Dream a Little Dream

Last summer, I posted my dream-shots for providing enough money so I could quit my job after Andrew was born and never work again. As expected by that oh-so-rational part of my mind, none of them panned out.But they were still fun to think about, and anytime I can con convince that rational part of me to try some of that power of positive thinking or imaging therapy, to do my part to influence the collective subconscious, I take advantage of it. How easy it is to bring my rationality over to the Dark Side depends on how strong my gut instinct on a particular issue is.

For example, my gut wasn't really telling me much about that previous round of dream vocalization, but the rational mind saw that there wasn't really any risk involved and it made me look at things in a healthier way. So the rational mind did a little shrug and my closet mystic took over.

Another example: my goals for 2005. Sometime at the end of 2004 or the very beginning of 2005, my gut started screaming that 2005 was going to be big. Every instinct in me started clamoring about Big Things Afoot. I set up my writing goals accordingly, thinking that the Big Stuff was about my writing. And then the Drew Monster showed up. 2005 was certainly a big year, I just misinterpreted my intuition.

When I started putting together Carson's Learning for the Interstitial Arts Foundation anthology, intuition began whispering. It started as a small sense of "You should do this." As I completed the project, intuition was shouting "This is your big break." I remember a great dinner out with Mark after I had finished the primary revisions. I detailed my dream to him, the step-by-step analysis of the possibilities that my gut insisted could happen. Since then, my rational mind has teamed up with my inner critic and pulled me down from the rafters, leaving me with a happy feeling of possibilities regarding CL and with the knowledge that the worst that could happen would be rejection.

Now that I have not one but two short stories under my belt (I finished another one this weekend, just a couple of words over 2.5 K; I'm so jazzed), I'm starting to hear my gut again. Nothing specific, just a sense of a lot of things clicking into place. It's enough to let my intuition override the tag-team of my rational mind and my internal critic. But this time, instead of posting all the details of my particular dream for CL and these other short stories and my writing career in general, I'm just going to give them a public nod and keep them between me and Mark and my journal. I'll know if the CL part of the dream takes steps to turn into reality some time in August or September. As for the short stories, I'll be submitting those probably by mid-August. Who knows when I'll hear back about those?

Believing in dreams is important. Trusting your instincts is important. Acknowledging your intuition is important. Hopefully doing all those important things will twist everything into motion.