Hello all!
Thresholds and dreaming. There are many dreams that offer thresholds – literal doorways, emotional thresholds, openings to new ways of being, new stories, places of healing and passion. We are going to explore a little how dreams may present or offer thresholds to us.
But first, I have been thinking about how every dream, in its own way, is a threshold or a series of thresholds.
I recently spoke with someone about dreams who does not work with dreams and is devout to their religion. She told me she believed dreams were a place halfway between the world and heaven. I loved how she saw them in this way – in accordance to her beliefs – and as a threshold to a between place.
For me, the dreams are a “place” we enter when we sleep every night. A “place” that is curated, crafted just for us. So, to even enter into a dream is to cross a threshold from waking consciousness to the magic and mystery of dreaming. To step into the dreaming and have interactions with all the dreams bring is to step into something new and something outside how we live in the world – even the rules of physics are different in dreaming.
And that is just one of the series of thresholds offered by dreams. Another threshold is our decision about what to do with the dreams. When we awaken, we step back into the waking world and we have a choice to remember the dreams or not. We have a choice to turn our attention to where we have been – or not. This decision is more about – Will I keep the door open to where I have been? Will I choose to be open to where I have been?
Another threshold, then, is the choice of what to do if we choose to remember or give some attention to the dream. If we decide to stay with just the remembrance and just thinking a little about the dream, then this is not going through the next invitation. If we choose to step into the conversation with dreams, if we choose to ask questions and be curious about what the dreams offer, then we do step through another threshold with this “Yes!”
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And, of course, the narrative and action of the dreams themselves do offer doorway after doorway after doorway for us to consider and move through or not.
Including offering choices of doorways. Including showing us the choices we are making already that we may not be aware of.
Sometimes a dream will offer a seemingly literal and very obvious threshold. I had a dream where I was standing in a darkened room, facing an open door into a space that was full of light. I mean, pretty obvious. Right?
This kind of dream comes when we are conscious of stepping into something new, conscious of stepping away from something known. An “obvious” doorway comes in a dream as support and acknowledgement for the choice we are facing.
At the time of the dream, I was considering leaving something that had been a major force in my life. My dream not just acknowledged this, but offered the choice in great clarity.
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You will have noticed how many times I have used words like “choice” and “offer” and “decide” so far. Choice is truly at the heart of thresholds that we are offered in dreaming.
Even when we are not aware of walking through doorways, making choices, we are doing just that. What our dreams offer around thresholds is, first, this consciousness. That we are making choices all the time, that we are moving through doorways in large and small ways.
Like my dream. It was telling me, at one level, there is a door. It was asking – What are you going to do?