It was a lesson. My dream mind had a lesson for me. This happens occasionally because of my obsession with understanding things: my dream mind, like a dutiful son, also tries to understand things. Sometimes it gets so excited by a flashy new idea it wakes me up to tell me. Typical kid.
This time it made some kind of presentation, something like a 3-D version of a Power Point presentation. But I only remember the words: "YOU are always there. As either your self inside the world, or as your inner self inside your outer self, or as a character inside your inner self." (By which he meant, I assumed, a dream character).
As I woke thinking about this I laughed at the irony. Here was my dream self looking me in the eye and telling me that he didn't exist as someone who could look me in the eye and tell me things.
He was saying, I am always my self. I may seem to be communicating with some aspect of myself the way I used to do sometimes in my stretches of isolation as a fire towerman in the forest, but it is all me. And when I'm fascinated by my dreams, by the people and the goings-on that populate them, well, they are just me too.
And out in the real world I may imbibe the essences of others, but those are my own imaginings. My outer world is populated with my self just as my dreams are.
Nevertheless, sitting here writing this, I'm thinking how nice it is to wake up to profound thoughts that are already fully formed and fleshed out, ready to write down, and me not having to put an ounce of effort into it.
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Michael Hudecki, Kathryn Alexander, Larry Burfield and 7 others like this.
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Donald Brackett you could be thunderclap newman.
Like · Reply · January 12 at 5:46pm
Stan Burfield Hadn't heard of the band before! How do you mean?
Like · Reply · January 12 at 6:07pm
Donald Brackett the song was called "something in the air"....maybe about 1968...if you find it on Youtube all will be clear...you'll likely remember it...
Like · Reply · January 12 at 6:49pm
Stan Burfield We have got to get it together now. Yeah, I couldn't remember that song. What's your Buddhist take on my dream?
Like · Reply · January 12 at 8:24pm
Donald Brackett Hmmm. Not so much my Buddhist take on your dream as the fact that it was a profoundly Buddhist dream, or rather a dream of awakening from the dream. I recall having a similar (almost lucid) dream once where there was some calamity and I suddenly realized that I was in no real danger because (as I declared loudly in the dream "Everything that's happening is happening in my mind"!) You had the same insight it seems. The trick now is to realize the same thing while you're awake...in which case, whether you believe it or not, you would be experiencing the essence of the Buddhist enlightenment that the original Buddha had himself. The thing to remember is that there is no diety in Buddhism, and Siddhartha Gautama was just a guy like us who happened to see the mind-based nature of reality, hence the Sanskrit word which is the root of his honorific: buddha = awakened. That's a great dream, most momentous, congrats on it!....now just have the same one while you're supposedly awake during the day....that will really blow your mind for sure (in a good way)....cheers, D.
Like · Reply · January 12 at 8:40pm
Stan Burfield
Stan Burfield I'll look forward to it. I can't imagine such a thing, but yes, it would blow my mind!.....The fun thing I've discovered in terms of lucid dreams is that, being big on theorizing, and so having a theorizing subconscious, sometimes I'm in a really weird situation in a dream and, in the dream, I start analyzing the situation, usually coming to a conclusion while I'm standing there. Then when I wake up I can't figure the dream out because I'm stuck with the analysis I made while there in the dream. It's only later, when I'm good and awake and removed from it, that I realize that inside the dream I couldn't see anything as being symbolic. Instead it's all real. So I have to toss out my dream analysis and just look at the imagery, and then I get it!
Like · Reply · January 12 at 8:51pm
Jenny Getsinger Such a philosopher! Keep up with the good work, Stan.
Unlike · Reply · 1 · January 12 at 6:03pm