It’s a dream. You’ve heard it said before, whether you believe it or not, is another story. You’ve read about lucid dreaming, perhaps even experienced it. To be lucid within a dream means you are aware you are dreaming while you are dreaming. While lucid you can push the threads that knit the dream together, push and pull, tweak and reorder, creating a slightly different dream. The dream changes when you’re a powerful dream walker, but you still wake up and are immediately thrust into another dream regardless of how powerful you were.

Very few call the Earth walk a dream. Fewer still experience it to be so.    

I’ve been wondering about lucid waking, being awake within what most of us call the world, reality, the cause-and-effect universe, and just what threads can be pulled – and if they should be. It’s my dream, as is yours, yours. We live in billions of different realities. Sci-fi movies are drenched in separation, where you are you and I am me, and what I do here affects you over there. But, this isn’t a sci-fi movie, no matter how entertaining and instructional they can be. It’s something else entirely.

So, back to my investigation. Is playing with the threads of the waking dream harmful? Is there any way it could be? It was harmful (not exactly) to the breakdown of separation when I played with fire while still under separation’s spell. It gave a sense of personal power, enhanced the idea of separation, of those who could and couldn’t, of those who would and wouldn’t. The desire for a different now, and the idea that I had the power to make it so, was tantamount to wishcraft.  

I’ve been here before and always backed away. Messing with the messy perfection of infinite aliveness feels so alien to the years of surrender and my devotion to the demolition of self. That devotion is hard to put aside even though I realize now that self never needed to be demolished. We do create our own tripping hazards. No need to be demolished, no need for the devotion, so where does that leave me? Now I am laughing. Leave me? No ‘where’ to go, no one to get there, and yet, there is still the appearance of someone going somewhere.

Regardless of what I realize, it still leaves me as a character in the dream, in this dream of a lifetime, powerless as always, yet in full recognition of what moves the world, what turns the wheel, of where the power lies … and it’s not outside of me; nothing is, even though it sure looks that way. Perhaps that last ‘me’ hinges on how I define ‘me’😉.

This character has her flaws, perhaps better called misconceptions or misperceptions, yikes! loads of them, just like the other players on life’s stage. Based on her proven intimately lived story she believes things like life doesn’t usually turn out well, and that can’t help but bleed over into whatever this character does. Those beliefs are the oxygen that fuels the life blood, the central blueprint, the energetic field displaying the hidden hoard of experience that is shaped and turned by the Potter’s Wheel into each precious moment.

That which seems to be out of harmony, which appears to be unloving, which by standards outside of now is less than possible, stems from this character’s misunderstanding, the fallacies she has integrated over lifetimes. There is no changing the character, although the character is always changing. Life sees to that with its rich painful sweet but highly educational experiences.

What happens though, when the character’s myths are seen, are understood, are viewed in the light of truth? I know, the word ‘truth’ is not accurate, but it’s close enough for this mystic’s musing. The more infinite aliveness is lived as what is, dreamland and dreamworld, the less power this human’s delusions have to override the naturally rhythmic, yet commonly syncopated design. Seen, unresisted, embraced and befriended, they simply aren’t given any validity. They are seen for what they are: mistaken identity.

I find that easier to see as I’m slowed down, slow enough to deeply appreciate life – all life, its fleeting moments of happiness and awe, the certainty of pain and sorrow, all the many glimpses of our loving basis and our incredibly diverse versions of mistaken identity. It is a movement from outward comparison to simple basic being.

That’s easier these days. It used to be such a struggle, and the struggle naturally x’d-out the simplicity, pulling me back, time and again, to the embrace of a chaotic magnetic field. Simple presencing moment by moment, breath by breath, relaxes the grip of mayhem, retraining the body, mind and soul to entrain, to remember its inherent aliveness. It can’t but not, for experiencing what we are rather than what we are not, soothes the savage beast, the nervous system.

If I pull the threads to change something, that belies a thirst for something else, a me and life who aren’t getting along. It’s a damn good definition of life centered in separation. Why else would I pull the threads? To see if I can? Still the same. Because I simply do. Now that’s closer to a valid reasonless reason. Who knows where that one would take me.

Maybe I will leave the threads alone and relax, knowing that “Yes, Life has this!” My pushing back against life created the illusion that I need to struggle against life, that life is a struggle, that I have to do something, that I have to work hard to figure it out. If I stop and give it no energy and give life free rein – free reign – it can’t help but right itself, bring itself back into harmony. Life flows effortlessly when I am not efforting. Left to its own inherent beauty, love simply loves. Messing with it, no matter how tempting it is, created the mess in the first place.  

Lucid waking is not even in the same game as lucid dreaming. We don’t wake up to change the dream, to pull the threads and create differently. It’s the separate character that dreams of changing the world. Life, infinite aliveness, doesn’t ask anything, but gives everything, when we are finally willing to let it, to stand back and simply be.

Being, living the life we have, is so contrary to everything we’ve been taught that even awakened the temptation to create something different shows up. The temptation to use power, to direct power, to be someone who can, to be someone. Trusting in the reality of separation is a subtly slippery slope. Perhaps that’s what’s meant by original sin.

Like this, and want to read more? Check out my latest book, Actuality: infinity at play. It’s designed to break the spell. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY

Photograph by Joana Kruse