Dreams And Your Inner Child

Advice By Evan Bailyn

Although your inner child may seem like a very distant concept, it is really just you with all of your layers of adult consciousness stripped away. Every night when you go to sleep, your mind gives you another opportunity to visit that inner child as it sinks deep down into your most natural state of being, exposing all of your fears, worries, and most basic needs. When you wake up, it is like emerging from an underwater solitude and climbing up onto a higher, dryer ground. The height that you scale before finally coasting on with your day depends upon how removed you are from your inner child. Some people, the most proper and adult among us, quietly ascend mountains before proceeding with their controlled existences, no longer able to detect the roaring waters of childhood they have subconsciously swum through just moments ago in their sleep.

Your dreams and immediate waking thoughts are the channels through which you communicate with your inner child. Trust them; and though the safety of the "real world" with its simpler, clearer set of rules might beckon you, resist it for a few moments every day and think about what you have learned from your sleep. Do not retreat right away into the security you have made for yourself over the years in relationships, positions of status, and other notions of identity. Allow the lull of your barest impressions to wash over you in its uncomfortable, convoluted collage of honesty. There is much to love about life and the day ahead, but facing your true self every morning will help you to unburden yourself of the mental weight you carry every day, and make you feel like a freer person.

It is amazing that the human mind refreshes, or "reboots" itself in this way every night, bringing us down from the mountain of illusions we create for our everyday lives. Although we cannot help but shake off the waters of our subconscious and go on like regular members of society, we should take advantage of the opportunity we get once a day to revisit our inner child, as it were - and, if possible, leave a trickle between our toes, just to keep a part of us dreaming.