Don't Forget Your Dreams

In the Bible, Joseph is sold into slavery and imprisoned, yet his spirit remains unbroken. Even in captivity, his gift for interpreting dreams leads to his rise as Pharaoh’s trusted advisor. One moral of this story is that no matter how trapped or defeated you feel, life is always offering you material — whether in the form of dreams, intuitions, or simply your breath — that can lead to transcendence.

The world certainly isn’t in great shape right now. Yet I often wonder to what extent our constant pessimism is a reflection of reality or a cause of it. As miserable as pessimism is, it’s also very comforting. It offers us the plush padding of certainty that we can predict what will happen next. In that sense, it’s part of our comfort-economy, along with reclining movie seats and food-delivery apps.

The real thing I worry about that we’re forgetting our dreams. Literally: stress, blue light, and the rhythms of capitalism make it harder to recall what we saw last night. But on a deeper level: dreams have also lost their social and spiritual place in our lives. Our fixation with productivity, metrics, and what is visible has cut us off from the invisible realm of possibility that dreams reveal. As a result, we’re cut off from large parts of who we are.

Joseph in prison reminds me of what Alan Watts called, “The Wisdom of No-Escape.” It is precisely when you let yourself be stuck in your actual life and tune into your possible one that things start to change: lingering in loneliness instead of rushing into a new relationship, pausing in unemployment instead of panic-applying to a new job, and taking time each morning to sit with your dreams, unproductive though they may seem.

A man recently said, “My marriage feels like a prison. My wife isn’t who I thought she’d be.” But why shouldn’t relationships feel confining when we bring to them our greatest limiting beliefs? Many break out of one prison only to land in another. But if you are wise, you’ll breathe into the contraction and listen to what it reveals. It’s when the walls close in that you learn how to walk through them.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, "Joseph, Overseer of Pharaoh's Granaries" (1874)