Waking Dreams

by David Rivinus

At night, while we’re asleep, we dream. We may not remember what we have experienced in this state, but the pictures and impressions are stored in our subconscious. They are communications from our deepest selves, offering course corrections, insights, warnings, and sometimes, congratulations.

Then, there is the day, while we are awake. Are the experiences we have during our waking hours different than the dreams we have during sleep? Surprisingly, perhaps, the answer is no. These experiences are exactly the same. They offer the same kinds of spiritual communications that we get from our sleeping dreams.

How does it work? The answer is that we are living in a paradox. On one hand, waking life demands that we interact with it objectively. We cook our meals, go to work and raise our children. Simultaneously, these same life experiences offer us an overlay of metaphors that are nothing more than dream symbols. These metaphors contain the same sort of imagery we experience during sleep. The trouble is that most of us don’t pay attention to them.

Here is an example of one of these waking dreams. A middle-aged customer, going about the normal affairs of his day, is interested in a new communication product and visits an electronics store. There are aspects to the new product that intrigue him, but he can’t make up his mind if the gadget is really going to benefit him or if it is a gimmick. The store is full of customers, one of whom is a gentleman driving a motorized wheelchair. It takes a while before one of the store clerks is able to answer the man’s questions. When the answers start coming from the employee, they are so full of aggressive sales rhetoric that the man feels more overwhelmed than he did when he was simply trying to understand the benefits of the product on his own.

Suddenly, the sales clerk’s monologue is cut short as the man feels an impact from behind. He instantly understands that something is amiss, although he is not exactly sure what is wrong. Nevertheless, he has the presence of mind to jump out of the way, as the motorized wheelchair he’d seen before comes plowing through the space that he had been occupying only seconds earlier. It runs uncomfortably over his foot, but that is the only mishap.

He is aggravated until he understands that the driver is in the middle of some kind of seizure and simply has no control. The driver’s family comes immediately to the rescue and wheelchair is brought to a stop. An apology is relayed to the man. Medicine is administered to the driver, and all is calm again.

The man is perplexed and a bit shaken. As he subsequently tells me, “I’m 57 and certainly have had as much contact with wheelchairs as the next person, but in all that time, nothing like this has ever happened to me.”

Further, the man has also worked extensively with waking dreams and understands that the dreaming process continues during waking time. He knows that waking dream experiences are to be dealt with literally and objectively; that’s why he jumped out of the way even before he understood what was happening from behind. He also knows that these same experiences are metaphors, or, dream symbols designed to deliver a message of importance. The poignant experiences, ones which leave us shaken and bewildered, are especially significant. This incident certainly qualifies.

The man sets himself on a peculiar course of action. After assuring the family that he is fine, no harm has been done and that he wishes the very best for the driver, he quietly begins to analyze the experience as if it were a dream.

He knows that whatever else a dream may concern itself with, a dream is always about the dreamer. He understands that he needs to begin the interpretation process by identifying with all of the dream symbols. In other words, he has to completely own the experience he just went through.

“Let’s see,” he begins. “I got run over. A vehicle came up on me from behind. The driver was out of control due to an impairment of his ability to drive. It could have resulted in serious consequences, but I managed to jump out of the way in time.”

Immediately, he understands this waking dream as a commentary on the unpleasant sales experience he has just endured. The man realizes that he had been, in a metaphoric, symbolic sense, run over by the clerk’s aggressive sales pitch. It had come up on him from behind and was out of control. The man’s lack of knowledge impaired his ability to distinguish the sales clerk’s valid points about the product from what was hype. Had he allowed himself to be blindly guided by the salesman, there might well have been serious consequences, for the gadget he was interested in was expensive. However, the man managed to jump out of the way in time and no harm was done.

Suddenly, all of his doubt disappears. The man knows exactly what he needs to do, which is to walk away from the sale. Only moments earlier he had been annoyed at an errant wheelchair. Now, he finds himself curiously thanking the disabled driver for being the source of important understanding.

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When the man relates this experience and his interpretation to me, I am delighted. He has come away with an important warning about a potentially frivolous buying adventure. Most importantly, he is looking at waking life from the perspective of the paradox, which is the fact that waking dreams are both literal and metaphorical.

I want to take him even further, to help him see that dreams can be understood on many levels. Wasn’t the annoying salesman also part of this waking dream, with the aggressive sales pitch being an element of the overall story of the wheelchair? And, if all the facets of the dream are parts of him, who is it that is trying to sell him a communication device that is less than ideal? I urge him to look at all the characters from the driver of the wheelchair to the salesman to the family administering medicine as parts of his own psyche. What can he learn?

After a pensive silence, he tells me that he has been trying to convince himself to make a move to a new career. He is ambivalent, but is trying to talk himself into it, bluffing his way through the various reasons why it is a good idea. Now he realizes that, metaphorically, he is actually the salesman, the impaired driver and the wheelchair, each of them trying to run over him. He is quite moved by this revelation. He lets the whole career issue drop and goes away more at peace than he has been for some time.

Dreams are extraordinary and can be understood on so many levels, the deepest levels being those we reach when we identify with each of our dream symbols. What’s more, dreams never stop; night and day, waking and sleeping, we are constantly dreaming.

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About the Author

David Rivinus has been a dream analyst since the late 1960s. His subsequent discovery that one can analyze startling daytime events as dreams revolutionized his approach, and he has lectured and facilitated dream workshops internationally ever since. Recently, he documented his findings and methods in the book, Always Dreaming. For more information, please visit: www.teacherofdreams.com