Page 264 - For Men of Understanding

THE WORLD IN DREAMS

For you, reality is all that can be touched with the hand and seen with the eye. In your
dreams you can also "touch with your hand and see with your eye", but in reality, then
you have neither hand nor eye, nor is there anything that can be touched or seen.
There is no material reality that makes these things happen except your brain. You are
simply being deceived.
What is it that separates real life and dreams from one another? Ultimately, both forms
of living are brought into being within the brain. If we are able to live easily in an
unreal world during our dreams, the same can equally be true for the world we live in
while awake. When we wake up from a dream, there is no logical reason not to think
that we have entered a longer dream called "real life". The reason we consider our
dream a fancy and the world 'real' is only a product of our habits and prejudices. This
suggests that we may well be awoken from the life on earth, which we think we are
living right now, just as we are awoken from a dream.

nificant evidence of this is the way we imagine the existence of things that in
fact do not exist in our dreams. In dreams, we can experience very realistic
events. We can fall down the stairs and break a leg, have a serious car acci-
dent, get stuck under a bus, or eat a heavy meal and feel satiated. Events sim-
ilar to those experienced in daily life are experienced in dreams too, with the
same persuasiveness and rousing the same emotions.
A person who dreams of being knocked down by a bus can open his eyes

in a hospital-again in his dream-and realize that he is disabled. But all this
would remain a dream. Also, he can dream of dying in a car crash, that angels
of death retrieve his soul, and his life in the Hereafter begins.
The images, sounds, feeling of hardness, pain, light, colours-all the feelings
pertaining to the event he experiences in his dream-are perceived very sharply.
They seem as natural as the ones in real life. The cake he eats in his dream
satiates him, although it is a mere perception, because feeling satisfied is a per-
ception too. At that moment, however, this person is lying in his bed. There

are really no stairs, no traffic, no buses, no cake, because the dreamer experi-

262 For Men of Understanding