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Q #41: The events, activities and relationships of our "waking dream" comprise our classroom and are the vehicles for learning our lesson of forgiveness. Is there any particular significance or value of our "sleeping dreams" in the process of learning forgiveness and should our response to these images be any different from our response to our "waking dream" classroom? A: It is the same mind that is dreaming both our waking and sleeping dreams. And it is one of the ego’s many tricks to try to convince us that there is a real difference between the two so that we believe we are awake when we are really still asleep, just having a different form of the same dream of separation. One of the more important insights our sleeping dreams offer us upon our shifting to a seeming waking state is the realization that our mind has the power to make up a world in dreams that seems very real while we are experiencing it, a world made up solely to meet our own personal needs. Jesus elaborates on this aspect of our sleeping dreams in a very clear passage: "Does not a world that seems quite real arise in dreams?...And while you see it you do not doubt that it is real. Yet here is a world, clearly within your mind, that seems to be outside. You do not respond to it as though you made it, nor do you realize that the emotions the dream produces must come from you...You seem to waken, and the dream is gone. Yet what you fail to recognize is that what caused the dream has not gone with it. Your wish to make another world that is not real remains with you. And what you seem to waken to is but another form of this same world you see in dreams. All your time is spent in dreaming. Your sleeping and your waking dreams have different forms, and that is all. Their content is the same. They are your protest against reality, and your fixed and insane idea that you can change it" (T.18.II.1:1; 5:2,3,4,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15). In our sleeping dreams, we have the same choice of teachers that we have when we are "awake" and we may find over time that we can choose forgiveness while we sleep, recognizing that our judgments within the dream are not justified. We may even become a lucid dreamer, becoming aware, even as we are dreaming, that our sleeping dream is an invention of our own mind, presaging the awareness that will eventually come to us about our waking dreams. And our sleeping dreams also afford us the opportunity to understand the real meaning of forgiveness that Jesus is attempting to lead us towards, when we realize, upon awakening, that the source of any upset we experience in our sleeping dreams has nothing to do with what anyone else is doing to us. Our upset reflects nothing more than a decision in our own mind to be upset and then to attribute that loss of peace to a cause that seems to be outside of ourselves. The awareness that this is what we are also doing in our waking dreams is the foundation for the process of forgiveness as Jesus presents it to us in the Course: "I am never upset for the reason I think...I am upset because I see something that is not there" (W.pI.5,6). "Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred" (W.pII.1.1:1). When we can generalize this recognition from our sleeping dreams to our waking dreams, we will be well on the way to awakening from all of our dreams of separation. 作者：Kenneth Wapnick, Ph.D. 翻译：张红云 校阅：Robert |
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