On dreams and awakening

So why do I always check my statistics before I post a new entry?  If I am not writing for an audience, why do I care if anybody is reading this?  I suppose it is natural for a teacher to wonder when he will be granted his students.  That sounds like quite a mouthful does it not?

I have been studying A Course In Miracles for some time now.  About three years to be exact.  It contains a lot of information about what it means to be a teacher and what it means to be a student.  The main thrust of this is that the teacher student relationship is always perfectly reciprocal.  ACIM says that what you teach is what you learn, and so what you see in your students is what you learn about yourself.  And so the teaching and learning relationship is really about looking at your brother or sister and seeing myself reflected there.  The real bottom line is that there is only one consciousness that needs to be awakened.

The expansion of the consciousness will be able to save the earth.  That is my core belief about teaching and learning.  This world that we create is a classroom and the lesson we learn is the expansion of the consciousness.

In dreams I have had recently, upon remembering the dream, I can see that the lesson was I should have recognized in the dream that it was a dream.  One of my dreams was about swimming up a stepped series of rice paddies surrounded by snow with a polar bear and a pool raft.  The polar bear was not dangerous, but he was relatively unconcerned with the mission of swimming up the steps.  I was trying to keep the raft and the bear and the whole production in order and I was trying to move the entire procession up the mountain.  There were other human characters who entered and left the dream.

The dream was so vivid.  So incredibly vivid.  And I remember feeling very strongly the urgency of continuing up the stepped terraces of rice patties.  But at no point did it occur to me that I was in a dream.  And so upon awakening, I remembered this dream, and the lesson I received was that I should have recognized the dream for what it was.

And so there is the rub.  It is exactly that same realization that will awaken us from the state of illusion that we are living in right now.  Yes you too.  You are reading this.  How did that happen?  How strange that you stumbled upon this text.  It appears nowhere in any book or search engine.  It's only purpose is to ask you to ask yourself, am I dreaming now?  And the even deeper level of this, your consciousness and mine are the same.  It is also I that must now ask myself the same question.

So who, in a dream, do we call upon to awaken?  It is our same consciousness right?  Think of a vivid dream that you have experienced recently.  Take your mind back to that moment in the dream and meditate on the feelings that you were having in that dream.  Now imagine that you in that state of dreaming realized that you were in the middle of a dream.  Who would you call upon to awaken?  Where does that being live?  IN another dimension?  Another reality?  Feel the water, touch the polar bear.  Are they not as real as the material in the consciousness you are experiencing now?

So now ask the same question.  If you were right now to realize you are in a dream, who would you call upon to awaken?  You could have this very conversation in a dream and still not realize that it is a dream.  You could read these words and dismiss them as abstractions.  But that's just it.

And so we are called to wake up.

The awakening from a dream does not depend on the resolution of all of the dramas contained in the dream.  Think of a dream of a building with a flood on the bottom and a fire on the top.  Think of the chaos, the lost loved ones, the injuries and the frustration.  These matters do not need to be resolved to wake up.  There is no long process required.  There is no need to tie up the loose ends, to solve the quest, to find the solution.  No, upon awakening, the dream simply dissolves and even if we can remember it, we can see that the whole of it never was.

Now think of your life situation.  You stress about your job, your relationships, the election, the wars, the environmental calamity.  All of this.  Do we need to solve all of this to wake up from the dream?  No.  We just need to wake up.

And so I write this and I come back and I look to see if anyone has read this.  I look to see if anyone had left a comment.  I look to see if there is someone else out there, or in here, who is dreaming the same dream.  That will be my teacher.  That will be my student.  I suppose I look because I want someone to help me wake up, and I guess that's just the long and short of it.