Is Your Dream a Royal Road to Unconsciousness or Just a Bubble
There are many philosophies and arguments about the dream. Most eastern theories exist on the strand that life is nothing but a dream while western theories treat dreams as silly imaginations or just foam and bubbles. Science tries to demeans dream as nothing but a chaotic turbulence, the arbitrary byproducts of automatic bodily processes that occur in the brain while we slumber
Eastern View
One of man’s greatest unsolved problems is the mystery of dreams. It is said that ‘Life is nothing but a dream.’ During our dreams we do not perceive we are dreaming.
We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we perceive it was a dream. Only after the remarkable awakening will we realize that this is the great dream.
William Wordsworth describes our birth as “a sleep and a forgetting”
They even asked some Critical Questions
How do I know that enjoying life is not a delusion?
How do I know that in despising death we are not like individuals who got lost in early childhood and do not know the way home?
This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief
-Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi
Dream within a dream
How do I recognize, when I experience something I claim “waking up,” that it is actually a waking up to “reality” as opposed to simply waking up into another level of a dream?
“The Butterfly Dream” is the most famous story in the Zhuangzi one of two foundational texts of Daoism.
The transformation of material things
Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction.
“Life is a Dream” may be regarded as the most universal in its theme. It seeks to teach a lesson that may be learned from the philosophers and religious thinkers of many ages-that the world of our senses is a mere shadow, and that the only reality is to be found in the invisible and eternal.
— Pedro Calderon De La Barca says in Life Is a Dream
Royal Road to The Unconscious
Freudian dream analysis theory defines a dream as a “royal road to the unconscious”, dreams allow for accessibility to parts of the mind that are inaccessible through conscious thought.
Freud, the father of psychoanalysis also believed that unexpressed emotions never die, they are buried alive and will come forth later in an uglier way. Freud also said that The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life
You yourself know best how lately you awoke from that You know you went to sleep on? — Why, have you never dreamt the like before? Dreams are rough copies of the waking soul Yet uncorrected of the higher Will, And all this stage of earth on which we seem Such busy actors, and the parts we play’d, Substantial as the shadow of a shade, And Dreaming but a dream within a dream!
-Life Is A Dream, by Pedro Calderon de la Barca
Thoughts are Things
Thoughts are things and they impact our physical reality that nourishes the soul, dreams, belief and possibilities
“Why, human thought is a real element, a real force, darting out like electricity from every man’s or woman’s mind, injuring or relieving, killing or curing, building fortunes or tearing them down, working for good or ill, every moment, night or day, asleep or awake, carving, moulding and shaping people’s faces and making them ugly or agreeable.”
― Prentice Mulford, Thoughts Are Things
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?
-Edgar Allan Po
Carl Jung on Dream
So are dreams our subconscious brain going wild or what Carl Jung argued that they offer profound insights into our problems and the inner map of the dreamer’s future psychological evolution, a message of the unconscious. They do not deceive, they do not lie, they do not distort or disguise … They are invariably seeking to express something that the ego does not know and does not understand.
But do not stick around for the appropriate dream to come; do not wait at all, time will never be right; Start from where you are, whatever ability and tools you have, you will get better as you go along — because thoughts are things, and life is a dream, and together they are the world, itself.
