In my thirties, I came to the realization that we are all selling something!  We are marketing ourselves, our beliefs, our causes, our opinions.  We are called upon to make judgments about everything that comes at us from our surroundings and everything that comes out of us from inside.  There is a snarl of worry and anxiety rattling around in our thoughts. There is no peace or love to be found in this struggle.  We are lost in a mire of success and failure, competition and survival.

Instead of knowing love, we carry a pack of wounds from perhaps a loveless upbringing; ways that we felt hurt and neglected and abandoned and rejected.  We imagine that these hurts are repeating themselves in many small ways in our present life.  Perhaps someone doesn't return a phone call and I interpret that to mean I am unworthy.  I reach out to someone, they look at me with a blank stare, and I imagine they are judging me. It is hard to remember that the person’s response is about them, their distraction, their disconnection, maybe even their small-mindedness, not about me.

Over time, we numb ourselves down to feeling the awfulness of that kind of life. We have been face up, facing out into the world and playing the world’s game.  Now we must flip over, face down in the water to let go of that crazy world.  The deep water of the dream is where we can find clues to the puzzle.   It is in the rich land of the unconscious, below the subconscious mind, where the heart can experience without judgment. 

Dr. Candice Pert and biologist Bruce Lipton speak of how the subconscious mind is a storehouse of a repository of stimulus-response tapes derived from instincts and learned experiences, projections and reactions programmed by years of painful experience. It is from the level of the subconscious that we react and project the past onto our present experiences an estimated 90 percent of the time. The subconscious mind is strictly habitual; it will play the same behavioral responses to life’s signals over and over again. 

The conscious mind’s capacity to override the subconscious mind’s preprogrammed behaviors is minimal. For example, if a slithering snake pops out of this page, most of you would run from the room or throw the book out of the house. Whoever ‘introduced’ you to your first snake may have behaved in such a shocked way as to give your impressionable mind an apparently important life lesson; See snake…snake baaad!  The subconscious memory system is very partial to rapidly downloading and emphasizing perceptions regarding things in your environment that are threatening to life and limb.  If you were taught that snakes are dangerous, any time a snake comes into your proximity, you reflexively (unconsciously) engage in a protective response.

But what if a herpetologist was reading this and a snake popped out? No doubt herpetologists would not only be intrigued by the snake, they would be thrilled, and especially if they found that the snake was harmless.  They received a different programming. 

Dream Matrix dreamwork asks us how we can be present to today without reacting from our past? How to come from the undefended place of our openness with the unconscious so we can begin to see beyond our projections and the contamination of the subconscious.