Question for Bernie
I repeatedly dream that I am driving along a road and come to a crossing where all lanes on the opposite side come toward me. There is no lane continuing in the direction I am coming from. Sometimes I just drive along the wrong way, frightened that I’ll get hit by a car coming the right way, and sometimes I just try to squeeze through between the road and the houses.
Another dream I have repeatedly is that I have to be at the airport by 10 o’clock, and I can’t get finished packing, or I get to the airport and find out that I don’t have my passport. When I try to call someone for help, my phone won’t work, or I can’t manage to enter the number in correctly.
Both of these dreams leave me feeling very stressed and helpless.
What do you make of these recurrent dreams?
I send my thanks and love to you.
Bernie’s Answer
The message your Mind, Body and Spirit Connection is telling you is that you are headed in the wrong direction and don’t have your life together. In these dreams you are criticizing yourself for being disorganized, yet in your conscious life you are extremely well organized. Your unconscious mind is trying to tell you, through your dreams, that what you are searching for is to have …the wind at your back… and to …go with the flow… of life. If you discover how to do that, much of the stress and anxiety of being a perfectionist will be eliminated.
The dreams are recurring because you want to change something fundamental in your approach to life. People who are perfectionists are highly stressed by the inability to control life. They can’t just accept life as it happens. But, Society gives perfectionists a lot of praise for the results they get for everything from keeping a perfect house to doing it all by holding down a job while raising a family and being active in the community—all at the same time. The downside of being a perfectionist is rarely talked about.
It is unreasonable for anyone to be required to meet a standard of perfection in order to be accepted fully in any society—or family—or job. Perfectionists are either raised with this unreasonable expectation or pick it up sometime early in life and try to live up to it from that point on.
Your dreams are telling you to turn your life around and go the other way and see where it takes you. It is very hard to change a lifetime of handling life in one particular way, but you can do it. Start with smaller things, like telling yourself that it is okay to leave something undone for a day or so, whether at work or at home. Observe how other people who seem more relaxed about how day-to-day things happen and see if you can pick up any hints that could help you let go of the need to be in perfect control of everything.
My CD, Finding Your True Self: Audible and Subliminal Affirmations to Develop Your Personal Sense of Inner Peace and Wisdom, could be a great place to start on your path to learning to accept yourself. Remember that you can lead a life free from stress and anxiety. You, and everyone, deserve to enjoy life to the fullest, but we need to find constructive ways of changing our patterns of thinking and behaving that will give the mind, body, and spirit a chance to truly thrive.
Peace,
Bernie