the dream within the dream

This morning during the rocking motion between sleeping and waking, I had a dream within a dream. Even the fact that I was dreaming within my dream was significant. To have a dream inspired or delivered in a dream is at least symbolic. In this experience, I got in trouble for something and sensed that I was in trouble even though I didn’t know what it was for. The sensation was correct, and I woke twice thinking, “phew, it was only a dream.”
I think the whole thing was an amalgam of conversations and experiences that Allison and I had during the weekend. Some of the conversations had to do with me sensing things about people that they don’t know themselves, understanding things about people that they don’t understand. Sometimes an encounter causes something to pass between people of whom perhaps only one is aware. Often - I am sure of it - the one from whom it passed would never have given it away. Sometimes, I feel I can see into the mind, other times I see into the heart. It is almost always vague or opaque like a sound that you hear on the other side a fence but can’t tell what it is, or a smell of which you can’t know the source.
Anyway, that was the gist of some conversation between Allison and me, but it doesn’t really tell you about the dream. But that was vague too, because it also had to do with sensing. The dream had less to do with sensing things about people and more to do with perceiving a lost course. They are related because people follow courses, and because it has to do with the desire to correct something that is askew. I sense things in people and acquire a desire to help rid them of a source of pain, or an encumbrance.
I think that the fact that I was dreaming in my dream, was a symbolic play on the concept of “dream”. The inner dream was symbolic of “vision”, and idea, a drive. In the dream that encased it, I was actually acting on it, radically and suddenly because it affected a lot of people and a lot of people responded. I saw myself having vision and acting on it – two simultaneous levels.
I wondered if I abuse an ability to perceive, sense and see and understand some things by merely trying to pass the understanding along so that someone else will take action. I constantly battle between the feeling that the path needs correcting, and that a new flight plan needs to be drawn. What is the difference between reform and revolution? Adjusting, or starting over? Is it a nuance? Or a gulf?
In my dream, I acted upon a very real burden that I feel all the time. I acted upon it in a very different way than I have been responding to it. I saw that my subversion had laid a ground work for the next step out of the shadows.
There is only so much you can do to treat symptoms. Often treatment of symptoms provides just enough temporary relief to ignore the underlying condition so that it worsens until the symptoms just can’t be treated any longer.