Those who are close to me know that I started having unusually vivid dreams after my son passed away, which continue to this day. Whenever these dreams wake me up in the middle of the night, which is all the time, I immediately write them down even if I’m half-asleep and my eyes are shut while doing so.

Some of the messages I’ve received in my dreams are personal to my own healing journey and that of my family. Other messages are more universal, and I have gotten a lot of joy from sharing them with friends and seeing how they impact others.

I’ve decided to share a dream with you that I had a few weeks ago because its message may be not only applicable to my life, but yours too.

This particular dream was about a brown leather keychain that I purchased in New York two decades ago and have been using ever since.

At one end of this keychain is a large silver hoop which snaps on and off and is intended for a car key or any kind of key that is frequently removed and shared with others.

I keep my car key separate. So on this hoop, I made a habit of carrying seven or eight old keys that I simply never took the time to take off. One, for example, was from my family’s old home that we sold a few years ago. Another was from an old job. Over time, I lost track of which keys were which, so to avoid throwing any away that might be important at some unknown point in my life, I kept them all and lugged them around everywhere I went.

This brings me to the other end of my leather key chain, which holds a large silver hoop that does not snap off. It’s intended for keys that are used all the time and not typically shared. I keep my house key and three others on it.

In my dream, my brown leather keychain was held up in front of me by some invisible force. I stared at it closely and noticed that the keychain in my dream looked exactly like the one in my life, with the same keys organized in the same way at both ends.

When I pondered why I was dreaming about my keychain, the invisible force unsnapped the hoop with all my old keys on it and tossed it in the trash. The sequence repeated itself for a second time, with the same hoop again being unsnapped and the old keys being dumped. When it started to replay for a third time, I woke up, wrote the dream down, and fell back asleep, questioning what the dream was trying to say.

Every key is associated with a door, I thought to myself, teetering on edge between sleeping and waking.

While this may seem obvious, I had never considered that for at least a decade or more, I had been carrying around a bunch of old keys that fit a bunch of old doors. The time had come to ask myself, WHY?

Keys hold energy, a second thought tumbled in hard.

This prompted me to ask myself: Why would I carry around old energy associated with old doors that closed years ago when I can just as easily throw the keys away and make space for new energy that opens new doors?

It all made perfect sense to me.

When I woke up that morning, I got out of bed, grabbed my key chain from my purse, took off my old keys, and walked straight outside to my trash bins, where I threw them away. With my brown leather keychain in hand, I stared at the one empty hoop and felt a spark of excitement growing inside of me.

One day, this hoop will hold a new key</em>, I immediately thought. <em>And this key will unlock a new door. And when that door opens, a new adventure will begin.

The possibilities were endless.

“Part of a spiritual awakening is realizing a lot of things are possible beyond the day to day,” one of my favorite spiritual teachers and counselors, Nicole Sheier, once told me early on in my journey to heal a broken heart. “Pay attention to your dreams at night, they are prepping you.”

And they were making life a whole lot more interesting.

When I turned to walk back inside my house, I already felt different. Maybe something subconscious had disconnected from my past. Or maybe the laws of energy were simply at work.

All I knew for sure was that I felt lighter and more open, just like my keychain did, and that the dream in my sleeping world had given me a great tip for my waking world that I wanted to share with everyone I know.</span></p>