The Naked Intuitive

Dream Wisdom - What a Muppet in a Mirror Taught Me About My True Self

I dreamed I was walking through a busy old-world village, moving through the rhythms of ordinary life, saying hello to people going about their everyday chores, passing out cards, letting people know I was an intuitive and how to find me.

I slipped one of my cards into a shop window, and a woman came out holding a ceramic disc, wanting me to read it. I hadn’t advertised that kind of work, but I looked anyway. I went inside myself, trusted what I felt, and told her there were energies of fertility around her. That she would soon conceive, or perhaps already had.

She was already with child. She knew it was true, and she wanted to follow me home.

As I walked, I became aware that I was unclothed, at least from the waist up. I had my staff with me, the same one I carry in waking life, and I was walking through the village this way. And there was nothing strange about it.

Back at my home, which was also my place of business, something between a journalist’s office and a law practice, the woman was full of questions, and I did my best to answer them while shifting into the professional journalist/lawyer mode. At some point I realized I needed to dress for this role. I found a long, shiny blue dress and put it on, and looked in the mirror.

Looking back at me was a muppet. Short, hunched, old, wrinkled, bald. In a shiny, blue dress. Something Jim Henson might have made. I wasn’t disturbed. If anything, I was almost amused, because I understood what was going on immediately. I reached for the large, gaudy, bright red wig I knew was waiting, to wear with the equally gaudy blue dress. Because the over-the-top ridiculousness of it brought me joy.

It was a costume. It had always been a costume.

And the muppet in the mirror knew it too.

When I woke, the message was clear:
My intuitive self is my true, naked self. Everything else is just something to wear.

So my friends, I offer these words of dream-wisdom...

Life is theater. Dress accordingly.

(The roles we adopt aren’t life. They’re just what we wear while we’re living it. The roles we build and invest ourselves into, believing they are us, when really they are something we’re performing. Possibly sincerely. But still a performance.

There’s a difference between purpose and performance. My naked self was living in alignment with my purpose. The costume came when I had to perform in the roles that survival made necessary. I was acutely aware of that, which is why the absurdity was humorous. I knew in the mirror that that wasn’t me. It was the me I had to wear to move within society, to make money, and appear successful.

The nakedness underneath, that’s who we really are. Sometimes it’s not loud or grand. But it’s the truth, glimmering beneath the surface of the stage.)