The answer to the question is "Yes." What we believe about the premise of the question is what requires us to come up with a true or false answer.

I was leaving a store the other day and they have a person who checks your receipt against what they see in your cart. He greeted me with, "How's it goin'?" I said, "Fine. How's it goin' with you?" He responded, "Livin' the dream."

He then offered, "It's not necessarily the dream I want, but I'm living it."

The Ed McMahon line that was delivered to Johnny Carson countless times on the Tonight Show popped into my head - "You are correct, sir!"

We are all living the dream.

The dream is our life.

We have dreamed the life we are living and it's a dream come true. The question to ask now is: "How's it working for you?"

We didn't arrive where we are by circumstance or accident; we had a hand in it. The dream we are living may be a nightmare but we had a role in crafting it.

The dream we live is determined by our conditioning which, for the most part, sits below conscious awareness. We learn many things we're unaware of through social, cultural and parental conditioning. They are called "Patterns."

This learning runs in the background, often without recognition, and silently creates our life, our dream.

We are living the dream of conditioning.

There is only one way to wake up from that dream. Recognize that your dream is living you. That means to first realize that your life is the sum total of your patterns. Once you have that realization, you are a step closer to living the dream you desire.

After acquiring this realization, the next step is to recognize the dream while we're dreaming it.

Did you ever have the experience of having a dream and saying to yourself in the dream, "I must be dreaming"? That's recognizing the dream in action. It's a necessary step in waking up.

Your patterns of thought and behavior need your attention. They are the building blocks of your life. If you want to build a new life, your best chance is to notice your patterns.

There is timing involved. The timing that's necessary is to notice your patterns while they are running. You have to train yourself to realize you are dreaming and to wake yourself up.

Your patterns may have been someone else's dream for you. You will live someone else's dream until you notice your patterns.

The final step in waking from the dream is to interrupt your patterns while they are running. That means to notice you are having a waking dream and to pinch yourself.

Consciously interrupting a pattern, while it's running, opens the door to a new dream.

Interrupting your patterns with regularity causes them to come back with less frequency, until they eventually stop visiting.

There is a philosophy out there that says you can daydream your way to your future. I don't have a quibble with that notion, only its placement. That step has to come after you learn to recognize and interrupt your patterns, otherwise it will be a pipe dream.

You are living the dream. The only question left to answer is: "Is it the one you chose or was it chosen for you?"

Interrupt it and find out.

All the best,

John