TL;DR: This post reveals how a client’s emotionally charged work assignment became the perfect backdrop for dream-state alchemy—and how that dream dissolved resistance and sparked powerful clarity and ease. The experience shows how dreams work in conjunction with waking reality, when one is Positively Focused.
When Marsha (not her real name) came into session this past week, she carried a storm of energy around an assignment given to her by a work colleague and friend, Janet (also a pseudonym). The assignment seemed simple on its surface, but for Marsha, it stirred a complex emotional brew: fear of exposure, anxiety around performance, and a deep, practiced belief that being emotionally transparent might somehow be unsafe.
I wrote about this in my last post. I’m going deeper in this post, to show how exactly the dream state works in conjunction with waking reality, thus making it a powerful Source of awareness.
It’s easy, when gripped by these emotional currents, to think the problem is the whatever we are facing. But in the Positively Focused practice, we know something deeper is always at work. And that’s where this session offered Marsha something stunning.
Marsha described the assignment as triggering a downward emotional spiral. Her words reflected the inner tangle so many experience: “The moment Janet [gave me the assignment] my stomach dropped and my anxiety was like blowing through my head,” She said. “It got so bad that afterwards, I was physically shaking. I was so, so very extraordinarily stressed out, and felt incredibly pressured.”
Marsha tried applying the Positively Focused process to calm herself, and she got some traction. But the resistance was persistent. Eventually, she let herself rest. She was tired. And rather than resist that tiredness, she did something quietly powerful: She allowed herself to slip into sleep.
What happened next is a beautiful demonstration of how dreams serve our waking evolution.
The Dream Wrapped in the Waking Life
I asked Marsha to share her dream. Understanding the power of the dream world requires that I share what she shared. So here it is, straight from our session transcript:
“I was thinking about [Janet] and the task before I went to sleep, and I felt like, in the dream, even though I was in the dream, it was almost like [the task] was on the outskirts. My worry of that specific thing was on the, like, physically around the frame of the dream that I was having, even though it had nothing to do with the dream.”
Unknown to Marsha at the time, the dream had everything to do with the task. I’ll break that down in a moment. Here’s how she described what happened next:
“My mom and I are in a hotel room, and then we go explore this town, and everything is like old and dusty, and unkempt. And then she goes back to the hotel room, and I go to a shop or something where there’s an ex firefighter who’s very attractive. He’s showing me some things, and I’m flirting with him, and he’s embarrassed. I leave him to go back to the hotel room where my mother is, and she is not in the room, but the kitchenette that’s in the hotel room has like a pot of tea or something that’s bursting and like flowing, and it’s dangerous.”
“So I turn it off, and I’m really mad about it. And then someone who’s my sister. I know this person to be my sister, even though, in real life I don’t actually have a sister, comes in, and I’m mad at my sister, who, oddly enough, looks a lot like me, not identical twins. I’m mad because she wasn’t there in the hotel room to make sure that something hazardous, like a boiling pot, wouldn’t occur to protect my mom, who was not in the room.”
Interpreting The Dream World
Dreams, in the Positively Focused framework, are vital, vibrational events. They are not just the mind replaying memories. They are orchestrations of our Broader Perspective, designed to help us integrate, soothe, and expand.
When we go into nonphysical, we leave our brain, as well as the rest of our bodies, behind. When we return to our bodies, the dream’s “echo”, or resonance of the dream in non-physical, returns with us. At that point, our brain takes that echo and tries to translate the nonphysical experience into a kind of waking experience. It’s the same function the brain plays in waking experience: it’s translating vibrations into our “reality”. So it tries to do the same thing with nonphysical vibrational experience.
As it does this, it uses imagery from our waking life to approximate as best it can what happens in our nonphysical “dream” experience. Since dreams are much more complex than physical reality, the brain doesn’t get it all. It does get enough, however, for someone trained in dream work to interpret the dream.
That’s what I did with Marsha.
I told her several things stood out about this dream. Some of those things indicated the powerful connection Marsha has to the dream world. Her dream was extremely vivid and detailed. Her recall was also astounding. Furthermore, Marsha’s dream occurred in a nonphysical container holding the waking life assignment and the emotional response Marsha had to it. That she perceived that was remarkable. But she still thought the dream had nothing to do with the assignment.
The dream had everything to do with the assignment, however. And, in the dream, Marsha worked through her fear and anxiety, which is why what happened when she came out of the dream was possible. Let’s look at the dream imagery to see the connections.
Dream Symbolism Offers Keys
The shopping mall and hotel imagery was not random. Marsha is a young, mixed race, beautiful woman. And she maintains that beauty with a passion. She also loves the finer things in life. Shopping malls are her happy place. Since nonphysical, for everyone, is a place of unmitigated joy, freedom and expansion, the closest imagery her brain could approximate that expansive experience to is shopping malls.
However, that environment was dusty and full of abandoned products. That indicated that Marsha no longer want’s that old way of being to be her main focus. That is reflected in her waking life, evidenced by her willingness to work with Janet on a fledgling business and her decision to become a Positively Focused client. She’s ready for expansion, in other words.
Hotels in dreams are often transitory locations as hotels typically are in waking life. So the dream takes place in a transitory state, the transition being from the “what-is” of Marsha’s anxiety and fear (which are vibrations), to a different vibrational frequency, which Marsha intends to move to in the dream.
The firefighter experience is Marsha’s Broader Perspective showing up as capable, competent and with a lot of experience (retired) dealing with what I described as Marsha’s “4-alarm fire” that was the assignment.
“He’s a demonstration of you, to yourself,” I told her. “Of your ability to handle what you consider to be a conflagration, the fire raging in you.”
While I explained this, Marsha got more interested and energetic in her vibrational stance. She leaned into the computer. I could tell what I shared was landing.
Evidence she’s capable
The firefighter represented the fact that Marsha’s got this whole situation under control. Marsha’s brain interpreting her as flirting with the firefighter was an attempt to approximate the intense connection and love Marsha has. Not for firefighters, but for the connection she has with her Broader Perspective, which is what the fireman represented.
The next important image was the kettle in the kitchenette. It was about to explode. I probed Marsha about this important image: “What kind of kettle is it?” I asked. “Is it like an ancient Japanese iron kettle, or is it like a modern pot?”
Marsha said it was a traditional Japanese iron kettle.
“That’s not surprising,” I said. Then I explained how the transient or liminal space represented by the hotel was a place of expansion. Her mother not being there showed that in nonphysical, Marsha is expanding into her own sovereignty. Her mother plays a dominant role in her life right now. That role isn’t negative. They’re good friends as well as mother/daughter.
However, Marsha is a freedom-seeking, powerful expanding being. And because of choices her mother made, her mother is all about tradition and conservatism. The ancient Japanese tea kettle bursting with steam, bubbling over, I said, is representative of Marsha’s sovereign, creative energy wanting to expand beyond limiting tradition and conservation beliefs.
The you that wants freedom and expansion, I told her, “It’s bubbling over, out of this cauldron that you’ve wrapped around it to try and contain it. And no, it’s not going to be contained.”
Sibling As Broader Perspective
Then we touched on the wonderful interplay of Marsha with herself in the context of her mother’s influence. The sister Marsha doesn’t have, looked like Marsha. That’s because this “sister” is actually Marsha’s expanded self, who already has moved past her mother’s influence. And the argument Marsha has with her was about Marsha coming into alignment with that expanded version of her.
The expansion represented by all this imagery happened in the dream state, in part, to spur Marsha’s movement forward in wake state. It was movement forward, which was why, when she woke from this dream, not only did she feel better, resistance she had about the assignment and other tasks disappeared.
Sleep state is powerful. In the dream state we process tremendous energies all to our benefit. Consciously benefitting from that experience, however, requires we know it’s going on. And it requires us fostering the processing. How? By moving forward from the dreams.
What do I mean by that? Well, most people don’t realize they’re dreaming. Many who do don’t know what dreams really are. Or they forget them the moment they wake. In doing so, they pick right back up whatever they were thinking about before they went to sleep. So they just re-amplify whatever momentum they had from the previous day.
The key to benefitting from dreams is to wake up in a “fresh-start” frame of mind. Sleep state resets us to our expansion. Recognizing this and leveraging it makes a huge difference, as Marsha found.
Integration Through Symbolism From Resistance to Inspiration
To recap: Every symbol in Marsha’s dream was an echo of her waking concerns:
- The boiling kettle reflected her suppressed, expansive, creative and emotional energy.
- The hotel symbolized a temporary space of identity—she hadn’t yet claimed her sovereignty in that assignment.
- The flirtation with the fireman showed her inner fire seeking expression in playful, unstructured ways.
- The absence of her mother underscored the detachment from external authority; she wasn’t looking for approval anymore.
These weren’t intellectual metaphors. They were felt, emotional realities in the dream. And, they had her wake up different. When she came out of sleep, she wasn’t just rested. She was clear. She felt different. Lighter. No longer bogged down by the invisible weight of the assignment. And what followed was surprising to her:
“I woke up, and the anxiety had dissipated.” She said.
The dream had done the heavy lifting. But her Broader Perspective and the Universe weren’t done with her yet. Moreover, what happened next tied the whole manifestation together perfectly.
A girlfriend who lives in London texted Marsha after this dream event. It’s someone Marsha doesn’t talk with often, which explains why she thought this text was “random”.
It was anything but random though. Attached was an Instagram meme, “talking about how today is the luckiest day of the year, the luckiest day.” Marsha said. Marsha was stunned by the meme’s beauty, she said. It just really stood out in her mind.
“Okay, it’s supposed to be the luckiest day,” Marsha recounted. “This is a really big deal. So everything should just go really well today, and I shouldn’t be feeling bad anymore. That’s how I felt when I saw the message.”
“Right after that,” Marsha said. “My other girlfriend sent me another screenshot which I just need to read to you. And so I was wondering if this was my Broader Perspective communicating to me via universe. It has Taurus on it, and then it goes: “Once she became comfortable with being uncomfortable, she was free to grow.”
Free to grow
“It resonated so hard!” Marsha exclaimed.
Indeed. It was the perfect capstone to a brilliant unfolding. A perfect orchestration looping in her Broader Perspective, the Universe and two friends’ Broader Perspectives which inspired them to send messages at the perfect time.
After receiving them, Marsha said, “…I instantly felt better.” Of course. She fully embodied, right then, that expanded self she met in the dream.
Now, Marsha’s story is not unique. Me and all my clients experience our versions of exactly the same sequence of events. This story is inspiring. But it’s also more than inspiring. It’s instructional. It shows how dreams can:
- Help us process emotional energy too overwhelming to resolve in wake state.
- Use symbolic language tailored to our personality and preferences.
- Release resistance in ways we don’t have to consciously understand.
- Prepare us to receive inspiration and act from alignment, not pressure.
- And if we CAN bring conscious awareness to the process, our appreciation – of ourselves, of our expanded nature, of life in general, grows.
Most importantly, it shows that waking life and dream life are not separate. They are part of the same vibrational conversation.
The Relationship That Makes It All Possible
Marsha didn’t get lucky and these events weren’t random. She got receptive and then manifested what some would call a miracle. Her willingness to trust the process, rest when tired, and explore her dreams made the difference.
That willingness is what we cultivate in the Positively Focused practice. By “cultivate” I don’t mean working hard at it, but by nurturing the one relationship that makes everything else make sense: Our relationship with our Inner Being. That relationship is the source of every insight, every dream, and every inspired action. And it’s available to everyone.
We don’t have to wrestle our way through resistance, we can rest our way into clarity. We can dream our way into power, freedom and our sovereignty. And we can become people who feel good first, and let life match that frequency.
Want to learn how? Become a client. We got your back. Always.