When we want to gather our thoughts, or gain some perspective, we usually take a break from the normal and find a place of quiet and/or solitude. And with good reason: it is difficult to sort everything out when we are in the whirlwind of events. But we have that instinct to go and find a quiet place precisely because that’s when our higher connections and guidance can reach us: they can’t get through to us when we are in the spin of our external obligations, and internal moods and emotions. And, as this excellent dream scenario shows, our journey is trying to bring that quiet state into our everyday life – so that our guidance can always be with us. (At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.) This post was originally published in June 2018.

Jeane: Well, I had one dream with two parts, and in one part of the dream a male cousin I haven’t seen for many years, that I really like, has come to town and I want to spend time with him.

And, at the same time, there’s a family get together at a restaurant I think we’re maybe both going to go to. But I find out I can’t spend time with my cousin because I guess he has a boyfriend that he’s going to go spend the afternoon with, so I’m kind of disappointed in that. But he’ll still be at the family luncheon for part of the time, but I’d hoped to go with him and then spend some more private time with him.

But I head off to the luncheon on my own. He’s there briefly, and the luncheon seems to move from this café that’s near the water to a second place where people are picnicking near the water, and then they seem to kind of go up into the mountains a bit to a third place.

Then we’ve left. He had left early; I think he left after the first place to go meet his friend. And everyone else has left, and I’m on my way back home, when I realize that I’ve left my purse somewhere. So I start to go back to the three places I’ve been before looking for the purse.

I go to the first one and there’s still some family there. They haven’t seen my purse, and then so I’m thinking in my mind about walking to the other two places. And then I remember that I’m also concerned because I have some taxes to pay and I can’t remember where I’m supposed to pay the taxes. That’s on my mind, so I’m trying to sort two things out at once now, besides the third thing of being disappointed that I couldn’t get together with my cousin. For some reason I feel like if he were along that it would be easier to sort all this out.

I finally realize that I probably am going to have to backtrack to all three places and make sure that my purse isn’t there and, at the same time, I’m feeling this pull to go home because I left my phone in my purse so if anybody found the phone and everything, and tried to phone my home I won’t be there. Since I don’t have a phone on me I can’t receive any calls, but it feels like I have to backtrack first and ask, and then I can go to my house.

Then I remember that all the taxes get paid at an office there. So at least now I know where to go. It’s like I’ve remembered what I need to do about the taxes. That seems to take a certain pressure off me, or create a relief, but I still have to go see if I can find the purse.

John: Yeah, the energetic last night was such that there were all these complexities that kind of threw the situation around, and it all had to do with something astir that is meant to be astir at this point in time – in terms of throwing a curveball at the issue of identity, or way of being.

Your dream is loaded with symbolism. First of all you have the cousin, who is gay, who you can’t spend much time with, representing something that is anew, like another level of things, a way of being in terms of something. There’s no judgement about what this is. It’s just that something anew is trying to be at hand, but can’t quite come through, and it’s meant to come through in terms of your overall beingness which means a beingness that has all of the relatives, or all of the parts of yourself, getting together.

And yet this part only flickers. It is only barely there and, as a consequence of something like this affecting the scenario of things, everything gets shifted. In other words, the restaurant that had been at a place along the water, gets shifted what, into the mountains.

See, in the town there’s all kinds of clutter and complexity. Things are not simple, and so even though you have a water setting, which is supposed to inflect an emptiness, you have a scenario that still has a heck of a lot going on.

So then when it shifts to a place in the country you have the simplicity of the setting, and you don’t have a lot of pressure hitting you. And then when it shifts to the mountains; each of things is building to a letting go, to an emptiness. So as you become more empty, the third image then is that you’re able to handle more complexities that are there to hit you, because going up into the mountains with the setting is to be able to survive ordeals, to work through ordeals, solve obstacles.

But then your dream proceeds to tell you how the one, two, and three like that works. In the first instance, it is something trying to come in, like the issue with your cousin, who you’re not able to spend the time that you need to spend with because of the fact that he prior commitments, or complexities, in other words. So that’s the first example.

And then, in the second example, the simplicity, that you might say corresponds with the country setting along water, enables you to recognize that there are obligations outstanding that have to be taken out of the equation.

In the third, where you hit an emptiness able to solve barriers and obstacles, to penetrate barriers and obstacles, that’s also when you don’t carry any kind of separate identity. And when you don’t carry any kind of separate identity, where you don’t have something else going on with you, like an internal dialogue or projection of some sort that you conjure up on your own as something that has to be done or is meaningful, when you’re able to be blank like this, or totally empty, that’s when you know how and where to deal with whatever comes along that still digs at you – like the idea of having to pay taxes.

When you go to the countryside, where there’s the lake, where all the parts of yourself come together in that kind of a scenario and you don’t have the outer complexity, you have the simplicity, you’re able to recognize unfinished business, taxes and stuff, that need to be paid – but you’re not empty enough yet; you don’t know quite how to contend with that.

When you go into the mountains, meaning that somewhere along the way of this whole journey you have lost your purse, you’ve lost your identity, when you become kind of blank like that, then you kind of know things naturally, in terms of the overall whole, that you’re able to feel.

In other words, you have made a journey that’s able to go from an innerness, the water represents an inner flow, you’re able to go from an inner flow that is not quite very viable in the city of complexities and peculiarities, in which you can have inklings of something coming anew, another level of yourself coming into the family, but flickering, not able to completely come through because there’s something different going on yet, so many different things going on, that as it progresses the energetic of that comes through, as a part of yourself having awoken energetically. That energetic that is needed there as part of you comes through, but you can’t put your finger on it in terms of quite how that transpired because it occurred as you were unfolding, or developing, and becoming more empty.

And along with that losing of identity which may have, on one level of the outer way of looking at things, been very disconcerting, on an inner level of things enabled you to access what was needed to be accessed, that was trying to come through, and simultaneously such an access gave you the ability to contend with things that on the first image you weren’t even recognizing or noticing yet.

In the second image there was still an amnesia a bit. On the third image you went through the obstacles sufficiently enough so as to be empty with no identity and, therefore, having in a knowingness that just was naturally there.

Isn’t that a complicated dream? So the secret to a dream like that is to recognize the process as an unfolding inner process, and then also be able to look at how this is an ongoing thing in terms of the outer unfoldment of things. Because what is happening on an inner level like this, it’s easy to try to stay with that as if one’s looking at this and trying to gather personal information in terms of what is going on. The way that the dreaming is also pointing to is what is different and what is happening in relationship to the inner into outer flow.

And so you have this inner waking up that is leading to a quality of a letting go where you drop the identities of yourself and become very simplistic. You can contend with things that complicate your life with responsibilities that are outer, such as the taxes. You eventually get to where you can release that sort of thing rather than put it into the heart as a characteristic that then veils you from being able to function according to how it is that you really are.

When you are contending with the taxes you have an identity that, if it’s in terms of having a responsibility, an obligation, a pressure in that way, when you set that aside, you can become more blank, and therefore more open and more receptive to yourself in an overall whole.

To download this file, Right Click (for PCs) or Control Click (for Macs) and Save: Toward Simplicity