The Lucid Dream Metaphor
Imagine dreaming that you are on a street corner. It feels so real. You think to yourself: “Am I dreaming or am I awake?” So you decide to read a license plate on one of the cars, thinking that if there is no plate number, you’ll know your dreaming. You check the plate, and sure enough it’s a New York plate. You, then, wake up, and realize that the license plate, the street corner, the cars, the guy you passed, the sense of time and distance, and even you were all a dream.
Our dreams are completely subjective, yet it all appears objective, and tangible. In the dream you think that you perceive reality, however you indisputably conceive it. So, we see that our minds are inhabited with images of people, animals and plants. There is the sense of matter, distance, sound, time and space. The two worlds, subjective and objective, dreaming and awake, imaginal and concrete, feel alike, because they are both formed in schemas -- mental patterns. There are remarkable implications from this simple understanding.
Non-conceptual Meditation, as well as Mindfulness-based Anxiety Reduction practices lead us to become measurably more aware of schema. A schema is a reality that manifest at, both, imaginal and concrete dimensions. When working on healing our emotional wounds, there are particular schema-realities of interest.
Emotional Deprivation: “My needs will never be met.”
Abandonment: “I am the one who gets deserted.”
Defectiveness: “There’s somethings wrong with me.”
Abuse: “I’m the one who gets abused.”
Subjugation: I am the one who has low status.
Failure: “No matter what I do, I can’t succeed.”
Vulnerability: “I am the one who is susceptible to misfortune.”
Impulsivity: "I am the one who can’t stop myself.”
Schemas, though forming as personal reality, are archetypal realities. Your sense of shame, for example, is cosmic by nature. Schema-archetypes are collective, universal patterns, or realities, like birth, death and love. All creatures share in foundational schema-archetypes. These representations are evolving with the organisms of the earth. In other words, humans have schemas that insects do not. Human reality is a cosmic event. Because you feel that your reality is personal, it does not mean that your reality is not cosmic. Personalizing is, at its foundation, an impersonal function of nature.
Recommendation: Watch “The Lucid Dream Metaphor.”
If a collective unconscious is a stretch for you, remember evolution. The biosphere was here first. It functions like an organism, and a womb that has developed manifold life forms like you and me. Our minds are as much a quality of the inclusive biosphere as they are a quality of each of us. Secondly, remember that all life forms have interdependent existence. Indeed, nothing has independent existence—everything is relational, and coordinated by the singularity that is the TranscendentEternalMystery
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