Reposted from Galactic Roundtable, July 30, 2009
It is 1:01 a.m. on July 30, 2009 (11-1-11).
From within my sleeping dream last night, I woke up out of the waking dream that my friends and I were having.
This occurred after several dreams I had had in which I was the only one in my world who could make himself big or small, or exist without needing to be part of a functioning group, or do other seemingly-unusual, some seemingly-magical things.
But waking up out of the sleeping world’s waking dream of ordinary life caught my attention more than these other dreams because it immediately began creating immense and apparently-real logistical problems.
I immediately began discussing my situation with others.
Not all of them awakened, but many of them agreed to relate to me as if what I was saying was true. Their response was to “lay down tools,” so to speak, and look to me for direction in how else they should live their lives if not by conditioned responses to date, time, relationship, role, etc.
I saw that, if I were to succeed in waking up other sleepers or even if I were just to succeed in persuading them to reorient towards me as a person who saw that the dream was a dream, whether they also saw it or not, might bring the whole coordination of actions, the whole symphony of gestures called a “functioning society” to a standstill.
I might then be faced with a massive logistical problem of substituting orders from me to a population now without reason for doing things in place of the simple well-functioning society I saw before me whose smooth operation I was about to interrupt.
The whole clockwork mechanism of the world might stop if I took this situation further. I asked myself if I wanted to then substitute for the easy running of the world by conditioned responses my need to determine every move and issue commands?
In a weird and inverted way, this “free” economy that I was embedded in was anything but free. However, if people did not wake up from it but simply followed my directions, it would become a “command” economy and the situation would be worsened. I decided I didn’t want that.
I decided not to interrupt its smooth functioning any more than I had already done by saying that I had woken from the waking dream and they had not. I stopped discussing my dilemma.
I detached one set of cameramen from the whole of the waking dream, the conditioning functioning of society. Why there were cameramen available, I don’t know and didn’t ask. They were filming something.
I asked them to accompany me to record my observations, but otherwise allowed things around me to remain operating as they were.
With their help, I recorded my observations of the dream as a dream, that people were simply behaving in ways that we all had agreed were “right,” and that nothing more was happening than people acting according to their roles, as conditioned by the day, time, and relationships they were in, and so on.
In the morning, they bathed, ate, talked, and went to work. In the evening, they returned home from work, ate, talked, and went to sleep.
No one questioned any of it since inner commands like hunger and sleepiness appeared to provide enough reason as to why the ritualized events all happened. The fact that all could choose their bedclothes and pillow size offered enough individualization of the process to sufficiently cloak its conditioned nature.
At this point in my dream, I decided that the world looked too strange viewed from this angle and that I would see if it looked as strange viewed from my waking up altogether from the sleeping world I was in.
I awoke from sleep. At first my bed, at least partially wet from sweating in the muggy weather, seemed small and I seemed large. But gradually that sensation disappeared and I got up to write this dream down.
I am not necessarily awake from the waking dream I woke up into. I am to the extent of seeing it as a coordination of gestures determined by matters like date, time, relationship, and role, but the experience of awakeness is not as deep as it was in my sleeping-world awakeness.
It is 1:22 a.m. and I am preparing to return to sleep.