reality is like a dream

[ralis]

As a child I had frequently the overwhelming experience that I was dreaming,

that the whole world including me were a dream.

That "derealisation" experience was always so intense that it scared me to death and I usually began to cry.

I also had frequent distortions of my visual sense perception, things seemed to shrink down to microscopic sizes

or I seemed to grow to gigantic proportions. Sometimes this started while I was sleeping and while sleeping I realized

that the "Alice in Wonderland" syndrome had again begun, then I woke up and it was indeed distorting my perception.

So I didn't need a teacher to give me "direct introductions" to the facts that reality is like a dream

or that sensory perception is a deception. I was taught these things directly through my karma.

As a child I didn't understand the implications of these lessons,

I was just constantly scared to death.

I thought that I was cursed, but in reality I was blessed.

 

Had or has someone similar experiences?

 

I had rather strange experiences as a teenager due to being able to completely shut down all thought and experience a state where nothing existed. It was as if I was feeling space prior to any physical manifestation. There is a local taco joint here in Santa Fe when I walked into the door, the same thing would happen. Perhaps that place is a gateway.

[Bindi]

As a child I had frequently the overwhelming experience that I was dreaming,

that the whole world including me were a dream.

That "derealisation" experience was always so intense that it scared me to death and I usually began to cry,

hoping that this state would go over soon.

I also had frequent distortions of my visual sense perception, things seemed to shrink down to microscopic sizes

or I seemed to grow to gigantic proportions. Sometimes this started while I was sleeping and while sleeping I realized

that the "Alice in Wonderland" syndrome had again begun, then I woke up and it was indeed distorting my perception.

So I didn't need a teacher to give me "direct introductions" to the facts that reality is like a dream

or that sensory perception is a deception. I was taught these things directly through my karma.

As a child I didn't understand the implications of these lessons,

I was just constantly scared to death.

I thought that I was cursed, but in reality I was blessed.

 

Had or has someone similar experiences?

 

I remember coming across the ability to play with size perception in school at around 10 years old, and I actually cultivated this distortion of perception to relieve the boredom I felt in class. When I was 12 I had a dream of a catatonic ‘crazy’ old man and woke up to hear the words ‘he is me’. In terms of shattering my simple conscious concept of reality this was a cracker, it ripped apart any simple certainty I had about who I was, and forced me to start questioning this level of reality. After that dream I couldn’t help but start to subconsciously identify with this other me, and it left me grappling with concepts that were overwhelming at the time and pretty much ruined my ability to live a normal life.

 

So, it was an actual dream that introduced me to the concept that my sense of who I was in this world was limited and unreal. And I would likely argue from this dream and other useful dreams since that dreams are a truer version of reality than my waking perceptions.

 

I certainly agree that our perceptions and conscious thought are limited, but to my way of thinking it is insulting to the value of dreams to call unreality dream-like in a pejorative sense. 

[wilfred]

the implication is that it's subjective - all of it. a more purified mind stream = more ability to discern materiality at its square root, direct perception of energy through awareness.

[Old River]

 

 

“This is how to contemplate our conditioned existence in this fleeting world:
 

Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream;
Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.

So is all conditioned existence to be seen.”

 

 

~ The Diamond Sutra

 

[ralis]

I certainly agree that our perceptions and conscious thought are limited, but to my way of thinking it is insulting to the value of dreams to call unreality dream-like in a pejorative sense. 

 

Would you elaborate a bit more?

[ChiForce]

Poor Karl...you need to stay away from this discussion.  You aren't qualified to answer it because you have never received your mind transmission from a Sambhogakaya being from a dream and resulting in your enlightenment, at least partially, in your waking consciousness.  Rendering the kundalini energy rising or the completion of the micro cosmic orbit possible, in your waking life.  Without a physical master.

 

For the OP, lay persons, uncultivated mind, won't have a clue to answer it.  The reality is that your reality can be a dream and your dream becomes a reality only if you managed to liberate yourself and to be reborn in the heavenly realm.  In another words, when you die or in a deep state of samadhi.  Until then, dream still has certain dream like quality but yet a potential reality if things do unfold the way the dream envisioned.  

 

For a cultivated person, dream and reality are often not so clear.  The danger is that you become paralyzed mentally in your own reality because your dreams are telling you something different.    Well, you don't trust everything in your reality and why would you trust everything coming out from your dreams.  Practice not clinging...you will be fine.

 

FYI, you don't always dream about the Tao or in conversation with some heavenly beings.  Once in a while, you get some low level crazy dreams.  

Edited April 13, 2016 by ChiForce

[silent thunder]

Fascinating topic and one that has been with me much of my life.  I have long had the unshakable sense that one moment, I will awaken within the 'real world' in a manner similar to that in which I have become lucid in the dream states, a multitude of times.

 

This sense is not one that I sought.  It is with me unsought, without desire and it is persistent in a way that few other things in my life have been...

 

I am agnostic and open mindedly, skeptical by nature due to a heavy religious upbringing and many experiences that are beyond the scope of the materialist paradigm to explain; indeed the reality I lived as a child, with its invisible man in the sky is one I woke up out of one moment, to become the man I am now, one level of awakening out of a dream in which I lived for the first 10-15 years of my life...  and this fluid sense of how my consciousness and awareness relates to sensory information and the conditions of 'reality' around me... it is unshakable this dream-like quality and experience of all sensory life.  It remains with me and has been reinforced through the decades, through my direct life experiences.

 

When I feel space in my waking life, it is almost fluid like. For me to describe the feeling of space is not so easy and perhaps that is dream like; that is to say the experience of space which I can feel.

 

On several occasions I have had paradigm shifting experiences of the fully conscious, tangible and fluid nature of space.  Each left me with the resonant, indelible sense that space is far from empty, ever, even in the vacuum, and that everywhere it is fluid, alive and intimately relating to us on many levels at every moment.  I have one particular samadhi experience I'm intending to share here as soon as I get some time when this current project ends, it occurred while I was sitting at the Getty sketching... but many times space has become a living, palpable part of me, or I have in a sense, awakened into a wider range of senses of self. My body becoming vast, or expanding to the parameters of the room in which I sat, or stood.   Space in these experiences is intimately part of me and I am a physical part of it.  I can feel it as clearly as I can feel the cotton of my shirt on my skin or the keys under my finger tips.

 

Something Joseph Campbell said always resonates whenever this topic comes to mind for long.  "Dreams are private myths. Myths are public dreams."   This sense for me is unshakable, even as I am skeptical about the nuts and bolts of it.  Reality seems like a communal dream state to me.

 

Subjective experiences of time and space have constantly reinforced this for me.  However, this state does not respond whimsically and instantly to the intentions of one consciousness.  It being a slow, dense and shared state, it remains malleable and fluid, but slow to alter compared to the instant reflections of intent in the high vibrational state of the individual dreaming.

 

Great topic.  Great discussion.  Thanks.

[ChiForce]

We can't really know for sure-- in order to know we would have to be "outside" of the dream. Perhaps we are all like Zhuangzi's butterfly. However, if we imagined what it would really be like if our experience as if it WERE a dream, there are some interesting implications which serves as an excellent metaphor for nonduality, rather than as myriad reified objects that arise out of an essentialist metaphysics.

 

(Essentialism only "works" in a certain limited context-- the problem with essentialism is the conviction that such a view is the end-all and be-all of reality. It is the error of transposing empiricism (which works great in science) into the metaphysical. This generate a myriad number of problems which I can't even get into here.)

 

But consider this: I think most people have dreamed of family, friends, co-workers, people in the past or even those basic "stock characters" -- and no matter what our interactions are with them in these dreams, none of these "other persons" within the dream are actually "other persons" at all. If your father is, for example, angry with you in a dream, that isn't really your father expressing anger -- it is yourself, the dreamer, who is angry.

 

As a metaphor, this suggests to me that the "self" we believe exists (as an essential, reified, independent object) is actually a distortion of the unified whole-- and only through such a distortion do we make the error of thinking we can have good without bad, or beautiful without ugly, or pleasure without suffering, etc. These distortions then lead us to actions which do inevitably rebound upon us because we AREN'T separate from the whole. Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Compensation" serves as the perfect commentary for the second chapter of the Daodejing in this respect.

 

I think this is why stillness of the mind/body (via certain forms of meditation) is vital to "smoothing out" those distortions, so to speak. The less stillness, the more distortion, and the more distortion, the less clarity. Many of our struggles in life are really just struggles with this "self" which believes itself to be "real" -- as a reified, seperate independent being -- which is very similar to how we experience the "self" in dreams.

 

Such meditative practices don't get one out of the unreal and into the real because there is no "outside" at all. There is only experience. Maybe Zhuangzi's point is that it doesn't really matter if reality is "real" or "just a dream" -- in the end, there is only this one experience, the one life we are now living.

Oh, those characters you met in your dreams but you have not seen them in ages???  They are your karmic manifestation being played out in your dreams.  You have developed karma with them.  I guess the karmic seeds are being played out mentally in your dream visions.  If you have good relationship with them some years ago, more than likely they would behave nicely towards you in the dreams. 

[roger]

People take the fact that we exist, and what a miracle love is, for granted.

 

There's something unspoken among people, something they don't often consciously think about. But they know in their hearts, they're just not consciously thinking about it.

 

The fact that we exist is amazing, the life within us is sacred, and love is divine.

 

Everyone already knows this.

 

I see "waking up" not as a concept of ultimate truth, but when you see the ultimacy of everything, how incredible everything is.

 

"Ultimate reality" might be thought of as simply ultimacy itself, the profundity and glory of life.

[Silent Answers]

Maybe we'll wake up when everything rests. As for implications, we learn from our dreams.

Consciously from analyzing them in our awake state, and on a deeper level we reorganize lessons for effective execution, back in "reality". So, assuming this is a dream, you'd better do something worthwhile with your time here, so as to help evolve the greater mind that contains us.

 

I've come to believe that there is only mind, which can/must be compartmentalized within itself to function. There is no thing that exists as what we like to think of as physically being there. Instead, all is the imaginings of mind within mind, exploring itself within to expand/define its horizons.

 

In other words, we are all part of the God mind; our actions, beliefs and feelings all adding together to enhance the overall understanding/experience. The same pattern is reflected within our own image.

[Bindi]

Would you elaborate a bit more?

 

I can try. In my experience, dreams are primarily concerned with disentangling the mind from all unreality with their often merciless truth, to me they are a perfect mirror of our emotional dysfunction and false ego self, and in various ways a perfect guide towards the ‘ocean’. If there is a disparity between my conscious thought and a dream, I accept the  dream’s version to be more real (as long as it has been correctly interpreted), and work to align my thinking with the dream’s version of reality. If I ignore the dream's version of reality, then my mind makes the decision to accept my false ego self's version of reality. 

 

I currently believe that dreams are actually formed in Ajna chakra, and are like small packets of information from this source which has always remained connected to the ‘ocean’. I see the seeming distortion of dreams as being the distance the dream message has to travel between Ajna and our conscious mind’s ability to comprehend the message. When this distance is lessened by our conscious mind/consciousness moving towards Ajna’s way of seeing, dreams tend to become less distorted because the conscious mind and its ability to perceive actual reality has been correctly cultivated. Also as this distance lessens, Ajna can start to communicate knowledge and actual reality directly when awake.

 

So basically what I’m saying is that it is the conscious mind’s wrong thinking and subsequent distortion that causes the problem with dreams, not the dream’s problem, so ‘dream-like’ is a misnomer, as ‘dream-like’ can more truthfully refer to actual reality.

[steve]

That's a beautiful post Bindi. My view is perhaps a bit different at this moment and I'll share, not to disagree, but to collaborate.

I currently feel that our dream life is the ongoing mental process that is present for us during the day and night. 

In dreams this process certainly has a different feel and yet it is not free of the illusions and misconceptions of the ego-mind.

As our waking ego-mind becomes less deluded, so do our dreams. 

 

Just as dream is directly connected to 'the ocean' as you put it, so is our waking mind.

The primary difference is that conscious self-awareness is active will awake and asleep when we dream, unless of course we dream lucidly. This can be a distraction in the waking dream but when used correctly is very valuable in sleeping dream.

 

If you don't already do it, I'd highly recommend trying some lucid dreaming work as it puts a very different perspective on things, at least it did for me. Unfortunately, many of the more modern methods of lucid dreaming focus too much on the entertainment and personal gain value of dreams as opposed to the more traditional approach which focuses on a more spiritual utility in the practice.

[Apech]

@Bindi

 

Brilliantly well put.

[dwai]

If reality is like a dream,

which implications does this have?

As with a dream when we are asleep, it seems real until one day you become aware that it is a dream and become lucid. Similarly for this reality...

[wilfred]

As with a dream when we are asleep, it seems real until one day you become aware that it is a dream and become lucid. Similarly for this reality...

 

sure enough, increasingly lucidity and even breakthroughs via dream states significantly shifted my waking experience to be more aware of 'awareness' or the 'basic ground'. along with this comes more direct perception of energy - the gaps between everything become clearer as the mind penetrates the subconscious/subtle side of our reality.

[Wells]

.

Edited May 10, 2016 by Wells

[Kubba]

If reality is like a dream,

which implications does this have?

Thats just a radical advaitic approach. Probably not so healthy.

[ralis]

Thats just a radical advaitic approach. Probably not so healthy.

 

How so?

[ChiForce]

Thats just a radical advaitic approach. Probably not so healthy.

I think it has to with your own karma and how much karmic trace you have left to work on.  Is not healthy when your karmic traces being manifested in you dreams and begin to dictate your life style in your waking reality.  You are basically replacing one set of illusions with another...from your dreams.... 

 

How can you be sure your dream reality and visions are real and grounded on some ultimate reality???  You can not..... 

[Karl]

I think it has to with your own karma and how much karmic trace you have left to work on.  Is not healthy when your karmic traces being manifested in you dreams and begin to dictate your life style in your waking reality.  You are basically replacing one set of illusions with another...from your dreams.... 

 

How can you be sure your dream reality and visions are real and grounded on some ultimate reality???  You can not..... 

 

How can you say that you know all this for certain when you are convinced it's all just a dream ? Which is to say, you don't actually believe your own hype, or you wouldn't even try.

[ChiForce]

How can you say that you know all this for certain when you are convinced it's all just a dream ? Which is to say, you don't actually believe your own hype, or you wouldn't even try.

Simple Karl...simple time displacement would tell you that you are in a dream.  If you dream about your lost friends or people you once knew 20 years ago..and you are interacting with them in your dreams...you know you are in a dream. 

 

In the dream of clarity, to use the Tibetan dream yoga terminology, you are receiving information about the future and you are having precognitive dreams.  Here, dreams and reality can not be easily distinguished.  You have to question if your own karmic traces are generating these visions and dream information.  A layperson or a person with a dull mind would still get stuck in their own karmic dreaming.  They are still preoccupied with the past. the seeds of their own karma.     

Edited April 13, 2016 by ChiForce

[Karl]

Simple Karl...simple time displacement would tell you that you are in a dream.  If you dream about your lost friends or people you once knew 20 years ago..and you are interacting with them in your dreams...you know you are in a dream. 

 

In the dream of clarity, to use the Tibetan dream yoga terminology, you are receiving information about the future and you are having precognitive dreams.  Here, dreams and reality can not be easily distinguished.  You have to question if your own karmic traces are generating these visions and dream information.  A layperson or a person with a dull mind would still get stuck in their own karmic dreaming.  They are still preoccupied with the past. the seeds of their own karma.     

 

If you are in a dream then nothing matters. It's either a dream or it isn't. You set the rules. If you are just treating the dream as reality then what's the difference ? That's rhetorical of course, because there clearly is none, so why not accept reality. If you decide to change the definition then I'm at liberty to turn it back. I can say that your dream is your reality and that's why you are trying to explain it.

 

I don't have karmic traces, but I do have high blood pressure :-) I have no issues with my past, no regrets, no guilt, absolutely no concern whatsoever. I'm not preoccupied with my past, because it's the past. I can use what I obtained from experience, what is useful and then delete the rest as useless crap. That means I love now, I love life, I love reality right here and now. That it doesn't always conform to my expectations or desires is all part and parcel of my joy meant of life. If I ever get to the point I detest it so much I would regard it as a dream then I will know I've either taken a wrong turning, or my life actually has become of such a poor quality that I no longer require it.

[Wells]

.

Edited May 10, 2016 by Wells

[ChiForce]

To Karl,

 

Sight...in a highly cultivated mind or with individuals with gifted insights or with good karmic merit, they receive teaching from great masters and immortal beings in dreams...because they are the Sambhogakaya beings and would only manifest themselves in dreams...silly.

 

  I don't expect you to understand why dreams are important...

Edited April 13, 2016 by ChiForce

[Karl]

Your understanding is very limited due to dualism.

The topic of the tread is: reality is like a dream.

 

It either is a dream or it isn't. We all know what a dream is. We go to sleep, we fall down stairs, fly, eat a banquet, but we know when we awake that none of that happened. We can determine dream state and waking state very easily.

 

Where is the dualism ? Im completely non dual as should be obvious. A is A, a thing is a thing.