I had a vivid dream last night.

There was nothing unusual about the dream as most of my dreams were rather unrealistic in the ‘real’ world. There was something about this dream that made me ponder more on the concept of living in the physical world.

My dream had a Hollywood scripted drama written all over it. There was the main character with the hot girl and his best friend in one party. The other party had the typical bad-guy feel construed as the enemy. It was a turf war and I was stuck in the middle.

I had lost the freshness of my dream already so I couldn’t remember most of it by now. One scene did stuck with me.

My whole body was laid on the ground faced down. I couldn’t get up or I didn’t want to. I saw a gecko in front of me coming closer. It walked quickly towards me on its hind legs like how the gecko would in the GEICO commercial.

I wanted to show my love towards it as I felt it was attracted to my energy. It crawled on my body and explored around it. It stayed with me for a while. Then it went on my right arm and I felt a shift in the energy. I detected a malicious intent.

The gecko started nibbling on the skin of my forearm like it was tasting it. Then it sunk its teeth into my skin and started taking bites of my meat. I actually felt the sensation of the pain as I woke up shaking my right arm to try to get it off of me.

What’s the difference between the dream world and the real world?

What is real? What defines real? If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

Who better to quote that than Morpheus, the God of Dreams.

Who are you?

Really…

Are you your body? Are you your mind? Are you the senses you experience?

Are you there experiencing the events of your daily life? And are you there experiencing the events in your dreams? So what is the difference?

The difference is the physical form. We’ve come to trust anything we can experience through our sense organs as real. Anything else is but a dream.

Everything is made up of energy. Everything comes from the transmutation and entropy of the initial burst of energy known as the Big Bang. The Universe has been expanding ever since that point. Photons first escaped the dense clouds of plasma and light came into existence.

The light is energy.

E=mc^2

One of the most important scientific equation has the energy equals to the mass times the square of the speed of light which is the only constant in the Universe.

From then on, other elements started bonding, creating new elements. Planets were created and slowly living beings came into existence.

Never forgot, any physical form is made up of atoms. Your body is made up of trillions of cells which are made up of molecules which are made up of atoms. An atom is made up of a proton, an electron and a nucleus. The proton and electron spins around in a circle generating energy.

So we are literally made up of energy. It’s a miracle all those atoms do exactly what’s needed for our body to survive.

We tend to forget this or don’t really care. It’s too trivial for the busyness of our lives. That or our mind just can’t grasp the immensity of what is beyond.

On one end of the spectrum we have an atom which can be further divided into subatomic particles. On the other end of the spectrum we have the whole Universe. Our planet is like an ant in our galaxy alone with billions of stars. And the Universe has billions of galaxies just like ours. Finally, there is anything in between that spectrum. It’s mind-blowing.

The attachment to our physical form is the reason I would argue our dream state more ‘real‘ than the real world. We don’t really sleep. Our body does. But the real you never sleeps. We’re ever-present. Is it the same you who is there in the dream as the you who is there in the real world?

A side question. If we are always there, what happens when our body dies?

In our dreams, we are formless. We are freed from the bondage of the physical form. Maybe that’s why we can do some crazy shit in our dreams. I always wondered, at what point do we, the formless soul, become encapsulated into a body?

One scene in Inception always intrigued me. Cobb and his team met with the chemist who took them down to the basement of his shop where they treated patients who can’t sleep. Now they rely entirely on the potion to sleep and share a dream together. When Eames asked: “They come here everyday to sleep?” The groundskeeper answered: “No, they come to be woken up. The dream has become their reality. Who are you to say otherwise.”

Become more aware of who you really are. Who sees when you see? Who hears when you hear? Who dreams when you dream? Then maybe you will dream to wake up.

do:

Next time you have a vivid dream, try to recall your dream and ask yourself were you there?

During your daily life, take moments out of your day to remember to breathe. And maybe ponder a bit about what you see in front of you. Realize all you see in front of you are just a collections of atoms which are just energy.

🙏