I have always loved dreaming.  Sometimes, I go to sleep just so I can dream – and often, to finish a dream.  Yes, finish my dreams.  I have always had very vivid dreams and lucid recollections of them. At the risk of sounded cliché or crazy, I will say that my dreams are so real that it seems like they transport me.  Arguably, they feel as real when I am in them as my perceived reality feels when I am in it.

When I was kid, I pictured a TV in my head as I was falling asleep (no wonder my parents took our TV away for a few years).  As I fell asleep, I would ‘flip through the channels’ and choose what I wanted to dream about.  I would skip through the scary ones and settle on the the ones that made me feel good.  It wasn’t until much later in life that I realized that this was uncommon. It served me well.  Though, I don’t have to do it anymore, I sometimes will for fun and nostalgia.

Now, I can fall asleep to finish a dream from the night (or nap) earlier.  Usually, I see where the dreams take me and go along for the ride, but when I know I am dreaming, I can dictate what happens next, when it ends, or who will appear in it.

As a result of my connections to my dreams, sometimes the distinctions between my perceived reality and my dreams blur.  I often do things in my dreams that I need to do in my reality and then I think they have actually been done.

Recently, I read the following passage in Mysticism and the New Physics by Michael Talbot (page 6 in my copy)

“I may dream that I am sitting at a table having breakfast and talking with my friends, but when I wake, I know that both I and my friends are part of the continuum of the dream. To say that there are many ‘consciousnesses’ in the dream is merely a semantic distinction. All the people in the dream are illusions. They …are constructions of consciousness”

Interesting and provocative.

What does that say about reality and consciousness?  Could it be. . . that saying there are many consciousnesses in reality is also a semantic distinction and that people in reality are constructions of one consciousness?  Illusions. . .?