With this presidential election, you may feel you are in the midst of a nightmare, which is good news if you know how to work with it.

According to dream expert and author Jeremy Taylor, who has worked with dreams for over 40 years, all dreams come in the interest of health and wholeness. All dreams. Even nightmares, which bring insights so crucial and timely that they scare us to get our attention.

This election nightmare is no different. It is offering you exactly what you need at this precise time to grow and evolve. But first you have to be willing to look deeply at what is happening beneath the headlines and heed the wisdom being offered you.

So let’s do some dream work, shall we?

Working with the Trump Nightmare

On center stage of your nightmare stands the character of Donald Trump. If you take him at a literal level you may see him as a villain bringing out the worst in us.

But dreams don’t operate at the literal level. They are much more sophisticated. They demand that we approach them at the symbolic and metaphorical level―and they pretty much always turn the tables on what we assume to be true.

So if this were my dream (and of course it is), rather than a villain, Donald Trump would be playing the role of a gifted spiritual teacher. I’ll explain what I mean by that.

First and foremost, spiritual teachers help us see and transcend ego, enabling us to shed the ego’s illusions so that we can awaken to the truth of our divine nature. The character of Donald Trump is functioning in my dream as a spiritual teacher of the highest order because he is showing me in unmistakable terms what ego looks like. After all, if I can’t see what ego looks like, how can I ever hope to transcend it?

Based on the fallacy of separateness, the ego is an erroneous thought system that causes me to perceive reality upside down―like a lens that inverts the light passing through it so that an object appears upside down.

The thought system of ego generates in my mind an illusory world of fear, hierarchy, domination, and death, while obscuring from my awareness the reality of oneness, love, reciprocity, and immortality.

Thanks to my spiritual teacher I am able to witness the ego in a caricatured, exaggerated form. Beholding his example, I can see how the ego seeks attention, perceives itself to be greater than others, and believes that greatness rests on wealth, fame, influence, and the ability to dominate others.

By depicting the ego in such an unbridled fashion, Donald Trump is giving me the tools I need to detect these same ego tendencies within myself, even when they show up in subtler forms.

My teacher is also impressing upon me the urgency of shedding this erroneous thought system by showing me where it would lead me: down the path of animosity, division, blame, projection, and violence.

If this were my dream (and, like I said, it is) by running for president, my spiritual teacher is placing before me a straightforward question: Do I really want to elect the ego to sit in the Oval Office of my executive function?

Dissolving the Nightmare

Now this is where the teaching of Donald Trump, blessed be his name, becomes truly sublime, demanding that I really step up to the plate of my own spiritual maturity. He isn’t simply giving me the chance to decide whether I want ego sitting in my Oval Office. He is caricaturing the ego to such a degree that he is practically begging me to see through its act entirely and opt out of its drama completely.

Here’s what I mean.

Only the ego attacks. In fact, outside of the ego’s inverted, illusory world attack doesn’t even exist. So if I attack my spiritual teacher, who is so graciously showing me what I need to see in myself, if I respond to him or his followers with anger, ridicule, hatred and blame, I have in fact elected, inaugurated and installed ego in my Oval Office. I am keeping alive the fallacy of separateness and ensuring that the nightmare continues.

But if I can see through my teacher’s ingenious, theatrical ego-charade and see the divine radiant Being that he truly is, a Being who for my own benefit has been willing to cloak his true nature even from himself in order to help me awaken, and if I can begin to see that the same divine radiance is my own true essence, then I will have learned what this nightmare has come to show me. The fallacy of separateness falls away, the nightmare dissolves and the angels rejoice.

The Global Dream

But let’s zoom out for a moment, because this nightmare isn’t just your personal dream, nor mine. This is a national nightmare, a global nightmare, a collective dream. So let’s listen to what it is telling us about what we need in order to heal as a country and a world.

In the world’s dream, the United States is the Donald Trump of nations, and our spiritual teacher is helping us see how we must appear to others—believing we are better than they are, and that our wealth, influence, and military force make us great.

Is it any wonder that such bravado would evoke attack from others who are caught up in the ego’s inverted world of hatred, division and violence?

But what might happen if we were suddenly to wake up from our own ego dream? What if we realized that this national ego that likes to call the shots on the world stage, flex its military muscles, and flaunt its wealth isn’t US at all?

What if it dawned on US that our greatness doesn’t reside in riches or military might, but rather in the capacity to know and express right side-up reality: that we are all on this planet as an interdependent community of equals?

If we were to come to that realization, the world’s dream would change in the twinkling of an eye, and Donald Trump, supreme teacher that he is, will have accomplished his task.

How, then, could we be anything but deeply grateful that he has deigned to be among us, helping US awaken to the truth of who we are?

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For a whimsical depiction of the absurdity of ego and its empires, check out Patricia Pearce’s tale No One in I Land. “[No One in I Land] shines with love and wisdom and is so simple that anyone can understand it. It really drives home the happy message that we are all one, already whole and perfect, and never alone.” ~Amazon reviewer

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[A version of this article was previously published on www.patriciapearce.com.]