Blog 26 The Dream Catcher

The Dream Catcher

“Pursue your dreams – especially when you think they’re getting away from you ” Freya North, Author

I have been very fortunate to have spent a lot of time on Ranches in the American Wild West. I tried a whole lot of ranches before finding my true spiritual home… a beautiful slice of heaven called Tiger Mountain Ranch Oklahoma. I am an insomniac… I function on little if any sleep… yet on a ranch… I dream. I dream for hours… okay the dreams are funky as hell...they usually feature the odd eagle or hawk, quite a few bears, wolves, snakes, and a bit of the constellation. BUT I sleep. And when I return home, I feel my spirit has been refreshed.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a city girl through and through. I lived in Devon for a while so I’m cured of all things bumpkin. To me the best quote on the countryside came from Gary Dawkins aged 8 when as a similarly aged classmate I too was dragged by the well meaning London County Council to observe and be enriched by “The Countryside”. As we tumbled out of our bright blue L.C.C bus and our very theatrical (in those days that is what we called it…theatrical) teacher waved his arm over a view of the Norfolk Broads and said “BEHOLD CHILDREN….THE COUNTRYSIDE…”. Gary Dawkins pushed forward, had a good look at the undulating hills, rolling meadows and sparkling water and said…”But Sir…. There is NUFFIN there!!!”. A point of view I still have empathy with today. But none the less I consider myself very fortunate to have spent a lot of time on Ranches in the American Wild West…. Where you could not be further from city living if you tried!

Like a sun tan was once the sole reason to travel 30 years ago, spirituality is something today’s traveller would consider themselves bereft if they returned home without some insight into the peaceful side of their soul. And I found this on an American Ranch… of all places. My first Ranch was an accident… I met an American Indian when my girlfriend left me stranded in the Californian desert. He took me to a ranch for sanctuary. I found myself in the middle of hundreds of acres of beautiful valleys and mountains… but what got me was the way they just left me to sort my head out. For the first time in my life… I actually stopped thinking… and just allowed myself to be. I enquired if it was normal to feel so relaxed … and also if they had any idea why had I had untroubled sleep… when in reality I was in the deepest doggy do do of my life (my lovely friend had taken off with my money as well as my tickets). I was told it must be the dream catcher which hung in my room – which was mine to keep when I left the ranch.

Now I am not one for hokum. I have enough trouble getting my brain around my own faith. However... if you hang this tiny tennis racket cum mobile in your room it will catch the positivity from your dream, which you can take forward into your day. Dream catchers are also believed to bless those who are sleeping with good luck and harmony. Apparently, you receive and keep good dreams if you have received one as gift but it also helps if you return the favour. So I lingered on the ranch while the American Indians helped me make a dream catcher myself. It was a rather tangled spiderweb effort … can’t imagine who on the ranch would hang that monstrosity up!

However the point of telling you all this is to let you know that I’ve found American Indians tend to really believe in dreams. They feel if when you have no conscious resistance and you can feel it can be real – then you should be able to replicate it when armed with that information in your conscious state. And actually, I think they are on to something.

I had my dream explained. I was told my dream found its way to the centre of the dream catcher and floated down the feather to me which was why I could remember it. I had dreamt I was a hawk, gliding on the wind. I could see lots of rabbits. The rabbits could not see me. But I didn’t swoop down and take one. I just stayed up there watching them. I recall feeling peaceful. Apparently the dream was a good one and it meant I know where something I need is and I can always get to it when the time is right. In the case of California, that is exactly how things played out…. Which was unfortunate for my thieving ex-friend.

Whilst I am enough of a city slicker to not believe dreaming of bunnies and birdies are a clue to the present or future, I do believe in the wider concept of dreams. We all have dreams. Some may call them ambitions, some may call them secret hopes… but as they are usually fanciful projections of a version of events not yet realised…. They are just dreams.

But this does not mean that they are fanciful in a negative way. What better reason is there to get up every morning than the desire to strive to get to that vision we have of Nirvana. We must know it is this vision that is our definition of happiness and to not get there will always leave us with a faint taint of something unrealised. And yet, at the first hurdle, by and large we give up on our dream. We call it childish or not practical or not realistic… I have even heard it said… “Well it would never have worked out anyway” uttered from someone who never even tried to take one step beyond mediocrity.

It is not easy to give up on your dream – no one wishes to be thought a failure. We all have dreams of what we ideally would like to be, who we would ideally like to share our lives with and when we’d ideally like to achieve all this. But life comes along but a big wet cod slapping us in the face. It appears that three pronged dream will have to go through some modification. Maybe we shall not be the person we thought we would be or not do the job we thought we would have. Maybe or life will be shared with someone who really does not get you as completely as you’d hoped… or maybe no one at all. Maybe you’ll arrive at Nirvana a little closer to retirement – or maybe you’ll stop at one of the places on the way instead.

But as realistic as that sounds… can you taste it? It’s that faint taste of… this could have worked out better if only.

We have dreams for a reason. They are there to show us the possibilities. Advertisers are not slow to take advantage of this. Honda tells us consistently of THE POWER OF DREAMS…. They ask us why have dreams if you are not going to make them happen. Nike scream JUST DO IT…. Like damn the consequences and be bold enough to just try. The Telegraph’s current campaign telling us it DOESN’T HURT TO DREAM BIG…. It features garden sheds each with a home run business in it. (BTW…each went on to be a FTSE 100 company). I like the last campaign the best… especially as one of the business in a shed was owned by a 17 year old Swedish boy (Ingvar Kamprad whose little company is known to you and I as IKEA).

You don’t have to be extraordinary to try to make your dreams come true. You just have to … follow Nike’s advice JUST DO IT!

This is my favourite tale of someone who did exactly that. This is the story Paul Scott. The recession literally ate his job working for a caterer in the city. So he thought he’d try his hand at the one thing that life the universe and everything seemed to get in the way of him actually doing… running his own fish and chip shop. So funded by his redundancy money -Scott’s Chips opened in February 2009… and closed in May 2009. Yup! Having lived the dream for just three months… Scott sold the business at a slight loss and it is now trading under new management as The Hippi-Chippi. Paul Scott lost money… and in June 2009 started work at a firm catering blue chip events. He has got to be miserable…. He must be feeling like a right failure. Does he bugger!!! Paul was quoted as saying “It is so liberating to have actually done it… It’s haunted me for years, the idea of being me own boss… but I never had the nerve to try… Now I’ve done it it’s like I now know I’m an employee and I can be actually really enjoy being one”.

And that’s the whole thing about daring to catch your dreams. It’s liberating to realise them. To follow ones dreams be it for love, career, glory, or justice… is not heralded by a green light saying NOW go. Conversely like Ingvar with no premises or Paul with a global recession… the time to pursue you dream most ardently is the time when your dream seems furthest away… when it appears hauntingly ethereal rather than solidly graspable. It is not measured by success or failure. If you succeed you will be like Ingvar Kamprad saying “Blod helvete Var tyst! Så glad du låta jag har den skjul når det!!!” (Bloody Hell Mum! So glad you let me have the shed after all!!!). But if you fail you will be Paul Scott, a man freed from the lurking thought that life could possibly better if ONLY he had tried the road never travelled.

I have no idea if following my dream will make me an Ingvar or a Paul. More than that I don’t really care. To follow my dreams will mean that I will KNOW the outcome of the ardent pursuit of what I want. I will never have to guess or be haunted by what ifs. I will never have to be dissatisfied with what I have.

I have always considered myself lucky for knowing what my dream is. Some people are not so fortunate to have clarity with their dreams… tangled as they are in the day to day. On ranches I learnt that dream catchers work best if you weave one and give it as a gift… you can weave one from just about anything. All it takes is for one to be quiet and at peace, and let the unconscious thought come forward. The dream catcher will hold it till you return to a conscious state – then you can choose how to act on that information. So have you figured it out yet?

I give you This, the first dream catcher I have weaved from words….