“Someday there will be a great awakening when we know that this is all a great dream.  Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman – how dense!  Confucius and you are both dreaming!  And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too.  Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle.  Yet, after ten thousand generations, a great sage may appear who will know their meaning, and it will still be as though he appeared with astonishing speed.  …
“Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased.  He didn’t know he was Chuang Chou.  Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou.  But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou.”  – Chuang Tzu

“The self dreams the double. … Once it has learned to dream the double, the self arrives at this weird crossroad and a moment comes when one realizes that it is the double who dreams the self.” –  Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power

“Indeed, perhaps what is now the REM state was the original form of waking consciousness in early brain evolution, when emotionality was more important than reason in the competition for resources.  This ancient form of waking consciousness may have come to be actively suppressed in order for higher brain evolution to proceed efficiently.  This is essentially a new theory of dreaming.” – Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience.

The basic tenet of magic is, that it’s all just a dream; that waking consciousness is but a more highly evolved and specialized facet of dream consciousness.  Dream consciousness came first evolutionarily, and waking consciousness is an outgrowth of dreaming.   Although we tend to believe that there is a vast difference between being awake and dreaming, the fact is that this is indeed merely a belief – a belief which enables us to focus our attention on waking – to isolate it and solidify it – to the exclusion of dreaming. 

We make a big deal out of the difference between waking and dreaming, but the distinction between the two states isn’t as clear as we usually imagine.  When we run past life regressions; or even just listen to music or dance – any time we are so absorbed in any activity that we lose all sense of self perceiving self and are operating on pure “flow” – we are actually closer to being in a dream state than in a waking state.  The less we are consciously controlling what is happening, but rather just letting it happen by itself, the closer we are to dreaming.  The act of  “going to sleep” is just a thought form we use to convince ourselves that we’re not dreaming half the time anyway.   We use the acts of “going to sleep” and “waking up” to separate out the two modes – to make a distinction where in fact little distinction exists.  It’s like two people who have been living together for years finally getting married – it’s a symbolic thing, there’s not much objective difference between the two states.  It’s as if we made up some sort of distinction like “write with your right hand on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays” and “write with your left hand on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays”.  If we got everyone to do this and make it an automatic habit, then after a few centuries the human race would have invented another distinction in consciousness (indeed, this is in fact what different cultures do).  People would find that life on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays was very different from life on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  But it’s all an artificial distinction. 

Ancient humans were doing what we would consider dreaming as their everyday state of mind.  There wasn’t as sharp a distinction then between being awake and being asleep.  Then people slept in snatches, as infants do, and they alternated hunting off and on with dozing.  Most of their hunting was done in a state of mind that we would call sleepwalking (a trance state).   They weren’t just wandering around aimlessly looking for game to hunt:  they could sense what was out there and could project their consciousness forward into their prey telepathically and so anticipate the prey’s movements.  We moderns can still do this now and then, as for example when on the prowl for sex, or when we sense a business opportunity, especially when we feel lucky; but our hunter forebears relied on this intuitive faculty to eat every day.   In other words, ancient hunters were more connected to their world, more psychically attuned, than we moderns are.  They were able to pick up information from their environment which eludes us.  But on the other hand ancient humans had less sense of a self at center than we do, just as we moderns have less sense of there being a solid, separated “us” there when we are dreaming compared to when we are awake.  

Waking consciousness is something which evolves; which can be seen to evolve even between human generations.  That’s why people “back then” seem so naďve to us – they were dreaming more than we moderns do.  We’re more awake than our forebears.   Consider too how wide-awake First World societies are compared with most Third World societies:  First Worlders living in the Third World tend to find the natives to be “irresponsible” and spaced-out, when in fact all they’re doing is dreaming more in their everyday waking lives than hup-hup First Worlders do.

The point is that there isn’t as hard-and-fast a difference between being awake and dreaming as we are accustomed to believe.   It is exactly that belief (that what we do when we are awake is more important than what we do when we are dreaming) which maintains the rigidity of wakefulness – the persuasiveness of the lie that what is happening to us when we are awake is “real” – that is to say, that there is some separated “us” to which things are happening – rather than that the whole shebang is just our projection.   That “us” is symbolized by the thought forms of a body, and an outside world in which things happen to that body. 

When we are dreaming, we have a body also, and a world outside of it.  That body and world seem perfectly real while we are dreaming, but when we wake up we realize that it was all just a dream.  The interpretation that we have a physical body when we are awake is also merely a belief, exactly like the interpretation that we have a body while we’re dreaming is merely a belief.    While we are dreaming our dream bodies operate with all five of the usual physical senses.  Therefore, we really don’t have any objective criteria for deciding, at any given moment, whether we are awake or asleep.  In precisely the same fashion, our body when we are awake and the world surrounding it are just a dream.  There is no objective difference whatsoever.  That’s what other people and our society do for us:  assure us that we are indeed awake and that what we are experiencing is “real”.

Ancient humans were more magical than we are (not as separated).  They permitted dream material to freely intrude into their awareness, whereas we moderns have mechanisms in place to immediately repress any such incursion into our reality.  When dream stuff intrudes into waking consciousness we get moments of discontinuity.   Any sudden start or shock or fright is a rift in our sense of continuity – or better said, a mad grab for our sense of continuity to mask such a rift.   We have to say that discontinuity is unreal, and that people who experience discontinuity are crazy, or tired and overworked and in need of rest.  We have to get everyone to validate this pretense – to pretend that they’re not experiencing discontinuity, in order for society to exist.  Society and waking consciousness are just two names for the same thing:  in dreams, we are basically alone.  In point of fact we’re just as alone when we’re awake, but we stupidly believe that we are sweating and puffing and bleeding as part of a team.  Thus being awake can be defined as the pretense that we’re not alone (that we are part of a society). 

The reason why the dream state is so mutable is that there is little sense of separatedness in it.  It is importance – the sense of urgency, of being driven, of being uptight – which stabilizes attention.  We are able to focus our attention when we are awake because of our socially-conditioned striving and constant intranquility within ourselves that keeps us awake.  Waking consciousness is a clenching up within oneself – a moment-to-moment flinching from death – embodied in an interminable, self-referent inner chatter every second we are awake.  By contrast, the attention we have in dreams has little importance to it because we don’t think so much; but as a result we can’t control what we will pay attention to (what will happen next) as well in dreaming as we can when we are awake.  What we experience when dreaming is far more immediate, vivid, gripping, and intense than in the ordered waking world.  It all happens so fast that we can’t separate ourselves from it as we can and do in waking life.  We don’t get weekends off and two weeks paid vacation in the world of dreams, and there’s no TV to watch – no way to make it stop happening or pretend it’s not happening.  We must either be on the qui vive every instant; or else stand there in a stupor; but we are inevitably so caught up in the dream, so much a part of it, that although we are experiencing our feelings in symbolic form in dreams, there is little sense of separatedness there.  Mind exists, but it’s not developed.
 Mind cannot develop until there is a clearly defined sense of separatedness, which gives mind a pause, a moment’s rest or leisure, in which it can reflect on itself.  It’s that moment’s rest or lull which gives birth to a sense of time and linear continuity. 

(continued ... )