Dancing Between the Worlds

We all live in many worlds at once, seamlessly, though we sometimes talk ourselves into believing that the only "real" world is the story that contains the job and family and news and shopping and worrying and hurrying about in a scary world. The waking world is only one of the realities we dance in every day.

We spend a full third of our lives asleep, and our night dreaming world is a vital, lively place in which we have adventures, visit the past, be a child again, fly, breathe underwater, travel to faraway lands, see the future, and even talk with the dead.

It is a world that gives our bodies time to rest, reset, restore, take out the metabolic trash, and download vital information and energy needed for our day-to-day experiences from the deeper places of our consciousness.

We also dance in the liminal world of imagination, which is the bridge between the sleep and waking worlds. It is that place from which deep creativity, insight, and intuition rise. This is the sphere of life just behind our usual awareness… the world where a gut feeling gets our attention, a dream breaks through into waking life, and the place where we rehearse nearly everything we do every day. It happens so quickly, we ignore or dismiss most of the behind-the-scenes practice.

We imagine everything from getting a glass of water when we're thirsty to what our boss will say when we ask for a raise. This is the world in which we daydream, imagine the future, commune with nature, pray, write poetry, sing, get lost in music… it is also the liminal world in which we drift before and after sleep, and it contains wonders, energy, and joy. This sphere of reality also contains previews, hunches, hints, warnings, and insights. We spend most of our time in this world when we are young.

The worlds we dance between share energy and information constantly. We may wake from a dream in which we found ourselves in a cave with a protective mama bear. We may then, though we barely remember the dream, enter the day feeling that calm confidence the dream Bear left with us… then we stop for coffee and the big guy on line next to us is wearing a T-shirt printed with a nature scene that features a bear… to make the wait bearable (sorry), he starts telling us about a fascinating book he's reading about the way some dreams have changed the course of history… Then our phone pings, and it's our friend who just got her three-year-old to take a nap… by telling her the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears… three times!

You may leave with your latte thinking that these were just quite the lineup of coincidences. Let's call them synchronicity, since the worlds we dance between are always in sync. Life rhymes, and thoughts and images pass seamlessly between the worlds even when we ignore the signs or try to close the gates. We may have ignored our night dreams so long that we barely remember them. And yet… their influence is present in our lives.

Breakthrough and crossover events happen more often than we realize, and when we acknowledge these crossovers, we invite more information and open to a deeper way of understanding ourselves and the life we are living.

As we get good at acknowledging and listening and looking for the ways in which life rhymes, we become smarter decision makers, better artists of life, more intuitive, less reactive… happier. We live in a world of symbols and clues, suggestions and instructions that are part of our larger selves.

All of the worlds we live in are real. Every. One. They operate a bit differently than our consensual waking world, but truth be told, the world we think of as the Real World rises from the others. Energy and desire, fear and worry, imagination and action… all translate these inner worlds into physical form.

There's one thing I know for certain about life: as we imagine, so do we live.

"Our imagination can be the source of healing, powerful change, deep meaning, clear guidance and direct creation." — Robert Moss

We have been conditioned by the constant bombardment from news, TV shows, ads, and social media that fill our minds with images and stories of chaos, violence, fear, hopelessness, intolerance. The prominent stories that circulate are fairly dark.

You may have noticed that after a day of chaotic screens that seed your thoughts with fear and worry, you feel exhausted, and maybe you find yourself imagining threatening situations until you are emotionally wrung out. I get it. It's time then to turn to your imagination, practice psychic hygiene, and take charge of what you seed your mind with.

Imagine, dream, and follow up by seeking out what is good in the world and in your fellow humans. Remind yourself that beyond the dark images and stories there is much goodness. Kindness. Wonder… seek it out.

This is the importance of consciously dancing between the worlds. If we ignore the worlds of dreams and imagination, we limp through life looking outside ourselves seeking relief… searching for the wonder and magic that we already have at our fingertips. This is one reason we are drawn to movies that give us, for a short time, that hope, belonging, and belief in the wondrous and numinous. Of course it's not the only reason… music, art, and movies all remind us of what is possible… of what we can be and feel and create.

Do you think that David Lynch (Dune, Twin Peaks, The Elephant Man), Steven Spielberg (E.T., Close Encounters, Disclosure), and Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally…, and wrote/directed Julie & Julia and Sleepless in Seattle) dance joyfully between the worlds? You bet they do!

Your life, and mine, hold every bit as potent a story as those that make the big screen. You and I deserve every ounce of energy and insight that our dreams and imaginations have to offer.

We humans are powerful Imagineers, creators, innovators, and miracle makers. We have walked on the moon, replaced failing organs in our bodies, and dreamed dreams that have changed history. We incubate reality in the imaginal, then call it into being with our reasoning mind. Art, movies, science, dreams, visions, intuition, and even the many synchronous events that slip into our waking reality… All of these wildly diverse and wondrous things show us the power and beauty of dancing between the worlds.

Come… shall we dance?