The bestower of mysterious gifts

Careful whom you summon! (Gleanings in Bee Culture, 1874)

I am not sure if I slept much last night.

I remember looking at the clock a few times and being surprised at what it said. I don't know why I was surprised.

I dreamed a lot. But the last dream wasn't really a dream. It was a work session. It laid out for me, in nerdy, procedural detail, a project that I was supposed to do, and exactly how I was supposed to do it.

It was a project that I didn't even realize I needed to do. Therefore, my subconscious mind was protecting me from the consequences of not doing this project and prompting me to do it.

A few hours later, sitting at my desk in Inman Park, I did it. It took an hour. I followed exactly the steps that my dream had laid out for me, and the work got done. Crisis averted.

I don't believe in magic, but I'm constantly experiencing moments that feel just like it. How did my brain solve a problem I didn't even realize that I had? How did it deliver such an elegant solution to me so efficiently? I am the cluelessly grateful beneficiary, but also, somehow, the bestower of mysterious gifts. Or maybe that part wasn't actually me, but some higher power.

I don't know if I'm risking self-delusion by putting such trust in myself (or in the universe or God or whatever). Honestly, though, I don't think self-delusion is that big of a problem, most of the time. Great empires were founded on less. (Actually, maybe that's where the problem comes in.)

My subconscious isn't telling me to invade other people's countries, though. It's feeding me song melodies and blog ideas and new approaches to old problems. I could second-guess it and wonder whether these bounties are any good, but that just seems rude.

I'm not psychic, but the older I get, the more intuitive I become. I expect to have dreams like that. I expect to know things that I have no logical reason to know, just from seeing a few decades' worth of patterns and people.

I think it's important I didn't dismiss the dream. I obeyed it. That seems like a good way to get more of the same. I don't mean that in some "please the muse" kind of way — it's just that if you listen more, it makes sense that you would hear more.

Maybe this listening is a skill we can practice. We can even ask the questions that bring the answers (although, clearly, it's not strictly necessary). If I get these things that I didn't even ask for, what else is there? What puzzles am I busting my butt to solve when I could actually just take a nap and wake up with the solution?

This happens all the time, really. I was trying to solve a Wordle right before I had to lie back and open my mouth at the dentist this week. I closed my eyes and quickly had the answer, just by assuming it would show up. Where did it come from? Who knows.

As I wrap up this post, I could tell you how to cultivate your own intuition to gain mysterious gifts from your subconscious mind or wherever they come from. But I don't know how you do that. All I know is that if I can, you can. And it's cool when it happens.

It seems greedy to ask for these things, but it doesn't seem to hurt. It seems like we're working with a renewable resource. Expecting them to arrive sometimes does the trick — that's pretty much what I do every day when I write these articles.

In a world that's dangerous and unpredictable, it's nice to find something that's peaceful and unpredictable — and that perhaps can become more predictable with practice. I'll be experimenting with it and I'll let you know what I discover.

As for you: Do you receive gifts from your intuition or subconscious? How does it work for you? Any tips for me?