How To Live In A Dream World

I hope the premise behind this blog post blows your mind as much as it did mine the first time I read about it.

My spiritual guru, Wayne Dyer, strikes again.

I was recently reading his fabulous book called, You’ll See It When You Believe It, and my head almost exploded when he presented the concept below.

For real.

Under the subheading of “Oneness and The Dream,” Dr. Dyer outlined a very common experience that most of us encounter every single day of our lives — waking up from a dream.

In this case, let’s assume the dream is a bad dream where you’re being chased by someone who is trying to kill you. You’re familiar with the drill: you can sense the person chasing you, you can see the person chasing you – maybe you know them, maybe you don’t, but you’re scrambling to get away from them as if your life depends on it.

Because it does.

During your dream, this scene is incredibly real. So real, in fact, that when you wake up from the dream, your heart is racing, your palms are sweating, your blood pressure has increased, and you’re fully freaked out.

Here’s Dyer’s first fascinating fact about this waking up from a dream:

While your fear is real, what’s causing the fear is actually an illusion.

 Holy crap, that’s true.

As you’re running frantically through the woods in your frightful dream, your body produces a real reaction to something that is anything but real. The person chasing you is not real. They are an illusion that you created in your mind.

Funny how that works. Here’s how it works:

• You fall asleep at night, and you enter an alternative reality.
• In this alternative reality, you get bothered and flustered about things that do not exist.
• When you wake up in the morning, you feel silly for reacting so strongly to the illusions in your mind.
• You shake it off and get back to really living.

Here’s Dyer’s second fascinating fact about waking up from a dream:

The same sequence above will happen when you die.

Brace yourself.

Here’s his premise. One day when we leave this world (regardless of your religious beliefs on this topic), we will enter a new world. Our physical bodies will die, but our consciousness will live on in a different, more metaphysical world. And when we wake up in this new, magical world, we will look back on our physical time on earth and see the folly of having held so tightly to the illusions we created in our minds.

Then, we’ll shake it off and get on with the next level of living.

Full head explosion.

I think he’s onto something. If you’re not there yet, try this exercise on for size. Think of that feeling you have when you’re lying in your bed in a full sweaty mess recovering from the stress of attaching yourself to a person or situation in your dream the night before that wasn’t real.

You feel silly.

Of course, you feel silly when you know what you just experienced was a dream, but haven’t you also experienced that exact same sense of foolishness when you got all hot and bothered by something in your actual life that also didn’t happen?

Like the time I worked myself up in a froth because I thought I was going to be late for a tennis match and I didn’t end up being late at all.

It happens all the time.

We get worked up and stressed out about illusions in our life, just like we get worked up and stressed out about the illusions in our dreams.

Maybe our life and our dreams have more in common than we think.

I’m fascinated by the fact that one day we might look back at our time on earth and realize that so much of our stress was caused by illusions. If this is the case, then perhaps it’s time to figure out some coping mechanisms that will help us get less worked up along the way.

Here are four things that happen in your dreams that can also happen in your life…if you let them.

1. Time does not exist. Time is meaningless in your dreams. One minute you’re a wise grandmotherly figure, and the next minute you’re a fumbling teenager. And when it comes to the lapsing of time, you can easily experience what feels like an entire lifetime in a 12-minute dream. How can we apply this rule to everyday life? We can reduce our preoccupation with time, aging, scheduling and hurrying. One day, when we wake up, our lifetime of ninety years might feel like it was a dream of 90 minutes. So, let’s try not to stress over each and every minute of those ninety years. We might feel silly for doing so when we wake up.

2. Obstacles can be turned into opportunities. Your dreaming mind knows how to turn obstacles into opportunities. If you’re driving down the road in one of your dreams and the road suddenly ends in a cliff, you turn the situation into an opportunity to fly rather than crash and burn. In your dreams, you’re in charge, and you can determine the outcome. The same should be true in the rest of your life. Every challenge you encounter in life has the opportunity to teach you something. The lesson here is to reduce our need to curse problems and instead pause to see what we’re about to gain from them.

3. You create everything around you. You create everything that you need during your dreams — you create the people, the events, and the reactions. If someone sneezes on you, then you created the person and you created the sneeze. If you didn’t, who did? In that same vain, you create everything in your own life. You have to take responsibility for the people and the circumstances in your life. Respond today as if everything that comes your way was put in your life by you. If you’re struggling with something in your life, ask yourself, “Why did I create this in my life?”.

4. Your reactions are real; everything else is an illusion. When you dream, your reaction is real but everything else is an illusion. The same is true in your own life. No one can create anger or stress within you; only you can do that. You’re responsible for the energy you bring into a room, and you’re responsible for the way in which you react to the world (or illusions) you see in front of you. When something goes wrong in your life, it’s not the illusion’s fault.

So, there you have it. Four things your dreaming mind can teach your living mind.

By looking back at our dreams when we’re awake, we’re able to see how futile it is to be upset about the illusions we created.

If I were a betting woman, I’d say that we’ll all be doing the same level of reflecting when we meet what’s on the other side of this life.

We’ll see life from a new perspective with a wider-lensed view which encompasses it all.

How you live out your one, big dream role is entirely up to you.

During the day, while you’re living your life, start practicing what you already know to be true when you’re dreaming. I think you’ll experience a marked difference in how you view your life and the world around you.

Sweet dreams.