The Awakening

Sometimes within my dreams I become aware of the strange fact that I am actually dreaming, it is amusing in that I realise that the laws of physics do not apply here, for I could jump high into the sky, soar through the air and somehow evade all troubles I encounter; in these moments, I don’t want to wake up, it seems after all to be a blissful paradise. At other times when the dream is terrifying, I will try to wake up, in order to avoid imminent danger, but instead I am unable to awaken from that dream and simply find myself in another one. Sensing that the spectre that haunts me is tracking my every move, I am filled with utter panic as if I am locked within an astral Russian doll, as layers upon layers of dreams unravel and leaving me still trapped.

However, no matter how terrifying or terrible a dream is, it is just that a dream. It would be strange for instance to hate or despise someone because of what they did in your dream. Even if something dreadful like a loved one dying, occurred within the dream, on awakening this would vanish except for a lingering sense of foreboding, which even in time would disappear. Any sense of injustice in a dream would be almost irrelevant and indeed the form of morality that accompanies it is likely to be distorted in a similar way to the science that prevails there. The big ‘what if’? What if the life we are living now is just a ‘dream’ perhaps the outer layer of all dreams, the one from which there appears no escape except through dying? If this be true then death become the great awakening, the ultimate release of all life’s troubles. It suddenly dawns on me how the apparent paradoxes of life are then resolved. How often have we said ‘If there was a God why would he let wars and famines occur, why does he let evil persist and why let good and gentle people suffer. And now you know the answer because it is the earthly realm, a sub-reality into which we have all been born, a test perhaps? Or a trial run for the real experience to follow. Like a loving mother comforting a child who has just awoken from a hellish nightmare, God seeks to embrace those who flee to Him.