Your Dreams Aren't Yours

Why the most powerful dreams don’t belong to you — 3 portals to blow your mind wide open with Frank Ocean, James Blake, KRS 1 + Ayanda

Mar 30, 2025

This morning, I want to share with you three tiny portals—each in the name of love, a bell hooks kind of love —

"the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth."

I chose Little Door as my artist name because I believe portals surround us, waiting to fling open into expansions of consciousness.

Music has been the biggest, most accessible one for me since childhood, and now that I’m creating music, the portal’s pull has only intensified. Transformation has become quantum.

When I spot a portal out there in the ether, I want to point it out to you—to nudge you toward its edges, to invite you to peek around and decide if you’d like to step through.

Life is different on the other side, if you choose to cross the threshold.

Portal # 1 — Godspeed

Frank Ocean’s original song is a hymn unto itself, but this live performance by James Blake never fails to bring me to tears. To enter, close your eyes and imagine these sounds welling up from your own body. The tender lightness of each note floating up and out.

The freedom of being profoundly inspired by another artist’s work is a paradox few truly grasp—but standing before naked, exalted beauty has a way of multiplying itself. It replicates by being held, by being seen.

It is received by the triune of the heart/body/mind. It goes in, exponentially compounds within the vessel, and releases back out as a new form of expression and beauty. That’s why making art will always be a generative practice.

From this song, you could distill a life aphorism: “The table is prepared for you.”

Or, if you prefer: “This love will keep us through blinding of the eyes, / Silence in the ears, / Darkness of the mind.”

Portal # 2 — KRS 1 Breathing Consciousness

A dear friend sent this to me recently with a note: “This made me think of you!” I’ve never felt more seen. She gets me.

Artists, mystics, philosophers, monks, scientists, shamans, poets — we’re all contemplating and churning the same questions about reality and our place in it.

The artist’s role is alchemical: we are dismantlers, architects, and dream summoners all at once. Some hold up mirrors to the current reality — to shatter the malaise of denial—the chokehold on collective breath.

Others swing crowbars at rotten systems, burning down what no longer serves.

And then there are those who stand knee-deep in the unknown, humming melodies the world hasn’t heard yet, calling the uncreated into being with nothing but their devotion.

This isn’t metaphor.

Every line we write, every note we play, every stroke we paint is a refusal to worship the world as it is—and a foundation laid for the New Earth waiting on the other side.

Especially now, when everything feels fractured and world leaders seem one misstep from annihilation… watch the artists. They’re doing the quantum work of constructing the alternate realities we’ll inhabit.

Portal # 3 — Collective Dreams

A stunning reframe from

ayandastood

: What if our dreams aren’t solely ours? Cultural conditioning tells us they are—that if we want to write the book, compose the album, or plant the garden, the dream is ours alone.

But what if your dreams are collective?

Because they are.

On the other side of your lush, pulsing dream are people already waiting for it. Waiting to hear the song that shifts them. Waiting to read the book, to learn, to eat the fruit from your garden. Your dream is a thread in a web—not just yours, but a gift passing through you.

What does it do to your beautiful little brain when you free yourself from thinking of your dream as individual pursuit? A solitary quest of forging into the mucky resistance of the world to claim your dream?

And instead you imagine arriving to a circle of people awaiting you, their palms up and open? They’ve been waiting. Ready to receive. Are you ready to give? The dream was never yours alone. It’s a current moving through you— a collaboration with the unseen.

Imagine the collective sigh of relief, "Finally, you’re here."