that I’m caught up in the worrying and fretting ego mind, that I realize that it is just busy chatter and sit back and consciously observe the chatter in my mind carrying on with itself.
So I am sitting here this morning, trying very hard to observe the nervous chatter. “Worry about finishing the year well. Worry about my children and their safety. Worry, fret, fret, worry.”
Deep breathe. Observe the chatter without reacting. Go ahead and feel the fear; that’s the essential part of myself. Just sit and feel the fear.
Fear is just too damned difficult to feel without reacting to it. So I’m sitting here, writing it all out, hoping that the simple act of writing it all down will allow that dream to release me, or allow me to release the dream and the fear that it induced.
chatter … fret … chatter … worry … chatter …
Holding on to beliefs limits our experience of life. That doesn't mean that beliefs or opinions or ideas are a problem. It's the stubborn attitude of having to have things be a particular way, grasping on to our beliefs and opinions, that causes the problems. Using your belief system this way creates a situation in which you choose to be blind instead of being able to see, to be deaf instead of being able to hear, to be dead rather than alive, asleep rather than awake.
As people who want to live a good, full, unrestricted, adventurous, real kind of life, there is concrete instruction we can follow: see what is. When you catch yourself grasping at beliefs or thoughts, just see what is. Without calling your belief right or wrong, acknowledge it. See it clearly without judgment and let it go. Come back to the present moment. From now until the moment of your death, you could do this.
~ Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty, p. 112.
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