Dream is destiny

One of my favourite films is Richard Linklater's "Waking Life," an amazing combination of live-action dialogue and animation that explores the fabric of reality through philosophy and dreams.

The central theme of the film is the statement "Dream is Destiny." The protagonist, a young man named Wiley Wiggins, literally lives out this theme by wandering through a series of lucid dreams, in which he meets all manner of unusual characters and absorbs their ideas about life, death, and dreaming. For Wiggins, playing the typical naive boy-hero, the entire journey becomes an attempt to understand the nature of the journey itself, a loop from which he can only emerge by gaining wisdom as he goes along. Constantly questioning the absurd, yet strangely real circumstances in which he finds himself, Wiggins gradually begins to understand his destiny as he continually dreams it into existence.

The notion that we dream ourselves into existence isn't new - it goes way, way back in many cultures from the Aboriginal Australians to the ancient Greeks. But one of the key points that "Waking Life" makes is that dreams are disappearing. We're actually losing our ability to dream. We sleep fitfully, and because we have to, but we don't focus our energy on our dreams, nor do we occupy our dreams in a lucid way when we do slip into REM sleep.

This is tragic not just because sleeping is healthy, but because (as Waking Life would suggest) our dream lives are actually our real lives. Again, this is not a new idea, but it bears re-examination. In my view, we become more and more evolved as individual souls as we are able to make choices for ourselves. In successfully making choices as individuals, we evolve further. Free will is the heart of the matter. More evolved beings have more of it, and the more of it we manifest, the more of it we gain.

So think about that in context of dreams: a dreamer lives in a fluid world. In our waking lives, we must deal with gravity, with the need for oxygen, with distance and time and decay and death. Not so in the dream world, where these and other "facts" of our existence are suspended or non-existent. Now, imagine you have mastered lucid dreaming, and can actually control your circumstances. If what I have suggested about free will being the heart of the matter is true, then you have the opportunity to manifest yourself as a more evolved being through your dreams, precisely because of the infinity of choices available to you, and the relatively consequence-free context in which you are able to work them out.

Now, I'm not a lucid dreamer. In fact, because of schedule and lifestyle, I feel like I frequently don't dream at all. But the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the key to coming to terms with life in both the physical, and the metaphysical realms, has a lot to do with a good night's sleep.