By Kyle Collins
I’ve always been fascinated by dreams, especially as kid. Just what were those little movies that played across my mind as I slept? Where was this alternate dimension that I entered quickly after my head hit the pillow? And – maybe more importantly – what did they mean?
In my teenage years, I kept dream journals and read books and articles that I came across about dreams and the dreaming mind. At some point, the information sated my curiosity or at least made sense to my becoming-more-analytically-driven mind. I came to the conclusion that, yes, while they’re sometimes fun, rich, and wild, dreaming may not be a nightly nocturnal magical mystery tour. Sometimes, I read, dreams are just junk; the brain processing and smoothing out the wrinkles of the day.
Leave it to Sharon Stone to burst in and bring a little more mystery to my life.
I was 25 (-ish), living in Macon, Georgia, where I’d grown up, working in television news. It’s probably fair to say I was frustrated at the time. The curiosity I had about my sleeping life was only more magified in my waking life. I was unapologetically in search of my Life Mission. My purpose. My raison d’etre. Big things, and a big thirst that I’d never been able to quench, exactly. The people around me weren’t necessarily well-equipped, I thought, to help me sort through my dilemma. While my parents’ advice to “pray for it to be revealed” was absolutely correct, it wasn’t always so satisfying. I thought I should be out doing something about it. It was like fighting for peace or working to be relaxed; it’s a very mixed-up way to be, but of course I didn’t see that. Ahead I forged, fought, and struggled.
So you can imagine how startled I was when a piece of the puzzle came to me when I was doing absolutely nothing. It was in a dream, from Miss Stone herself.
“You have to allow yourself to be prepared,” she said.
“Allow yourself to be prepared.” “Allow yourself to be prepared.” The words reverberated through my head the following day, and for many days since.
Not “be prepared” (like any good Boy Scout would be) or “prepare yourself,” which is what I thought I was doing. But “allow yourself to be prepared.” This meant, to me, that other forces were at work helping me with the preparation, and that I needed to be willing to trust that the process was happening, and that it was a good one. Maybe if I just went with it, things would feel better and, who knows, move a little more gracefully (or, let’s be honest, quickly)?
I’d love to say that I then went to work the next day, told them my $4 billion-dollar idea, got my own talk show, helped a lot of people look at their lives a little differently and the rest has been history! But we know life doesn’t exactly work like that. Several years of testing and trying, watching and learning, thinking and doing and dreaming, dreaming, dreaming had to come (and will continue to come) after my Sharon Stone-provided “Aha!” moment.
I still don’t know the ultimate, absolute truth about dreams and dreaming, both the ones we have while we sleep and the ones we have while we’re awake. To be honest, I don’t know or really understand much more about the mechanics of dreaming than I did as a 16-year-old checking out dusty Carl Jung books from the library. The difference, though, is that now I trust more — in dreams, in dreaming, in life overall and in any of its channels through which insight and inspiration can come.
And that is something that, after years of incessant, sometimes Sisyphaen-feeling doing, helps me sleep a little more soundly each night.
You can help Kyle keep his dream-of-all-dreams, a talk show on the Oprah Winfrey Network, moving closer to a reality by going to www.OprahKyle.com. View and vote (as much as you want!) for his submission for the “Your OWN Show” competition, and tell your friends about it. Keep up with Kyle’s behind-the-scenes-of-the-dream action at www.Facebook.com/OprahKyle and www.Twitter.com/KyleCollins.
