DREAMS

What is a dream?

Last night I went to bed. I recall nestling underneath the covers, turning off the light, then rolling over onto my side and closing my eyes. I lay there in the quiet darkness until I lost consciousness, which is another was of saying I fell asleep. I had a dream that was partly lucid. In it, I recall seeing myself in a mirror, a smirk on my face, my eyes big and blue as I say, “Oh, I see what this is. This is a dream. I’m dreaming.” I proceeded to awake the next morning and go about my day, leading me here, now.

But what happened while I dreamt? I don’t mean about the details of my dream. What I am referring to is my conscious attention. It seems to be the case that, when we dream, nothing really changes. We feel real while we dream. At least I do. I recognized myself, the mirror made sense to me, my eyes were blue, I could understand the words I was using. To quote Leo DiCarpio’s character in Inception, “Dreams feel real while we are in them. It is only after we’ve woken up that we realize something was actually strange.” One part about dreaming that I find strange is that I act as if I am conscious while I am not. We lose consciousness when we fall asleep. So how is it that dreams seem so real, and yet aren’t? Before we get into that, first we must welcome consciousness.

What is consciousness?

As I sit here typing out these words, I can see my hands, there are cicadas buzzing off in the distance, and the soft yet firm hum of a soaring plane carries off behind them. There is a toothpick in my mouth; I chomp at it with my front teeth. My mind is focused on thinking about what is happening right now. Other than that, there isn’t anything else ‘happening’; meaning, there isn’t anything else I am conscious of.

Is consciousness our word for the experiencing of something?

There is a lot more happening right now than I could ever attend to. Technically speaking, the whole universe is happening right now. This is mind-blowing to contemplate, but every single thing in the universe just moved a bit. It all just moved again. And again. All the stars, asteroids, worm hearts, and human thoughts just changed a bit. It’s wild to imagine, but everything – possible, impossible, known, and unknown alike – is occurring right now.

My mind just flashed back to a time in May when my friend and I went to Detroit to see a Hozier concert. I find myself spontaneously recalling moments from that adventure more often than any other memory of mine. I had the best time with her there; it was a truly wonderful experience. However, I do not think about those memories – that is, I do not consciously bring them to my attention. I do not pine for them, nor do I seek them out. They just appear in to my consciousness.

They can, sometimes, capture my whole attention. That is, I will stop doing whatever it is I am doing and consciously attend to these memories. As I do so (as is happening right now), my heart floods with a heaviness; it feels like my blood got denser and is moving slower. I miss those moments in Detroit. This heaviness crawls up into my throat and grabs it, holding it gently but firmly.

What is happening to me right now?

I am both writing these words, as well as recalling an experience that occured months ago. Both are within my experience. Both are within my consciousness.

So what is consciousness?

I don’t know. But I’m wondering if it might have something to do with what we think it is. By that I mean, if we think about consciousness, we usually use words to do so. These words can cast an illusion over reality. Birds are ‘birds’ only if we decided to accept the label ‘bird’. Dreams are only ‘dreams’ if we decide they are ‘dreams’. However, to welcome something is to undermine our conclusions, to forget what we know about something and look at it from a imaginative, fundamental, and sensual perspective. To analyze it right here, right now.

Consciousness is but a word that we use to call attention to the right here, right now. And right here, right now, I am welcoming dreams.

What is dreaming?

Lying in bed, I lost consciousness. What does that mean? Maybe we can answer that question by asking what happened?

I was resting in the darkness behind my closed eyelids until I was looking in a mirror, smirking and telling myself I was “dreaming”, and then I woke up in my bed again.

That’s what happened.

But what happened?

I don’t know. It seems like nothing really happened. I guess what I am pointing at is that fact that my dream was as real as my being awake. I can recall myself looking in the mirror, and much like my Detroit memories, they are not clear or steady or detailed. I can make out larger bits, like my blue eyes and smirk, or the grey overcast of downtown Detroit. However, neither the dream nor the memory have the refined qualities that my hands do right now.

I just took a moment to rub my hands together. They feel ‘real’. So let’s welcome this.

What is real?

I am currently resting in the present moment. My guitar is next to me; I can see it out of the corner of my right eye. I know it is covered in signatures from people I have met, all in different colours, however, because my vision is focused on this laptop screen, I can’t see any of the signatures.

Are the signatures real?

I guess it depends on what we mean by ‘real’. What is real?

Real seems to be whatever is occurring right now. Stripped of as many labels as possible, I feel my fingers pressing against the keys, the tiny clicking sounds like the shuffle of a crab across a sea stone. I can feel my sight; that is, I am aware that I am seeing these words appear on the screen in front of me. This leads me to a new question:

What is aware of my sight?

My eyesight falls upon my phone (because it buzzed), and my mind determined that it was indeed my ‘phone’ that ‘buzzed’. But, again, these words are not what they represent. They merely point at what they represent. What actually happened?

I am becoming increasingly aware that I am seeing and labelling things, and it is this awareness that disappeared for a bit when I fell asleep. While I was consciously resting behind my closed eyelids, I retained my logical coherence. That is, I still had and used words to make sense of my thoughts – like dark, sleep, tired, etc. Maybe, as I fell asleep, I went where there were no words.

But then I had a ‘dream’. I can call it a dream now because it differs from what is happening right now. It has a different quality. I went to sleep, then woke up as myself. And even though I was myself in the dream, and even though I was partly aware I was dreaming while I was doing so, there still seems to be something fundamentally different about ‘dreaming’ and being ‘awake’. What is it?

Imagine we had no word for dreaming. How would anyone ever know that they had dreamt? We would simply go to sleep – that is, close our eyes and rest in the dark – until something happened (i.e. a dream), which, for all intents and purposes, would feel real until we woke up. Perhaps we may recall the incongruity of the dream experience and wonder about it. Maybe in the dream, we were stabbed in the stomach and are jolted awake by the experience, hastily checking to see if there was any damage to our abdomen. There isn’t any. So what happened?

How is it that something can both occur and not occur at the same time? How is it that I can be in Detroit, walking through a foggy city with my friend, but also be here clicking away like a crab? Which experience is real?

You may say that the clicking is real, that my fingers are real. And I would be quick to say that I agree. At least they seem to be real. But, remember, welcoming is to undermine conclusions so we can see what really is happening. So, if I welcome what is happening right now, what happens?

Nothing. Well, that isn’t true. Everything – known, unknown, possible and impossible alike – are all occurring right now. Only, for me, for my consciousness, other than the clicks, the chainsaw sheering away in the background, and my guitar out of the corner of my eye, nothing else is happening.

At this moment, something profound does become apparent. We create our realities.

This may seem untrue, but much like with my dream – how I recall going to bed, falling asleep, dreaming, then waking up – I can look back into my past and see how I got here. This, unfortunately, is very hard to do, especially with any sort of detail. However, just because we can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. I was in Detroit. Now I am here. Detroit helped get me here. These moments right now are helping me get somewhere else, too. I just don’t know where that will be. And yet, I find a profound comfort in trusting these little moments. It feels a lot like love.

We humans do this thing where we imagine some decisions to be more important than others. What to do for a living, who to marry, whether or not to be a Leafs fan (especially when they suck), these choices are important, and they seem to carry a lot of weight. In other words, they have a profound effect on what shape our lives will take.

Although this may be true, we almost never give that much credit to the moment-by-moment choices we make. We barely think about tiny things, especially if we find ourselves in a place we do not want to be in; we seek an escape as soon as possible. We desperately avoid boredom, confusion, and fear; we try as hard as we can to get inspired by something, to find something interesting to focus on. Why?

I don’t know for sure, but my gut is telling me – because I have made decisions based upon greed, too – that it is because we don’t want to take responsibility for our lives. We want freedom, wealth, fame, immortality, and yet do nothing but seek those things in words. By that I mean, we imagine labels like ‘doctor’ or ‘politician’ will grant us the power we need to be important in other peoples’ eyes; we imagine one million, two million, ten million dollars will be enough for us to live happily ever after; we even imagine that, as long as we don’t think about death, we ourselves will never die. We imagine all of these things, and never do we realize that, while we are busy imagining, we made choice after choice to not pay attention to what is actually happening right here, right now. This reminds me of a lyric of John Lennon’s: “Life’s what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”

Making plans is important. I hope to welcome ‘plans’ in a future essay (because this one’s long enough). However, when we sacrafice out of unconscious habits because we identify reality with words, we undermine our freedom. The reason why right here, right now, is so damn important isn’t because some mystic or saint or guru said so. It’s because there is never going to be anything else. This is as true as gravity. The issue is that we don’t pay enough attention to trying to see the real truth. If all we ever do is run from discomfort, which is merely focused attention, it will become all we ever do, until we do it without even realizing it, which is a complete lack of attention. Just think about how when we don’t know something these days, we utter the phrase: Google it. We run so much.

I am not saying you have to be one-hundred percent present at all times. That is ridiculously unfair to ask. However, I do feel that we must try to pay more attention to the moments that we would rather avoid. This is because, more than anything, boredom, confusion, and fear put us in the moment. It is easy, so very easy to experience joy. Part of the reason why Detroit makes me feel so sad, is because I was so happy there, and there isn’t here right now. Part of me longs to have it back.

This longing, or it’s inversion, the reaching out for labels, is what causes us so much unnecessary suffering. We need only try to be more present with ourselves to realize that we have the power to completely change our lives. Every single thing you do, say, or think, every single choice you make, large or small, ever single moment of your life matters. All we need to do is accept this, and suddenly, pow, something incredible occurs to us:

We realize we are dreaming.

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