Dreaming

You are a dream.

You are a dream of eternal consciousness in the waking state. You are a dream of varied and infinite realities in the sleeping state. You are the dream of death in the deep sleep state, and you are awake in the supraconscious state. Dreaming is reality.

All of life is a dream. There are no unimportant dreams. Dreaming is the borderline between life and death. It is the most sophisticated of all spiritual arts. Dreaming is existence. This world, this earth, the people upon it, the ages that have past, the stars, the moon, the experiences that each one of us has, our loves, friendships, hopes, dreams, ambitions, frustrations, from the moment of our birth to the moment of our death, that which we call the experience - our experience in this world is but a dream or a succession of dreams.

Normally when we use the word dream, we think of something that's insubstantial. Dreaming is something that happens at night. It's the dark side of the moon. When we dream we have experiences that don't seem to relate to the world we're in. Sometimes we may dream of a person or a friend, we may find ourselves in unusual circumstances or usual circumstances. Sometimes it would appear that the subconscious mind brings us a message in our dreams, tells us something about ourselves or others or the nature of reality.

Most people tend to forget their dreams. You might remember a dream that was very frightening or very beautiful, perhaps a very zany dream where you went through many different experiences which were very disconnected. Some dreams bring us into the waking consciousness. The final dream that we have at night, before we wake up, is the easiest to remember.

Sometimes in a dream we will be ourselves. The person you are now will have a dream odyssey, an adventure. You won't be aware that you're dreaming. During the dream you'll feel that you are wide awake, that you are having a solid experience. And if you're Susan, Susan will be in the dream as the central character or as an observing character.

Sometimes we will dream another self. In the dream we will be another person. We'll have another identity, another name, another set of ideas, different conditioning. Sometimes we won't be present in the dream at all. It's as if we're watching a movie and the only presence, or consciousness, is that of the observer, the witness. We're watching the dream move back and forth, the characters, the players speaking, talking, acting.

Dreams bring us our fantasies. Things that could never happen in this world that we might want to happen, happen in our dreams. The person we loved who went with someone else can come to us in a dream and be ours for a time. Our worst nightmares, of course, come true in dreaming. All the things we fear can come to us and terrify us.

Most people don't regard their dreams very deeply. Dreaming seems to be an offbeat experience in our human cycle of existence. We don't question the fact that we have to sleep or that we have to breathe, that we have life. We don't question the fact that we need to dream. Science tells us that it's healthy to dream. If we deprive a person of dreams, if we keep waking them up every time they start to dream and then let them fall back asleep - if a person doesn't dream enough, they begin to exhibit abnormal behavior when they are awake. It seems that dreaming is a very healthy experience. It purges us. It allows us to process, or cycle through, many different emotions and experiences, radical feelings and tendencies, which would perhaps enter into the world of the waking experience otherwise, and which might not be socially acceptable. So in dreaming we can do what we want to. We can break all the rules and not hurt anyone, including ourselves, and then we can enter into the rational orthodox world after awakening.