Letting Go – Day 10
30 Days of Letting Go Day 10
By Jenny Griffin
Shamans and Dreamers: What Happens in a Dream…
… doesn’t stay in Vegas, it can help you resolve important issues in your waking life.
Have you ever experienced a dream in which you sobbed, or raged, or expressed yourself joyfully and woke up feeling like something tangible has been released? Well, it has, say many experts on the subject of dreams. In fact, the ability to dream is in itself an important and cathartic element of human life. Some even suggest that if we didn’t dream, we would suffer delusional and psychotic episodes. It’s like a vent for your subconscious mind.
Kelly Sullivan-Walden has written a great deal on the subject of dreams and their importance in the role of an awakening planet. In ‘I Had the Strangest Dream: the Dreamer’s Dictionary for the 21st Century,’ she outlines eight different dream categories and walks you through the role that each type plays in your waking life. Several of them involve letting go in a very tangible way: ‘The Processing Dream,’ in which you find solutions to unresolved situations in your waking life; ‘The Venting Dream,’ which often feels like a nightmare in its intensity, and in which you vent some of your biggest fears and concerns from your waking life; and ‘The Breakdown/Breakthrough Dream,’ during which you might come face to face with natural disasters and other destructive forces.
The act of dreaming involves letting go on a number of levels. There’s the initial letting go that allows you to fall asleep, releasing the conscious mind’s tendency to try to control and drive events, and trusting that your dreams will take you somewhere new and magical. With this initial letting go, we’re giving our subconscious mind permission to step forward and take over. ‘I’ll sleep on it…’ really means, ‘I’ll dream up a solution by tomorrow.’ We let go of the rational, ego-driven part of us that wants to believe we can think our way through anything, and connect to a sphere of potential so vast we can’t even perceive of it in our conscious minds. We let go of impossibles, improbables and unlikelies, and make way for things to become their highest versions of themselves. Nothing is impossible in the dreamtime.
