The Common Dream

 Most often what we call dreams are a kind of escapist fantasy. There is something about our lives we don’t like or which we find difficult to accept and so, to get away from it and to cushion ourselves from the unpleasant effects we manufacture dreams in our heads. This kind of dream  is an idea, a picture with which we console ourselves for the unsatisfying life we happen to be leading.

 

But is it possible to have a dream which is not an illusion or a fantasy, but rather, a vision which  serves as an inspiration, giving you direction in life, a dream that flows out of your very being. It is not something that you manufacture in your head. Rather, when you look at it in silence you see that an inner dream is something that arises out of nowhere and nothing. Like a mysterious story it develops out of the air and without quite knowing how, you find yourself becoming a part of it. Perhaps you could say that a dream in the sense that I refer to it here, is actually a vision, something which is much larger than that which comes out of your narrow personal wishes. It seems to come out of the very fabric of existence in the same way that the earth has come out of “nothingness”, the way  the stars, the other planets, the sky itself, have arisen from the void.

 

Perhaps the confusion and the feeling of being lost which so many of us experience in life today, arise from this – from out  of the sensation  of having  lost contact with one’s dream. A friend of mine once actually dreamed that she was trying to remember a  melody which she used to sing as a child which she seemed to have forgotten in adulthood. However  hard she tried, she couldn’t recall the song any more.  Perhaps a dream is like a song or a melody that runs through your veins and sometimes you forget how the music goes. I have a feeling many of us are like that. We have forgotten how to sing. We have lost touch with the true melody of our lives.This is why we feel lost and confused so often and find ourselves running round in circles. Without knowing it we are attempting to  retrieve the melody of our lives.

 

Are we all born with a dream? I think so. It seems to me that we are all part of a dream which starts to unfold for us the moment we are born. Sometimes it seems to me that all of us are part of the same dream, a dream which has to do with happiness, with being creative, with enjoying life with each other in a way we have never done before. It is a dream which involves our coming together again like members of a lost family, finding their way to each other after thousands of years.To know it and feel it, to do your bit to realise the “dream that wants to be dreamed”  - isn’t this what fulfillment is about?

 

And yet, the sad thing is we wander around lost in our own personal fantasies and illusions, isolated from the rest, cut off from each other. Our personal ambitions and desires are so exaggerated that there is no more room for other people in our dreams – at the most there is space for one or two of our family members or close friends. Living separately as we do, dreaming our own petty, restricted dreams we have forgotten that we are part of the whole, forgotten our connections with each other.The dream of the earth, of the universe seems to be falling apart.

 

Is it possible in these brash, cynical, and fast paced times, to make space for something essential which could possibly transform the nature of our lives? Like a few others who think about these things, I too wonder. Is it too late? Are we, as a species, beyond redemption? Have we already drifted too far apart to find our way back to each other, back to a space where we can make each other whole?

 

This is one of those questions the answer to which lies deep within. Each of us needs to see if we  can once again discover the inner dream which will merge into the outer vision which we can make a reality if we want to. To do that requires us to journey deep down to the spot within us where a YES is waiting to be discovered under layers of conditioning, under layers of fear, mistrust and cynicism which have been preventing us from participating wholeheartedly in the story of life. A “yes” to the process which gave birth to us, yes to love, yes to a completely new relationship with each other. And if we're lucky enough to find it, we need to be still with it, to treasure the space and allow that yes to guide us back to the whole.

Uma

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Chandran]

I was reminded to a line from a Laurens van der Post book in which he quotes an old Bushman as saying ' There is a dream that dreams through us. There is a dream that dreams us.'

[Uma]

Chandran, I love that quote.