What is Reality – Are Dreams Really Just Dreams?

Are dreams really just dreams and a figment of our imagination – something unreal? When you goto sleep and have a dream it feels very real in that moment. The moment you wake up, only then do you realize it was a dream. However, you are still affected by it upon awakening. If something happened in a dream, and you believe it was a message, how can you “know” about it even after you’re back in the real world? If it really was a dream, you in “reality” shouldn’t be able to know about it at all, since it’s not technically “real”. So if it’s not “real” then how can you even remember it? There should be no crossover at all between the dream world, and the real world if there really is only a “real” world that exists. But this is not the case. Usually when we wake up, we’ll feel our heart pounding if we had a nightmare. Or we might feel happy if it was pleasant. And it may even affect our performance in life if it was emotional charged.

Dream experiences, like life experiences also leave impressions and memories on our psyche. When we have a life experience, it is stored in our subconscious. At any time we can recall the memory and relive that experience. One cannot conclude that a dream is just a dream, and life is “reality”. How can you know that for sure? In your dream, you don’t say, this is just a dream! You are so engrossed within the dream, that you take it as real too. It’s only upon awakening that you realized it was just a dream.

However, dreaming and reality is really a continuum. To use an analogy (which is what I like to do often), when you make a phone call to someone overseas, even though they are thousands of miles away you can still communicate with them and touch them. How can you touch someone thousands of miles away, if you are communicating with them through air, sound waves, and electricity? Essentially that’s all we’re doing. We’re talking to someone through a device (an invented name called a telephone), creating sound, and then transmitting it in the form of a message through thousands of miles of space, and air. Now, can you see air? Can you see sound? Can you see electricity and space? If you consider space, air, and sound as not real just because you cannot see it, how can you explain making a call to someone, and touching them? Does that mean your touching them in some way is not real too? Does that mean you have to travel thousands of miles to see them just so you can tell them what you’re feeling so you can get the message across, hence making it real?

So in the same way, if someone can touch you from something “non-real” like space and sound, then a dream can also in a sense touch you too. The non real touches the real, and the real can touch the non-real. Therefore, is the dream really just a dream? If it’s affecting us in any way, then it cannot just be a dream. It cannot just be an isolated case otherwise they would not affect us in any way, including our memories of them.

Dreams are REAL. Thoughts are REAL. Reality is just a continuation of a dream, albeit a persistent one. It’s an illusion – a well crafted magic trick. It’s a veil pulled over our eyes, to give us the appearance of something tangible, in a place we call “reality”.

Thoughts CREATE reality whether it be in a dream or in “life”. Dreams are a projection of our deepest desires, fears, and joys (feelings). Reality is also a projection of our deepest desires, fears and joys. Therefore if our thoughts create reality, and we believe everything to be real, then that means if we change our thoughts (or beliefs at a deeper level), we can change our reality in both the dream world, and the real world. Thoughts are POWERFUL. We are what we think and feel, literally every moment of witnessing.

So essentially the only thing that connects the dream world and the real world is THOUGHT and FEELING. Without thought and feeling you wouldn’t even know you’re alive. You cannot even project without thought, so even SIGHT would be impossible without thought first. After all, what we see around us as the “world” is only an appearance/projection of the mind. Just like a movie projector, projecting the film onto the screen.

It’s meaningless to say dreams are fake, and life is real because as we’ve seen, neither are possible without projection of thought first. They are part of an eternal continuum of thought processes, just like a stream of water in a river. The constant “flowing” of thoughts gives us the illusion of reality whether we’re in a dream or not.

What does all this mean for us? Well it means that we should really PAY ATTENTION to our dreams AND our life and not be so quick to assume we are safe when we “wake up”. The real waking up happens when you realize that you are beyond just the dream world and the real world. When you wake up from this, and see that you are witnessing all of it, you start to see THROUGH the illusion. You start to see things as they ARE. You no longer even think in terms of dreams, or reality. Rather, you start to see it as part of a spectrum – a spectrum of consciousness. Although, even though everything is a modification of consciousness, consciousness itself is never touched because it’s the substratum of everything. Just like when the sun’s rays shines into the ocean and is reflected to create your image in the water, even if you were to splash the water, the sun itself is never “touched” because it’s beyond all of it. Even though, it’s creating the reflection in the first place….

The only TRUTH or reality then, is CONSCIOUSNESS. The underlying fabric of the universe. Even though dreams, and life appear to be real, they are none other than consciousness (like the Sun) projecting itself into manifestation and creating the illusion (reflected image).

However, does that mean that reality is not valid? Can we simply negate the world as unreal, and forget it even exists? Not necessarily. For if we want to know the TRUTH (Consciousness), then we have to use it’s own projection (our mind) – which is technically “unreal” according to our logic. How can we use something “unreal (dreams/life)” to know the “real” which is Consciousness? Just like we concluded that dreams themselves cannot be unreal, and is just as valid as life, we’d have to also conclude that LIFE and DREAMS are just as VALID as CONSCIOUSNESS itself in order for there to maintain a continuum. For if this continuum is broken, then we might as well falsify consciousness itself, and just live in illusion for eternity and never truly “wake up”.

So it looks like if we truly want to awaken to consciousness, we have to first see things for what they are – an appearance, a modification, a shadow. But we also have to realize that in order to awaken, we cannot just negate the world as unreal either. So what do we do? If we cannot see the world as real OR unreal, how do we really wake up? Well, it seems in order to know this as more than an intellectual stimulation of ideas, we must immerse ourselves in that TRUTH first as consciousness. We have to have FAITH, based on this belief, that consciousness alone is real. For it’s ALL we have. If we keep seeking outside of ourselves in the dream world and real world, we may be deluded into thinking we’re awake when in fact we’re not. The dream/real world may trick us and keep us in perpetual self-ignorance. We may never know truth, even though we believe we do. But once things in our life or dreams start to crumble like dust, it’ll again jolt us into this state of contemplation – that anything real CANNOT be temporary and can only cause us endless misery. If it really was the TRUTH, we would not be affected by all these mere acts that play out, like Mr. Hamlet in his sililoquays. The TRUTH, as we discussed earlier, is UNTOUCHED like the shining SUN. How can something disintegrate if it’s the very essence of it. When your Gold watch breaks, do you say, my Gold is ruined, or do you say that my watch is ruined? You in fact (usually if you’re a sane person) say the latter because the Gold itself is unmodified, but the actual form (watch) which is a modification of Gold is broken from its original form. But Gold itself stays intact. You don’t say, my Gold is broken. If anything you would say, my watch is no longer a watch, it’s just plain Gold without form (if you’re a bit of a geek).

Therefore, we can say the same thing about ourselves. We can say, we are body and mind, when in fact, we are just a modification of consciousness – consciousness as the form of a self. Even if the body or mind collapses, we can never be anything OTHER than Consciousness itself. So is it safe to assume that if we want to know our true nature that we would have to contemplate on consciousness first? We’d have to use our “unreal” bodies and minds (which are microcosmic units of consciousness reflected infinitely in manifestation like rays of a Sun, or waves of an Ocean) to get in touch with consciousness. We’d have to direct our minds using our conscious AWARENESS to reflect back onto ITSELF so that it can know it’s true nature – which is consciousness.

So how does that relate back to dreams, and what is reality? We established earlier that dreams are just are real as the real world. And we also established that the real AND dream world also aren’t unreal relative to consciousness (Truth). But in order to know the Truth as it is, and to know this beyond the intellect, we must “know” consciousness as it is. And we can only do that if we reflect back onto consciousness itself using our minds consciously. In order to connect at that level, we must go beyond the world of the dream, and the real world to it’s essence (consciousness). And since the dream world and the real world are projections of our thoughts we must be able to transcend thought. But we can only do that if we use our “unreal” minds to witness our thoughts to get to the Source of them. Once consciousness is known for what it is – what is always was in fact – then we will no longer see the dream world OR the real world as separate. We’ll see them as a process, unfolding before us while we witness it without becoming identified with it. The dream, real, and consciousness then, become ONE.