THE GUIDE

When we sleep and dream, we find ourselves transposed to another realm ~ a realm where the world we inhabit reflects the state of our mind.

Here, we may feel lost or enraptured, terrorized or comforted, experience flying or falling, striving to get somewhere or paralyzing in pain.

We may take the ever-shifting landscapes for granted, witnessing them as a matter of fact, as we ourselves take on different roles and faces without much thought.

And when we awaken, we believe the dream to be over, and perhaps linger in confusion for a while as we orient ourselves to our old familiar world, dismissing our nightly travels into oblivion like an evaporating haze.

And so we forget, and go about our lives as though nothing of consequence had happened.

But what if we are not finished the dream, or it’s not finished with us? What if our sleep state is merely a microcosmic reflection of the lives we live out in waking reality?

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We go about our day and make subconscious pacts with others ~ I will play this particular role in your drama if you play this role in mine. Then we conjure up our desires and experience the results, for better or worse. And we curse god or fate, while deep in our minds we are busy creating our own stories....

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And then there are times when we can experience certain ‘shifts' in reality ~ moments that come without warning or reason, somehow altering an entire scene without changing a thing ~ like a color filter moving over the eyes, a trick of the light perhaps, or a change in mood, a déjà vu, or sudden knowing. But like a haze, such moments soon evaporate, and we continue onward as we had before.

Some people might label such experiences as mental aberrations to be rationalized away, to be fixed or stabilized. But for now, let’s entertain the notion that these shifts are mere glimpses into something else, something beyond the very involved cinematic dream we call life, experienced through the filters of our sensory perceptions.