The Dreaming of Reality
Dreams are enough to make us believe that our own personal view of the world is somehow the secret underlying meaning for which all things happen. They are the confidence which renders meager doubt into absolute truth and hesitation into full-on action. But none of us will admit that dreams are reality, that they are not illusion, nor that they are always positive, and yet time and again we are told to live by them, to follow them, and to play the role which we have fictionalized in our heads.
Though it is separate in our understanding, the dreams of sleep and the emanations of our waking hours, are but one and the same. There is even a certain pleasure in pondering if the exotic nature of our dreams holds a meaning to the current situation in our lives. Such is the wonderment of recognizing the imaginative play of the real and the illusory, or the duality that seems to balance out life, because somewhere within the dream we believe there is a reality at which we will perhaps one day arrive, or is yet unattainable, or was even a path we did not choose to go down. So much of it comes from the belief that we need to create our future, that our efforts and our thoughts as they are, hold no power; and much of it is from the idea that our private lives are what is illusory and what we strive for outside of that is reality. 'It was like a dream', 'I thought I was dreaming', we say unwittingly after an event, or the passing of something of importance, but it is only because we have created a reality that encompasses the experience, the famous 'looking for a donkey while riding a donkey'. Even when we are awake and consciously moving about in the world, it is truly hard to know when we are dreaming, but even harder is finding out what creates illusion.
Douglas Thornton
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