Waking Dream

Waking Dream

Night time dreams usually seem to be reality while they are going on – until the moment that waking consciousness dawns and dissipates them. But sometimes a person may have the experience of realizing he is dreaming.

Then the dream loses its grip – whatever threats of evil or promises of good fortune it is offering are seen to be illusory. The dreamer feels liberated, above the grasp of the dreamy chain of circumstance and consequence – he can walk away from it, laugh at it, be at peace and unmolested.

The real world also has dream-like qualities. Individuals and societies swirl through their collective dreams, their story-lines of who they are and what "it" is all about. Everyone seems trapped in a chain of circumstance and consequence from which there is no escape, no possible extrication.


Or is there? The Buddha, or awakened one, continues to abide in this world, but is no longer a dreamer in it. He is no longer a believer in the story, no longer possessed by the grip of phantom obligations and compulsions.

Surely this what Jesus spoke of in being "in the world but not of the world."


The spirit of awakening produces a yearning to let go of the dream, to release the filmy fabric of illusion and let it fall away into the fairy dust of inconsequence. It produces a yearning to rise and float higher toward the true light, the substantial unseen reality from which the insubstantial yet apparent world derives its life force.

To stop being a mere bit player, and unconscious actor in a confused and chaotic drama . . . and to instead become director of an orderly and gorgeous spectacle of unfolding truth.