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So many people have spoken of "being in control" of their dreams. How to achieve it. What it's like. So many people have made it out to be some kind of "holy grail" of dreaming, albeit an apparently obtainable one. It's such a commonplace thought to pop up when discussing dreams that when I saw similar thoughts arise during a movie we were watching called "Waking Life", my own thoughts began to spiral.
"What", I thought, "if we've got it all backward?" "What if the way we go through dreams is the last vestige of what we remember from early childhood about how we are to go through life?"
What if control is the disease? What if wanting things to go this or that way is an infection that some would now take with them into the dream world? What if the ability to decide in our dreams marks the death of all that is true and right about the way we are to live our waking lives? What if this way of being, this control obsession that we live as though it were natural to the human state, is really a sickness that we've become so accustomed to, that we are unaware of the obscenity of it?
What if, as we float through our dreams, witnessing and particpating in the events that transpire around us, we are also meant to float, leaf-on-stream like through the course of our lives?
These decisions we make moment to moment..upon what are they based? And what is the motivation behind the desire to be in control? An answer of "survival" seems lacking..almost petty, as though we speak of hunting down zebras on the Serengeti plain. Isn't survival only the avoidance of death? And if we reduce the purpose of our lives down to a mere hide and seek game we play with mortality, what sort of paltry existence do we lead? Never living, only hoping not to die. Never running toward what we would be, only away from what we would not be..dead...forgotten.
What if our dreams are there as a reminder of what we once had before we were taught to fear? To fear death and pain, to fear chaos and the unknown. What if it is the hammer of human conditioning that has pounded us into so pathetic a form as that of a field mouse scampering across a field away from the raptor claws of finality? And what if, as Castaneda's Don Juan said, "death is an advisor", not a mortal enemy? What if death remains ever present not to be focused on, but rather to remind us that life is to be experienced as a dream, not clung to like a leech clings to skin? What if what we need will always be provided without the requirement that we seek after it? What if instead we truly lived and let the mundane needs fall into our lives as they are meant to come? When death comes, what if it is meant to have been, not forgotten, but disregarded up until the moment of its arrival? And when it comes, what if it leads us not into oblivion, but into the arms of another dream?
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