The dreams that have recurred the most for me in my life are the ones that I had when I was attending the US Air Force Academy, a university to train young people to become officers in the US Air Force. I was there from the age of 18-21. As I have changed over the years, so also has the way the dreams present themselves. The central theme is that I have re-enrolled and am facing a particular problem. In this particular dream I am in my dorm room which is a bit more like an apartment because it has more than one room in it. I have two other roommates. What is unique is that the rooms are really messy, which is uncharacteristic of the way dorm rooms look at a military academy. What I want to do in the dream is relax and rest, but the room is a mess. It is hard to find a place to lay down and relax.

In reality my experience in the Academy was that to outward appearance everything looked extremely clean and orderly, inwardly,however, young men’s lives were a big mess. Everyone, to a person, was unhappy with the system, but very few of us could go against the force of conformity. In the face of a long standing way of doing things, I imagine that they felt powerless to do anything but go with the system. What made it difficult to be true to your inner self in that environment was the culture of constant criticism, of the belief in finding out what was wrong with you. I was under pressure to have everything perfect with no breathing room for creativity. You were not allowed to make mistakes less some higher ranking officer might look bad and lose his position.

The dream presents a problem of organization, how to get the space organized, but in order to organize my life in a better way it cannot be done on the basis of conformity. The first challenge for me, as I think about it, is to dissociate from the culture of mistake mongering. There I was, here I am, in an institution that highly valued tradition and conformity. Many people in such institutions advance through finding out what is wrong with others, in pointing out weaknesses, in criticizing mistakes. For some unknown reason to me a lot of people were seen as strong if they could criticize their subordinates. They were seen as capable leaders. I never saw them that way. I always saw them as the worst possible leaders.

The problem i have in the dream, which is the problem living in the modern world or even the ancient world, is to organize my life around the positive energy internal to me. It is in conflict with a culture that wants to organize lives in conformity with what the traditionally based leadership desires. The first principle of organizing one’s life seems to be the ability to find the positive energy that exists in oneself and in others and then to relate to that energy. This is because we are both independent beings and social beings. You cannot organize your life apart from others, on the one hand, and you cannot be like anyone else on the other. We must be our own unique selves and also live fully in harmony with others. The Academy was teaching us that we did not have a unique self. We only were to develop a self that was in conformity with the wishes of the higher leadership. It is why the room is such a mess.

Much of our self-help literature focuses on the uniqueness part, but it often fails to put that self in a social context. For instance, you hear the same thing from many people who are successful athletes at the highest level. They say that if you set your goals high and work really hard, that you can achieve anything. “Look at me. I did it.” But if you are a woman living in Afghanistan right now, your unique self is highly unlikely to win an Olympic medal. The social context does not allow for it. In order to thrive we can relate to all of the positive energy internal to us, and then live in a supportive manner with those around us, each encouraging our own paths.

The mess in the dream is caused because the leadership did not recognize that people are unique. They wanted to mold us to be what they wanted us to be for their own ends. And when you were not in conformity with how they saw it, which I never was, then they pulled out the “unity” card. They said you were causing disunity by not doing things exactly as the leader wanted them. In the 1960s when people started to raise their voices over the dangers of too much conformity, the traditonalists in America had the slogan, “America, Love it or Leave it.” In the new millennium it was, “You’re with Us, or You’re Against Us.” And the fundamentalists’ unity card says that you are either with us or you are going to hell.

So why am I getting the dream now? What is the reason that I am being in such a messy room? I don’t have a problem with going against tradition, of leaving conservative ways behind. What seems to be calling to me is the need to understand that those around me need much more support to be their own unique selves than I realized, that, while it was always easy to put tradition aside for me, it is not that easy for others. The mess caused by attachment to tradition is much greater than I realized. My role is to encourage others to find their uniqueness and run with it.

What is unique about yourself? What are your highly positive qualities? What new qualities do you want to add to make you even more effective? How are you tied to your traditional past that hampers your growth? What is unique about your family members? Your friends? How can you support and encourage them?