Diane Kennedy Pike is co-director of Telcos Institute and author of Life as a Waking Dream: How to Explore Your Most Vivid Life Experiences. On this interview with Michael Toms about waking dreams, she says: "We have the illusion that when we open our eyes in the morning, reality is 'out there,' and we are not participants in the creation of what appears in our lives." We would do well to follow the example of Australian Aboriginals and Native Americans who have developed a rich wisdom about interpreting both daytime experiences and nighttime dreams in similar ways. By paying closer attention to our feelings, our body sensations and our intuition, we can wake up to the larger fuller self that resides within.
Pike suggests that we notice in particular any "life themes" that keep surfacing again and again. Instead of rejecting them in anger, we can treat them as teachers. The real self comes through to us in symbols, archetypes, and manifold meanings. Keeping these doorways open to what Pike calls "direct knowing" is part and parcel of reading your life as a book.