A Dream Within a Dream

Once upon a time, as I was coming out of a medically-induced coma, I lived another life from behind closed eyes. This life bore only a superficial resemblance to my own, but was real enough to fool me. Weird-ass shit. I was living in my own private fantasy world that was only somewhat informed by my actual physical environment. In my dream within a dream, I felt that I was a prisoner of some sort, and my only priority was escape. I knew I was in a hospital, and I knew I was hooked up to a lot of tubes and wires, but I was operating within a fictitious narrative that was all in my pretty little head. 

All I could think about was escape. I had it all thought out, all the way up to the part where I ran into the rainy nighttime parking lot, where I planned to steal a car and keep the party going. In my mind, I believed my wrists were restrained. My genius-ass escape plan was that a maintenance guy would come around wearing a tool belt in which there’d be a utility knife within my limited reach. (Yes, my internal understanding of my external space was such that a toolbelt-wearing maintenance guy would be working next to my bed, maybe replacing lightbulbs or fixing a leak or something.) I would surreptitiously swipe his box-cutter knife, conceal it until the coast was clear, then use it to cut one wrist restraint, which would then allow me to reach a larger cutting implement conveniently sitting nearby. With that bigger, better knife in hand, I’d burst into a flurry of escape activity, slashing all my restraints, yanking out all my tubes and wires, and making my way out of my room, along the corridor, down the stairs, through the lobby, out to the parking lot, and into the freedom beyond. That plan was very much alive, distinct and emotionally charged in my thinking, such that I actually did yank out all my tubes and wires, making a bloody mess of myself and the nurses who restrained me, as I made my heroic but short-lived bid for freedom.

Obviously, there was no maintenance man, no box-cutter in his tool pouch, no better knife nearby, and I was not a prisoner. I wasn’t even restrained at that point (after that little stunt, I was). I had a vague sense of where I was – in a hospital bed, jacked into various machines and sundry liquids – but behind my closed eyes and chemically impaired mind, I created and inhabited a wholly fictitious scenario. Why did I think I was being held against my will? I had no idea, only that captivity was bad and freedom was good. There was no thinking involved. The world of my eyes-closed imaginarium somewhat resembled my actual situation; not as I saw it, just as I imagined it. My mental-emotional fantasy bled into my physical reality with my actual escape attempt, which could have had very serious real-world effects (only in the sense that death is serious).

That story draws a clear parallel to the standard human condition of asleep-in-the-dreamstate. That’s the condition from which you may be emerging, and it was my condition for nearly twenty-eight years. That’s everyone’s condition until they sit up and open their eyes and see who and what and where they really are. In reality, I was coming out of anesthesia after having the contents of my ribcage rearranged. In my dreamworld, I was trapped in a situation from which I must escape at all costs. My desire to escape was not well-informed and rational, it was emotion-fueled and idiotic. It didn’t make any sense and wasn’t based on actual circumstances, but the emotional energy was flowing like lava, and my mind was fully enslaved to my heart’s desire. 

On the one hand, I was in a good situation. I was focused; I had a goal and a plan to reach my goal, and I was totally intent on executing that plan. Inside my dipsy-doodle brain, which I never doubted for a second, my assessment of my situation was spot-on, despite the wild improbability and theatricality of it. Maybe that’s everyone’s experience under those drugs in those circumstances, or maybe mine was a drug-distorted projection through my own unique pattern, which is what I suspect. When trapped, it is in my nature to chew my leg off before considering other options, like opening the trap and removing my leg.

That was my experience of revisiting the eyes-closed, fear-based state. We live behind closed eyes in a fantasy world that only vaguely resembles our actual circumstances; an emotion-addled mental distortion in which the dreamworld is so deeply believed that it goes unchallenged. There’s no thought of eyes or seeing, or even thinking or doubting; the imagined world is accepted without a second thought, or even a first. We believe that reality as we imagine it is reality as it is, but we are unable to achieve a moment’s lucidity in which we might question our understanding. My own situation was not calm and rational, but angry and desperate. I was in a no-escape scenario in which I could think only of getting out, all the way to the point of taking physical action. My internal reality was, by waking standards, completely insane, but not entirely unrelated to my external circumstances. I had some idea of who and what and where I was, and it bore some resemblance to my real-world situation. 

Now, let’s compare my hospital experience to our experience of the sleeping dreamstate. Our eyes are closed and we’re operating from within an imagined version of reality, despite inhabiting a physical reality. We are emotion-driven to an overwhelming and absurd degree, such that, despite possessing the power of reason, we’re unable to employ it. Our sleeping dreamstate experience is fully immersive; we can’t even perceive our situation, much less question it. To be so deeply befuddled that you can’t doubt or question or reason your way out is a form of hyper-intoxication. It never occurred to me in my drug-addled state that I was anything other than awake and alert, so what chance did I have to become awake and alert? (Of course, in my first decades, I was never that focused. I wasn’t going anywhere, just floating in-harbor, neither on land or at sea.)

The silver lining of this cloudy time was revisiting the pre-awakened state. It was like returning to the land of my youth; in retrospect, anyway. I slipped back into the sewer-dungeon of my early life and took up unquestioning residence there; no longer awake in or from the dreamstate, but totally asleep in it. Maya was in charge with no opposition. There was no Little Bastard piercing my sleeping mind; telling me it wasn’t real, that my eyes were closed, that I was trapped in a totally absurd fantasy-world. Despite the conflicting signals I was receiving from my physical environment, I was fully committed to my eyes-closed vision. I was asleep in the dreamstate as if I’d never been otherwise; how cool is that? What a wonderful experience to get to go back and see it again, live it again, and (thankfully), rise out of it again.

Most people (all, less a few), go through their entire lives behind closed eyes, but we’re not talking about everyone, we’re talking about you. You’ve done something that might not seem super-significant at the moment, but which has the potential to go nuclear; you peeked. You managed to crack open eyes you didn’t know you had and see things you never suspected; to wit, the unreality of reality. A shaft of light, in the form of the initial nondual insight, pierced your sleeping brain; now you know more than you did before, and more than anyone around you. You know there’s such a thing as sight, and that you are capable of seeing. You know there’s another world beyond the one you currently inhabit and have always subscribed to. You know that you’ve been deceived your whole life, and that opening your eyes and becoming undeceived might be possible. You know these things well enough that you’ve made an actual journey in your realer reality; at least, enough to make it here. That, in human terms, is pretty massive. Where you go from here is yet to be seen, but getting this far is a remarkable and hugely uncommon feat.

It was medical-grade pharmaceuticals that dragged me back into the sewer-dungeon, but maybe it could have been other things; things I might not have recuperated from. I always thought it would take a serious head blow to re-asleep me, but all it took was a gas mask and an IV drip. Maybe some form of emotional intoxication could do it – love or hate, or some combination or variation thereof – the same hot emotions that launched me out might suck me back in. I don’t think of myself as a highly passionate person, but I didn’t think myself a candidate for open-heart surgery either. (In the dreamstate, every day is anything-can-happen day, so never say never.) It’s kind of a scary thought; could Maya just turn a dial or flick a switch and pull me back in? I don’t think so, not as long as my brain still worked, but my brain wasn’t working under those anesthetics. This is where the real power of a 24-to-1 heart-to-mind ratio becomes apparent. Imagine a hundred-pound ballerina getting crushed by a twenty-four-hundred-pound sumo wrestler; that’s how much chance I had to launch a mental revolution and overthrow a tyrannical dictator.

That’s what it means to be sub-lucid. Whatever brain-power I had was entirely suppressed by the emotional fantasy in which I dwelt. Under those conditions, I stood basically zero chance of piercing the veil or rising out of the fog, or even understanding what a mindfunk I was in. You could say that I just emerged from anesthesia back into waking reality, but that’s exactly what we’re talking about; you emerging from under the influence of emotional anesthesia and into your own waking life. You’re here because you got yourself here. You turned your head in Plato’s Cinema. You managed to peek out through taped eyes; you saw something few ever see, and now you’re taking action. You might go further, or it might end here; either way, it’s an adventure. There are two ways you can go, down-and-in or up-and-out. You wouldn’t think the initial nondual insight would be something you could forget, but it is. You can slip back into that river of emotion coursing through your mind and find yourself washed back into the spiritual carnival with all its pretty lights and petty distractions – easy as falling off a log.

There’s no right or wrong, better or worse, there’s only whatever you do. If you want to come out and play, your Little Bastard is sitting next to your bed, across from Maya, speaking forcefully but encouragingly. He’s your only hope of breaking out of the false paradigm of the sleeping dreamstate, into the less false paradigm of the waking dreamstate (and maybe out of all paradigms altogether). You are divided into two unequal and opposite emotional factions at this point, the tiny ballerina versus the gigantic sumo wrestler. As the former grows, the latter shrinks. Their hands are on your awareness dial, adjusting your lucidity up and down, and there you are between them, head lifted, eyes cracked. It might not seem like much, but it’s going in a good direction. This is the great animating contest of liberty, and here you are, in the arena. Well fuckin’ done.