It's Just a Dream

How to use dreams to become wise.

A dream my father was good at juggling. I mean, crazy good. 

Everyone, especially me, was positively overjoyed by his superhuman dexterity. There he stood, in the threshold of my childhood living room (where else?), juggling an uncountable number of bean-bags for us, the audience of ten—no, a hundred. Anyway, tears of rapture obviously streamed down our faces. 

This is normal. I don’t have to tell you how normal it is.

My childhood living room morphed suddenly into a house I lived in when I was a teenager. My dad would go from looking about 40 to looking his current age. Nothing to see here. Wait…

Only on waking did I notice how strange everything was.

“Waking up” is more than just “regaining consciousness” (whatever that means). Waking up is to realize the more coherent (but not totally coherent) dream of waking life.

Modern neuroscientists (very smart, I hear) report that we don’t just look at the world and see it. We “see” our internal narratives and expectations (dreams) trying to map themselves on what has helped us survive in the past (the Darwinian view of “reality”). This plain fact is revealed by how easily we are bamboozled by illusions and biases. Drift on a swaying boat for a few hours, and after landfall, you will “dream” that you are still rocking. The unconscious expectation still seeps through the cracks of your waking mind. This “seepage” is always happening in a million ways, just below your awareness. It is the reason your life plays out the way it does.

Even if you’re “awake,” you can “wake up” more. When you’re a child, you can’t imagine what it’s like to be an adult. Once you’re an adult, being a child was like a weird dream. If I ever become wise (fingers crossed), my current outlook, as reasonable as it seems, would seem like the vague memory of a weird dream. The wise person is to the adult what the adult is to the child. There is no upper limit to this process of waking up. 

It all seems to point to one ultimate dreamer: "I am that I am," whose dream we all inhabit, discovered independently by many different peoples in many different places. As Kanye West said, "This is a God dream."

Some people think the “ultimate dream” is the material world; science, or mathematics or rocks or something. Those people are stuck in a materialist dream. They’re like if I was trying to count the number of bean bags my dad was juggling to master my dream. Really, I just needed to wake up. That fact, unfortunately, only becomes clear after you do.

Those same people also make a strange claim: dreams (specifically the type of dream you have when you sleep) are random static of your neurons firing. Anyone who knows anything about dreams knows that’s a ridiculous theory. I can always find the meaning of my dreams, if I just think about them for a second (don’t ask me about the opening dream).

Dreams show you the narratives you hide from yourself during the day. You play them out fully while you’re asleep and paralyzed so they don’t get you killed or shamed. Dreams are private windows into your animating spirits. If you dare to look, you can bring to awareness your own maladjusted myths.

Keep a dream journal. Start an open dialogue with your depths. Dreams are not trying to “hide” anything from you. They are doing their best to communicate. They use images since they don’t have language. To communicate with them is like talking to a sage who only speaks in Zen Koans. Through them, you get mystical hints how to wake up from whatever bad dream your life currently is. Which is to say, become wise.

Jacob dreamed about a cosmic ladder with angels climbing up and down. That infinite process of waking up, itself, is heaven: coming ever closer to the dreamer that dreamed up our cosmos, but never quite attaining union.

“Jacob’s Ladder” by William Blake, 1806. Commissioned by Thomas Butts (lol)

If Jacob dreamed a dream like that, that must mean he was very “awake.” Wise. You might think that would mean he got along swimmingly with his family and was a very good boy. That's not what happened. Actually, the opposite. Jacob means “heel grabber.” To try to align your dreams with the final dreamer, you will at first behave in all sorts of inexplicable and deranged ways. 

Waking up—pulling unconscious into conscious—means playing out your dreams. Not just on the harmless internal stage of sleep, but out here where other dreamers live. That process will be full of mistakes and betrayals. Those will painfully correct your dreams. That’s why Jacob changes his name to Israel, which means “we who wrestle with God.”

To wrestle with dreams is to begin a journey. The end of that journey is the sort of wisdom that can house generations of thriving descendants. That's what we're all trying to do: build a dream-stead that our children and our children's children can live in.

If you're like me, the dream of your family has been disturbed somewhere along the way. You inherited it, so it’s not your fault. But it’s still your duty to go down into the depths, find out what kind of cleaved demons lurk in those shadows, and then wrestle them into the light. It's really an impossible task for one individual to redeem an entire family lineage, but it's one that we're all nevertheless trusted with.

There are at least two places to begin: understanding your nighttime dreams (which we just covered). Then, look at your dreams (hopes and goals) for your future.

Future dreams are actually pretty similar to nighttime dreams. With them, we cast our narrative onto the world and hope to make it manifest. If they resonate—that is to say, if they’re true—they will reshape the world. To the extent they are untrue—unexamined wishful thinking, partly hidden from ourselves, we will be endlessly frustrated.

It helps me to read about great dreamers. The Red Book was Carl Jung’s transcribed dreams. It’s a deeply strange book. Each of his dreams was so much more profound than the most profound dream I've ever had. That makes sense: his dreams we so true that we all live, in part, in Jung's dream. He dreamt, for example, on a train in Switzerland, of blood—a tidal wave coming over the Alps. It was a premonition about the coming great wars, which, of course, he was right about. 

You know how some people can sense how a movie is going to end? In that same way, some people can sense how this whole story is going to turn out. They don't know exactly how, but they can. 

Once we become good dreamers, our dreams don't necessarily come true, although they seem to from the outside. Really, they just become more like inevitable foresight. To know, accept, and then partake in your destiny.

Dostoevsky partly attributed his literary genius to his seizures. Before he would have a seizure, he would enter a dreamlike state—an epileptic prodroma. He got closer and closer to the divine dream until it was almost unbearable. At the total climax of understanding everything, everywhere, all at once, he would have a grand mal seizure. Maybe he was just crazy. But… he wrote The Brothers Karamazov. Make of that what you will.

We have to remember: when you're dreaming, you can't imagine the ways your dream is silly. It's only when you wake up that you're able to look back and realize how incoherent it was. It doesn't happen in the other way: dreamers can't know what it's like to be awake. For those reasons, humility is step one.

Then, we can look to our sleeping dreams. Not like tea leaves to use for fortune-telling, but to understand the lies that animate us like puppets. If we seek to know them, to accept them, we will bloom into a new awakening. We will wrestle with them and become more full synchronized, integrated, and coherent. We might yet wake up, like a drunk finally sobering.

Then, the next place to look—the lighted cracks, slightly ajar—are our spontaneous desires for the future. If you’re unsure, the most honest ones have been around the longest. I've wanted to be a writer since I was eight. That’s a good place to start.

With some luck, we might stumble into a mode of being so much more awake than those around us they will think us either insane or marvel at us magically juggling a hundred balls at once.

Nobody doesn't want that. Unless, of course, they're so enthralled with their pleasant dreams that they don't want to wake up. Five more minutes?