Recurring dreams and plans and the VII of Cups

Part of my routine each morning is to draw a daily tarot card for my practice.  Often, I like to share this card I draw for myself on my Facebook page in order to practice writing about the cards and hopefully entertain my dedicated fans, provoking them to look for the tarot's significance in their daily lives.  The problem with focusing on myself when I draw the daily card, is that I often draw the same card quite a few times in one week or month.  This makes for some less than entertaining or thought-provoking FB posts, since I'd just be writing about the same card over and over again.  Yet, these recurring cards are fascinating and deeply meaningful to me.  When a card continues to jump out at me, I know that it is something important for me to focus on and dedicate some time to thinking about, meditating on, and hopefully acting upon.

Recently, I've drawn the VII of Cups quite a number of times, including this morning when I attempted to set my intention for the day.  The VII of Cups is about illusions, breaking through delusions, choices, wishful thinking, and confronting your fantasies and imagination.  This card even more explicitly depicts the feeling of being overwhelmed by information and choices that I wrote about last week with the II of Swords.  In the card, we see a person confronted with a dream cloud laden with possibilities.  The person in the card is startled, delighted and overwhelmed with the challenge of figuring out which of these possibilities can be reached there above and then brought down to earth to be manifested below.  How to make these tough decisions, what should we base them on, what do we really want anyway!?  The VII of Cups shows up to remind us to examine our dreams, reevaluate our life goals, and chose what to focus on. Obviously, I'm having some issues with this lately, given the preponderance of the II of Swords and the VII of Cups in my personal readings.  It can be wonderful to have so much going on in my life, but also a bit stressful for this over-organizer to keep everything in line!

So what advice does the VII of Cups have to offer and how can a person who draws this card in a reading access that advice?  I'm a big fan of meditating with an image.  In the Rider Waite Smith deck image above we could put ourselves in the shoes of the person staring up at the cloud of possibilities and outcomes. Meditate or journal about what is in each of these cups.  What option or path might that cup hold?  Is that path in line with an overall life goal?  When time tries to squeeze close and limit possibilities, how can we learn to focus just on the things that carry us in our desired direction and let go of other fun or neat options, or even destruction pursuits we crave, that don't aid us along?

The Shadowscapes tarot image here shows a couple preparing to make their dreams reality.  The woman points to a distant tree island, while the man examines some plans on a scroll, looking intently down.  This image reminds me an awful lot of myself, the planning mastermind, and my girlfriend, the builder of incredible castles in the sky. Will either of us manage to manifest our dream of living and touring around the country in our van utilizing just one of these tactics?  I believe it might benefit us greatly to help each other to dream big and create pie in the sky fantasies, while simultaneously carving out and writing down a concrete plan of action.  If we don't let ourselves create and spin fantasies, how will we know what we even desire?  And if we don't try to manifest those dreams, how will we know what we are capable of creating for ourselves?