The Dreamer Wakes Up from the Dream
Are your nighttime dreams any different than your waking day experiences? In both cases, you appear to be the star of your experience. Think about the last dream you had and the role you starred in. Perhaps it was a pursuit dream, a love story, or a flying dream. Your body may have been running, driving, or dancing. It felt real, very real. And what about your emotions? Did you feel fear, excitement, desire, anger, or grief as the dream unfolded? Are these feelings any different than what you feel when you are awake? When someone you love dies during a dream, do you feel any different than when someone you love dies in waking life? Aren’t there times when you wake up and think I’m glad that was just a dream because it felt so tangible?
The only difference between our nighttime dreams and daytime life is that our waking experience lasts longer. It continues day after day which gives it more credibility. Yet both nighttime dreams and waking day experiences are an activity of consciousness, which means they are both projections of your mind.
Everything is a dream.
You are the creator of your dreams every night and all day long. While you are sleeping, the body in the bed no longer exists, nor does your waking life. Now you are free to play whatever role you want in the dream and interact with numerous dream characters that are a refraction of your dreaming mind. Not only are you creating these changing roles, but you are also creating every dream character and everything else in the dream.
The only difference is your nighttime dreams arise from the unconscious while your waking experiences arise from pure Being. Here is the key: you are the Dreamer, not the dream character. And thus, the dream character can never wake up, only the Dreamer. As pure Being of your nighttime and daytime “dreams,” It wakes up from the dream character. To participate in your nighttime or waking dream, Being must put Itself to sleep in order to create the dream character and the dream which you identify with as being the truth of who you are. But it is not. Yet we become so fascinated with our dream character in both waking and nighttime states that we forget what proceeded our character and who we truly are.
Who is the dreamer?
If you’re not the dream character, and not the waking character, then who is dreaming? You are pure Awareness or Being. I’m using these non-dual terms interchangeably and it really doesn’t matter what we name it because what you truly are has no form and no name. What you are can be deeply experienced in the “gap” between sleeping and waking. Often, this is how we begin to wake up to our real nature. We get a series of glimpses between sleeping and waking when pure peace transcends bodily sensations, thoughts, and feelings. In my own life, this has been experienced as unbound space and stillness. There is no experience of any discomfort in the body, nor any distractions from thoughts or feelings…just absolute silence, happiness, and contentment. And then, the identification of the body and mind comes back online, and I appear to be back in my body playing a character who goes by the name of Laura Grace.
Sleeping, dreaming, and waking are all aspects of consciousness. Our true nature, or Being, has put Itself to sleep so It can experience Itself as a particular character. Consciousness is the backdrop as we shift from sleeping and dreaming, to waking and dreaming, then into dreamless sleep when no conditioned character is playing any role. Dreams are incredibly powerful because they literally reveal to us how the dreamer-self waking up from nighttime dreams is exactly the same as how the Dreamer-Self wakes up from the waking dream.