You are the dreamer of dreams

The you that is beyond form, is eternal and alive in a formless world.

A brazen statement, perhaps, but would you be convinced of that if you could leave your body, exist in a formless world, and then reenter your body and exist in the state that we call form? I suggest that you do exactly that every single night, and that you spend approximately a third of your entire time here on this planet doing precisely that. We call it dreaming, and much can be learned about ourselves as part of pure thought by seeing what happens when we leave our bodies and enter the world of dreaming.

Every time we go to sleep and begin dreaming, I believe we actually leave our body, and enter a new dreaming body. We convince ourselves that our dreaming body is real while we are dreaming; otherwise we would not be able to have the dream. Where would it take place?

Let's take a look at the rules that apply while we are dreaming, and see how different they are from the rules that apply while we are in waking consciousness.

First of all, in dreams, time does not exist. We can go backward and forward at will. We can be with someone who died many years ago and that person will seem very real. We can be a teenager again, and that too seems quite real while we are in the dreaming body. We can live an entire lifetime in a fourteen-minute dream sequence and it is all real to our dreaming body.

Secondly, there is no cause and effect while dreaming. We can at one moment be talking to someone we know very well, and in the next moment be on a bus talking to a stranger. We can engage in an activity that produces the opposite result from that which would occur in waking life.

Thirdly, dreams can be without beginnings or endings. We can shift in the middle of a sequence to another place, and then come right back again, years younger than we were a moment ago.

Fourthly, in the dream every single obstacle turns into some kind of opportunity. If in the dream we are driving along a road that suddenly ends at a cliff, we can turn that into an opportunity to fly over the terrain rather than crash into an abyss. In a chase scene we somehow develop the amazing ability to catch bullets in midair.

Fifthly, we create everything that we need for our dream. This is very important to my hypothesis. If we need a person to yell and scream in the dream we create that person as well as an episode of screaming. Everyone and everything that we need for the dream, we create. If we don't, who does?

Sixthly, our reactions within the dream are manifested in our physical body, but the things that create the reactions are all illusions or thoughts. For instance, if you create someone threatening you with a knife, your heart will start beating faster, and that is real. But the knife and the person wielding it are illusions.

And lastly, the only way we know we are dreaming is to awaken. If we dreamed twenty-four hours a day, that would be our reality.

We are convinced that the body is real, yet everything that we experience in the dream is entirely in the realm of thought. There is no physical reality, it is an illusion, we realize when we awaken. We spend approximately a third of our lives sleeping, and a large percentage of our sleep time in dream activity that is pure formless thought which seems very real before we awaken. In fact, we are capable of some pretty fantastic feats while in our dreaming body. We can fly, transcend time, create anything we choose; and male dreamers can even create the entire dance of life in this state of pure thought. What is a nocturnal emission or a wet dream but the ejaculation of the protoplasm of life? Pure thought creating the opportunity for the dance of life. No physical contact. Pure thought creating life. Quite an amazing process in this fabulously mysterious world of pure formlessness, of thought.

I am not addressing here the interpretation of the content of dreams. I am writing about the process of dreaming in order to encourage you to become a waking dreamer. That is, to help you understand that the rules that seem to apply only to your dreaming body can become applicable to your waking body as well. This lesson was advanced by Thoreau, who put it this way: "Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake."

For purposes of comparison, think of three levels of consciousness. The level at the bottom we will call our dreaming consciousness; the next level up we will call our waking consciousness; and the third level we will call a higher level of consciousness. Now let's see what these various levels are like, and what they mean in our lives. I will use a personal example.

As a youngster I would often dream of shoveling snow, and sometimes I would mumble out loud about my shovel and wake up one of my brothers. He discovered that if he disguised himself as part of my dream, by speaking gently he could get me to hand him my dream shovel, which of course he thought very funny, and he would wake me up with his laughter. But as long as he masqueraded as part of my dream, I would cooperate from my dreaming level with him in his waking level. This I believe illustrates our ability to communicate between our dreaming and waking consciousness.

What if someone from a dimension higher than waking consciousness wanted to walk and talk with us? That person would also have to be disguised, and pretend to be one of us, though he or she would know that there was a much greater consciousness beyond the waking consciousness level. If that being was charismatic and convincing, many might listen and achieve a sense of the potential of the higher consciousness beyond waking consciousness. Such is, I believe, the process of highly spiritual masters who have come here to teach us about the dimensions that are there for us in the world beyond our form. What would be a good disguise? How about that of a carpenter who gives us an inkling of what is available for us, and who tells us while performing miracle after miracle, "He that believeth in me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do"? How about a teacher, or a writer, or a gas station attendant? Yes, there are miracle workers out there who can lead us to the edge of our waking consciousness, to glimpse something more. The great spiritual masters who have lived among us and who continue to do so have transcended the rules of form that we believe are the only set of rules.

While we are in our dreaming bodies experiencing the part of our lives we spend in this world of pure thought, we can have transcendent experiences when we choose. We do not need any of our senses in this formless state. We need not touch or feel or smell anything using our senses to know that it is real. Thought is real.

By becoming a waking dreamer, you will enter that higher level of consciousness beyond waking consciousness, the level that spiritual masters have let us glimpse through their teaching and their examples as human beings. But to do so you must challenge your reality-thinking belief system.

To become a waking dreamer you must learn to "die while you are alive." Let's start by looking briefly at the process of dying. It is my belief that (1) we cannot kill thought, and (2) all form is in transition. It follows then that death will be very much like the dream consciousness I described above. We, our thoughts, leave our body when we enter our dream, and then we (the thoughts we are) reenter the body for waking consciousness. Similarly, when we die our thoughts leave the body and can look back at this dream we are living now which we call waking consciousness, with the same kind of vision that we look back at our dreams. This is a powerful idea. It could free us from fearing death if we learn to internalize it. The reason we have difficulty accepting that this waking consciousness is a dream is that everything seems just too real. But go back to our dream consciousness. The same rationale applies here. While we are in the dreaming body we are convinced that it is real, but it is real only for the dream and becomes an illusion when we awaken. Everything that we experience in our waking consciousness is also real to us.

To die while we are alive gives us the only opportunity we will ever have to get outside of this package that houses us temporarily. An ancient parable repeated generation after generation by the spiritual masters of India illustrates this point:

A traveler from India went to Africa to acquire some local products and animals, and while in the jungle he saw thousands of beautiful multi-colored talking parrots. He decided to capture a talking parrot and take it back as a pet.

At home he kept his parrot in a cage and fed him wonderful seeds and honey, played music for his pet, and generally treated him well. When it was time for the man to return to Africa two years later, he asked his parrot if there was any message he could deliver to the parrot's friends back in the jungle. The parrot told his master to say that he was very happy in his cage and that he was enjoying each day and to convey his love.

When the traveler arrived back in Africa he delivered the message to the parrots in the jungle. Just as he finished his story, a parrot with tears welling up in his eyes fell over dead. The man was alarmed and decided that the parrot must have been very close to the parrot in the cage and that was the reason for his sadness and demise.

When the traveler returned to India, he told his pet what had happened. As he finished his story, the pet parrot's eyes welled up with tears and he keeled over dead in his cage. The man was astounded, but figured that his pet died from the despair of hearing of the death of his close friend back in the jungle.

The trader opened up the cage and tossed the dead bird outside onto the trash heap.

Immediately his pet parrot flew up to a branch on the tree outside.

The trader said to him, "So, you are not dead after all. Why did you do that?"

The parrot answered, "Because that bird back in Africa sent me a very important message."

"What was the message?" the trader inquired impatiently.

"He told me that if you want to escape from your cage, you must die while you are alive."

We must indeed die while we are alive in order to be able to look back at our waking consciousness and see ourselves trapped in our cage, which in our case is our body. And then we will see how unnecessary it is to remain caged.

Let's take a closer look at those seven rules that apply to our dreaming body and see how much more enchanting our waking consciousness will become if we learn to die while we are alive—to become an awake dreamer.

1. Time does not exist.
Einstein's life study was devoted to the simple message that we exist in a completed universe. If time does not exist, except as a convenience for man, then eight hours and eighty years are the same thing. A dream of eight hours and a dream of eighty years are identical, and the only way we know we are dreaming is to wake up. In a dream, we can be a tiny baby or a toddler or an adolescent. We can get married, have children, pursue a career, go bankrupt, have grandchildren, move to a retirement community, and become old—all in a period of minutes. In the dream it is very real and we are able to reduce it all into a tiny segment of what we call time.

While we are awake, in the waking-consciousness level, it is possible also to recognize that time is an illusion and redefine ourselves to include our formless and ageless natures.

2. There is no cause and effect.
In the dreaming body we come and go freely without being restricted to the laws of cause and effect. In thought we are exactly the same. We can have a thought that is totally unrelated to the previous thought within a greater thought process. We can have a dream within a dream within a dream. In waking consciousness too we can choose to recognize that we need not be confined to the rules that determine form. The physical law of gravity does not apply in thought. In fact, just beyond our atmosphere even our form is not confined to gravitational restrictions. A waking dreamer can dream any thought without reference to the previous thought. We can flit from one thought to another and use only those thoughts which are useful. In waking consciousness we can understand that we are capable of shifting gears anytime in our life. If you trained yourself to be a physician and it no longer applies in your life, you simply choose new thoughts and begin to apply the concepts of making your visualizations your waking-consciousness reality.

3. There is no beginning and no end.
In our dreaming body we do not disappear or terminate, because it is only in form that there are beginnings and endings. We never die in our dream in the sense that we simply discontinue being. Nor do we in waking consciousness, and we must understand this if we are going to get over our fear of death. We cannot kill thought, and we prove this over and over every night. Your dead grandmother can be right there in your dream, at age fifty-three and eighty-three, unrestricted to the rules of form. When we go into our dreaming body we do not have to have a beginning for each dream sequence, we are simply there, pure and simple; there is no need to start out.

We can be right here now in waking consciousness as well, disregarding beginnings and endings, imagining forever instead. Within the concept of eternity, the notion of a beginning and an ending is an absurdity. Try imagining where the universe starts and ends, and you will see how foolish all of that is. Try imagining a thought having a beginning and end and you know that thought does not conform to such rules. The universe, and everything in it, including mankind, is thought, and the waking dreamer strives to comprehend rather than being preoccupied with where it ends and how it begins. Truly enlightened souls knew that they cannot die. They know that death is just a transition of form, and that the astral thought dimension experiences no such phenomenon as an ending or a beginning.

4. Obstacles are opportunities.
Our dreaming body knows how to turn obstacles into opportunities, and when dreaming we all do this all the time. We are frequently transcending difficulties and shifting to new realities within our dreaming body. This is one of the lessons to learn about our awake state as well. Everything that we encounter in life has something to teach us. Every sickness has within it the seeds for overcoming the illness. Every relationship, regardless of how noxious it may appear, has something to teach us. Every addiction has within it the power to overcome it, and every former addict I have worked with always says the same thing: "I bless my addiction for what it taught me about myself and my own ability to transcend the trap that I created for myself." The waking dreamer knows while it is happening that there is a blessing disguised in every problem he confronts, and gets better and better at seeing that blessing in the moment.

We can develop this waking-dreamer attitude by discontinuing our need to curse problems and instead pausing to see what we are about to gain from them. We must keep uppermost in our waking consciousness that everything that we fight or curse will only weaken us and hinder our ability to see the opportunity in the obstacle. We know all of this in our dreaming body. In fact, while in our dreaming body we may rage at someone and wake up still angry and tense. The lesson here is important. The anger is real and we experience it both in our dreaming and in our waking body, but the people or things that we were angry at are all illusions. What a great lesson to have. All of our anger will be experienced by us, but the source of that anger is not real at all, it is in a character that we created for the purpose of our dream.

5. You create everything that you need for the dream.
In our dreaming body we create everything that happens. We create all of the people, the events, everybody's reactions, the time frame, everything. We also create everything that we need for our waking consciousness. Let it sink in for a moment! That is one of the lessons that spiritual masters have been trying to teach us since the beginning of recorded history. Take responsibility for it all! Imagine yourself dying and looking back at this level of consciousness from that dimension of formlessness so similar to dream consciousness. As you transcend your cage, your body, you will see that you created everything you needed for the dream that we measure in years, rather than hours, but that is exactly the same if we understand that time does not exist.

Now try to recapture that notion while you are here in this body. Keep reminding yourself that you are a multidimensional being. From this perspective of being in the dimension of pure thought, creating all of your experiences, it will not seem like such an absurd notion. Look at everything in your life from the perspective of knowing that it is impossible to retain form when you transcend it, just as you cannot hold on to, the things and people that you create for your dream when you awaken.

A bit weird? Yes! A bit scary? Yes! But imagine what a powerful and transcendent idea this could be in your life. You begin to stand away from your form, and view everything that you have and do not have, all of your possessions and all of your relationships, all of your business enterprises, all of it, as something that you have created for this dream. Now you can learn to have your creations work to make this the best dream anyone ever had, or you can become upset, immobilized, depressed, worried, and over-stressed by things you have created for this dream. All over illusions! So why not begin to take responsibility for it all, and enjoy your eighty-plus-year dream?

6. The reactions are real, the characters are all illusions.
While dreaming we have many emotional reactions. We feel ecstatic as a result of some thoughts, and our body reacts with changes in blood pressure, increased heart rate, blushing, erections, smiling, and the like. We feel hurt as a result of other thoughts that are our dreams, and our body reacts with frowns, tears, and other physical manifestations. Anger is produced by dream thoughts, and our body responds with clenched fists, fast breathing, gnashed teeth, even tears. But remember, we have created all of the characters and events and are acting them out in thought only, yet we are still having physical reactions. The characters are indeed illusions, but the reactions are real. And so it goes in waking consciousness as well, though it may be difficult for you to accept the waking-dreamer concept in your life right now.

I have no desire to debate about what exists or does not exist in whatever reality is or is not. To me, the reactions, the manifestations of our feelings, are real. If those feelings are interfering with our enjoyment of this life, then we need to examine what we are allowing to interfere with our happiness. Whether the people or events are real or not ^;.s just a question of perspective.

The value lies in examining what is happening to you, rather than whether what is happening is caused by something real or an illusion. Examine your anger, hatreds, or stresses in this new light. No one can create anger or stress within you, only you can do that by virtue of how you process your world, or, in other words, how you think.

So rather than debate who or what is real, focus on what you are doing to process your thoughts, your feelings. And just as in your dream, when you really awaken, you will see as you look back that only your reactions, the residue of feelings in your body, remain. Are you able to let those feelings and thoughts flow through without censorship as you do in dreaming consciousness? In waking life can you think what you think without judging it or repressing it or stopping it? In dreaming consciousness you feel and encounter the array of human experience without judgment. Try doing that in waking consciousness too, and you will become what I mean by an awake dreamer.

Consider the realm of love. Your reactions of love are real and you experience them in your wakeful body, but only you can create those reactions by your thoughts. The more you choose to have loving, positive, beautiful thoughts toward yourself and others in your life, the more you will have salubrious reactions in your body. We create it all, including the persons who are in our
life. More important, though, is how we allow or disallow our inner reactions. This is the true essence of being a waking dreamer, to be nonjudgmental of how we react emotionally to all of the characters and events that are part of our lives. Focus on what you do with what you think and feel. If you learn how to die while you are alive, you will be able to look back at all of those externals and see that they are illusory, but that your reactions within you are very very real. In fact, those reactions are what you are, your thoughts pure and simple.

7. The only way you know you are dreaming is to awaken.
If we dreamed twenty-four hours each day, that would be our entire reality. We know that we are dreaming only when we awaken. The same thing applies to this level of consciousness that we call wakefulness. Once we awaken, that is, examine the principles of the dimension of formlessness and thought, we are able to look upon all of our activities in the same way we look at our dream consciousness. From the perspective of awakening, it is pretty silly to be attached to things which we have to be asleep to experience. No doubt that is why my neighbor has a sign in her laundry room that says, "After Enlightenment, the Laundry."

It is unnecessary to allow the actions of others to control our thoughts when we have the capacity to process our world and the people in it as we choose. Awakened persons know deep within their souls that they are much more than a body, that they create everything that they need for their dream. By looking back at our dreams when we are awake we see how futile it is to be upset about the dream content which we created, and we can also see the folly of being upset about anything that we create in a wakeful state. The key to grasping that we are thought and thought is us is to wake up now, and use our new perspective to make this lifetime as glorious and harmonious and loving an experience as is possible. This does not exclude examining our dream contents and waking-life circumstances for greater self-awareness and understanding, though that is not the subject of this book.

Now I suggest that you reexamine the seven principles of being a waking dreamer and think of how you can apply them in your life. Use this new awareness to make this waking consciousness all that it can be, and also to free yourself of a fear of death. Use the potential of your own death as an awakening experience, and begin living the greatest life anyone ever dared to dream.

(Source: You'll See It When You Believe It - Wayne Dyer, 1989)