I am present in this life to be a vessel for the dream that is within me and for the outflow of the spirit of that dream. And I believe the same is true for you. My heart and mind are made to be that vessel that is so filled with the dream that it’s compelling me in my living. This is motivation! The dream filling my heart gets me up every morning. I have a real reason to be here. I have something great to fulfill in my life. I have something to share with other people.

It is a privilege to welcome the spirit of the dream that enters my own heart and mind from within me. It is also a privilege to receive the spirit of the dream that comes to me through the passion of another person. To me, it is essentially the same. When someone else’s vessel is overflowing and they are sharing the potentiality they are feeling for themselves and for the world, I have a chance to be a vessel that receives from that person, as I would if it was flowing from within me. I have the opportunity to catch what is overflowing from them and hold it.

That’s far better than being a leaky sieve. If the dream comes into me—from within me or from another person—and it just leaks out, that’s what I become: a leaky sieve instead of a full vessel. Do you know how to hold your dream and keep it safe? From within you, you receive the essence of what is possible in your life and what could be created in this world. The true dream tells us that the world does not have to be as it’s been—it could be different. It will be different. It could be the dream. Do you honor the dream within you? Do you hold it sacred in your heart?

Sometimes we try to share our dreams with other people, and they are like a leaky sieve: they don’t understand, they won’t hold it, so it just falls all over the floor. It can feel disheartening when someone isn’t honoring your dream. You could begin to think, Well, maybe it was just a dream—maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe I should just give up and live an ordinary life, and just get by. Maybe it was all my imagination anyway.

It is in times like that that we have to come back to the core truth that we are here to be the vessel for our own dream. No matter what anybody else thinks, my dream is sacred to me. I hold it sacred and I let it overflow in the living of my life. I let it manifest in whatever way it’s destined to manifest. Then perhaps I am privileged to find someone else who will receive the dream as it’s overflowing from me. And perhaps I may have the privilege of being the vessel for somebody else’s dream.

I have a friend I’ve known for years now. We met in New York City when she had her own dance theatre company and I saw one of her performances. Just recently, I had the opportunity to visit with her and her partner outside of Seattle on my way back from Edenvale, in British Columbia. For years, I have had the privilege of receiving her dream, as I did on my visit. She’ll often speak to me about things I don’t quite understand. But she has a dream, and it is always flowing through her. So I get to be the recipient of her dream and tell her, perhaps not in words but with my heart and with my eyes, “I believe in you, and I believe in your dream. I believe in who you are.” I have played that role for her over many years, and it has always been a privilege.

What an honor to receive the dreams of another person! We may not always be able to make sense of how those dreams are being expressed. We may think, “Well, I just don’t know how that’s going to happen.” Still, we can believe in who they are and believe in the essence of their dream.

The manifestation of a dream seldom comes out just like we think it’s going to. It probably won’t for them. But it will manifest if they’re true to it, and it becomes all the more easy for it to manifest if there is somebody with them who believes in their dream. And then maybe, just maybe, we can look at them, eye to eye, and we can see the same dream. We can see it together. Yes, we know we’re in a process, and it’s probably not going to come out just like we might imagine it. But we can see it together and commit ourselves to what we are seeing. We can feel it together. We can share the feeling of the dream and be uplifted by it.

There does come a point when we have to get serious about those dreams if they are to come true. If they are to be more than dreams, we have to live and breathe them in the moments of our life. We have to share them with the people we are with. I couldn’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had this week when, in essence, I was saying to a person, I’m still dreaming the dream. Are you dreaming the dream with me? And then we get to be practical about how we’re going to do it because, in the living of life, we end up doing something and have to do something if the dream is to manifest. And we’re either going to come together with friends, letting it come to focus wisely, intelligently, the best that we can and working it through on the basis of thoughtfulness and intelligence, or it just remains a dream. We end up sitting in a café talking about it instead of letting it come true. Until somebody does something and people agree to do something together, the dream stays a dream. People have to be willing to let the wisdom of the dream come to focus so that there is agreement in action, and then a backing of that action with the collective heart of all concerned, if dreams are to manifest.

Feelings play such a vital role in the process of manifestation. They open us up to the dream. We touch potentiality first through the heart. Then feelings play a part when we are actually manifesting the dream. The emotional body has to be behind the action that’s being taken. And if you are taking the action, I’m with you in taking it; and if I’m taking it, you’re with me. If we’re both taking it, our hearts are in it together.

At any point along the way, a person can bail on the process. A person can somehow give up, unhitch their wagon from the creative process, and acquiesce to the world as it is without that person’s creative initiative. A person can choose to become a victim to what’s around them—a victim of other people and a victim of the Creation that’s around them. They can choose to see themselves as the object of the sentence, not the subject, not the doer of the deed, not the creator and the dreamer. My desire is to be with people who are all-in as the creator in the creative process, and all-in together.

What happens when you have a belly flop? What happens when you run out of money, or your friends leave you? What happens when it doesn’t work out the way you thought it was going to work out? What happens when you don’t get your way? Did the dream leave you? I say it is just going to work out a different way. You are still the creator of your experience and you are still responsible for the dream.

I take the role of being the open vessel that receives the dreams that I’m given, very seriously. If I don’t, nobody will. I remember when I woke up to that reality. I looked around one day and felt bereft because I didn’t see other people around me taking the dreams that I had seriously. And then I had to ask how seriously I was taking my own dreams—and in that, how seriously I was taking myself as a human being, and my role as a vessel, not only for the dreams that were coming to me but for the Dreamer and the Creator that I am.

Do you ever think of your life that way? That there is an indwelling Being in you, who ultimately is you, who is an aspect of the Divine; the Wonderful One Within. There is the Wonderful One within you and within me, all part of the larger reality of the Divine. That is the Dreamer. It is a major threshold in anyone’s life when they come face-to-face with the reality that they are hosting an aspect of the Divine that lives within themselves. Regardless of what anyone else does or doesn’t do, and regardless of whatever you have done or not done in the past, here you are today with your humanity as the host for the indwelling Spirit.

One of my favorite Star Trek characters was Jadzia Dax. Dax was a symbiont alien life-form that incarnated over centuries in multiple humanoid hosts. In the episodes I watched, Dax incarnated in Jadzia, an intelligent, beautiful woman who was a Star Fleet officer. Jadzia Dax took on the character of both the indwelling being, Dax, and the human host, Jadzia.

It seems to me that this character was born out of an innate knowing, present in all people, that there is a Being incarnate in us, for whom we are responsible. Ultimately, that is the reality of who we are. Other people might disrespect you and not see that indwelling reality. They may not appreciate you, or honor who you are. They may even hurt or disparage you. But whatever other people do, you are left with your own responsibility for the reality that is incarnate within you.

I propose to you that your number one job on Planet Earth is to be the host for the Wonderful One Within; to receive its dreams and its will, and the potentiality that it carries—to be an expression of its character, to be an expression of the love that the Wonderful One Within you carries. The central purpose of your life is to bring the truth and the knowing of that Being; to live that knowing. Even when you doubt yourself and you feel confused, your calling is to live in that knowing and with that love that is unshakably present.

That is job one for you and for any human being—to be the vessel for that reality, and then to let the vessel you are overflow into your world with an accurate expression of the reality of who you are—that truth and that love and that dream—and accept the humble role that you have as a human being, which is to take action on the dream in the simplest of ways, knowing that that’s how any real dream manifests.

For me, the dream manifests because I as a human being say, “Yes, what do I do now?” At whatever place we find ourselves in our life—however high or low or in between—our role as a human being is to be open to receive the dream. And, knowing that we may not get it perfectly right… That there may be a better action to take later… That later we’ll have more wisdom and more strength, and there’ll be more possibility and we’ll see more clearly… Now, we take the step that’s before us to our highest vision. We must have the humility to take that step and do that deed, knowing that the manifestation of the dream depends upon it. It depends on us taking another step, knowing that the greater dream is given to those who act with integrity on the dream that they have. Those who hold with integrity the Being that they are, with honor, and then allow their vessel to run over through their thinking and feeling, their speaking and their actions and their living.

It’s said that the first great commandment is to love the Lord thy God with all. Yes, to love the great big God up there, wherever the totality of what God is may be. But it is also to love that aspect of God for which we have the most direct responsibility, and that’s the indwelling Being that we are. If I truly love that reality of myself, I can honor that reality in you. I can hold safe your overflowing cup and hold that flow precious.

When I sit with a friend who is pouring out their dream, I view that as a sacred privilege. And then we can roll up our sleeves and get about the business of manifesting the dream in very practical ways, knowing that it isn’t going to come out just the way we thought and knowing that we’re going to commit ourselves to constantly staying open to more of the dream, more of the vision, and constantly staying humble, asking “What now? What more?” On that basis, there’s always opportunity.

I am grateful to share the essence of my dream in these words. How it configures in anyone’s heart and mind is individual and unique to them. But I believe all dreams come from one place, the birthplace of all dreams, what the Australian Aborigines call the Dreamtime—not a time way back when. A place beyond space and time. What we, who are from a Judeo-Christian background, may speak of as “heaven.” That heaven is not a reality that we come to later. Heaven is the Dreamtime that’s present right now, out of which all potentiality is born. Let’s be all here to receive it as it pours forth.