What if life really was a dream and there were only two waking states: “dreaming wide-awake” along-side of “dreaming dead asleep.” Assuming life to be “but a dream” what would it mean to become awake verses be asleep?
The general belief is that we wake-up from sleep to experience the real world. That belief would rule out the possibility we ever awaken from a dreaming state if is assumed we awaken from subconscious sleep to conscious daily living.
Alarm goes off, out of bed, off to work or school we go. This is unmistakably hard core everyday reality many of us face. Bills need to be paid and challenges met. Questioning what state we’re in doesn’t put food on the table.
That’d be true if asking fundamental questions doesn’t matter at the end of the day. What if it could matter?
Suppose there’s two kinds of nonsense drawers? One that gets filled with the right kind of bull and the other with the same old moonshine?
To proceed a leap of faith might be needed. Let’s assume there might be an unexpected payoff tucked away in that bull drawer stuffed with our imaginative speculations that only needs a little rumination to coax out.
We’ll pretend we’re stuck in a live-wire dream called “life.” What might be the difference it’d make to wake-up to the “fact” we’ve been in a dream state while going about our daily business? Like it now appears we’ve been rowing our little boats downstream like crazy watching our days pass like river bank trees as if there’s no tomorrow.
It might matter if we’re ultimately clueless as to who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we’re headed even though having been told only the lost don’t know. What if it is true that what we don’t know verses what we do know should be the focus of our concern?
Why might it make a difference to sort this out? For starters, if “it is what it is” can’t be known because it is a dream state, we might stop wasting time trying to figure such things out.
What if the void, the pure emptiness that supposedly might be, is the real reality and this dream state just means that in order to have any experience at all, emptiness needs to be compressed down into some-thingness that could be called “the dream?” For lack of a better term, of course.
If so, to be truly awake in terms of reality would be to have an experience-free experience if to have an experience of reality means existence is distilled emptiness. Saying “having an experience of reality” seems to imply experience isn’t the same thing as reality itself.
Dreaming wide-awake would be like experiencing a part of the ocean of emptiness reduced to a drop of experience. With assumed awareness that drop of experience is all that can be known, a door might be cracked-open to dreaming wide-awake.
Making the important point that while it is impossible to be fully awake and know it, it is possible to be partially awake and know it. If so, it seems possible to dream wide-awake instead of dead-asleep.
Having entered such a cloud of unknowing, bills still need to be payed and food to put on the table. The question is can that happen with a little less worry? Why?
Choices made now for future outcomes might be made less worrisome when dreaming wide-awake because we no longer hold ourselves accountable if we can only know as in “dream” in part. If dreaming wide-awake sounds better than no dream at all, then a way forward could be ours.
If so, partial knowledge experienced is better than total knowledge unknown. While having “no worries” may seem too idealistic, having less worries seems more attainable if partial knowledge means the risk factor inherent in every decision made is now laid bare.
Hopefully, going forward while dreaming wide-awake would then mean there’s less chance of getting blind-sided because the assumed need for total knowledge of our situation has been taken off the table. In other words, certainty is no longer thought to be needed for knowledge.