"Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul." --Virginia Woolf

I'd like to tell you about a dream that happened over two centuries ago. Giuseppi Tartini was a talented and popular 18th-century musician. Tartini dreamt that he made a compact with the Devil, who agreed to be his servant. In his dream, he gave his violin to the Devil to see what kind of musician he was, and the Devil played such an exquisite solo that it far surpassed anything Tartini had ever heard. The Devil's music so delighted and amazed him that he woke up and immediately tried to reproduce what he had heard in his dream. His best efforts produced a composition he called The Devil's Trill, which the public regarded as his finest work. But Tartini felt it was so inferior to the Devil's music in his dream that he said he would have broken his violin and abandoned music if he could have found any other way to support himself.

In Tartini's time, the Devil personified the spirit of evil, a demon, the ruler of Hell, and the chief adversary of God. So what or who is this "Devil" and how can he create such beautiful music? It's an important question that evokes an answer that threatens to topple some massive ideological structures. Might Tartini's dream be saying that it is his devilish, non-conformist, rebellion against the accepted musical authorities, the musical gods of his age, that carries the treasure of his unique genius, his authentic, original music? In fact, his dream suggests that his true creative nature depends upon characteristics the establishment has rejected and cast out.

Our dreams, if we pay attention and learn how to interpret them, do something that is quite astonishing! They present us with dream images and symbols, like Tartini's "Devil," that represent either conformity to outside influences and authority that would smother our essential nature, or, on the other hand, represent our own hidden genius and creativity that wants into our life; those priceless qualities that define who we really are and empower each of us to live an authentic life, to become a true original, a masterpiece. Our dreams want to draw us out, save us, pull us outside the narrow passageways and cloned subdivisions that have been put upon the land; our dreams want to collapse the gray, concrete garages where we mechanically park our lives each day.

Our dreams relentlessly identify those essential, extraordinary qualities that make us unique and authentic individuals. At the same time, dreams are ruthless and often shocking in exposing influences from others, from society, from family, from groups, from ideologies, that threaten our ability to live our own lives. Any technique of dream interpretation that ignores this powerful and empowering dream dynamic is like a child playing in the shallow end of the pool, safe and secure but missing something tremendous, a priceless tool for helping us to avoid living a puppet-like life of dull conformity, a life without passion and creativity, a life of depressed potential, a life of little or no value to the world we live in.

An Authentic Life is the expression of our essential nature, the original blueprint, the soul struggling, playing, creating, and recreating life. It is breaking the mold, living outside the boxes of life that want to define, contain, and imprison us. It's the distinct, eccentric, unconventional you, your unique sense of who you are in the core of your being.

In many dreams, the "Devil is in the details." In this modern example, the dream points out a controlling, group dynamic and its repercussions for the dreamer. The dreamer is a fifty-year-old woman who was searching for a spiritual philosophy. Here's her dream:

"I was with my spiritual study group and the minister, the one who led the group, fiddled with my hair, putting my falling-out-of-place hair back in place so that it looked right."

For the dreamer, her hair had a lot to do with how she looked, her appearance to others, and it also represented her ideas and thoughts--things that "grow out of her head." In her dream, the minister, an authority figure, rearranges her appearance, her thinking, and her ideas so that they look "right." This resonated for the dreamer and she realized her dream meant that the group's ideas were causing her to rearrange her thinking so that she would appear "right," please the minister, and fit into the group. It is precisely her out-of-place hair, her uniqueness and authenticity that does not fit into the group mind set.

We could look at the minister in her dream as a paradoxical figure representing a masculine aspect of her psyche that inflicts conformity on herself. But he also represents an outside influence that has gotten into her head. When I asked how her out-of-place hair felt, she replied, "Angry! It feels like I'm disappearing, like I can't be seen, I'm being like all the other hair that looks right."

Dreams want the individual life to become a creative intervention in the social order; they intend to change not only the dreamer's life, they mean to accelerate the evolution of the human spirit and change the world we live in.

John Goldhammer is a psychotherapist and author of: "Radical Dreaming: Use Your Dreams to Change Your Life" (Kensington Publishing/Citadel Press). Contact John @ 206-306-0322 or: jgoldhammer@mindspring.com for information on "Radical Dreaming" Study Groups.