FIELD OF DREAMS

Moonlight Graham: "We just don't recognize life's most significant moments while they're happening. Back then I thought, 'Well, there'll be other days.' I didn't realize that that was the only day." 

There’s a great story about a person who is given the power to dream an entire 100 year lifetime every night when he'd fall asleep. Let’s call this person “the dreamer.” And the dreamer was also given the power to completely control what was dreamt. Well, this person, as he began on his adventure of dreams, fulfilled all his deepest wishes, desires, and fantasies. He woke up after a few nights and said, “well, that was pretty great!” But the dreamer became tormented and depressed, and he, at first, didn't understand why. So he did some soul searching and realized it was the result of melancholy and boredom. Melancholy from getting everything he could ever dream while still feeling unsatisfied, and boredom from having so much control that he always knew what was going to happen next. 

So he said, “let’s have a surprise. Let’s dream a dream where something is going to happen to me that I don’t know what it’s going to be.” So he did that in a small amount, and he enjoyed it. And each night he slowly increased his lack of control of what happened in his dream worlds, and he became more and more adventurous and he made further and further out-gambles as to what he would dream. Until finally he relinquished so much control that he dreamt … this world.

He looked around and saw so many others driven to make fantasies a reality, fantasies that were very similar to those that he had once dreamed. Having lived many lifetimes he knew the dissatisfaction from achieving these dreams, and the dreamer felt deeply for the people. After all this time he realized something that those in this dream world had yet to see: that their fantasies were not their own. He knew that they were constructed by the prevailing myths of their society. They were, in essence, living out the fantasies of the circle of reality that they happened to occupy in order to avoid searching the scariest thing in the universe, themselves.

Because of this fear, the “control” they thought they had was really a playing out of what they imagined others wanted of them. It was actually just social and societal convention controlling their every move. It was the farthest thing from freedom. By this time, the dreamer knew that freedom wasn’t what he thought it was - some right to choose - as long as the chooser was consumed by belief in this imaginary world. He knew the actual “chooser” was a great mystery, and only when the great mystery acted on its own was his decision his own. The only way to achieve this was through a willful reduction of who he thought he was, as he had done throughout his many dream lifetimes.

​He realized that by increasing his lack of control he was, in fact, giving control to the great mystery, allowing it to flow rather than be managed. In this way, true decisions no longer appeared as acts of will but arrived as surprises, like laughter at a joke or recognition before understanding. Action became a response to necessity rather than preference. What we commonly call choice diminished, yet life grew fuller. Enjoyment deepened as certainty loosened. Freedom, he came to see, was not mastery or selection, but a faith in unknowing—in the emptying of the egoic self so that something truer could act through it. In this world, he was finally able to live his dream freely, as the dreamer.