Contrary to what we are often told, dreaming is not
fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It’s about waking up. 

In
ordinary life, we are often in the condition of sleepwalkers, going through the
motions, trying to keep up with pre-set schedules and to meet other people’s
expectations and requirements. We let other people determine what’s important.
We let them define who we are and what we are able and not able to do and
become. Ruled by habit and the need to get through the daily grind, we forget
that our lives may have a larger purpose. 

Dreaming, we wake up to a bigger story. The moment of awakening
may come in a sleep dream, when we get out of our own way and it is easier for
us to encounter something beyond the projections of the daily trivial mind and
the consensual hallucinations that weave much of our default reality. 

The awakening may come in the liminal zone between sleep and
waking that the French used to call dorveille, which literally means
sleep-wake. 

It may come in a flash of illumination during a walk in nature,
perhaps at the moment when the sun rises above the mountains and opens a path
across a lake. The awakening may be hard-won. It may come at the
price of illness, defeat or despair, of events or recurring disappointments
that push us down and back so hard we have to re-vision and revalue everything
we once held to be givens.

The initiation may come in the way familiar to true shamans, when
a power of the deeper life seizes us and tears us apart and consents, when we
are re-membered, to become our life ally. Angels can appear as fierce as
tigers, or as tigers. We don’t really need to go hunting our power; our power
is forever hunting us. 

Remedios Varo, Fenómeno de Ingravidez