Unstick Your Thinking
By Decoding Your Dreams
Last week I had a dream I was stuck in a maze. I could not find a way out no matter how hard I tried. And I was stuck for a long time. As I was wandering up and down and around the rows, desperately trying to get out, it occurred to me that there might not be an exit in this dream maze.
At some point in the dream I was able to levitate above the maze. Don’t you love dreams that allow you to do cool things like that? When looking down on it, I could see it was a closed circuit with no exits. Ok, it made sense I would not have known this until I could do the cool levitate thing. But I wondered why I had spent so much time trying to get out of the maze, not questioning if in fact there was an exit? Likely a case of classical conditioning. But still.
Then I remembered the Nine Dot Puzzle which was given to me during some business training a number of years ago. It was one of those “think outside the box” kinds of exercises. You may love this kind of puzzle, but I usually cringe when someone asks me to do puzzles. Mainly because I don’t usually solve them right away, or at least not as fast as other people. And I usually end up frustrated, a state I try to avoid as much as possible. But at first glance, this puzzle seemed easy to do. So I gave in. The rules were simple: connect all the dots using 4 straight lines without lifting my pencil. Oh, and no re-tracing any lines.
After a few attempts I realized that while it looked easy it was kicking my butt. What does this have to do with the maze dream? I am a good mouse, so I typically do what any good mouse does, and I continue to TRY to make something work. Even if I can’t make it work, I still try. Sound familiar? And I can work it for a long time. In fact, a very embarrassing amount of time. With the Nine Dot Puzzle, I was determined to get it right, to master it like no one had ever done. I was following the rules, and by gosh, I was going to win.
The beauty of the puzzle is this: the only way to complete it according to the directions, is to draw your lines OUTSIDE the dots. You have to extend beyond what you were taught in kindergarten. Remember the direction to draw within the lines?
I had to overcome years of coloring within the lines in order to connect the dots using four straight lines.
Here is what that can look like (many versions of this answer are correct, btw). You can also solve it with three lines, or even one line but both those solutions requires going WAY OUTSIDE the lines. I was not quite ready for that much change.
What was my dream, and this puzzle trying to tell me? When I woke from the dream I remember thinking about being inside a closed system and what that means. I was thinking I needed to BUILD an exit.
Like many people, when I wake from a dream I try to understand and apply its meaning to present day, to what I am working on, or some challenge I am trying to work through. As I tried to psychoanalyze myself, here were the clues:
- I was in a maze.
- I realized there was no exit, so I was going around and around.
- I had to get some perspective (the cool levitation thing) in order to verify, yep, there was no exit.
- If I continued doing the same thing I had always done, I was going to live forever in that maze- enter the Nine Dot Exercise that reminded me that the solution would require different thinking.
- I decided the only way to get out of the maze was to BUILD an exit.
Ok, got it. I think. Then the really fun part had to happen. I had to face what the maze represented. It was telling me I needed to build an exit, but an exit for WHAT? Our brains make up images and metaphors while we sleep. Our brain is working out puzzles for us, to help us. I just needed to figure out what the maze represented for me and then I would know what change to make, what exit to build. I needed to use a Nine Dot Exercise kind of thinking or strategy to help me figure out the dream.
Decode A Dream
I started with a simple exercise: what is a maze? I used to do this with my sister when she would come to me with a “weird” dream that was bugging her and she wanted to figure it out.
I would say this to her.
“Pretend that I am not from earth. I know nothing about your planet, your language, or your customs. Describe your dream to me and along the way please describe each word. Tell me what everything means.” Of course by doing this she started to understand what the object, or event, or word meant TO HER.
So, to understand what the Maze Dream was telling me, I needed to do some of my own decoding. I started with the maze itself, then asked myself what other words meant.
What is a Maze?
I pretend I am not from Planet Earth and I described the dream elements.
A Maze= a box, can be large or small, has lots of hallways, a lot of choices, pathways, can be confusing even scary, there is typically a way in and a way out, finding your way out can be difficult, it can take a while depending on the size of the maze. Mazes are often fun, but some people do not like them because they feel claustrophobic. You can lose your way.
This was all insightful, but I didn’t think I had landed on the “ah ha” moment I was expecting. So, I kept going and continued to describe the elements.
A box= a container, has walls, boundaries, can make you feel safe or trapped depending on your perspective. It can be very large, or very tiny. It can be made of a lot of different kinds of material: plastic, metal, cardboard, paper, ceramic, or even vegetation like a living hedge. A box transports items safely.
A wall= something that supports, protects, and constrains. It can be physical, emotional, or mental. It can cut people off from one another. Some forms of walls, like fences, have been known to make good neighbors. The wall can be transparent, or solid.
An exit= is a path, a journey from one place to another. It can be freedom from something. Or an escape. It’s an end to something. A moving away from, to something else.
No exit= it was a big deal in my dream that there was NO EXIT built into the design. No exit for me means being trapped. It means you are stuck in something with no way out. On a feeling level, having no exit means you have no choice, no control.
Here is what I understand about my dream. I have been trying to work and live like I always have done. But many things I am doing today are not working because they only worked in an old model, one that is gone. I am “waking up” to the realization that this old model has no exits, and the only recourse is to build something. In other words, stop doing what I have always done and do something NEW.
So, yesterday, I took a sheet of paper and on the left hand side I wrote all the ways I typically work including how I get stuff done. I included things like whether or not I typically ask for help, or do I just go it alone. Then on the right hand side I put a header that read “What is the OPPOSITE?”
I made 2 columns, the left hand side is what I always do, and the right hand side is the OPPOSITE of that.
I started to fill in what the opposite action would be to what was on the left. I’m not saying I will do the opposite action, but it is important for me to identify what doing the exact opposite looks like, and maybe what it feels like. This is the Nine Dot Exercise in real life.
The only way to get out of the maze is to build an exit.
If what we have been doing is not working, then maybe the opposite action is needed. It’s at least worth a try.
