To Solve Any Problem, Wake Up First
The dream and the dreamer are one.
I had one shoe on and one bare foot as I searched for where I could buy a train ticket.
There was a vast hall with confusing rooms and doors, and it took me quite a while to locate the right door for the tickets.
Finally, after even more confusion, I ordered my ticket. However, the man who was selling tickets kept my money and never gave me my ticket.
To make matters worse, while looking for a restroom, I was told that there was not one that I could use because my kind was not allowed to use it.
It sounds distressing, doesn’t it? It was! I struggled to fix it—however, nothing I did made any difference.
Everything I tried created more chaos and confusion.
And even though I knew I was dreaming, I wouldn’t let myself wake up because I was sure I could fix it.
That dream perfectly illustrated Mary Baker Eddy's statement, “The dreamer and the dream are one.”
I was the dreamer in my dream.
What does this have to do with everyday life?
We are dreamers, dreaming our lives. Instead of waking up from our dreams, we try to fix problems while dreaming.
The solution is to do what I did that night. I finally made myself wake up. Then the dream vanished, taking the problem with it.
Yes, our life dreams are a little more complicated. We have so many attachments to them that it’s hard to think we are dreaming or living in an illusion.
But we are.
And it’s our agreements with a worldview, our perceptions of ourselves and others, and our habits of thinking that keep us stuck in a dream, fixing a dream problem.
We’ve all had ah-ha moments. Where do they come from?
Moments of awakening.
Perhaps it would be wonderful to take a pill, as in The Matrix, and wake up, but it doesn’t work that way.
Instead, we practice waking up.
We practice not succumbing to the temptations of the world and our personalities.
We practice claiming our true identity as the reflection of the infinite One Mind.
Our true identity is not in the dream, so it does not know of the sensory perception that claims that the problems, chaos, and confusion are real and then believes it can fix them.
What makes waking up from this sensory perception daydream easy is that there is just one lie to wake up from—the lie that there is a duality of good and evil that simultaneously exists in the same place.
Following the logic that the dream and the dreamer are one, whatever appears in my day to my sensory perception is really a dreamer, with habits, preferences, beliefs, and ideas dreaming a story of themselves.
We are all dreamers, dreaming what we call our lives, and we all hear the call to “wake up!”
We all ignore it much of the time, or struggle with the concept of waking up.
We are all habitually stuck in our personalities and perceptions.
We all think we can or must fix the situation in the dream.
We all think this is going to be hard.
We believe it takes time, a reversal, or a situation change for it to happen.
Perhaps we believe we have to go somewhere to wake up, but that’s not true.
When I woke up from my night dream, I was still in bed, where it all started.
We discover our true identity is still present when we awaken from the sensory perception-induced dream.
This awakening reveals that what appears as evil is good misperceived, and we are all one—Man—as the idea, the action, and the expression of the one I, which is and knows only good.
As we wake up, what we once thought was real and claimed as personality rises like the mist from the wet grass.
It causes no pain as it leaves, but its leaving reveals what has always been there.
And solutions to problems reveal themselves because we have started with the correct premise that there is no problem.
We are simply stripping away what isn’t true.
The dreamer and the dream, the lie and the liar, are all one, and it is all an illusion. We are not dreamers dreaming a dream.
Therefore, there is no need to fix the dream, no need to hold on to the lies of habits and struggles.
Instead, let’s wake up to our true identity.
This is where we live now.
The alarm clock is ringing. This is the day to wake up to Life!
Psalms118:24 This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.