On Dreamshaping: Exit Signs

Mark McNease

There was something different about that morning. It could have been just another morning when I woke up feeling stagnant, overweight and overwhelmed. But when I opened my eyes, and my mind worked its way sluggishly back to the ‘real’ dream, the one I call my life, I had an unusually clear sense that the time had come: the time to change things, the time to rearrange the interior of my personal world, the time to shape what I experience as reality and my place in it.

I’d been on the same figurative road for years. I’d allowed myself to settle into a sort of perpetual frustration, and to think that if only I did some thing, or some things, differently, I would find the elusive happiness I’d always wanted but had cynically dismissed as a marketing tool for the self-empowerment crowd. I’d told myself contentment was much more important that happiness – and what is happiness, anyway? A puppy? An ideal job? Or, most probably, an illusion.

That morning I woke up with no illusions. I was overweight, to put it politely. I worked in a grocery store deli, a physically debilitating job that would wear down someone thirty years younger. I’d spent years in a state of indecision, managing to write ten novels but still feeling as if the things I wanted to accomplish were always out of reach. It was time to take this whole dreamshaping thing seriously, to ‘put up or shut up.’ I’d been on the same road most of my life, though it had appeared different to me with the occasional changing of circumstances, and it was time to get off. The exit signs were everywhere.

What are your exit signs?

Exit signs are the things we can identify in our lives that tell us change is imperative. They flash before us as we travel the same routes day after day, and if we don’t heed them, we may find ourselves at the end of our journeys having gone virtually nowhere despite the changing scenery.

The exit sings for me are:

I’m 40 pounds overweight.
I work at a job I can’t wait to quit!
I’m creatively busy but not fulfilled (an abstract desire, but important).
I’m unfocused to an alarming degree, jumping from thing to thing.
I’m sixty-two and not convinced the dream of my life is what it can be.

These are some of the major exit signs I saw flashing when I woke up that day, determined to get off a road on which I never seemed to gain much distance. It felt as if I had been standing still while the ground beneath me turned, but only in ways that always brought me back to the same reality – the reality of my life, the dream I had not had the determination and fortitude to change.

And here we are – here I am – acknowledging that, as the driver of my life, the conductor of this cacophony I call a mind, I have driven it all into a ditch. It was time to climb out of the ditch. Time to look clear-eyed around me, to identify what I wanted in my dream and what must be removed, and get to work.

Remember throughout this all: dreamshaping is not wishful thinking. It is wishful doing. There is nothing supernatural here; a door does not open by my thinking it so. It opens by my reaching out and taking the handle.

Open it. Step through. Look around you. The dream you live is yours.