Bed is my synagogue. Dreams are my bible. Waking up my goal. Waking up is the entire purpose of the spiritual life, and waking up is hard to do! I depend on my dreams like I depend on my friends.
One of the best things I've done for my dream life is to get myself a Zen Alarm Clock. The zen alarm clock is not actually a clock but a "musical instrument for progressive awakening". At the appointed hour the most beautiful chime dings once and then stops, giving you time to go through alpha brain wave state and actually finish your dreams and then remember them!
I mean what's the point of truncated unremembered dreaming. A waste of energy! The tone is based on Pythagorian Harmonics. The whole thing is very scientific! You wake up with a "powerful charging effect on your mind". Or at least that's what they say. I would say a "powerful charging effect on my life"! Three minutes and 48 seconds after the first chime it chimes again. And then at intervals according to the Golden Mean and you never have to press the snooze button!
You never have to hear news about something awful first thing in the AM. You fall asleep gradually (hopefully!) and that is how you should wake up as well. It totally changed my life. But don't get the digital one. After years of dependable use in a fit of over enthusiasm I back slapped zenny to a concrete floor. Woops. The nice people at Now and Zen offered to replace my clock for half price despite the fact that it was well past its warrentee. So I got the more aesthetically pleasing, better for traveling digital model. NG. Get the original model. You will thank me. We will meet in dreamland..
If you are a student of Judaism you probably believe that words are magic. If so: armed is an anagram for dream. (One anagram for Beth Lapides is: shlep it a bed! go ahead go do your own name you know you want to!) And in a sense when we are dreaming we're arming ourselves with the inner knowledge available only with symbolic revelation. Aming ourselves like one of those many armed gods, giving yourself a greater ability to accomlish. (If like me you are a workaholic who needs to defend dreaming!) Unless you get lost in a dream world. Sometimes I tell my students to forget the dream, and focus on the passion. It's so easy to get plugged into the dream machine, where we can't even tell if our dreams are our real dream or the manufactured dream, the fame and fortune and red carpets. Like that blonde chick in "I'm From Rolling Stone", her "dream" was keeping her from her dream. Although another anagram for dream is "rad me" and maybe she knows what she wants.
Don Juan tells Carlos Casteneda in "The Art of Dreaming": "…dreaming is perceiving more than what we believe it is possible to perceive." In these times of transition, shift and change, dreaming may be the best way. In a time when solving our problems seems too hard, dissolving them may be a better approach and sleeping and dreaming amazing tools for this dissolution.
This year on MLK Day I listened to his "I Have A Dream" speech. It's not "I had a dream", it's "I have a dream". Present tense. In the now. Might be a good listen as you get ready to celebrate freedom this Passover.