The difference between waking reality and dream reality

[idiot_stimpy]

When we think of both dream and supposed waking life, we think they are completely different. However they are different in stability but in actuality they are quite similar. 

 

I think analysing dream reality and uncovering it's rules helps us better understand waking reality. Those could say that waking reality is also dream reality just more stable. 

 

When we dream our minds projects a reality. Our 5 senses still work, we have a dream body. In most cases when we dream we treat the dream as real and experience suffering due to attachment as similar in waking reality. 

 

What's interesting is within a dream, when we come to the realisation we are just dreaming and all experience is unreal/illusion, our attachment to our situation is greatly reduced including our suffering. 

 

Looking into Dzogchen togal recently I couldn't help but question the current waking reality we exist in. Maybe just like in a dream, our bodies and dream is just a projection, in waking reality maybe it is no different. We are experiencing projections of our own mind, our body and senses are also projections. Maybe reality like a dream will have less of a hold on us if we start to believe it might not be as real as it seems.

[silent thunder]

Powerful observations stimpy.  The dream like quality of awareness in the aggregates of life has been with me since earliest childhood.

 

My first conscious memory in this life was a dream so intense, that then led to an out of body experience.  It forever imbued in me the dream like state of awareness as it interacts with the five aggregates and the indelible fact that my body is not the source of awareness... rather the body arises within awareness.  Awareness is what is... all else arises and shifts within this...

 

The nature of my experience in this waking life seems inextricably linked to the projections of mind, the conditioning and assumptions derived from conditioning.  It is all so ephemeral, even the shared dream of waking life.  One small insight can utterly transform my experience and interpretation of all that i encounter in 'the real world'.

 

And my experiences in the dreamscapes have been at least equal to my awareness experiences in waking life in their ability to inform me about my own true nature due to how i react to stimuli and what this reveals about my nature.

 

Due to this I have innately been predisposed to see the natural connection between the sleeping dream state and the waking dream that we all share as being layers of one overarching process, not seperate states.  Even the manner in which we 'come online' in waking life is similar to how I become aware  in the dream state.  When i become lucid in dreams... the dream is ongoing, having already begun and i find myself in the midst of a process and then become aware of it.

 

Similarly, the first few years of life are foggy but at some point in early childhood, our lucid awareness 'comes online' so to speak and we begin to form memory and the ability to have what we experience through awareness to inform and imprint upon us.   The manner in which i awakened into reality mirrors exactly the manner in which i become lucid in the dream state nightly.

 

Dzogchen was an immediate draw due to its deep, intimate exploration of the waking and sleep states of consciousness.  The work of Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche in particular in his book Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, has been a potent companion to my lucid dream work over the years.

 

If you're not familiar, there is a fantastic film called Waking Life, that explores the dream like nature of waking and sleeping life.  My son and i revisit it once a year or so and it never ceases to inspire some potent conversations and exploration.

 

Thanks for sharing mate... this topic is near to my core.

[idiot_stimpy]

36 minutes ago, silent thunder said:

The manner in which i awakened into reality mirrors exactly the manner in which i become lucid in the dream state nightly.

 

 

This is beautiful and the point of my whole post. Thank you very much for sharing.

[stirling]

 

Quote

"So you should view this fleeting world: A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, A flash of lightening in a summer cloud, A flickering lamp, a phantom and a dream." - Buddha, Diamond Sutra

 

... so it IS when looked at properly. Deep in meditation the world IS a flickering phantom world of ephemeral moments. Time, space, and self drop away and there is just being. This is an experience anyone can have, though many will say it is just a "state". 

 

In some branch of Advaita Vedanta or another (I forget which) they consider the stack of consciousness inverted to the way we commonly think of it: Waking reality is the most "asleep", the dreaming world more accurate, where time, space and self are wiggly, and deep sleep and the blackness of empty being-ness as most like the enlightened mind.

 

Ever notice how our waking stories about our dreams have to be altered to fit into a narrative, as they don't really follow our typical lines of causation? In a dream you can be in one location one moment, and then walk into a completely different place all of a sudden. You can see the dream from your "self" perspective, or suddenly from the perspective of another "character". When you try to read something in a dream, it may be nonsense, or may be different if you try to read it again, or even have numbers and letters that change constantly. I have noticed all of these things and more when I am not trying to bend the contents of a dream into a narrative.  All of the typical rules go out the window. 

 

I have found that one can be "enlightened" (awake to the non-dual nature of reality) in both the waking world AND deep sleep, but it is somehow possibly easier in sleep where the rules already don't make complete sense. 

 

In the waking world we have a tendency to explain away the odd moments of life, missing time in the car, strange figures we see out of the corner of our eyes, missing doorways, stairwells, things we decide we "misremember". If we get out of the habit of explaining away our experience or constructing stories about what "must have" happened, and just accept that being present with reality is weird, we open a door onto much more. 

 

It is absolutely good to hold our ideas about reality lightly, rather than grasping for surety.

[silent thunder]

28 minutes ago, stirling said:

It is absolutely good to hold our ideas about reality lightly, rather than grasping for surety.

The entirety of my life has repeatedly driven this exact point into my conscious awareness repeatedly.

[Nintendao]

2 hours ago, stirling said:

When you try to read something in a dream, it may be nonsense, or may be different if you try to read it again, or even have numbers and letters that change constantly.

 

I was always fascinated by the way text behaved in dreams. I found out that instead of fruitlessly trying to focus my eyes on the symbols, i could just sort of ask the paper what it was trying to tell me 

[idiot_stimpy]

 

 

 

[idiot_stimpy]

Samsara or nirvana, it does not matter, all states good or bad lack self identity when it is all simply seen as a projection.

[blue eyed snake]

12 hours ago, Nintendao said:

 

I was always fascinated by the way text behaved in dreams. I found out that instead of fruitlessly trying to focus my eyes on the symbols, i could just sort of ask the paper what it was trying to tell me 

ah, like this?

 

Spoiler

 

 

[idiot_stimpy]

Quote

There is only one dreamer, the one Self, dreaming many dreams

In every body there is a dream, but the dreamer is the same, the

one Self, which reflects itself in each body as "I am".

 

The dreams are not equal, but the dreamer is one. I am the insect, I am the poet - in dream. But in reality I am neither. I am beyond all dreams. I am the light in which all dreams appear and disappear. I am both inside and outside the dream. Just as a man having a headache knows the ache and also knows that he is not the ache, so do I know the dream, myself dreaming and myself not dreaming - all at the same time. I am what I am before, during and after the dream. But what I see in dream, I am not. 

 

Ultimately nothing is mine or yours, everything is ours. Just be one with yourself and you will be one with all, at home in the entire universe. 

 

 

 

Excerpts from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj's I AM THAT

 

[silent thunder]

Such treasure of insight and ability to convey in words the nature of this most subtle and familiar aspects of reality.

 

This quote in particular is nigh on an exact mirroring of Toltec cosmology and the nature of the myriad shared dreams within the one great dreamer.

 

Thanks for this thread stimpy.  Deep synchronicity amd resonance here...

 

[old3bob]

Btw. i'd say transcendental ponderings, etc. are not excuses to not deal with the "world" of people and our environmental degradations...  dreams do not feed the hungry, homeless and suffering multitudes, work on serious environmental concerns or free people who are better off in the physical or astral worlds.

Edited April 18 by old3bob

[idiot_stimpy]

 

[silent thunder]

On 4/18/2024 at 12:36 PM, old3bob said:

Btw. i'd say transcendental ponderings, etc. are not excuses to not deal with the "world" of people and our environmental degradations...  dreams do not feed the hungry, homeless and suffering multitudes, work on serious environmental concerns or free people who are better off in the physical or astral worlds.

No one implied not dealing with the world of the shared dream.

 

Again you infer meaning that is not shared or implied.

 

Pondering the dream like nature of reality is not rejecting or ignoring.

[old3bob]

22 minutes ago, silent thunder said:

No one implied not dealing with the world of the shared dream.

 

Again you infer meaning that is not shared or implied.

 

Pondering the dream like nature of reality is not rejecting or ignoring.

 

again more double talk per your,   "It is not inherently true, real or even important

It's just another thought/story."  by ST;  so just another unimportant thought story dude so own that and I'd also suggest getting off your quasi-nihilistic sounding high horse!

Edited 34 minutes ago by old3bob

[steve]

@old3bob

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