When you think about the course of your life, have you ever asked yourself why its events happened?

Failures, losses, mistakes, sufferings, loneliness, the people we have met, what we have longed to learn, what we have been capable of doing, and what we have remained unable to realise...

Time, even in its most scientific formulation in physics, is a vague and bewildering concept.

We imagine that we live a linear form of time. The past has passed, the future has not yet arrived, and the present is all we have: a fraction of a second which, before we can even grasp it, has already joined the past.

Many times in my own life I have felt that I have seen traces of the future in the past, and traces of the past in the present—which is itself the future of a past that has ended.

What is the meaning of what we experience in life within such a nonlinear and bewildering conception of time?

Sometimes I feel that everything happens within a dream, where the speed and sequence of events are not necessarily clear or linear: a mental state of experience that may have no external reality.

But what I am saying is this...

Even if life is nothing more than a dream of the mind, what we experience within that dream can still carry a deeply personal meaning, just as our dreams can be pregnant with profound meanings and important messages from our unconscious.

Every dream tries to tell us something important about ourselves. Something we need to understand. Something we have not yet understood. Something we need but cannot directly access through conscious understanding.

Every dream conceals within itself a deep and personal meaning. So too does the dream of what we call our life, and everything we experience within it.

We can reflect on the meaning of our nightly dreams and on what they seek to reveal about us and who we are, just as we can think about the meaning of events in our lives and what they may be trying to tell us about ourselves.

The great question of the mind is always...
What is the meaning of what I am experiencing?

Aydin Areta