THE STUFF OUR DREAMS ARE MADE OF
What can be said about the stuff our dreams are made of? For me, dreams are mind manufactured stuff -vaporware! – and not of much real interest…but… they can be watched with awareness. What interests me here in this little exploration, is the watcher of the dreams.
Mostly, we believe in our dreams, night and day varieties included. We think and feel they’re all about us – our hopes and…our dreams! No wonder then, that hope/dreams are like hoop-dreams! They vanish like Thoreau’s thoughts:
“Those sparrows too, are thoughts I have. They come and go; they flit by quickly on their migrations, uttering only a faint “chirp”…they will be gone directly without leaving me a feather.”
Ditto for dreams.
Our dreams may be studied and recorded, but one thing’s certain, no matter the content – they don’t last. What seems to last about dreams is the residue that remains in our daily activities; they shape our attitudes and expectations about our lives and how we interpret life around us. Dreams, like thoughts, shape our experience. It’s useful to remember though, that our interpreted experiences are just that, and not real. How quickly we forget…how soon we substitute the reality of what is happening with our ideas about it! Not that anything is wrong here of course. It’s just that some of us wake up one sunny or foggey morning and wonder if we’ve been dreaming our life away. (And in a way, we have…but that’s another exploration for another day!)
We see that those dreams are not only Local – not just in my head, but also Regional and National and International! And Celestial too…in our head! Indeed, dreams are sub-conscious cultural collections of tribal values forged and transmitted through generations of acceptable and accepted thoughts and feelings.
But some of us – some sooner, some later, some when they die, perhaps – get this insight into the ways mind/dreams seem to alter, but do not change, life as it actually is.
There occurs an easing off of a sole reliance on the mind, senses and dreams to tell us what’s really happening .
We begin to see between our thoughts and dreams; to glimpse what is actual and true in this still silence of existence; to re-cognize that which Is.
And to rest…in a peace that’s not the stuff of dreams.
That rest is silence.
