Inhabit your dream

What is life? An illusion,
A shadow, a fiction,
And the greatest profit is small;
For all of life is a dream,
And dreams, are nothing but dreams

The artwork was a gift from my dearest cousin Mary Alice, who died recently and unexpectedly of a cerebral aneurysm. She created it for me years ago because of a story I told her of something that I remembered, something that happened to me when I was nine, walking from my house to the ball field to play baseball with the neighborhood kids. I was climbing a hill on a hot summer day, noticing how out of breath I was just exerting the energy to climb that hill, and I was worried that I wasn’t as good or as athletic as the other kids, who happened to be all boys, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself in the game. And it suddenly came to me that this little stroll was just a dream. And it wasn’t even MY dream. I was a character in someone else’s dream and everything that happened to me, everything that I did, didn’t matter because I essentially had no control over what happened in someone else’s dream. What freedom! What bliss!

On an episode of the television show House, a patient sues his oncologist after finding out that he has been misdiagnosed. He doesn’t have cancer after all, and he isn’t going to die in six months, as he was previously told. “You ruined my life by telling me that I’m not going to die,” he says. When he thought he only had six months to live, he was the happiest he had ever been in his life, he said. He had nothing to worry about. He could live in the moment and he had no real responsibilities. What freedom! What bliss!

I used to meditate for twenty minutes twice a day. After a year or so, I began to go deeper and deeper into the meditative state. It felt like I was sinking in intervallic plunges into a bottomless body of water. And as I sank and gave up control, I felt intense calm and peace. I was nowhere. I was dreaming yet not quite dreaming. This, I thought, is what it will feel like to die. You will merely drift deeper into the dream, and when your life is over, you will be in yet another dream, a different dream, but a dream nevertheless. I felt, and still do, that there is unconditional love surrounding the dreamer. And dreams, as Pedro Calderón de la Barca tells us, are nothing but dreams.

If I had 37 days to live, I would look forward to the next dream, and in those days left in this dream, I would attempt to capture that complete sense of relaxation and calm, that sense of being loved, and that feeling of freedom and bliss of accepting the fact that we are not in control. I’ve chosen a photograph of a moment in time when I felt all of that. The beauty of this photograph is that I could easily recreate that moment or moments like it. The sad truth is that I don’t nearly as often as I would like.

-Gay Clyburn

If life is a dream, let’s create–as much as we can–the dream we want, one in which unconditional love and calm and relaxation figures more prominently than schedules and conditions and frenetic activity and measuring our worth by other people’s standards. Let’s create moments where four friends can laugh on the grass in big light (can you find me in the photo?), where we free ourselves from the fallacy that we are in control and can simply be.

"Live like you’re dying"" is a catchphrase, soon to be a CBS reality show.

What if we lived like we were living, instead?

Fully inhabit your dream.

Thanks, Gay, for answering the question, "What would I be doing today if I only had 37 days to live?" If you’d like to answer that question and join the worldwide conversation about living more intentionally, send your essay and photo to me by email.

[patti, joann, rosemary, and gay on a hillside by a beautiful cottage in a tiny village in virginia]