With peace and serenity in my daily life, my subtle world (or dream) life is very much more pleasant and the colors are more vivid.  When I'm irritated, worried, or super distracted in my waking life, my dreams are extremely chaotic and seem to have no rational connection to each other whatsoever and are often quite dark and gloomy.  This is all stuff we've talked about before.  However...

I've been having more success with meditation lately, and I find it to carry over into my daily living and now I see how it is affecting my dreams as well.  When I get meditation "right", I generally feel lighter during the day.  I mean that I don't feel so attached to all the things that happen around me and just tend to observe and appreciate things more -weather, nature, people, my health.  My mind is more focused and I don't let things pull my attention away from what I'm trying to accomplish.  

An interesting question arises: what is MORE real?  The things that are happening outside yourself, or the the things that are happening within?  The so-called "objective" or the so-called "subjective"?  We are human beings having a human life experience.  The things that are going on within us -thoughts, emotions, intuitions, desires, etc.- determine our destiny and life path much more than the physical things that surround us, don't they?  Two people can go through the exact same material experience; one of them it crushes and depresses him for the rest of his life; the other faces it, deals with it, learns, grows, and becomes a stronger person because of it.  What's the difference?  The inner nature of the individuals.  Isn't that inner nature, then, at least as real as the thing that happened to them?  

Maybe our response to things isn't a response, is what I'm trying to say.  Maybe we have anger, irritation, or lust as PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS, embedded in our consciousness first.  Maybe that is the reality.  It's not that someone cuts us off in traffic and then we get upset; it's that we are upset and then someone switched lanes in front of us.  When we're in the subtle world, where the matter is maleable in response to thoughts, those pre-existing conditions materialize as part (or whole) of our subtle world experience. 

I believe this is true.  And it's about time I begin taking more responsibility for establishing more wholesome and beneficial pre-existing conditions in my consciousness.