I had one of those dreams I love, again. The ones where I lift, without effort, my feet off the ground and fly unburdened through the landscape. This one, though, was different. Normally, I wake from my flying dreams feeling frustrated. Lingering inside of me is an almost desperate desire to turn the dream into reality. To somehow master the actual art of levitation and fly around during my waking hours. It sounds somewhat absurd when one considers it in a literal sense. Why fly when you have feet?

Yet we all have inside of us the memory of wings. Our soul, condensed into a physical form to live out a life, knows the freedom of boundless existence and pure, unfettered joy. This is why we dream of flight. To return to this truth. Before this morning, I would wake from my flying dreams feeling weighted by reality as soon as my feet moved off the bed and found landing on the ground. Back to a reality that could not compete with the marvelous freedom of my dream, I would consider it a teasing escape from the here-and- now of existence.

This morning, my dream woke me before it felt complete. I was still flying when it nudged me to wake up at the precise moment I needed to. I don’t use an alarm, and it was 6:10am, time to start the morning and call the teenagers out of their beds. Yet, although I was rather in love with the scene I was living in my dream, the feeling it had instilled in me lingered in a different way than previous nights’. Clarity developed as the vivid display of the dream landscape slowly faded. The gift was inside of me. Not illusive and intangible. It was, simply, me.

I have been grabbling with some of the larger issues of life these days. I will not go into them, as they are private matters, but suffice it to say, they have weighed upon me. Most nights I go to bed and dream of the struggle. Last night, though, I found the release.

It was one of those rare dreams (at least for me) where the seemingly tangled complexity vanishes into the pure truth of life. As I flew from scene to scene, facing the inner demons that I had externalized into my life, I exorcised them. Sometimes literally. I filled my lungs and blew light into the darkness of a haunted basement filled with festering “life.” I flew back to childhood and laughed energy into absurdity. The worry of words not being read turned trivial inside a bookstore that could not contain my flying body. I was vast and limitless. Without weight, I flew into the open air and breathed light to the children surrounding me. I knew they saw the wonder of it, and that was enough. I didn’t linger to prove it, instead, I realized, it was their choice to join me. They had their lives. I had mine. To live. Individually, first and foremost.

You see, as I flew, it became clear that I was flying for no reason other than for myself. What may seem as a selfish revelation, became a selfless truth. The tangle of need to please another, or gain another’s approval disappeared with each scene I flew through. Let them live their lives, so you can live yours.

About a year or so ago, while holding my hands above another person in the transmission of energy that is Reiki, I saw inside the lens of the inner eye, the birth of her soul. It was so profoundly beautiful, I kept it to myself. Until now.  Imagine a star coming into being in the cosmos. A billion particles of light exploding into being. Together, their size dwarfs the planet we call home.

Her soul was all souls. No different than mine, or yours. The magnitude of this weightless revelation coalesced into the truth of my dream upon waking. The vehicle of this human body in which I reside no longer felt like a burden — limited and weighed down — as I realized that the light of my being was a truth that superseded any false notions of reality I chose to cling to. I could hold onto the burden of worry and doubt; of fear and disbelief, and that long held need to live through another’s approval, or I could let it all go and be me. Wholly and completely. Just me. Living this life uniquely designed for my growing and learning back to pure limitless existence.