What happens if we give our own relationship with our dreams a chance to form first?

Maybe we let the dream stay close, just for us, for a little while. We can let the imagery linger. We let ourselves remember what it felt like without immediately needing to discover more about it.

We can allow the dream to speak to us before we go speak to anyone else.

There is time for the dream dictionary. For Google. For telling five people about what we dreamed. There is even time for someone to hear “snake or water or dead grandmother” and immediately start applying meaning to what we saw.

But first, we can stay close.

What if we allow our dreams to tell a story in our mind before we go search for what that story means to anyone else? There is time for that, too.

What Catches Our Attention?

We live entire days surrounded by things we see, hear, feel and experience.

We get in the car and full scenes are happening in front of us. We go to the store and see people and products. We drive through the country and see trees and streams, creeks and lakes, birds, squirrels, maybe a deer crossing the road.

All of those things become part of the experience of that day. And we don’t necessarily stop at the end of it and ask:

• What did the squirrel mean?
• Why did I see three creeks?
• What was the deeper significance of aisle seven?

Sometimes things simply belong to the experience of being alive that day. And sometimes something catches our attention.

Maybe you’re stopped somewhere and reach beneath the dash looking for your charger. Your hand touches some little thing you left there and completely forgot about.

You pull it out: Oh! I forgot *that* was there. But now? You’re close enough to see it again.

Or maybe an animal you’ve never seen before crosses the road. Something about it catches you: Wait. That.

You become curious. You look closer. Maybe you figure out what kind of animal it was. Maybe you explore its symbolism and find something that connects beautifully with where you are in your life.

Sometimes something catches our attention, so we bring it closer. Other times, something comes close enough to us that it catches our attention.

Either way, attention changes our relationship with what we’ve experienced. It’s what we choose to look closely at that begins to shape the meaning of our day.

Some things become a memory. Other things wash away.

The Whole Dream

Why would dreaming be so different?

Inside a dream, there may have been a room whose walls we can’t remember. People whose faces have already disappeared. We may have moved from one place to another without knowing how we got there.

There were sounds, colors, objects, sensations and countless little details that made up the experience while we were inside it. Some of them we remember.

Some of them wash away.

And yet, we had the whole dream.

Think about the end of an ordinary day. We don’t have to reconstruct every moment to know how the day felt. We don’t have to remember every tree we passed, every person we saw, every thought we had or what we ate for lunch.

The experience is whole even when our memory of every piece isn’t.

We don’t need every detail of a dream for the dream to have been a whole experience. What we remember is part of it. What washed away was part of it, too. What we remember and what we don’t recall already shared itself in its own full scenes – weird, ordinary, shifting, blurry, vivid, forgotten, and sometimes, even deeply detailed.

And somewhere within that fullness, something may stay close upon waking.

• A feeling.
• An image.
• A person.
• A place.
• One tiny detail we can’t quite stop thinking about.

Maybe that’s where we begin. Not by looking harder, but by looking closer.

What stayed close enough to remember? What caught your attention? What feels different when you hold what you saw in your dreams close to your own life?

Because the closer you are to your own experience of the dream, the more meaning it already has.