I woke up this morning from a very powerful dream; the feeling of it is still with me. In its details it was rather simple, but in its feeling and meaning it was very profound for me.
I had somehow come to a complete understanding that human souls are granted by God the freedom to experience whatever reality they most believe in. This took particular forms in the dream, but in the clearest, I was seated in an empty, white room, eating a phone book. A co-worker stepped in to wonder what I was doing, but I had no way to explain that for me, the room had everything in it I could ever want, and that the phonebook was actually a very tasty lasagna.
Later when I thought about this it occurred to me that a phone book, of sorts, represents an particular ideal of knowledge: a single book that’s a compendium of irrefutable factual knowledge, well organized. Meanwhile I was eating this book as if it were a tasty meal. This brought the following quote to mind:
Although to outward view, the wayfarers in this Valley may dwell upon the dust, yet inwardly they are throned in the heights of mystic meaning; they eat of the endless bounties of inner significances, and drink of the delicate wines of the spirit.
In another scene, I was driving on the freeway, which was filled with traffic, yet I was somehow feeling the most intense peace and joy to be alive and experiencing such a place. I wondered, “What if hell is our real home and this life is just a respite? That would completely alter how we experience existence here.” That is, we seem to want something so much better; what if this life is actually fantastic, and we miss out on that reality because we believe in something else?
At the end of the dream I was trying to tell a group of people this, even lifting myself into the air to shock them into accepting the possibility that things might be other than they seem. I remember saying to the group: “Our culture has so completely determined the life we experience, we can’t even separate what we’ve been told from what we know ourselves. Imagine if the basis of all our understanding begins with the number two. No matter how much we add to that foundation, we will never comprehend unity. We need to subtract from what we started with to achieve that understanding. We’ve been set up in such a way that Truth is simply not perceptible.”
Then the dream ended and I felt as if anything were possible provided I truly believed in it. It might appear one way to those who see me, but how I experience it is something completely up to me.