If you dream about building a castle, when you awaken you will have nothing. If you dream about a love affair, when you awaken you will have nothing but longing. But if you dream about painting, or writing music, or solving a riddle, when you awaken you will have the answers you need in this world. So is it true with the world above this one.
Dreams have been an alternative way to understand consciousness since the earliest philosophies, playing major part in Vedic, Hindu and Taoist religions. In a dream we are faced with consciousness that is unaware of any other world, but on waking, we understand how our experience of consciousness was limited during the dream, fully functioning, with the ability to reason and act, yet unaware of the dream state.
Even more surprising is the lucid dream. Anyone who has experienced a lucid dream has an entirely different dream experience, because in a lucid dream the dreamer becomes conscious of the fact that he or she is dreaming, and is fully capable of reasoning and acting in the dream world, with memories of the waking world being as accessible as during waking hours.
What better analogy for enlightenment or higher consciousness is there than a lucid dream? In one particular lucid dream, I became conscious during the dream as I looked for an exit from the dream. When I had finally made my way back to my bedroom (in the dream), I was able to consciously open my eyes, maintaining consciousness continuously from inside the dream world into the waking world. It is said that likewise, a Taoist master can ascend to a higher realm through the top of his head, during meditation.
During a dream, especially a lucid dream, we are aware of a physical existence in the dream. We can act just as in the waking world, and often seek to protect our dream bodies from harm.
But what is inside our dream head? It seems like a funny question, yet when we dream we are fully formed beings, with arms and heads, and I have seen myself in the mirror in dreams, thus confirming that all of the normal appendages do exist in the dream world.
Yet we are taught that inside of our heads are our “real” place of consciousness. Our brains, although unseen, materially create our consciousness, and this consciousness is therefore a product of the material world.
But in a dream, is our dream head the source of our consciousness? Clearly not, and the most hardened materialist would admit that in a dream, our head, like the rest of our dream body, is only an illusion, created to give us a correspondence to the waking world, and a way to understand the dream that would not be possible without this illusion of anatomy.
So then if our dream body dies, we know that our waking bodies do not die, as any number of long dream falls have proven to me. And what is inside of our dream heads? Apparently nothing that is really critical to existence, as it is given up on waking.
So then how do we know that our waking brains and bodies really are a seat to consciousness, and not once again a correspondence to some higher level of life? We cannot differentiate this waking world from our dreaming world in any rational way. Our anatomy in this waking world is not a proof of reality, any more than our dream heads are a proof of the reality of a dream.
So why do we dream? Perhaps a better question is why do you dream? For entertainment, to pass the night time hours, or to do something more profound?