a dreamer’s mindset

I’m relearning how everything is possible.

As a child i held that mindset and belief and as an adult lost it in my need to succeed, be liked, and among.

Conformity and normality create a trap.

I am again finding and feeling i can be free.

And remembering all that i want and more also wants me.

The mindset of a child may be the most precious point of view. To have imagination. To play with innovation. To see beyond what is within our view and what is or isn’t being shared with us. To take reality and reimagine worlds of wonder is a strength I wish more of us would flex, feel into, and allow to flow, myself included.

I feel I came into this world to dream. As a double Pisces, both sun and rising, it is not only in my birth chart but also in my being to get swept away by the wind and live into the ideas of my heart, head, and hopes. Be it day or night, there’s something so real and sacred inside of me that has always imagined greater. Sadly, for a significant part of my life, I lost that, I lost her, I lost my most precious medicine to mending: my dreams.

Trauma takes away our ability to dream. Trauma isolates us in survival mode, making it difficult and ultimately impossible to imagine what lies beyond the omnipresent pain and circumstances we face. Trauma breeds fear, and fear makes it seem like there’s nothing beyond its reign, making it unsafe to imagine a different reality.

One way we learn to survive through trauma is by dissociating, but dissociation is not dreaming. It is a way to cope and survive, leaving the body as it endures the unimaginable. Our mind, thoughts, and spirit go elsewhere. What if our dreams are here to save us too?

Dreams grant us the gift of using pain as a reminder that there is more for us to see. They allow us to believe in ourselves and in the wild wonders and ways the universe believes in us too. I believe we are here to dream and to create a world, a lifetime, a lasting legacy beyond the conditions we now know. We are created with the ability to take our world and lives and expand into horizons that hold hope, healing, and the blueprints of what is possible and yet to be discovered. Blueprints for new days—sunny, starry, and bright—that return us to our light and give us strength and direction toward our love and all its creative wonder.

Wonder is a precursor to dreams, as are visions. Although they are real and vital parts of us, they can also hibernate and become abandoned. When I reflect on when these aspects went void and blank for me, it was due to the tragedies and traumas of life. When my days became a struggle to get from point A to B while holding the weight of uncertainty and grief, dreaming became foreign to me, as did wonder and vision. When life only allowed space to hold it together and get through, I lost not only the space to breathe fully but also the space to believe in my own sense of wonder.

I think of the void I entered after losing my parents. The antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications I was on, combined with the hurt no one had taught me to hold and those around me not knowing how to navigate it, dried up the well where my wonder used to swell. My dreaming was lost, and I was lost with it.

I think of the years leading up to that July 4th and the amount of stress I was under, and how my family was becoming more buried by it too. No dreams came then—maybe just the occasional nightmare. There was no room to reach for the stars when we were just trying to get through another day, hoping to avoid more hurt or wounds.

I think of my own relationship with substances, especially alcohol, as a minor, a teenage Keri, and in my early twenties—trying to be an adult, to look like I had it all figured out, and to perform for my peers as if everything was well, bright, shiny, and new, while deeply hurting. The dependency on alcohol denied me of my dreams then too.

And yet, I hold with such gentleness and tenderness the child in me from before all those phases and processes of life—before I felt the thorns and traumas. She always had a way to dream and envision. Now, at 37, with much healing and revision, I am remembering to believe in her and all she believed in.

Healing the child in me and remembering that I am always a child too has led me back to wonder. Wonder has strengthened my capacity for curiosity. Curiosity makes me consider how and why we prevent ourselves from keeping our dreams alive. How have we arrived at a place where we lost that skillset, those gifts, that ability to dream and envision more, and to fearlessly and fiercely believe in and make it so?

I work directly with kids, which is both a gift and a great responsibility. They are mirrors not just to me but to all of us, reflecting parts of us and our youth that we may have lost, still love, or still need healing. Through them, I also witness the wounds within me that still need healing, as well as the day and night dreamer.

I work with youth engulfed in trauma and hardship, within corrections, meeting children navigating their lowest lows, and accepting circumstances that, in my opinion, should be unacceptable because they deserve so much more. We all deserve more. They learn to be accountable for their choices while also witnessing the web of their environment and its impact on those choices.

Big stuff for such little beings. They amaze me every time I’m with them. They survive the unimaginable, and I hope one day they dare to give themselves the credit, compassion, and opportunities to create a world where no one has to walk those routes, know those realities, or abandon their dreams.

We only know what we know. If our environments are unwell and unstable, unable to imagine and believe in more, we become that way too. So I also have to remember that the time we have together and the conversations we hold that make space for dreams, creativity, and wonder will, and already have, made a difference in their lives—bigger than the now. I truly believe they hold the blueprints for what can be, and it is an honor to encourage them in their ability to dream.

I feel deeply that we more than ever need the integrity of a child’s imagination. The fate and future live in the mindset of every child, and that mindset is still a part of us over 18 as well. It doesn’t matter how old we are or how much pain we’ve experienced; I truly believe, from my own experience, that those precious portals within us can be liberated, allowing us to dream again and make those dreams come true.

If there’s one thing I wish for us all right now, it’s to nurture the child within and believe in the ideas of the children around us. Let silly be. Let play lead. Let imagination take hold. Allow the mind to expand beyond fear, hurt, and freeze. Pay attention to what you are focusing on. Is it cookie-cutter? Is it repetitive? What would happen if that shifted? What would happen if we all shifted a little too?

When was the last time you allowed yourself to dream? When was the last time you listened to another’s dream or fostered the opportunity for someone else to dream?

Can we do our best not to stifle dreams but to breathe into them, believe in them, and believe in ourselves?

So much of this limited lifetime of ours wants us to expand beyond the limits we are used to. So much of the human experience is about returning to the truth that we are starlight, cosmos, consciousness, and that it works through us all. Every falling star is an opportunity to wish, to witness in awe, to return to wonder.

Dream by dream.

Mindset shift by mindset shift.

Vision by vision.

Can you please help me and help you and help us all by remembering a time when you had a greater vision? A radical and outrageous idea? A destiny, a desire, a dream—wild, wondrous, with all the time and space to come true?

The child in me and the child in you might just be onto something, if we can only believe in that child and all they believed could be.

I understand the world and our lives are saturated in trauma. I also know from my own experience that sometimes this backdrop is the greatest place to resurrect hope, dreams, and love so powerful and true. And if that lives in me, dear child of this Universe, you can be sure it is alive in you too.

What will you be dreaming about?

In what ways will you open your heart and mind to the possibilities that maybe, just maybe, they can and will come true?

Bowing deeply and dreaming with you.

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