Waking up and becoming lucid inside of a dream is a second order change, where one literally snaps out of a hypnotic trance in which you were identified with being a separate, contracted self, or ego, cut off and disconnected from the rest of the dreamscape. You have an expansion of identity; in full-blown lucidity you realize your identity with not only the entire dream, as it is recognized to be just your own energy projected outwards, but also with the dreamer of the dream — what I call the deeper, dreaming Self — which is who you’ve now discovered yourself to be. The question I want to investigate is, how would you dream the dream onward if you became fully lucid?
When I ask some people this question, they respond by saying they would dream of losing twenty pounds, or getting a million dollars, or something of that nature. I respond by saying that these are all dreams of the smaller self, which is the dream that they’ve now wakened out of by becoming lucid. I remind them that in becoming lucid, they’ve discovered their identity with the deeper, dreaming Self. So the question becomes, how do you imagine this deeper, dreaming Self wants to dream the dream?
Please try and imagine the following as we proceed. You’ve awakened in the dream, becoming enlightened, so to speak, but now that you’ve seen through the illusion of the separate self, you’ve realized that there is no such thing as enlightenment until everybody gets it. For when you become lucid in a dream, the boundary between yourself and others dissolves, as you realize the interconnectedness and non-separation between yourself and everybody else (all six billion others) in the dream.
So many of your fellow dream characters are so asleep, not recognizing the dreamlike nature of their reality; it is as if they have fallen under an enchantment. They’ve become absorbed in the dream and have become so identified with their roles that they’ve forgotten who they are. They are truly suffering a case of mistaken identity. They are all just aspects of you. This is the point where you step into your bodhisattva-nature, as you begin to realize that to be of service to others is to literally help yourself, as who are these others but your own true Self?
Once you’ve become lucid you see that this isn’t a dream that you are just passively watching in a detached way, but a dream in which you are actively participating in and cocreating. You realize that you can consciously step into and cooperate with the dream, helping it unfold to its highest, wherever that may be. This isn’t done from the point of view of the separate, egoic self, whose moment by moment expression is effort-full, straining, and striving, continually strategizing and manipulating the dream so as to fill its imagined sense of lack. This realization stems from a totally different center of one’s psyche, an all-embracing place of fullness, an experience totally unimaginable as long as one is identified with any reference point whatsoever.
Over time, or better yet, when you snap out of the illusion of time itself, you realize that the boundary between dreaming and waking dissolves until you recognize that life itself is the dream from which you are awakening. You begin to have the astonishing realization that the universe is actually dreaming itself awake through us and it takes the most awake and visionary among us to recognize this reality and help further the momentum of the process until it builds up a life of its own. We become agents, or representatives, of this awakening process, as we’ve realized our place in the universal dream, offering our lives in service as a conduit for this incarnating deeper, dreaming Self.
Paul Levy had a spiritual awakening in 1981, and is in private practice, assisting people through their own process of awakening. As an artist, he is creating an art happening called “Global Awakening.” Upon completing this article, he turned on the television only to hear the words “This is your dream and you deserve to have dreams come true.”
