Our brains are strange and wonderful things. It allows us to feel, see, and hear things. Our senses don’t work unless our brain lets them. We can’t dream unless our brain lets us do it. Dreams are as complicated as life. Some of us dream in vivid color, others don’t remember dreams at all, and some claim they never dream.

I dream in color. I know that I also journey while I sleep and end up in some interesting places with beings represented by people I know in real life. As a shaman, I see, feel and hear all kinds of things while in the dream state. It makes me wonder about those people who say they don’t dream. What do their souls do during that time? Mine is pretty busy. I would imagine theirs are too. Why don’t they have any awareness of it? What does their brain do?

I’m sure science has an answer for that, but from a metaphysical perspective, what does that mean? Does that mean that in the world of dreams, they are blocked? Are they blind there? I thought I read somewhere that people who are blind can see in dreams. What does that say about the power of the human mind and its physical counterpart, the brain?

Lately, my dreams have been a vivid mix of the present and the past. I see places and people I haven’t seen in years and interact with them as if it were yesterday. If you believe that all time runs concurrently and there is no past, present, or future, it was yesterday or today, according to my limited human perception. I also see places that I have never seen in waking life which makes me wonder if they are actual places or my representation of those places. The sense of realness of those places astonishes me. I can feel the rain on my face, smell the scents in the air, and feel the rock in my shoe. In dreams, I can also fly, levitate, grow wings and sit on mountain tops I will never physically explore in this lifetime. What does any of it mean?

I could try to decipher it with books on dream interpretation. The symbology of dreams forces us to try to decipher them in the light of day. Our rational minds struggle to assign some sort of meaning to the visions, feelings, and sensations we encountered. It may also have answered a question we had or brought to light something we hadn’t considered about a situation that concerns us.

The point of all this rambling is to think more about how dreaming affects us and how it can help us move forward in the things we want to do. We are whole beings. Every part of us has something to do with something else. Every aspect of us is connected to every other aspect of us.

We tend to discount dreams as nothing more than leftover thoughts and feelings, and they could be, but what if they are also more than that? What if they are also another way to see inside ourselves? Until we learned to speak, read, write, and comprehend concepts that couldn’t be seen, our communication was non-verbal. We learned from watching, listening, and remembering. Now that we’re older and our brains are clogged with all the information we’ve learned since we were crawling and wearing plastic underpants, we still dream.

I encourage you to think about your dreams and what they might mean. A part of you could be giving you an answer or at least a direction on what to do about something that has you wondering or worrying. The images or feelings you get might mean nothing, but sometimes, at least, I find that they often mean something.