This is subtle, but it has made a difference for me. Describing our waking lives as real life can in some ways take away from the value of our dreaming lives. If our waking life is real, does that make our dreams unreal? My dreams are very real to me, and in some cultures (Australian Aboriginal), dreams are actually considered to be more real than waking life.
So the point is, I think waking life is a far better and more accurate depiction of the time we are awake than is real life. You might want to try calling our time awake as waking life instead of real life in order to give more value to dreaming.
“Waking Life” as opposed to “Real Life” is the application of a principle from Neuro-linguistic programming known as “reframing”.
Reframing:
In NLP, reframing is the process whereby an element of communication is presented so as to transform an individual’s perception of the meanings or “frames” attributed to words, phrases and events. By changing the way the event is perceived "responses and behaviors will also change. Reframing with language allows you to see the world in a different way and this changes the meaning.
I have found that it works for me and thought I’d share it.
By re framing the terminology that we use we can psychologically invest more importance in the dream state than it is currently recieving. By referencing it alongside waking life and giving it the same status, dreaming life becomes a whole other existence that happens to only be accessable through the medium of sleep.
A good analogy would be working life and social life. We run the two together; they don’t very often converge but we would not consider one to be more ‘real’ than the other.
Well not unless your social life were as non-exsistent as mine
good thought, good points! To me life is life regardless of what goes on in it; the dreams and the more supernatural just seems (to me) a part of life that everyone seems to ignore for some reason or another.
My thought: Live life to the fullest! Enjoy it and bring joy to yourself and others. technical details will always differ with opinions and mentalities. It just is.
Right up till now I never even knew how to talk about any of it to anyone; I just kept it all to myself. LD4all has helped me there. I am just learning to talk about it, I guess.
I fully agree with dreamster, I didn’t actually realize that, but I apply this right name philosophy to everything in my life, for example I don’t like to think of people as “ugly”, as that sounds degrading and I don’t want to unconciously degrade them.
Our perceptions in waking life are not reality. They interpret reality perhaps, but are not identical with it. what is really real, could be something completely different.
That is actually more of a reason for saying waking life than simply to give dreams a confidence boost.
Waking life is experienced in our heads as much as dreams are. And dreams exist so they are definately a part of reality.
Enjoy it and bring joy to yourself and others. technical details will always differ with opinions and mentalities. It just is.
