“What
is life? 'Tis but a madness.
What is life? A
thing that seems,A mirage that
falsely gleams,Phantom joy,
delusive rest,Since is life a
dream at best,And even dreams
themselves are dreams.”
Various translations of his play into
English were made still during his lifetime, and subsequently, so it is no
surprise that some two centuries later a folk song arose to paraphrase him
(first documented in the US in the 1852): “Row, row, row your boat, gently
down the stream… Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, Life is but a dream.”
In the esoteric sense, “life is a dream”
means that to the awakened, enlightened or illuminated (a higher state of
consciousness), the normal waking state of consciousness is tantamount to a
dream. Which is why Gurdjieff stated categorically, “Man is asleep”. The
difference is compared to the normal waking state versus a dream situation in
your bed, where, as we said a few days ago, you do no harm to anyone, whereas
if you are awake in the day-to-day sense, you can and do!
But dream we do when we sleep. Despite
all the chatter and psychology and pseudo-science of dream interpretation, to
the student of Self-Awareness, dreams are of little import. Look: we go
to bed, our minds are still busy from the day’s activities, so obviously we drop
into REM sleep occasionally and dream and “create” all those fantasy worlds and
images. It’s natural. The perpetual chatter of the waking mind simply slips
into sleep – dropping way down to deep sleep, where it remembers nothing, and
then popping up for the airy dream-world like a trout catching a fly on the
surface of a lake. Awareness is gone in deep sleep, but in REM sleep, a little
Awareness is there, and it “remembers” the working of the mind, the “dream”. How
you dream – what amount of detail, or colour, or sound or recurrent themes you
have – may indicate certain things of interest, but really it is simply a
recycling of stuff already in the mind, or a recreation of elements from Imagination
– which can be very powerful, obviously. But very, very few dreams are of much
importance – most have to do with mind chatter and body chatter only – food and
sex.
I dream less on weekdays with their
stricter schedule and more practises than on weekends, when social life tends
to take over. The more you lounge, the more you dream, and vice versa. Keeping
dairies or notes of dreams only provokes more of them. We have all done this at
some time, and that should be the lesson. When we are striving to bring an
ever-increasing amount of Self-Awareness into our lives, we cannot waste
time on fantasies and dreams. It makes no sense to do that. And we already have
the explanation as to why dreams occur – highly-developed, quiet and controlled
minds have no dreams (except maybe as authentic messages from the Universe!);
uncontrolled, untrained, skittish minds will be full of dreams, remembered or
not at dawn, because that is their natural tendency.
Sleeping is for getting the best kind of
rest possible, so to quieten the mind, we will practise various exercises
already mentioned, we will have tried to leave the stomach empty before bed, we
will have clean and neat sheets and bedding and room, we will not have provoked
the mind and emotions into over-activity. We will strive to maintain Awareness
for as long as possible, and when we finally slip away to the dark world of
sleep, and come back again, we will have dreamed less, and rested more, ready
for a new day of enhancing Self-Awareness, not trying to remember and
dwell on our own self-created fantasies.
Sorry, dreamers, you are only dealing
with will ‘o’ the wisps, ignis fatuus, little fires in the wood only followed
by fools…
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