Blue Heron Visions: Chapter 20: Dreams Asleep, Dreams Awake (Part 2)

This manuscript is both a memoir of sorts and a work of fiction. The stories and events included are based on my life experiences and memories but I have changed names, details, event sequences, and outcomes throughout the work.

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Chapter 20: Dreams Asleep, Dreams Awake (Part 2)

Elizabeth believed that illusion was what both waking and sleeping dreams had in common. Thinking back to her art analogy about the canvas and the actual painting floating above, she could see how whether waking or sleeping, dreams were like the paintings—all were illusions when looked at from the eternal perspective of the Universe.

When in a contemplative state, Elizabeth could see everyone's thoughts and actions as layers upon layers of illusions added onto the background of All That Is—that Being-ness containing everything and everyone. A perfect example was when she went to see a movie or watched television. She would watch images on a screen (another allusion to All That Is) that recounted a story that was simply a projected illusion. And the people portraying the cast in the illusions were themselves people, whose lives like hers, were thought paintings that never adhered or altered the canvas of All That Is, but merely floated above or lay on it as if on a plastic film. Both the stories on film (the movie) and the floating paintings (“real life”) had the same fragile and illusive quality as dreaming. Most human beings, though, would argue that only the film stories were dream-like. They believed that their lives—full of emotions, thoughts, physical manifestations, and spiritual awareness—represented reality (the capital R reality), the only tangible reality there was. “Without our life stories,” Elizabeth wondered, “who would we be?” A question she was sure many people had considered.

Elizabeth recalled a period of time where she had entertained the idea that God/Source/the Universe was dreaming everything that existed. She had struggled with the idea because of the way she felt about people and places in her own sleeping dreams. When she awoke from a dream, she did not concern herself with her dream images. They were simply figments of her thoughts and imagination. If she had dreamed about someone she knew, she might think about or call the person when she awoke. But there was always a part of her that would say, “It was just a dream. They are fine. What happened was only in your mind not in the real world.” When Elizabeth extended this idea to God-dreaming-the-world, she realized that when God awoke, all the world would cease to exist, just as her dream world ceased to exist when she awoke each morning. Elizabeth attempted to understand how her life would make sense or have purpose if God were dreaming her and imagining the events that occurred. Even trying to put words to the idea was a challenge for her.

Elizabeth had also considered the idea that God was dreaming the world to experience every possible emotion and situation that could or would ever exist. She struggled with this scenario because God became arbitrary, having little or no concern about the dream characters as individuals, but only interested in his/her own desires. Elizabeth could not conceive of a God so absorbed with experiences that he/she had no attachment to the fact that his/her need was creating painful and unthinkable situations for the characters being dreamed.

The God-dreaming-the-world scenario made Elizabeth feel fearful. She could see that her only importance and worth in the dream were her experiences. She herself had no real identity or substance since in the dreamer's (God's) waking reality, she did not exist. The irony was that God-dreaming-the-world demonstrated clearly that everyone and everything was part of a dream, an illusion by definition! Eventually, Elizabeth had abandoned the idea because God having a lack which would result in a desire was contradictory to the concept and definition of God being All That Is.

The main difference between understanding that All That Is exists as the essence of Life and God-dreaming-the-world was the value and worth of everyone and everything. In the first scenario, Love is the only truth and the one rule of existence. This immeasurable Love becomes the sea in which individual droplets of All That Is imagined Itself, created Itself, and lived Itself as Life. Each droplet is important and valuable to the oneness and wholeness of All That Is. In the second scenario, love is simply another experience, a partial fulfilling of the desire to know and experience all. Only experiences are worthwhile: The dream characters have no value to the dreamer other than how they can be used and manipulated to provide the needed experiences. Everyone and everything become tokens or pawns to be maneuvered and arranged for the dreamer's pleasure in the dream of Life. The idea of manipulation and using everyone and everything to fulfill what seemed to be a selfish desire was one that did not fit with Elizabeth's concept of God/Source/the Universe/All That Is.

Elizabeth relaxed her mind and let her thoughts wander. Thinking about God-dreaming-the-world reminded her of when her father used to tell her that she needed to come out of her dream world. She was a teenager at the time, and although she couldn't remember what triggered that comment, she knew she had heard it repeatedly. Perhaps the dream world about which her father was speaking had to do with Elizabeth's teen-aged idealism, her particular belief system about the world, or her daydreams about life. She hated that her father had admonished her that way during the time of life when one is supposed to be dreaming about the future and what possibilities lay ahead. She realized that her father most likely had the best of intentions in his warning. He may have been trying to get her to look at life more realistically and not through the lens of youthful ideals. But Elizabeth embraced the idea of looking at life realistically soon enough and spent most of her adult life doing just that. She would often add the term when she was disparaging herself or denigrating her lack of discipline: “I am just looking at life, at myself, realistically.”

Nowadays, Elizabeth wished that she could embrace and incorporate the excitement and adventure of her teen-aged dream world into her current life. That fresh perspective of new ideas, abundant possibilities, and an open-armed acceptance of life's offerings would invite magic into her daily life. How could she make that happen? What part did her sleeping dreams and waking dreams play in the unfolding of her life and her desire to see the flow of magic? If she spent time interpreting her daily life as a dream, could that make a difference?

Elizabeth looked at the clock and realized that she had spent over an hour lost in her thoughts about dreams. It was time to enter the dream of today and see what she could discover and learn about magic's flow in her imagined world.