Waking From the Dream Within the Dream

This morning I woke up in a beautiful place.

I had slept beside a window overlooking forested mountains. As the sun rose, its light slowly turned the hills a deep, glowing orange.

I lay there watching the world come into form.

And I realized I had just come out of a dream.

In that dream, I had been busy.

Endlessly busy.

One task led to another, then another. Everything seemed important. Nothing ever completely resolved. There was always somewhere else to go, something else to fix, another problem demanding my attention.

Then I woke up.

The dream remained in my memory, but everything that had seemed so urgent lost its importance instantly.

As I watched the morning light spread across the mountains, a thought arrived:

The dream I just left feels strangely similar to the life I sometimes live while awake.

The Treadmill of the Mind

My mind is remarkably good at creating destinations.

Finish this.

Fix that.

Solve this.

Get there.

Then I can rest.

But there is always another then.

Another task.

Another problem.

Another hill beyond the hill.

In the dream, I didn’t know I was dreaming. I simply accepted each new urgency as reality and moved toward the next destination.

Only when I woke did I recognize how completely absorbed I had been.

That made me wonder:

Can something similar happen while I’m awake?

Not because waking life isn’t real. Responsibilities matter, relationships matter and actions have consequences.

But perhaps I can become so absorbed in the story of my life that I temporarily lose perspective on the larger experience of being alive.

Layers of Waking

Perhaps there are different kinds of waking.

First, my body wakes from sleep.

My eyes open.

The dream recedes.

The room returns.

But perhaps there is another kind of waking.

My mind can wake from its own constant activity.

For a moment, instead of being completely immersed in planning, worrying, remembering, defending and anticipating, I become aware that I am doing those things.

I am no longer only thinking.

I am noticing myself thinking.

That small change in perspective can make an enormous difference.

What I call my ego remains involved in the practical world. It still plans, builds, solves problems, protects and chooses.

But something deeper seems capable of watching the entire process.

I have chosen to call that perspective soul.

From there, life doesn’t become less real.

It becomes less tight.

A Change in Scale

Perhaps awakening is partly a change in scale.

A problem can consume me.

An argument can occupy my entire mind.

Something I fear might happen tomorrow can begin affecting the life I am experiencing today.

When I’m completely absorbed in one of those stories, it can feel as though the story is everything.

Then occasionally something shifts.

I become still.

My perspective widens.

The problem hasn’t disappeared. The relationship still matters. The difficult conversation may still need to happen.

But what seemed to occupy the entire screen becomes one scene within something much larger.

This is happening, but it isn’t everything.

Maybe that is one of the gifts of what I call the soul perspective.

Not an escape from reality.

A wider view of it.

The Wave Doesn’t Disappear

My familiar ocean metaphor comes to mind again.

A wave rises from the ocean and, for a while, everything about being that wave seems enormously important:

Its direction.

Its height.

Its speed.

Where it is going.

What the other waves are doing.

The wave is real, but it isn’t the entire ocean.

Perhaps my individual life is something like that.

Scott is real. My responsibilities and relationships are real. My choices have consequences.

The wave doesn’t need to disappear for me to remember the possibility of the ocean.

Perhaps it only needs to stop assuming that its immediate experience represents the whole sea.

Dreams Within Dreams

That morning I wondered how many layers of awareness there might be.

A dream within sleep.

A waking life in which I can become absorbed in another kind of story.

And perhaps a deeper awareness capable of observing both.

The Avatar Experience asks whether life itself might be a kind of immersive experience. This question is more immediate:

Even if ordinary life is exactly what it appears to be, can I become more awake while living it?

I don’t know how far the layers of awareness go.

I don’t know whether what I call soul is something metaphysical or simply another capacity of human consciousness.

Increasingly, I don’t feel compelled to settle the question.

The experience itself is interesting enough.

I know what it feels like to become completely lost in thought.

And I know what it feels like, even briefly, to recognize:

There I go again.

Planning.

Worrying.

Defending.

Trying to get somewhere.

That recognition alone creates space.

And inside that space, something changes.

Playing While Awake

Perhaps this is where the dream metaphor becomes most useful to me.

When I’m dreaming, I don’t usually know I’m dreaming.

I’m simply inside the story.

When I wake, I see the story from a larger perspective.

Maybe awakening in ordinary life works somewhat similarly.

I don’t have to leave the experience.

I don’t have to stop caring.

I don’t have to abandon ambition, relationships, responsibilities or goals.

I can still work, build, love, create, struggle, make mistakes and solve problems.

I simply don’t have to become so completely absorbed in those things that I forget I am the one experiencing them.

The ego can still play the game.

But perhaps awareness can remember that the game isn’t the whole of existence.

That doesn’t make life meaningless.

If anything, it may make life more vivid.

The Morning Returns

Eventually, the sunlight covered the mountains.

The night dream was gone.

Another day was beginning.

Soon my mind would start making lists. Things would need to be done. Problems would appear. Decisions would need to be made.

Life would become busy again.

But for a few minutes, lying beside that window, I could see the machinery before becoming absorbed in it.

And perhaps that is enough.

Awakening doesn’t require me to leave ordinary life.

Maybe it doesn’t require some permanent state of enlightenment either.

Perhaps it happens in moments.

A moment when I notice the thought instead of automatically becoming the thought.

A moment when I see the problem without allowing it to become my entire reality.

A moment when the wave remembers that there may be an ocean beneath it.

The mountains were glowing.

The room was quiet.

And for a brief moment, there was simply awareness.

Watching.

Present.

Almost smiling at the whole thing.

Maybe awakening isn’t escaping the dream.

Maybe it’s becoming awake enough to experience the dream without getting completely lost inside it.