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.

Read Chapter 1       Previous Chapter       Next Chapter

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.

Copyright © 2011-2012 by Vicky Lynn Macchione.
All Rights Reserved.
No reproduction of this text is allowed without the written permission of the author.

Chapter 20: Dreams Asleep, Dreams Awake (Part 1)

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.

Read Chapter 1       Previous Chapter       Next Chapter

Chapter 20: Dreams Asleep, Dreams Awake (Part 1)

Winter lasted forever in Vincent's country. The days of snowflakes, frigid winds, icy air, and even more icy streets stretched on endlessly as each February day lingered seemingly longer than the one before. This morning Elizabeth had awakened with a start, breathing hard with her heart pounding in her chest. She had been living an intricate and intense dream about a squirrel with a machine gun who was helping her to escape from some criminal element that was chasing her. “Now that's one to write down and try to analyze!” she exclaimed as she rose to face yet another winter day.

Elizabeth decided to write her dream as part of her morning pages. Writing dreams enabled her to finish her pages quickly, allowed her to think about the dream and its interpretation, and ensured that she could return to the dream at a later date. She turned her computer on and began the process.

As she typed through the dream, her mind wandered from the dream. She started thinking about the other day when she had understood more clearly the illusory nature of her thoughts and actions and that daily reality was not reality with a capital R. She thought about how she had lived days in her life that unfolded as if she were dreaming. She considered how sleeping dreams could instigate emotions and their physical reactions, all while the dreamer lay safe and secure in bed. She pondered an idea she had heard or read about before that equated nighttime dreaming with daytime living as both illusions of a reality that didn't exist. While Elizabeth could understand the parallel, she wondered how that understanding could help her live life or transform the “pieces of magic” syndrome she experienced into a life flowing with magic.

As she continued her typing, her thoughts wandered to dream interpretation. When she wanted to get a sense of what her nighttime dreams were trying to communicate, she used several dream dictionaries. She would look at the meanings of the symbols in her dream and try to connect the individual meanings into some sort of coherent message from her subconscious. Although she did her best, she wasn't always successful in figuring out the dream's meaning and messages.

Elizabeth had always wanted to belong to a group that would meet weekly to discuss their dreams. Her friend who had belonged to such a group had sent Elizabeth the information about how to begin and participate in a dream group. But Elizabeth wasn't sure if she knew enough people who would be interested or had enough time to attend. Her friend, though, had been going to her dream group for several years and had often talked about how much the group had helped her interpret and integrate her dream meanings into her life.

What Elizabeth had noticed most about her friend, though, was her ability and facility to use dream interpretation in conjunction with events and experiences in her waking life. To Elizabeth, that skill would be most helpful as she attempted to use Stacy's mirror process daily. Elizabeth realized that she could start to incorporate dream interpretation of her “waking” dreams by writing down the experiences or events whose significance puzzled her or brought a “knee-jerk” emotional response. Then, she could look up the pieces or symbols in the dream dictionaries and possibly discover the meaning the situation was revealing to her.

Although Elizabeth's friend had mentioned another women who used this technique regularly, Elizabeth had never tried it herself. She would usually stew over the meaning of a relationship encounter or other experience, focusing only on her emotions and her thoughts. This strategy might be just the tool she needed to embrace the mirror process in a productive way. 

Thinking about waking and sleeping dreams spurred Elizabeth's curiosity. She took a few moments to examine synonyms for the word “dream.” One synonym she found and that she knew many people often used was the word “goal.” In Elizabeth's mind, a goal was not the same as having a dream for one's life. “Does calling a goal a dream bring some sort of magic to the idea?” she wondered. “Why do I think a goal is a challenge that requires planning and work but a dream is something magical, amazing, and somehow effortless to achieve?” she wondered. Certainly dreams require effort! Think of all the athletes who had a dream to achieve a gold medal or to be the best in their sport. They had to put an enormous amount of effort into achieving their dream.

Elizabeth wondered why she had the idea that dreams could be achieved easily. “Do I think that dreaming is the same whether I'm asleep or awake?” she queried herself. In sleeping dreams, people can do and achieve almost anything. Vincent nearly always had dreams about being able to fly. (Elizabeth had flown only once in her dreams and even then she was just a few feet off the ground.) But despite what the dreamer is doing, there doesn't seem to be a lot of effort required when you realize the dreamer is laying in bed and the mind is creating the whole scenario. In waking life, the mind may be the instigator and creator of an idea or dream, but the body is essential for bringing what the thoughts have conceived into being. Action is required to create and fulfill dreams in “real life.” Elizabeth noticed, though, there was a kind of magic in this process. She saw that conceiving of something in her mind and then being able to make that picture tangible in her life is the stuff of which magic shows were made. (“Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat,” she thought, smiling.)

Elizabeth had used this magic when she wrote papers while studying for her Master's degree. The professor would assign a 30-page paper that would be due in several weeks. Elizabeth would pick her subject and then let her thoughts run wild while going through her daily life. She believed that her chosen subject was percolating on the back burner of her mind. Before she began writing, she would create a brief outline. As she sat down in front of the computer and started typing, she would envision her completed paper and see herself handing it to the professor. Any time she would struggle or get stuck as she was writing, she would close her eyes and daydream again the vision she had created. This process had never failed her. Remembering it made clear why the word “vision” was also among the synonyms for the word dream. 

Another synonym Elizabeth had discovered was the word “purpose.” Purpose was something that Elizabeth felt had eluded her throughout her life and especially for the last eleven years. Even though Elizabeth had achieved goals during that time, she had never felt that she knew why she was walking the Earth and what she was here to accomplish. The uncertainty and confusion she had about her life purpose had pushed her to begin Stacy's monthly astrology course. In fact, the discomfort of those feelings had pushed her to try various teachings and programs to find her purpose throughout those eleven years. Elizabeth thought about how often she had believed that other people had more wisdom and a better plan about how she could find her one, true purpose. Elizabeth sighed. Most of the time she wandered through her life as if it were a dream—a confusing and mixed-up sleeping dream.

Come back Thursday to read Part 2 of “Dreams Asleep, Dreams Awake.”

Copyright © 2011-2012 by Vicky Lynn Macchione.
All Rights Reserved.
No reproduction of this text is allowed without the written permission of the author.