Yesterday, two friends told me about dreams they’d just had about me, dreams that disturbed them a little bit.

The first was set in an office. I was brusque with my friend in the waiting room, it seems, and then I went into my office and was shouting abuse at him through the door. Then I came out and threw a boxcutter at him, like it was a ninja throwing star. It hit him in the chest and lodged there. Yikes. Guess this is what happens when you don’t have an appointment, Dude.

In the second dream, I was in a hotel with my other friend. I was boiling with agitation and drove him away, fast and furious, to show him a house I said I’d been building my whole life. This was a big one-story magnificent glass house, very zen-like and empty of furniture. Once I was there, I was very happy and confident and I adamantly refused to go back to the hotel. My friend wanted to go back and I told him I wouldn’t take him there, and to go get a cab. I laughed at his description of me: “relaxed and peaceful but with a dose of Clint Eastwood.”

So what can we learn here, aside from the obvious fact that two of my closest friends see me as a bit of a dick?

Or is that the lesson?

My wife, who’s a therapist, has told me that in dreams, all the characters are us. Or some aspect of us. Maybe that lets me off the hook, yet I can’t escape feeling a little guilty. It’s strange when somebody tells you, with great intensity, how you acted in their dream. They recount it as if you’d really done it, and it’s like being told you did or said something when you were drunk.

Is there a Dream Eddie? Does he go out when I’m asleep and commit these and perhaps other, possibly much worse, acts?

Or is there some sort of Energetic Eddie? Just as there might be choppy waves in the water after I’ve jumped into the pool, do the things I say and do have an afterlife that impacts others?

Now we’re getting warmer.

Because I have been noticing this lately: how strong our impact can be. How much we can affect other people, and not just by our words and actions, but by our thoughts. You can sit there in judgment and anger at another person, not even expressing it, and they can feel it. The same goes for loving and supportive thoughts. “Thoughts become things,” they say in The Secret, and that’s true, but it’s also true that thoughts ARE things. A thought has power, and a thought with emotion attached to it even more so.

For a long time, I did not believe this, or more accurately, I knew it somewhere but lied to myself about it, because I didn’t want to own it. I told myself that if I thought something but didn’t express it, it didn’t count.

Not true. We’re all fields of energy, and the vibrations that come off us are radiating out into the world and affecting things all the time. I can see it in my dog, for example, who responds like a tuning fork to whatever mood I’m in. I can see it in my co-workers, the movement toward or away from me depending on my own responses.

The reason I didn’t want to own this is that it’s a huge responsibility. Bad enough to have to own your words and deeds, but to have to own your vibrations? Scary.

But better to be aware of your impact, to take responsibility for it and direct it consciously, than to ignore it and give your friends nightmares.