‘It was just a dream’ is probably the most pernicious, damaging thing that good, well-meaning parents say to their children. It inculcates the notion that each and every experience is to be categorized as either nothing or other; that each and every experience must either be killed or exiled. By doing this, we surrender intimacy with our own lives and become estranged from ourselves. The insanity here is plain to see: an experience is never nothing; it comes from somewhere; it is formed and arises in some way; it reveals something; it is an integral part of nature at some level. And an
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