Story-Making: The art of dreaming in the dark
Were you the kind of kid who daydreamed a lot? I was. Both my kids were too. It’s one of those things we do naturally, as children, because we’re still so connected to ourselves, our souls, and our Source. We haven’t yet lost touch with our true stories.
When I was a child, my daytime life felt like a dream. I did the things that kids do — woke early, climbed trees, played with my friends, read constantly, went to school; did my homework, reluctantly. But all of these felt like a prelude to my real life, which began at night, once I was in bed and drifting into sleep.
My Real Self woke up then. She stretched, and grew to her true size. Her head was in the stars, her arms were wrapped around the galaxies, her feet were planted deep in the belly of the earth.
She knew things my Daytime Self was not supposed to know. She knew the secret names of everything around her. And she knew that to call something by its true name was to summon its soul, and its stories.
I grew up in India, in Bombay, a city built on an island, surrounded by the sea. A city filled with contradictions. A city of great mansions, outside whose walls children played naked in the dirt, and scrounged through garbage heaps for food. A city where, what one family spent each week on clothes or jewelry, would feed a hundred families for an entire year.
As a child, I knew the secret names of those anonymous children, their bellies big with hunger, their hair bleached orange from malnutrition. I could see and hear their true stories, their possible futures, dancing around them.
It kept me from despair. It kept me from dying of a broken heart. And it led me on a life-long quest to bring those other stories — the ones in which everyone has what they need to thrive, to flourish, to be full and happy and free — out of the subtle energy realms, and into our world.
As a child, I knew how to create and play in many different worlds. I knew how to enter them, and where the exits were; I knew the bridges that linked them together. I knew the true stories behind the stories that unfolded around me day to day. And I knew how to make things happen by calling the stories that spoke to my heart.
The natural world was my friend, as intimate as my own breath. Each blade of grass and unfolding leaf exhaled its story; and I listened. I listened to the mountains, to the sea, to the crows clamoring on the rooftops at dawn and dusk. Each of their stories wove itself into a larger pattern that was the story of my neighborhood, my landscape, my city, my country.
At night, my Real Self sailed the skies on shining wings, playing among the stars, exploring the many lives she had already created in other dimensions. Every constellation was a map imprinted behind her eyes, on her tongue, in her bones. A map to destinations that were already hers, although they hadn’t appeared in the daytime world as yet.
My Night-time Self knew the galaxies more intimately than I knew the neighborhood in which I played with my friends every day after school.
She knew the best places to plant the seeds of future stories, future selves. She knew which life was happening in which dimension, and how to summon what she needed, when she needed it.
She knew which of the seeds she planted would sprout and how their flowers would look, and smell. She knew how their fruit would feel, sound and taste.
She knew which paths would lead her to where she wanted to go. She knew who her friends were. She knew the secret places where light turns and turns again in great spirals to spin heaven down to earth.
She was wise, fearless, magical, creative and free.
She was me, and she was you too.
Each of us is born knowing who we are and where we come from. We are born with the knowledge of our true home. We are born knowing that every story already lives inside us as pure potentiality.
It’s why some children have a hard time adjusting to life here on earth. They know they’re infinitely wise, powerful, and whole. And yet, no-one around them seems to recognize the truth of their being.
In time, we forget the stories we know. We enter the path of incarnation, and we forget that the flow of our life is a current in the great river of Wholeness — that we are not, and never have been, alone; small, isolated beings in a vast Other of a world.
We learn new stories, ones that sing of loss, lack, and limitation. We learn stories about Maybe and Possibly, and Someday and Try. We get patted on the back for working hard, for coloring inside the lines, for sitting still and doing what we’re told. For pretending that the stories we know to be true are just daydreams and fantasy.
We lose ourselves in these new stories until they feel so real, we forget that there are any other stories to be told. We lose the ease, flow and freedom that are ours. We lose the knowledge that every story lives somewhere in its secret home. We forget that we know where the stories live, and how to find them and call them to us.
We forget that the stories need us too, to come alive, to come out and play, to land here on earth.
We forget.
Until something — a dream; a visit from soul, spirit, Source; a feather dropped at our feet; or an illness, a death, a tragic loss — reminds us that the story we’re experiencing now is not the only story. There are other stories that are just as true.
Sometimes, when we feel most powerless, we remember that we have the power to choose. We can choose the stories that are ours to live. We can step out of the stories that don’t belong to us; and step into the ones that do.
We can shape our stories of our future by swimming out of the current of our past, and into a new story that’s held in the creative Flow of the Universe. We do this by loving and trusting our choices; by honoring our vision; by listening to our imagination and our hearts.
We make friends with our stories, the ones that we’ve forgotten. We make friends with ourselves, our world, our great, shining souls.
The stories that belong to us send out signals; tendrils of light and fragrance to remind us of their presence.
At first, you may experience them as a vague stirring of unease. Restlessness. A wordless longing for something…you don’t know what. Just, something.
You may catch glimpses of these other stories, other futures, out of the corner of your eye. You run into someone who dropped out of her life as a corporate lawyer to start a business baking cupcakes. She looks ten years younger than when you last saw her.
Or, you find yourself looking at real-estate ads online. For houses in Bora Bora. And you live in Ohio. You don’t know why you’re so drawn these rustic homes in faraway places. But you can’t seem to get them out of your mind.
Or, you experience a day where your heart is so filled with delight and love that you catch your breath in wonder. A nothing-special day. Maybe going to the farmer’s market. Or having breakfast at your kitchen table with a wedge of golden sunlight warming your elbow.
And then you realize that there’s another story swimming alongside you in a parallel current. Calling for you to love it. To welcome it into your life. A story that doesn’t leave you exhausted at the end of the day. A story that fills you with love, delight, the pleasure of a piece of toast on a quiet Sunday morning.
If you listen; if you follow these fleeting glimpses of other stories to see where they lead you, the stories will join their flow to yours. Dreams, signs, feelings, intuitions form a river whose current carries you; the moon that lights your way. They lead you home — back to that place in your heart, in your soul’s landscape, where you sing your stories into being.
So here we are, dreaming in the dark. Making friends with our larger selves, making friends with our souls, and the souls of our businesses. Calling forth our stories. The ones we have already lived, and the ones that beckon us into our unfolding future.
We enter our stories to discover our own rich and delicious wholeness. To discover who we are, and how we want to live. To choose from the many lives and the infinite possibilities that already exist in other dimensions, and to bring them down to earth.
Your business is a home in which your creative spirit can flourish, nurturing all that is whole within you, and within your world. Your business flourishes at the tideline, where your genius and passion meets the world’s need.
Through your business, you help to shape the world’s story as well as your own. You help to bring to life a world of love and wholeness, kindness and generosity, truth and justice, sustenance, shelter, light and freedom for all.