To sleep, perchance to dream

Dreams have so many meanings. We dream while asleep, while awake, and of what we want for our futures.

Altered states of consciousness. Sleep is one, where we drop from our usual beta level of brainwaves down through alpha to delta and theta. If you've got the right meditation, you can even move into gamma.

Not long after I moved to the cities, my depression manifested itself as waking up every hour. I got very little REM sleep, which meant I wasn't dreaming. During that time melatonin became the buzzword about getting to sleep. Since I was working at a nutrition center at the time, I had access to all the literature on it. I started taking it and was sleeping through the night, only to wake up once to go to the bathroom.

It seems like no one noticed my depression. I'd call myself a high functioning depressive, as much of an oxymoron as that sounds. I got out of bed and kept going because that was the only way I knew how to be. Working two full time jobs when I attempted the second time didn't leave a whole lot of room for not functioning. Lack of sleep didn't help any, either.

Sleep and altered states can have such an impact on our bodies. We need to dream in order to assimilate all that's happened during the day. No sleep, no assimilation, no genius breakthroughs either.

What's prompting this? The dreams I woke up to this morning and the morning before. This morning my mind was swirling about me not getting things done. I was asking people for help and wasn't getting any. The last thing I remember was seeing my dad and begging him, help me daddy. I was sobbing when I woke up.
The other dream was about his brother. In some ways the dream was a version of Heroes with my uncle in the Nathan role and me playing Clare. My uncle's been gone a couple years, the victim of liver disease because he drank himself to death. He didn't follow his dreams, and look where it got him.

I know the XPC is prompting some of the dreams. That's OK. I'd rather sort out some of the crap in my life through dreams than to have to slog through them consciously.

One of the things I do before I go to sleep at night is to set an intention. It goes like this. I intend to quickly and easily move into a deep, peaceful, healing, restorative sleep where unconscious and subconscious minds do their parallel processing and cross referencing (and working on my intentions) in the background while conscious mind and body sleep straight through till (morning or a specific time I want to get up, like 4:40 am), and we all dream on the high astral plain.

Why such a long intention? It accomplishes many thing. I want to go to sleep quickly and easily, which I do most nights. Deep sleep helps the body heal and restore itself. By telling the unconscious and subconscious minds to work in the background keeps them occupied without reminding me of all the things I need to do the next day. If they do insist on keeping me up, I have paper and pen next to my bed so I can write down what keeps popping up so I don't have to remember it, it's on paper. I'm giving myself a command to wake up at a certain time, or telling my body it can sleep in, cats howling at me to feed them be damned. Dreaming on the high astral plain tells me which astral level will keep the lower astral critters away from my etheric body while I'm out and about and keep my physical body safe.

I started this intention while I was in class for therapeutic coaching. The brain is a wonderful, plastic, pliable piece of wetware that can do so much if we give it the right instructions. Intentions are one way, visioning is another.

The visioning comes in because of where I'm at with my body. It's a conscious effort to stand up straight after years of protecting myself by slouching forward. With this accident, now is the time to make the physical corrections so I can stand up straight. In essence I will heal myself into straightness and strongness of body, which the mind and soul have attempted to do for years.

There's a company down the road that sells things like foam rollers, instruction manuals, exercise balls and the like. Since I'm a massage therapist, I can get a professional discount. See if I can sneak out early on Friday and go over there to get a roller, a stretching strap and instruction manuals to help me help myself.

One of the methods they recommend is the Franklin Method. For dancers, they practice all the time, but by the end of the season they are wrecks. Unlike athletes that practice, but then let the mind envision what the perfect movement is, dancers keep on dancing. Franklin brought in visioning to help them 'see' the perfect movement and perfect it in their heads before having their bodies do it.

If I can envision my body standing up straight, breathing and moving in an easy manner, then my body has a template to work from. I have given it a command, this is what I want to look like, feel like, be like. Things follow from there.