The great spiritual teacher Paramahansa Yogananda says that the purpose of our dreams at night is to awaken us to the dreamlike nature of the universe. Yogananda doesn’t mean that life is “just” a dream in that sense that it is a meaningless illusion. Rather, he is pointing to that this waking dream universe of ours is of a similar structure to a dream in certain revealing ways. It is profoundly important for us to understand that we live in, by its very nature, a dreamupable universe. This literally involves an expansion of consciousness, in which we realize the role our consciousness itself is playing in the conjuring up of this very universe. We are like magicians who have become entranced by our own creation.
Our night dreams have been symbolically re-presenting to us that the nature of our waking experience is the stuff of which dreams are made. In night dreams we find ourselves in dreamscapes that seem totally real, objectively existing, separate from us. We have the convincing subjective hallucination that we are actually awake while indeed we are merely dreaming.
If we simply inquire into the nature of our present moment situation deeply enough, we discover the dreamlike nature of reality. In a night dream, if we change how we view the dream, the meaning pattern we superimpose onto the dream (which being nothing other than a projection of the mind is of the nature of an inkblot, merely reflecting back our own interpretation), the dream has no choice but to spontaneously shape-shift in no time at all, faster than the speed of light, for the dream is clearly not separate from the mind that is observing it.
Quantum physics has discovered the same process is at work in this waking dream of ours, it is called the observer effect (the act of observation actually evokes the universe that is observed). Our perception is inextricably linked to our experience of the universe, it is part of the equation that is never not there. Our perception of the universe is a key part of the universe that is happening through us. To quote noted physicist John Wheeler, "Useful as it is under everyday circumstances to say that the world exists "out there," independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld. There is a strange sense in which this is a participatory universe."
This waking dream we are living in, being of a more dense vibration than a night dream, is more solidified, crystalized into materialized form, and is hence, “slower” in the way it is a function of our creative imagination. But our creative imagination is truly divine, in that it literally effects the suprasensory blueprint that underlies this seemingly mundane world of ours. Due to the seeming solidity of this waking dream, the effects of the creative imagination on how this waking universe of ours actually gets dreamed up are visible only with much more subtle, refined and rarefied vision. To quote Jung, "I am indeed convinced that creative imagination is the only primordial phenomenon accessible to us, the real Ground of the psyche, the only immediate reality."
The fact that we can't separate out our perception of the universe from the actual universe itself points to that it is through which lens, or axiomatic set we view our moment by moment experience that actually has a reality-creating effect, so to speak, and that shapes and gives form to whatever universe we find ourselves in. To quote Gary Zukav, author of The Dancing Wu Li Masters, "A powerful awareness lies dormant in these discoveries, an awareness of the hitherto-unsuspected powers of the mind to "mold" reality rather than the other way around."
Our dreams themselves are revealing to us the fluid, malleable dream-like nature of our waking situation. Being like a dream, once we stop superimposing our concretized mental constructs upon the canvas of reality and start allowing it to manifest as it truly is, it will reveal its dreamlike nature. To quote Michael Talbot, author of The Holographic Universe, "One implication (of the new discoveries in physics) is that objective reality is more like a dream than we have previously suspected." Or, I might add, then we previously "imagined." Imagine that!
A healer, Paul Levy is a spiritual and political activist. He is in private practice, helping other people who are also spiritually awakening to the dream-like nature of reality. He can be reached at paul@awakeninthedream.com. Please feel free to pass this article along to a friend if you feel so inspired.
© 2004 Paul Levy