The Hidden Treasures of Dreaming - Spirit of Ma'at

That the treasure lies inside ourselves, always within reach, is the first and mostobvious message of this famous Hasidic story. But that the treasure lies in our dreamingis a message that is less often understood or realized.But if the moral of the story is carried to its fullest extent, we can see that we are beingtold that dreaming itself contains the answer to our problems. In this story, dreaming isthe magic wand that disperses our clouds, opens our locked doors, moves our landmasses, cleans our cobwebs and dusty mirrors, and reveals the treasure hidden withineach of us.Is this true? Can we actually use our dreams to clear our own physical, mental,emotional, and spiritual bodies? To answer this question, we must ask another one:"What is dreaming?"Two Warring BrainsWe have only one body, but we have two arms, two legs, two eyes, and two brains.Without these ''twos'' we could not strive for the tension of balance. Unfortunately,however, one side of our mind and body will often become atrophied, thus weakeningand undermining the other side. For example, if your right arm is used too frequently,the natural symmetry of your posture can become unbalanced.Our two brains (to simplify matters we'll call them the left and right brains) havetraditionally not lived happily side by side. The left brain has dominated our way ofthinking since the advent of Scientific Enlightenment. It deals with logic, language,abstraction, mathematics, physics, problem-solving. Its thinking is sequential, linear,rational, and objective. Its progression is dependent upon the laws of cause and effect.The left brain tends to underrate and debase the subjective right brain.The right brain, on the contrary, is essentially involved with the body and all of itsattendant manifestations, sensations, and emotions. The right brain interprets facialexpressions and body movements. It deciphers lightning-speed, complex signals,reconstructing them to gain knowledge. In this way, for instance, not only does the rightbrain report on other people's appearance and state of well-being, it also makes anassessment of their deeper emotional landscape.The right brain operates instantaneously, holistically, and intuitively. As the Englishlanguage so aptly puts it, we are ''in-formed'' by the right brain, which picks up pattern,shape, and interacting forms. Thus, our smell cilia are ''in-formed'' by the shape of themolecules that waft towards our noses. Our ears are imprinted with the wave patterns ofsound, our eyes, with the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation.The right brain not only receives, but also responds to the outer world and to thefluctuations within our own bodies. It does this by bringing clusters of pattern, shape,and movement into our awareness. Our interactive right brain is actively dreaming dayand night.