The ability to dream about our future is a powerful resource which creates inspiration and gives us energy.
How to Dream
Sit and focus on your dreams, dreams that you want to turn into reality. As you see them, feel them and hold them visually in your mind. You’ll sense the energy building up and feelings of urgency rising inside yourself.
This is how we motivate ourselves, and this is also how we create frustration in life.
Trickery of the Mind
The feelings that are generated through a dream of a better self, a better future, can quickly diminish into false connections.
False connections: thoughts that manifest themselves as excuses as to why we probably can’t realize the dream.
The logic and reason of the human mind can present good arguments for negative and positive aspects of any idea.
There is a logic to it, though.
What happens when You Dream of Better Things
When we sit and dream, we are in free fall mode. We allow everything to come into play; all the possibilities of life come together in the dream and create a feelings-based-world that has its own logic and reason. We suspend our disbelief, and allows ourselves to accept the reality of our dream world.
Our negative thoughts are supposedly there to protect us from danger lurking in the shadows, and our positive thoughts help us to aspire to changes that will enhance our quality of life.
Yeah, I know, it’s so much easier to just read another book on personal development, and pore through the pages to find confirmation that your positive thoughts are, in fact, right.
Chocolate Ice Creams and Loan Sharks
But for now, just hang tight, be sensible and stay strapped down in the nice comfy arm chair where no predator, beast or loan shark can steal your ice cream.
Protecting our ice cream (and chocolate), is based on focused thinking. We know how good the ice cream tastes, it’s a hot day, and our mind will do everything to make sure we can get the absolute most out of it. So, we focus our attention on the ice cream, and keep our instinctive, protective, thoughts on high alert against ice cream predators.
The problem is that that type of thinking is counter productive in the society we have built. We shooed the baboons and dangerous animals away into the patch of jungle we gave them.
Focus and Awareness
Business and creativity requires a spatial focus ability. Business is creative, highly demanding, with multi tasks all lined up each day. Creative workers, like writers and artists who are real contributors to this World, can’t afford to spend too much time working with locked-in focus. That type of focus doesn’t allow you to see the whole picture, the composition of your plan, your dream will be out of sight, and out of mind when focus is too tight.
How about Meditation?
Meditation teaches that we must first learn to be mindful. When a student shows good progress in mindfulness, she can move on to the practice of concentration — which takes a long time to master.
As concentration progresses, a good teacher should introduce the student to the concept of focused attention that is always mindful of the object, but is also fully aware of the surrounding environment. This avoids becoming lost in the floating mind, drifting, and dreaming.
In our practical world we must also learn to use this ability. To concentrate on our dream, our goal. The ability to do this with intensity, and not lose sight of the reality of our environment, is a skill that embeds a powerful tool into the mind.
Meditation is more than mindfulness and concentration. It is an all-encompassing awareness that the deeper mind is capable of achieving.
Drawing the Threads together
When I first began to write stories, I also studied the concepts and ideas of what makes a good story. My study continues today, and there’s no end to it.
What hit me at first, was the problem I was faced with; the task of thinking about the character that I’d created, writing her going through her actions, remembering her main characteristics, focusing on how environment affects feelings and thoughts, sounds, smells, noises, and more, and, staying relaxed enough to keep my personal tensions out of the matter.
It baffled me. How could a human being focus on so many things at once?
But, as a writer who wants to create a dream world that is believable, you have to learn to focus on everything at once.
Just Keep Doing it, and it’ll Work for You
Honestly, I didn’t have an answer, but I wanted to write anyway. I kept writing stories, editing and reading them. Then I noticed how I was using most of the important ideas about writing, without thinking about them at all. The aspects of a well-written character were appearing in my stories. I’d clearly been focused enough to draw all the threads of technique together, and use them in my work.
Still baffled by this mental feat, I put a lot of thought into it.
I’m a writer who becomes deeply engrossed in his work. I am aware of this because I developed my concentration through practice.
The Grouch, or Grinch, or Whatever
I’ve been accused of being obsessive, moody, over-thinking, and too deep a thinker for my own good. I know this much, I’m concentrating when I work, that’s all.
I promise, if you let me do my work, I won’t steal your ice cream.
When I finish my work, I’m light hearted and happy go lucky, and can’t wait for the next episode of “Narcos”.
Personal Development that Works
I think it’s important for a human being to develop their personality to the point where they can think deeply, and not become lost and forgetful. To be able to come out of deep thought, by using disciplined thinking (like a tool), to pull out of the solitary world of their mind, and slip back into the world of people, business, and mundane problems. It takes deliberate practice, but is worth working towards — your partner will love this personality trait in you.
The ability to dream of the future and to create a plan that will work, that you can put into action, relies heavily on your ability to slip in and out of the negative and positive aspects of everyday thinking.
Reflect on the Reality of Dreams
When we reflect on our powerful dream, full of the feelings and emotions that fire us up, it can easily become distorted through the powerful logic and reason of the real world.
Logic can twist the dream, and convince us that we have just dreamed a childish version of life. Reason and logic have no place in the world of dreams, and every good thing in our real world started with a dream.
Complex Issues of Concentration in a Real World
We must navigate the complexities of everyday life with a broad awareness, with spatial focus that allows us to carry out tasks with quality work, and to concentrate on what is important.
If you listed on paper all the tasks you must do, all the people you meet in a week, the obligations you have to meet, and do this without forgetting your own needs, then you’ll see that you already possess powerful resources for success in life. Maybe, to master your dream, to believe in the depths and power of the human mind to create and form images of better things, is what you should be working on.
The mind of a dreamer is not a childish thing, but it should retain its child-like qualities to build worlds from within that will become worlds that enhance and raise the quality of all of our lives.
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