This morning I had a dream. My daughter, in the back seat, wanted a chicken salad sandwich. The lady wouldn’t only give me half. The other lady wouldn’t put the brownie in the package to separate it from the sandwich. Betty couldn’t get to the window to pull down the shade. There was something going on in the garage that needed cleaning up. I was playing a game where you throw your flower into the water but it had to bear gently to the left and land perfectly. I remember my friend’s shoes being so sharp-looking. And another friend was there.
I woke up!
For a few minutes I tried to make some sense of the dream. Really?! I spent all that time driving around trying to get a sandwich and what did that have to do with the shoes and the flowers in the water?! Funny, I seemed to he a part of all that, but I had really never had those experiences. The stories were never true. When I woke up I knew it!
Obviously, that was a sleeping dream. Then I began to think about the waking dream, as Mrs.Eddy calls it. This is the dream where materialism seems so real and definitive, where matter seems to make all the rules, where all the confusing stuff seems to be what is, and makes no sense whatever, but we seem to be so caught up in it.
I pulled together some of the stories in my waking dream. Or at least I started to. This had happened. That had happened. Very quickly I began to realize those stories were not any more true than the sleeping dream. But I had vested them with being real, responding to them, reacting to them, letting them form my stories.
They were, however, just a part of a dream narrative, – kind of like a movie you watch, but you know is just a movie on a screen. (The difference is that you know you are not in the movie, but you feel like a part of the dream.)
Nothing I could do would make those stories the reality of being. The more I invested my time in analyzing the dream, even the waking dream, I was diverted from what I really knew to be important and true – real spiritual sense.
The answer is clear. Don’t try to make sense of a material dream. It’s a dream. Don’t give it more reality than it has – no reality. No foundation in fact. Don’t try to make something out of that which was never real in the first place. Don’t wear yourself out doing that.
The beauty of life, the love of God, the substance that has no identification with matter, the grace of kindness, the abundance of proper and right substance,- the true understanding that all that is valuable and worthwhile, truly all there is or ever has been is the good, from God.
Simply put, if you do not find God in the experience, divine Mind governing, divine Love’s presence and power, if there is no divine nature, no God, then this is your recognition that there is no reality to the experience.
You know, we’re told the dream and the dreamer are one. So if we are a dreamer, making up a dream, that dream can have no more reality than the dream we make up.
The mortal concept is simply a dream. It’s not the reality of man. Never has been. Mortal concepts, sin, disease, death, etc., have no God to them. True being is right now, here and now, spiritual.
Remembering we are not now, and can never, spiritualize matter, gives us a reminder to turn in the right direction. Matter with all its dream narrative will never be real. Why honor it?
Know the real and you won’t be duped by the unreal. Look for the real, wake up from the waking or sleeping dream as having validity or reality – as worthy of your time, effort, worry, or analysis. The only consciousness that is worth our thought is the true and real, and that must come from God, divine Mind.
If you stay awake to what’s real and true, worthy and of value, you don’t get impressed with what’s not real. Then you don’t waste time in reaction or emotion, pursuing situations that lead only to more involved mortal thinking.
We gratefully stand in discovering and loving what’s true, and that’s where we put our prayer, our thoughts, our lives. The beauty of Life, and living, is because it is the expression of Love, and Truth, and Mind, and Sprit in a million wonderful ways.
That’s truth! That’s what we want. Lots more to say about this, but for now, let’s challenge the dream/unreal consciousness. Stay awake to man as the loved of God, all good. All safe. Clear. Strong. Able. Live that. Live the Life that is real!