Life Is but a Dream (II)

What does it mean to say that life is a dream? If we tell people that we believe the world is a dream, what are we thinking when we say that? Obviously we mean that the world is not actually real. Yet I think we mean more than that. Most of us believe that dreams reflect deeper dynamics in the mind, that they spill out of unconscious forces. In this view of dreams, every figure and every image in the dream is symbolic of thought-patterns in the mind.

Hence, to say that life is a dream is to say that our own personal life is populated with figures and images that are put there by our minds as symbols of unconscious thought-patterns. Look around you. That chair is not a real chair. It is just a dream image, a symbol of hidden dynamics in your mind. That person is not a real person (at least as you see her). She is just a dream figure, a symbol of hidden dynamics in your mind. Everything you see was put there by your mind because it symbolically expresses something in your mind.

It certainly does not seem as if this is true, does it? You seem to be just one more player in some larger (rather chaotic) script. You definitely do not seem to be the scriptwriter, nor the director. Surely you are not the one controlling all those figures. You appear to be just one figure moving amongst a collection of many others, all possessing the same independent, unpredictable will that you have. This raises the question: Given how real and objective this world seems, how can we actually see it as nothing more than our own dream?

by Robert Perry