you are all of what you dream
Vic Shayne
author
The Self is a Belief: the idea that causes suffering
Dreaming must be one of the most repeated themes in all of writing and poetry. We dream. We dream and yet our western culture does not provide for an intelligent, thorough discussion about dreaming and what we can glean from the nightly experience that is so much a part of our lives. Dreams are mostly relegated to a footnote in our daily mentations, but it is my experience that they can wake us up to what’s really going on, a way that we are experiencing life without realizing what we’re doing.
Most people ignore their dreams. They have an entire inner life while sleeping and yet they ignore it completely, never trying to figure out what’s going on. It’s like receiving emails and letters from yourself and never looking at them. Dreams are telling us something, but more fascinating than the dream content are the mechanics involved. Dreams are illusions within illusions and not that much different from our waking lives.
If you have ever had lucid dreams then something strange happens in the way you regard them. While in the middle of a lucid dream you become aware that you are dreaming. But what happened to me some time ago brought me to a new level of realization. I not only realized I was dreaming while I was in the midst of dreaming, but I also fully realized that I was creating all the other characters, the scenario, the setting, an image of my self, and the plot. I was the totality of my dream, playing all the parts. All of this became apparent to me while I was still within the dream.
When I woke up from this lucid dream I fully realized that the same thing is going on in my waking life: I am everyone and everything I see, as the creator and destroyer of my world, a world of my own making. When I use the word “me” and “I” here, I am not speaking of a personal me, which is the egoic self associated with a certain body and personage, but rather the me of total consciousness. As consciousness I am the creator and destroyer, the doer and the seer. I am the totality of all that is. And you are too.
With this realization I my mind was at first completely stunned. Nothing looked the same anymore; everything I looked at in my bedroom, as well as my wife and my dog and the furnishings, were clearly a reflection of my own beingness, my own essence.
getting back to the dream experience…
I have to wonder if much, perhaps most, of what has been written about dreams is not from the dreamer’s personal insight or awakening. If you search on google for dreams you will find many professors and other academics writing about the history of dreams, dream metaphors, and the mental and emotional processing of information. And you will find many New Age cultists and psychics discussing dream symbols. But these reviews and articles are missing the entire wonder of the dream experience. They are looking only at the phenomenon and its meaning but not the profundity of what the dream is.Dreams are no more, or less, metaphors and analogies than are our waking lives.
And this leads us to investigate what the mind is.
Science has brought us some wonderful inventions and has resolved our most pressing problems, but it is way off the mark in its conclusions about what our person experiences really are. Scientists attribute dreams and consciousness to the brain and its neurological transmissions. This is only a small part of the story, however. The brain may help us mull over an experience, but to say that it creates an experience is still a guess based upon effects and not causes.
To find a correlation between a thought and a brain impulse does not show cause. By analogy, if we stick a plug in an electrical outlet and turn on a lamp it would be a false conclusion to say that electrical sockets are the originators of electricity — even when in every experiment, without fail, the light in the lamp goes on. The experiment tells us nothing at all about the origination of the electricity, where it comes from, how it gets into the electrical outlet, or how it is generated.
Just because a brain can interpret signals and senses does not mean that the brain is the originator. This is quite apparent if you have had a series of out-of-body experiences. It’s not worth debating anyone who has not had such experiences. Theory and secondhand knowledge are not the same as experience.
The idea of “waking up” is a curious one; it is foreign to the way most of us are inculcated into the western world of theories, science, religious dogma, and materialism. When the awareness is completely outside of the reality that we are taught is the only real reality, then there is no mistaking the experience of existence external to the physical body.
I am not saying that dreams are real events equivalent to the events we experience in our waking lives. I am saying, however, that both the dream world and the waking world are real to the mind while they are occurring and being sensed, even if the senses are not of an embodied, brain-related nature.
What I have written here may be curious to you, or maybe you find it ludicrous. No matter. It is best to neither reject or accept what I have written, because only through your own realization can you know something for certain rather than using an unexperienced mind or secondhand information as your point of reference and judgment.
