In today’s concluding post about a young man falling on a
bus and hitting his head (He’s OK.), I want to explore further the idea that
the dream experience doesn’t stop when we’re awake.
The structure of
life
What do waking dreams imply about life? We make many assumptions: While we’re asleep, our
imaginations, fueled by our subconscious minds, invent bizarre stories. Many of
them make little sense and come to us in wild, fantastical scenes, like YouTube
clips gone mad. Obviously, somewhere in the deep recesses of our minds, we created
these things.
Then, while we’re awake, we deal with real life. It goes along in
its mundane, sometimes frantic way. There are hassles, but they are manageable.
Then, every once in a while, a real zinger comes along that throws us off
balance. We find ourselves struggling simply to hold ourselves and our families
together; we are overwhelmed. And the trouble is that these events—crises of
health, finances, interpersonal conflicts, accidents—are randomly perpetrated
on us by the mercurial nature of life. We have no control over them, and we are
caught in the middle of them as victims.
Not so
Not so! Not so!! Not so!!!! This is a myth, one that is so
ingrained in the human consciousness that we take it totally for granted. Until
we are willing to step back from these preconceptions of how life works, we are
stuck in this illusion, constantly allowing ourselves to be persecuted by it.
The fact is, we have a great deal of control over these unhappy
events. Why? Because we made them up in the first place.
They are dreams—waking dreams—and they are the product of our own subconscious minds.
They come to us not in order to make difficult lives even more intolerable, but
to teach. They come to highlight internal conflicts that we are struggling
with. Often, they do this by simply describing the conflict back to us. But in
doing so, if we are aware enough to pay attention, we see our dilemmas held up
in front of us. Even from that small distance, they are often clearer and
easier to grapple with and find a solution to.
These waking dreams do not come to us to torture; they come
to assist. Once they have done their job—helping us to understand a conflict—they
go away. The trick is to start looking at life with this in mind. These events
tend to begin gently—the equivalent of a wake-up slap. If they are ignored and
the issue is important, they return, this time more like a punch in the nose.
And if they are still disregarded, they become ruthless, expressing themselves
through major issues, like chronic or terminal illnesses, financial ruin and
other catastrophic events; they try to force our awakening; that's how they work.
For many, the above represents a radically different way of
looking at life, but one that brings long-lasting, peace-inducing benefits.
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