Getting on board

I love when a dream, especially a dream that bothers me, reveals good insights as I let it percolate—most especially as these insights lead to a sense of relief and good humor. This morning, after tapping “stop” on my alarm and ignoring the fact that I really ought to get out of bed, I dozed off into an otherwise uncontained snooze and had a dream about a crush I’d had in high school. In this dream, I’m with a group of friends and acquaintances I’d also had in high school, at least a half dozen or more. We’re all walking and navigating together through a crowded train station or transit center of sorts. The general atmosphere reminds me of the bustling, milling energy of my high school, but the metaphor lends itself to more, too. In this dream we’re all a little older than high school age, but not by much. Maybe 20ish or so.

As was the case back in high school, in this dream I am longing and yearning for this particular person’s attention. In high school we were close friends. I met him when I beboyfriended one of his friends and became a part of their tight-knit little group. More than anyone else at the time, I admired him for his leadership qualities, intelligence, relative confidence, sense of humor, and good discernment. He was often (not always) the sort of conscience of the group. And if he wasn’t exercising good discernment or conscience, neither was anyone else. Even I deferred to his judgement, mostly (not always), though being more of an alpha-type myself. Because of his steady friendship and my appreciation for the qualities he exhibited, when the relationship I was in took a sudden turn for the worst (or rather had been plummeting for some time and finally hit a bottom), I had the self-respect and confidence to end it and walk away.

Before that happened, I hadn’t realized how much or to what degree I’d really been attracted to this friend. But once I’d cleared the first relationship, my recognition of having the biggest crush (the word is so cute. I still like it) I’d ever had—
you know, by early teenage standards
—unfolded easily.
He talked a lot about another girl he had a crush on—one who happened to have the same first name as me. And the same last initial. It was terribly annoying, both because it made me feel hopelessly undesirable—I was not unaware of the ways in which she was “better” than me in a socio-economically objective sort of way; and had very sweet energy that was a liability for me to express among this mostly male group of friends. I kept mine mostly hidden. But hers seemed to express freely. I was painfully jealous.

And it was annoying because it simultaneously gave me a persistent hope, a belief, that if he liked her, he could like me too. Ever willfully obstinate, I took the similarity of name and some generalities of appearance as an encouraging sign in my favor. It’s kinda funny, and a little sobering, to think about now: that absolute determination, the tenacity, the insight, the gall to both identify and grasp the lifelines available to me as they presented themselves. However slim they might be.

I had noticed and was pleased that in spite of this frequent reminder that his romantic attention was elsewhere, our friendship was developing into a closer one. But hopelessness won out over hope. I hadn’t had any experience with friendship developing into something more—that where there was mutual attraction, intimacy could progress naturally and easily and reach a culmination point. It just wasn’t a part of the cognitive framework I was working with at the time.
Because daddy issues.

Out of this gripping hopelessness and intense discomfort—the angst and tension of wanting a thing that is only just perpetually out of reach, and no faith that if I relaxed even just a bit at a time, it would shift inevitably in my favor—and with no physiological or neurologic ability to relax or dial down my discomfort any more than I already was, I said yes to the first person who asked me out and offered even just a little relief. In so doing, I put a huge brake on any opportunity that had been developing for a more intimate relationship with the person I’d actually wanted one with. Terrified of the uncertainty and vulnerability involved in being more honest with both of these young men, I remained passively dishonest, and so overlooked the very occasional hints that he might actually be feeling similarly, in spite of the interruption of my getting involved with someone else. In fact, I was completely incapable of recognizing these hints for the opportunities they really were when they were offered to me—not until I was much, much older.

And by then, I was already hopelessly swept up with the inertia of the interruption: the hints weren’t nearly consistent nor direct enough to kindle more hope in me and stop the momentum of the doubt that had instigated it. It didn’t occur to me, at all, that I could act on my own behalf in response to my own desire, nor to respond more actively to any outward indications that it might be worth shifting directions.
I settled, as a pure matter of the physics at play, for the direction of inertia.

Teenage is as teenage does.

I most certainly was not alone: it is the predominant relationship pattern still, even among most adults; that is, settling for less than what we really want and going with the inertia of what we can more readily get: even justifying it, talking ourselves into the belief that it is somehow better or more noble or rational to do so and compounding its momentum—all because we don’t believe with enough conviction that we can have what we really want. So it remains perpetually out of grasp.
Not just with relationships, but also careers, goals, dreams, hobbies, you name it. Any expression of human desire.

I didn’t stop admiring this friend, nor wishing we could have been together even when coupled with someone else—but I did allow myself to be soothed and distracted (mostly) by the someone else. It was good enough, better than I’d expected, while it lasted. Mostly. I had terrible boundaries around my sexuality, and even when I mustered the courage to say no when I meant no, my no was overridden and I allowed it to be so by staying. The walking away was much harder this time, because I had unintentionally raised my own stakes considerably and with them the fear that I couldn’t ever meet them. Completely self-defeating.

I did eventually, completely, get over the crush, though, as we often do. I was only a teenager for so long, and that… well, let’s call it what it was, obsession, ran out of all the juice that had been in it for me. Other things began to dominate more of my attention and it all faded to a sort of fondness and a softer recognition that like most things that occur during our teenage years it had only been a partial expression of what I really wanted. A stop along the way, one I’d learned a lot from and overall felt far more positively than negatively about. Pretty unconditionally forgiving all the way around, disappointments and all.
And then I was ready to continue along the journey. Ready for what was next. For better or worse.

There’s more to it but for now that is sufficient back story.
So, in this dream, I and a group of friends, including this high school crush, are navigating a large transit center full of other people. I am in an all-too-familiar pining energy, a yearning, a longing. He is preoccupied with the people around us, with appearances, with playing the role among them he is used to playing: he’s had to be the leader, the conscience, of the group, after all. What might happen if he stopped, even for a little while? What would everyone think? Could he be esteemed and accepted anyway? Anxiety and belief say no, and I can sense it, palpably. There’s momentum in all that, inertia, and not enough attraction my direction to overcome it. My point of attraction in all that dependent yearning is not very strong. It isn’t stable for me, and so can’t be stabilizing for him, either.
Girls aren’t the only ones with daddy issues.

I’m keenly, intuitively aware that he is intentionally ignoring the more that is under the surface. That he is making an active decision not to connect, not to stop and acknowledge the mutuality. We just keep heading with our friends and acquaintances on the way to a train. And it only makes me even more … well, pathetic. Not in a critically judgmental way, I understand the way traumas tend to inform my behavior—but in an objective sense: increasingly more anxious and dependent and emotionally fixated on his providing me with direct evidence of what I already know to be true. I am divorced, so to speak, from my own knowing and relying completely on appearances—on his judgement.

Hopeless. Totally hopeless. A total surrender of all my power and thus a downward spiral.
There’s a name for the dysfunctional pathology of that: anxious/avoidant attachment. It’s a death trap.

Called out by a dream. Definitively. Undeniably.

My friends all board this train, and he with them. I do not board this train, and I am sad, disappointed, that he will be going away. I feel the finality of it. A sort of failure. Instead, I am now with two of my aunts, outside the transit center. One of my aunts disappears then returns. She tells me she went to say goodbye to my friends before the train left.

“I asked them,” she says, “which one of them you’d miss the most. And they all turned and pointed right at _____!” [crush—whose anonymity I will protect except that if you knew me in high school that’s probably a pointless concession. Sorry not sorry mr. high school crush.]
Called out. Very literally, even. By everyone there who knew me.

Finding it cute, endearing, sweet, my aunt is amused by this. I. am. not.
In fact, I’m fuming. “No!” I rebuke. “That’s not true!” I march back into this mass transit center, determined to find this train and the friends on it, and him, and declare I would not miss him, and certainly not more than anyone or anything else!

I woke up before I found a train I wasn’t going to find, anyway, however determined I’d been. Within the dream I’d already begun sagging, just slightly, under the realization that the train was gone, the opportunity missed; even as I marched doggedly toward it bristling with all the fire of my passionate indignation.

I woke up very annoyed, frustrated, and, well, crushed. HOW could a situation I’d been clear of for some very long time still provoke these feelings in me; have that kind of power over me?!?! And yet, I also understood that as far as relaxing into my subconscious, I probably at this point couldn’t have let myself dream it at all if it had been about anyone else: my feelings for this particular person were both resonant enough yet dim enough, now, that the dream was relatively mild. Easily overcome.

Nevertheless, I succumbed to a sour mood that I half-heartedly tried to ignore, to suppress. I understood exactly the sort of hurdle it represented for me more currently, and suppression, avoidance, or denial, at this point, is no longer viable. In fact, it’s grown less and less even possible, whatever I do.
My bar has steadily been going up and my willingness to not go with it has gone correspondingly down.

I deliberated on this dream as my morning went on and I began to clarify more of the message. The most poignant being that even though who and what I wanted had been standing right next to me, walking and talking and breathing and being right where I could see them, hear them, reach out and physically touch them—my dominant belief, whether I wanted it or meant to believe it, was that he was missing. I would miss him.
And so, he was. And I did.
That was exactly what dismayed me so much about this dream. I know that as a matter of pure physics and the reality of human consciousness, you can’t possibly find what you believe to be missing.
All you can do is distract yourself from its absence (even without realizing it) until that belief—call it a train, a train of thought, a feedback loop: “I can’t find it, it’s lost, it’s missing, where is it, I can’t see it, I can’t find it, it’s missing, it’s gone, where is it, it’s missing, I need to find it but I can’t find it,” stops dominating your attention for long enough. And then maybe you find it. Maybe quickly, maybe not.

When I remembered that, I had the first small lift in my mood relative to the dream.
“Good riddance, train.”
Train of thought, of observation, of manifested evidence—of course it’s easy to free the actual personified stand-in: the stunt double, so to speak, appearing as this friend.
And even though my attention had been on the train, in my own dreamscape visualization of the fingers-all-pointing scene my aunt described, a visualization, observation, participation clear as day, I nevertheless declared, “so glad I didn’t actually board the train.”

Like I said, I’ll take the lifeline, at whatever stretch it may be.

So, lifeline in hand, I mustered up the gall to be glad that I didn’t have the opportunity, even when I sought it, to get on board that train with those people all affirming the person missing in my life, where the collective dominant momentum was moving in the direction of this person missing from my life, thanks to their observation of my belief that it was missing in my life. So glad I didn’t get the chance, this time at least, to carry out my plan to waste breath and time and energy getting swept up in the direction of arguing with and defending myself from this clearly well-established belief that was pointless to deny, thus keeping it very much actively dominating my attention. So glad for the awareness of the opportunity to ease off; to let it go, whether I accept the opportunity or not.

Then I began connecting the narrative of the dream to my early experience of my father. Even when physically present, he unpredictably swung between extremes: utter devotion and just as utter emotional and physical abandonment. Joy and despair. Playfulness and severity. Tenderness and violence. Order and chaos. Love and addiction. Occasional attentiveness to my basic physical needs and thoughtless, even criminally extended neglect of them. Rescue and relief, and total rejection. And then complete physical abandonment: he literally went missing. I was 4 the last time I or anyone else in my family saw him, and I didn’t hear from him again directly for 36 years.
So, of course. That’s a lot of momentum of missing, moving against me.

“Daddy issues,” I confirm out loud to myself in the car as it coalesces thus in my mind. I’m pulling out of a driveway as I utter this, and look up to see a sign on a building across the street: “Daddy.” I groan aloud and chuckle as if at a bad joke. This is a synchronicity game I am very used to, and I understand it always and infallibly leads me to something better, toward uplift. Because I recognize the synchronicity for what it is, and it is *so* perfectly timed, I am effectively amused, now more willing to feel hopeful than hopeless. And subsequently in nearer emotional proximity to the clarity and relief I so much want and need.

I’d gone back in the dream, but now that I was awake and aware, I could make a different choice. Turn things around, so to speak.

I pull past the tree obscuring my full view of the sign. The name of the store is “Mac Daddy Repair.” They repair computers. I laugh out loud, again. The metaphor of computer repair is not lost on me; our minds are a sort of often-automated transit center for all our habitual trains of thought. I recognize that mine is broken, or at least, has been, or else I couldn’t have produced a dream like the one I had. But, here look, say the universal forces that be: literally, physically, actually available hope for repair.

Come to think of it, the “up” arrow on my MacBook isn’t working. I hadn’t thought very much about taking it to be repaired. The coincidence and the metaphor (up-uplift) amuses me even more.
And now I will take it in for a repair. But probably to the Genius Bar, rather than to some randomly self-declared “Mac daddy.”

I consider that one impetus for the dream could be that my father is in my life now, at least via text message (that being a matter of my own discernment). I am afforded opportunities for small repairs. He is as eager as he can be to repair what he can. There isn’t a lot he can offer: he is still hopelessly entangled himself in his own issues and very inconsistent. I can’t change that. But I do appreciate what he does offer and I offer what I can in return. That helps us both.
It’s a better platform than I was working with previously, and may be exactly why I ended up with my aunts somehow rather than on a train headed nowhere I wanted to go.

In the car as I continue on my way, I’m aware that I still feel only partially better. I’d like to feel much better before moving on for the day, and I know I can reach for it incrementally as soon as I take the time to focus, choosing the trains deliberately. Knowing when to exit one train and board the next. I’ve already begun.
I can be a very good navigator, when I want to be. We all can.

My belief, my understanding, is that we create the reality we live in. We can do it on autopilot, by default of what we’ve already known, what we’ve already observed in motion. Or we can do it deliberately, by choice, choosing to focus on what feels better, on what we want to observe, what we know to be true in spite of appearances. Not everything is going to yield quickly or immediately, it isn’t meant to, and lots of things have more momentum than we can hope to alter alone, or even within our own lifetime. The world would be terribly chaotic and impossible to navigate if there wasn’t enough stable momentum in a lot of our social structures, for example, whether we like them or not.

This friend in my dream offered a platform, a stable and honest expression of momentum that, like it or not, I cannot navigate intentionally without. I want to navigate intentionally, so I am very appreciative of it, and his role in my life—pretty satisfied, even happy when I think about it, however much this dream rattled my confidence and still has me feeling a bit grippy, a bit desperate, a bit more squirmy-rather-than-oblivious about the persistence of underlying anxiety, instability.

I know our emotions are like dashboard indicators or sign posts.
If I feel crappy I am on the wrong train, headed the wrong way. Every time. Period.

I believe, I know without any doubt, that when something unwanted happens its opposite is also generated energetically; and the bigger the problem, the bigger and better the solution. It’s just a matter of finding your way from what you don’t want into the emotional proximity of what you do want.
It takes practice, and it is a form of discipline.

And it isn’t always easy. It takes stepping actively out of entrenched habits of thought and deliberately practicing better thoughts, and then abandoning those for even better thoughts, and so on. Like exercising a set of muscles that have been under a cast for a prolonged period of time. It’s not going to happen all at once, and if you put the cast back on, you’re going to have to start again. There is no way around any of that. And it’s easy to get discouraged by a perceived lack of progress: progress often being so incremental that it is hardly noticeable except at some retrospective remove.

I stop in the parking lot at one of my favorite local places to be. I begin talking out, I mean literally talking out, what I know—what I know to have been true, what I have been working with. I acknowledge the faulty nature of the premises I have paid a lot of attention to. I understand my attention to them and forgive myself for my attention to them. I grieve, a little bit: I can’t deny this subconscious group of people pointing directly at something I’d formerly wanted so much and indicating to me so clearly that it was missing, in my own estimation, and that I subsequently hadn’t gotten what I’d wanted. Nor can I deny how its resonance is deeply effecting me more recently.

I appreciate myself, outloud, for caring enough about how I feel, for recognizing this awful feeling of squirming with powerlessness as intolerable, so much so that I am willing to use the more powerful energy of words externalized to generate momentum, despite my inhibitions and even if it meant sitting in my car talking to myself like a crazy person. I laugh, alone in my car, while talking to myself. Totally crazy. I’m feeling a little happy about that=even crazier. And even happier. I appreciate being one of those crazy people who dares to care more about how they really feel and how they really want to feel than anything else—recognizing anything else to be literally *insane* and detrimental to themselves and everyone around them, too. I appreciate being aware of the option to deliberately practice the sanity of basic universal laws to adjust what I’m feeling, and so what I am creating. I affirm my understanding that literally nothing else matters more than my feeling even a little better, even just a little more powerful and effective and attractive than I was feeling in that dream.
As I did all that, new trains of thought began rolling and relief began to flow. Ease became easier and easier to reach for and verbalize: like gaining confidence while swinging on the monkey bars.

A metaphor (not of my own invention) comes to mind as I talk to myself, that of a big huge bus, the kind that rock stars travel to their shows in: full of luxury and space and all the accoutrements of home while on the road. A big huge bus rolling at speed with a *lot* of momentum. It can be towing a car along behind it, and even if this car has its brake on, its resistance has *no* impact on the momentum of the bus: gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “resistance is futile.” It only wears out its own hardware; and will perhaps be in need of repair when the bus reaches its destination—the degree of which depending on the distance the car travelled with its brake on.

I believe, I understand, I know without a doubt that all the presence, all the resistance-free momentum of non-physical consciousness focused in my favor—in all of our favor—is driving this bus.

I remember, still affirming all this knowing out loud to myself like a crazy person, that they have set their unwavering focus on my destination and they share none of my fear or doubt: with absolute consistency they participate with the pure, full energy of my desires and never fall short. They do for me what no human being on the planet could possibly hope to do—what no person on this planet was ever meant to be solely responsible for on my behalf.

And now that I’ve felt my way into this much better momentum, it comes easily to me that this isn’t just any big old, awesome bus. It’s a party bus. It’s a high on life bus. All of the non-physical energies associated with me, associated with everyone connected to me, are all on board that bus enjoying a party that I got going and kept going through my experience of contrast and all the desires it set into motion and all the deliberate focus I’ve since accomplished.
And they are enjoying the party whether I show up or not.
(jerks)
(just kidding)

Sometimes, still, more often than I like or want to admit, I go sit (and sulk) in the car this bus is towing, a car it’s towing because I asked to have it towed along (it might be useful, after all, if it’s in good shape).
And sometimes, more often than I like to admit, I sit in that car sulking and pressing my foot into the brake. Wearing myself down.
Sometimes I’m still crazy by default.

I can’t affirm the knowing of my own power at the same time that I’m surrendering that power to another human being, asking them to exercise their power for me. They might be able to do it a little, maybe even a lot, but never as consistently as any of us really need. And then we’d both be trapped in a cycle of dependence, depletion, and exhaustion. (been there done that ready for something else)
I mean, that’s basically, exactly, what most of the world is currently doing. I’m not the singular anomaly I sometimes imagine myself to be while sulking.
It’s the transit center, the platform we’ve all mostly been hanging out on and the train we’ve kept boarding for a very long time.
Luckily there are options. If you’re willing to be crazy enough to start considering them.

Sometimes I do show up for the party. I’ve been choosing to show up more and more often with more and more consistency than I’ve ever managed before. And it is one helluva party. So fun, so playful, so inspired, so good, so full, so delightful. So happy. So satisfying. So devoted and lively. So unconditionally independent of whatever is going on immediately around me. This party is where all my intentional creative power resides and it is the means by which I will arrive at all the repairs I’ll ever need and all the destinations I could ever want.

Now I’m really having fun with all my crazy-talk, feeling much better and more uplifted, more steady, more sure, more confident with all this better-flowing energy in alignment with my own knowing. This is the knowing I kept looking for someone else to affirm for me in that dream: something I was doing historically back then, and inadvertently keep doing now in various ways, without meaning to.

And that’s okay. All I ever need to do is notice I’ve done it—I have dashboard indicators, actual feelings, for that—and then decide, again, as soon as I’m ready, to get unconditionally back on board the party bus even if it takes a little time and a little more uninhibition that I’ve previously had. And it’s okay to get off and back on. I’m human and I can’t help doing that. When I stop doing it completely, I’ll be dead, and I don’t plan on that any time soon. There’s lots of fun to be had here, still, or I wouldn’t be here. I’m looking forward to it. Looking forward to it eagerly, passionately, more often than not.

Am I crazy? Yes. According to nearly all of society I’m a.b.s.o.l.u.t.e.l.y b.o.n.k.e.r.s. Hopelessly, insistently—very deliberately crazy.
I love it. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

**If you are interested in any of these ideas, I recommend following Abraham/Esther Hicks. They offer the most clear, undistorted, unconvoluted expression of the law of attraction and accessing creative vortices than any other info source I’ve found.
happy creating.