Some time ago, I described one of my dreams in an article known as "Atop the Hill." This occurred during a time in my life in which I had just been diagnosed and was in an off-and-on relationship with someone who I can now safely say was the result of my naivete. I would spend long hours wondering whether or not I was in the right relationship for me, something that I'm sure everyone does at some point. However, I received my answer in the form of this dream, which provided me an oddly direct insight into my own perceptions of myself.
For those of you who have not read it, "Atop the Hill" describes an adventurer who ascends to the top of a hill to find and engage three beings--the Brain, the Stomach, and the Heart--in a game. The adventurer asks each of them a question, and each of them proves her wrong and wins her prize. However, once she gets to the Heart, she realizes that the prize, a rose, is too simple to find a question about, so she chooses to ask about the Heart itself. The Heart answers unexpectedly,
"I am most asked to tell lies."
This is the line that resonated the most with me when I woke up and encouraged me to write this dream down and make sure that it reached other people. The three Beings represent the three ways that people are guided to make decisions: by being logical, by following their instinct, or by using their emotions.
Often when we enter relationships on any level, we do so based on emotion, only allowing for logic and instinct to gently raise their hands and mumble their opinions into the discussion. However, we do not take into account that our emotions can deceive us. They can be driven by illusions of happiness and love that often leave us more broken than before, and when that happens, we ask our Heart to tell lies. We can lie that we are happy while instinct and logic scream that we are not; we can lie that we can make everything better when there is no hope left for it. We can even lie that we love without any intent of being a bad person, but simply because our Heart wants to get its prize. This can leave us bewildered and despondent, perhaps even convince us that we are unworthy of love and reject it when it genuinely does appear in the same way that the Heart ultimately rejected its prize.
One thing we need to understand is that no relationship is certain; no friendship is assured to last forever. There is no guaranteed happy ending. However, we can create our own by being honest with ourselves and using the Brain, Stomach, and Heart as a team to make our decisions about who we want on our side. It allows us to take that all-important introspective look into ourselves and find and improve any self-perceived "faults" that might one day cause us to make that Heart tell lies. It will help us let go of toxic people in our lives a little more easily and maybe get to that next day without feeling as though we are not going anywhere.
