“You know they say that dreams are real only as long as they last. Couldn’t you say the same thing about life.”
-- from the movie Waking Life

The above dialogue continues: “In the waking world the neurosystem inhibits the activation of the vividness of memories. This makes evolutionary sense. See it would be maladaptive if the perceptual impression of a predator were mistaken for the memory of one, and vice versa. If the memory of a predator conjured up a perceptual image, we’d be running off to the bathroom every time we had a scary thought. So you have these serotonin neurons that inhibit hallucinations and they (the neurons) are inhibited during R.E.M. sleep. This allows dreams to appear real while preventing competition from other perceptual processes. This is why dreams are mistaken for reality. To the functional neural activity that creates our world, there is no difference between dreaming a perception and an action, and the actual waking perception and action.”

Discussions of the implications of the conclusions listed in the above quote lead to speculation in metaphysics. Let's embark.

Consider what Carl Jung tells us in “Man and His Symbols.” Everything in every dream is symbolic, he says, and Cayce, renowned clairvoyant and dream interpreter, agrees. Jung refers to the entries of a child’s dream journal as evidence. The child dreamed of symbols that in no way could be constructs derived from her life experiences. The symbols had universal meanings. They were archetypes. Such archetypes also appear in the dreams of the elderly. This means, Jung concluded, that children when dreaming draw from the same knowledge base that expresses its information in symbols from which also do other members of the species at any and every age.

This means that when constructing dream symbols, the unconscious draws from a pool of information and expression bigger than the cumulative life experience of the individual doing the dreaming. Everything occurring in every dream is symbolic, is a codified message sent to you from your unconscious, which is tapping a base of knowledge bigger than the combined information taken from every instant of your life.

Important to note here is that both Cayce and Jung say that the codified messages you receive in your dreams in the form of symbols are not coincidental or chaotic, but are a direct response to the choices you make, have made, and could in the future make. This is to say that the messages, again formed by symbols, are conveyed by an intelligence that has an agenda for you and is trying to communicate to you your mission.

That stream of communication in symbols, from the higher intelligence to you, is infinite in scope and endless in span. Read on.

If it is True that, as the above quote suggests, “there is no difference between dreaming a perception and an action, and the actual waking perception and action,” then the opposite must also be true. The neurological action of experiencing something in waking life is the same as the neurological action of experiencing it in a dream.

If this is the case, then everything you see, hear, touch, taste and feel is, as is the case in dreams, symbolic, a codified message sent to you from a deep reservoir of knowledge. Characters in your waking life are, effectively, dream characters. Each is symbolic, loaded with meaning. Each event is symbolic. Each material thing with which you interface is symbolic. Your waking life is but a flowing stream of symbols washing over you. And, as mentioned earlier, that flow is neither chaotic nor coincidental.

Indeed, perhaps the great reservoir of knowledge from which dream symbols arise is the same as the one that births the symbols that comprise one’s waking life. And as mentioned, just as in your dreams, these symbols are sent to you intentionally, by an intelligence with an agenda, and when you decode the symbols your mission becomes clear.

I don’t hesitate to call the sender of the symbols an intelligence. Nor do I hesitate to suggest that it may be futile to differentiate that intelligence from what you might consider your own. Empowering is to consider them one and the same, the self. The religions of the world provide definitions of the self. One such comes from Krsna Consciousness and at least echoes others from Buddhism and other schools of Eastern thought. The self is part and parcel to the Overmind, the mega-thought feedback loop that is infinite, that was not created but creates. Plato would say this Overmind is the unmoved that moves, which is different from that which is moved yet moves (demigods) and that which is moved (humanity). The self, your soul, is an extension of God, thus your creative potential is unlimited as is the power of your thoughts. To listen to this self is to hear the thoughts of the Overmind as you participate in the creation of those thoughts.

Ergo, especially empowering is to experience a lucid dream, where one awakens in one's dream to control it, to guide it, and to thus take charge, to a certain degree, of the symbols that then arise. Even more challenging is to do exactly this in one’s waking life. But then again, maybe it is not so challenging at all. One simply has to wake up. Wake up!