The Dream Guides Are Total Trash, So I Built My Own
You see a mountain with snow, and the first thing you do is Google it. What does the internet tell you? “A mountain is an obstacle you must overcome.” “Snow means purity, or maybe fear of feeling cold.” Man, they talk about this like everyone on the planet uses the same damn brain and the same damn symbol bank. It’s ridiculous. They’re just copying old books written by guys who never had to actually do anything hard in their lives.
I read all that crap for about six months and wasted my time. It was a complete cluster. If a mountain was an “obstacle,” then every dream I had meant I was totally screwed. If snow was “purity,” why did I wake up feeling sick every time I saw it on a dream peak? It was a mess. Like a big tech company that starts with Go, realizes the tools suck, and then piles on Python, Java, and C# until the whole codebase is just a maintenance nightmare. That’s what standard dream interpretation is: a nightmare of mixed, useless solutions.
So, I dumped every book. I ripped up my notes. I established a new rule: The guide is for your own vision only. Your wiring is unique. And I started a new practice log. I called it the “Summit Tracker.”
My Practice: The Summit Tracker Log
I didn’t try to interpret anything for the first three months. I just logged the sight. I categorized every mountain vision into four buckets:
- The Vista: Seeing the peak from way down below.
- The Climb: Actively moving up the slope.
- The Summit: Standing on top, looking around.
- The Descent: Going back down.
Then, I logged the snow variable. Was it a light dusting? Was it a frozen, heavy sheet? Was it melting? And most importantly, I logged the feeling I had. Was it quiet power? Or cold, absolute dread? This was the hard part. It took me battling through about two hundred entries before I saw the pattern.
I spent an entire year thinking the Mountain meant “Obstacle.” I was wrong. The mountain is simply the Scale of your Ambition. It’s how damn big you want to go. The snow, I thought, was “Purity.” Wrong again. The snow, in my log, turned out to be the Immediate Cost of that Ambition. It’s the isolation, the resource drain, or the cold reality check you get right after you pull the trigger on a big move.
How did I figure out this simple, rough-edged truth that makes all the difference?
The Event That Made Me Throw Out The Rulebook
I know this because of the year I had to walk away from my cushy, predictable job. It was maybe six or seven years ago, right before I started sharing this blog stuff. The situation was rotten. I was working sixty hours a week for a boss who was, frankly, a liar and a thief. My wife was stressed out of her mind, and I was spending every evening just staring at the wall. My bank account was solid, but my soul was not. I was trapped.
One night, I had the worst mountain dream I’ve ever recorded. I climbed a sheer wall. It wasn’t the slow hike of my other entries; this was a terrified, gripping-for-life ascent. I reached the summit and it was covered in snow—not the pretty, pure kind. This was slick, dangerous, blue-white ice. And I was completely alone. No gear, no jacket. Just shivering on this tiny, isolated perch. I woke up hyperventilating.
If I had used the stupid book interpretation—”Obstacle, Fear, Isolation”—the answer would have been: Don’t do anything. Stay in the job. It’s too high, too cold. You’ll freeze.
Instead, I looked at my raw log.
- Action: Terrifying Ascent (The biggest, scariest ambition I’ve ever had).
- Snow: Isolated, freezing ice (The cost of my decision: no income for months, zero support from colleagues).
I realized the mountain wasn’t telling me not to do it. It was simply outlining the damn price tag. It was saying: “You want out? Great. It’s going to be lonely and freezing up there for a while.”
So, I pulled the trigger. I walked into that office the next day and handed in my resignation. My boss was shocked, and then he pulled the same garbage my old company did—he tried to get me back a year later, offering double the pay. I told him to forget it. That peak, that cold isolation, bought me my freedom.
The standard dream guides are still out there telling people that snow means “purity.” They never had to actually climb their own peak. They never had to pay the price. I did. That’s why my interpretation guide, rough and simple as it is, actually works. The mountain is the size of the challenge, and the snow is the cold, hard, isolating cost. If you can handle the cost, you own the summit.
