Lately my life has taken on a parallel focus. One intention involves studying online marketing and honing my unique storytelling skillset down to a teachable digital class, which I plan to offer on https://mastermind.com. The other has to do with working with clients in a caregiver capacity, which consumes about 20 hours of my time each week. To me, assisting people with physical or neurological challenges is extremely rewarding. Caregiving has been a passion since I felt called to care for my mother for many years until her death.

In addition I’m also actively engaged in improving my own health and fitness. That consumes another 8 hours a week. No wonder I feel there aren’t enough hours in a day to get everything done while maintaining and improving my blog presence. I’m not complaining. I love having interesting and challenging things to do everyday.

I have the privilege of creating the content of all my days. Making good use of my time takes discipline though. The first step in this present journey was finding my why. In other words, what do I want to do and why? That took a while to get my head around but now I’m up and running.

This stage is where time-blocking (a euphemism for time management that deals specifically with the hours in each day and how you schedule them) becomes so valuable. Establishing and reinforcing good work habits also plays a crucial role in moving forward. Saying no to wasting time or negative self talk has been another big challenge.

Here are some routines to practice. These give structure to days that would otherwise be without a spine, so to speak. Journal every day. I do this with my morning coffee, first thing in the morning. This is such a great support. A dream journal is a secondary source of creativity and inspiration even though it’s not a daily practice. It’s possible that my dream journal will take the form of a published book some day.

Dreamwork has many meanings. I refer to it here in the Jungian sense (that dreams are symbolic expressions of the subconscious) and as an open-hearted observer/documentarian. Dream symbols can have multiple meanings, depending on how they are examined. I abstain from analyzing dreams. My preference is too simply to record them. They, of course, speak to me on a very deep level but as a practice, interpretation is something I might record in a separate, daily journal.

You never know where dreams and visions can lead, what doors they may open. As an example, my sister started a blog on sub stack called Country Chronicles (https://heartlandrefuge.substack.com) that documents her adventures in off-grid country living. It, like my own blog, is still finding its way but has already begun to take the shape of a James Herriot style journey, full of stories about country folk, animals family and friends.

So anyway, while adjusting to my relatively new Monday – Friday working-with-caregiving clients schedule, I fell behind in my online marketing study goal and digital class creation. While I love my clients and am fascinated with their health profiles (they’re all neurologically challenged in some way), I’ve been stressing over leaving my creative goals untended. Then the other morning I woke up aware that I had had a dream that laid out my entire online class! My dreams are a gift.

By the time I got to pen and paper to record what my subconscious mind had created, the ideas were fuzzy and fading. So I did what I always do when a gift like this happens. I make the effort to record as much as I possibly can. I just started writing. Sure enough five central ideas came into focus. I used the clustering technique (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards) which I mention in an earlier blog post, to chunk down the ideas in their crude, disjointed form. This led to a brainstorming session on module titles and a bunch of literary research that helped me realize I’m still on track there.

So even though I didn’t fully recover the course my subconscious mind laid out for me, I was able to anchor some of it in on the conscious level, which is a big step forward. Today I’m devoting much of my time to class study and course creation so I’m certain more progress will be made. I can’t emphasize enough how important paying attention to your dreams can be to your creative life. At least that’s true for me.

Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.

Napoleon Hill