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Dreamshaping: The ‘What If?’ List
All things are of the substance of dreams …
By Mark McNease
I’ve used a ‘What If?’ list in my fiction writing, especially when I feel stuck in the journey of a story. Where should it go? Where do I want it to go? How can I imagine the next turn in the road for these characters?
I don’t like to admit that I sometimes find myself unable to tell which direction a story should take, and that includes the story of my life. So when I recently found myself feeling indecisive, even to the point of thinking I couldn’t do much of anything, I wrote a ‘What If?’ list for myself.
WHAT IF I set aside the novel writing for 90 days or so?
WHAT IF I truly opened up that creative space and let something else come into it?
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Dreamshaping: An Inside Job
Narration provided by Wondervox.
Dreamshaping: On Shaping Reality and Living Our Dreams
By Mark McNease
It’s not the thing the emotion attaches to, it’s the emotion.
It’s not the person or event the anger attaches to, it’s the anger.
It’s not the thoughts around which the confusion swirls, it’s the confusion itself.When I’m consumed by an emotion, even something as simple as anger aimed at another driver on the road, it’s the emotion that generates my state of mind, not the other driver. So many people have a need to be angry, or even enraged, without ever comprehending that the object of their rage is not the issue: it is the rage, and the need for it, that lies at the heart of the experience.
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Web Watch: ‘Everyday Health’ Offers Healthy Advice for Everyday Living
Web Watch is a feature at LGBTSr offering online finds of interest.
The more I age, the more I’m interested in discovering ways to improve my physical, mental and spiritual health. Not long ago I happened upon a website that offers suggestions, advice and resources that address all three of those pillars of well-being.
Everyday Health has more information, about more topics, than you could probably ever read. They also offer email sign-ups for daily newsletters on specific topics. I’m signed up for their Daily Dose of Healthy Living, Permission to Breathe, and Mental Wellness. You can see all their newsletter offerings HERE. Between the stresses of daily life, the stresses of aging, and all the other things, real and imagined, that weigh on us, it’s good to have a resource like this.
Everyday Health’s passionate, award-winning editorial team is committed to supporting you in your journey to live a healthy life each and every day. By adhering to the highest standards for accuracy, objectivity, and balance, we create trustworthy content based on up-to-date, evidence-based health and medical information and real world patient and clinician experience to help inform you how to take control of your health. Our content, including articles, graphics, videos, tools, and more, is created by experienced and accredited health journalists with valuable input from our Health Expert Network.
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Dreamshaping: Mark the Dreamshaper Dreams of Vegetables (VIDEO)
I set up this raised-bed garden several years ago when we moved to our Jersey house full-time. It’s one of my proudest home achievements, but it’s made with inexpensive wood and I need to shore it up and/or make some replacements. We also want to expand it. So … stay tuned, there will be more as the garden takes shape. It will be fabulous.
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Dreamshaping: Seeds of Doubt
Enjoy an audio small plate. Her name is Bella, and she’ll be your server today.
It’s never too early to doubt yourself. While that’s unlikely to be spoken by the most advanced two-year-old, it seems to be one of the earliest concepts we learn. We teeter on our tiny feet, attempting to walk for the first time. The giants in our lives encourage us, cheering us on to put one foot in front of the other, and then … we tumble. Our faces scrunch up. We probably cry. We wait awhile, looking for signs of approval, and we try again.
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Dreamshaping Podcast #19: My Robot’s Name is Josh (Adventures in AI Narration)
This is my first adventure in AI, using a service called ElevenLabs voice synthesis. It’s frankly amazing, and it opens up a lot of new opportunities for me as a creator. Podcasts, blog posts, short stories, anything I wanted to have narrated can now be offered as audio. It’s very exciting, and I’m looking forward to new frontiers as a writer and podcaster.
This first one is called ‘When You’re Older, Son,’ and the Slippage of Time.’ As with all things Dreamshaping, it’s a look at the human experience and how we create and experience the ultimate dream of our lives.
‘When You’re Older, Son’ and the Slippage of Time
Are human beings the only animals aware of time passing? Do cats know they’re getting old? Do fish ever wish they’d swum in this direction instead of that one? Is a tree concerned at all with the number of years it has stood rooted in one spot?
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Dreamshaping Podcast #19: My Robot’s Name is Josh (Adventures in AI Narration)
This is my first adventure in AI, using a service called ElevenLabs voice synthesis. It’s frankly amazing, and it opens up a lot of new opportunities for me as a creator. Podcasts, blog posts, short stories, anything I wanted to have narrated can now be offered as audio. It’s very exciting, and I’m looking forward to new frontiers as a writer and podcaster.
This first one is called ‘When You’re Older, Son,’ and the Slippage of Time.’ As with all things Dreamshaping, it’s a look at the human experience and how we create and experience the ultimate dream of our lives.
‘When You’re Older, Son’ and the Slippage of Time
Are human beings the only animals aware of time passing? Do cats know they’re getting old? Do fish ever wish they’d swum in this direction instead of that one? Is a tree concerned at all with the number of years it has stood rooted in one spot?
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On Dreamshaping: Treating Ourselves to Illness
Mark McNease
I recently spent several weeks with a cold—or a flu, or a sinus infection, or some dreadful combination of them all. A cough still lingers, the voice still gives out if I talk for more than a few minutes. This kind of seasonal illness has been with me for most of my life. It brings discomfort and frustration, dread at what awaits me in my elder years, and the perfect excuse to start reaching for those comfort foods and behaviors I believe I’m entitled to under the circumstances because I deserve this. It’s a way to quickly short-circuit any deeper or prolonged analysis of what’s really happening: I’m in a sate of discomfort, and I want something to make me comfortable that doesn’t require more effort than getting it from an ice cream container into my mouth.
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On Dreamshaping: Mission Accomplished
Mark McNease
I’m on a mission. How many times have we said this to ourselves? How many times have we told it to the people around us? Being on a mission is a way of focusing our attention and energy onto whatever that mission is. For a few people there may be one overriding mission in their lives—to be an actor, a writer, a doctor, the raiser of a family—but for most of us there are multiple missions that change over time. We may be on a mission to earn a degree during our college years, or to succeed without one. We may be on a mission to raise children, or to live our fullest lives without them. We may be on a mission to lose weight, or further our careers, or even to find the kind of inner peace that surrenders missions altogether! That’s a little closer to nirvana than I will likely ever come, so I accept that I have missions. The challenge is finding the best ways to pursue them.
It’s okay to have a goal, to see a particular destination in the distance that we work our way toward. A mission can be as narrow as arranging an event and having it go off to our satisfaction, or as wide and critical as surviving our formative years. I’ll admit I’d been on a mission to get through high school and leave the town I’d grown up in. It was among the most difficult missions of my life, but it is a mission accomplished. I made it. I thrived. I found other, less life-threatening missions to devote myself to.
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On Dreamshaping: The Wrong Idea
Mark McNease
If you spend much time watching television or browsing the Internet, you’ll quickly realize what advertisers have been telling us all our lives: that there is something wrong with us. Vast fortunes are made by people convincing us we’re naturally defective and the best way to repair our damaged selves, if they can be repaired at all, is by using whatever product they’re selling. Hair loss? They’ve got the cure. Overweight? Try one of dozens of programs, apps and plans guaranteed to slim us down and give us a fighting chance of at least liking ourselves, if love is too much to hope for.
We’re told so often, for so long, that something is wrong with us that we internalize it early in life. Good, supportive parenting is to be admired and encouraged, but it’s often the exception to the rule. Too many parents discourage their children’s curiosity and self-expression, choosing to limit them instead, often because they’d been limited themselves. We grow up being much more familiar with don’t, can’t, won’t, than we are with do, can, will, or try. Too many parents see their children as extensions of themselves, including their own disappointments and unmet expectations. They want sons to play sports, girls to keep flower-covered diaries. They seek to create only slightly altered versions of themselves in the adults their children grow up to be.
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On Dreamshaping: When the Body Speaks, Listen
Mark McNease
Our bodies are often the first to tell us when something isn’t right, when something needs attention. They begin speaking to us almost as soon as we find ourselves in this strange environment we call our lives: they tell us we must breathe within moments after emerging from the womb; they tell us we must rid ourselves of waste, first with the abandonment of an infant, and later with the control we’re taught and that eventually determines much of how we function in the world. Our bodies tell us when change is upon us, in stages that can be as frightening as adolescence, or as sudden as a broken bone, or as marvelous as a first sexual response.
Our bodies are constantly speaking to us. Unfortunately, we often refuse to listen, believing we know better than our bodies, or being unable to understand what they’re telling us, or simply denying the truths they speak. Bodies are wild and natural, and taming them sometimes comes with a very high price. But we can begin to hear what they tell us, and by taking their advice we can live a freer, easier existence less burdened by pain and uncertainty.
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On Dreamshaping: Letting Go Is Not Defeat
Mark McNease
Oftentimes the hardest part of letting go is simply not knowing what will take the place of the thing, person or situation we’ve allowed ourselves to relinquish. We may think the difficulty is in living without it, but upon closer inspection we discover that the real problem, and the impulse it creates to hang on, is being unaware what could possibly replace it. Comfort comes in many forms, including the illusion of certainty. Our routines, habits, assumptions, and repetitive thoughts all provide comfort—despite how uncomfortable we tell ourselves they make us! They offer reassurance that today will be as predictable as yesterday, and tomorrow will bring more of the same. Sameness is mistaken for safety. It allows us to be less fearful of what comes next.
Knowing that I have kept my life cluttered with the same things I want to be free from requires introspection that makes changing hard. I don’t want to admit these things bring order to my days. I may claim to be unhappy or displeased with my weight, or my behaviors, or my worldview, or my addictions, but they have provided me with continuity. I’ve trusted myself to wake up in the same dream since I was a child being told that dreams were beyond me, that I was limited and destined to achieve little in this world. Whose definition of achievement was another matter, and my resistance to that judgement, that taking measure of me, is among the reasons I survived. I wanted to see what could become of me, what experiences awaited in a new day, and I wanted to prove the assumptions wrong. Ultimately, the voices that tell us we are limited, and that play a part in our refusal to let go of the ordinary, become our own voices, the unwelcome narrator in our minds.