I had a few dreams last night where there were moments that caught me by surprise. One dream I was at a party at a friend’s house and one of the girls was making an announcement while holding the host’s car keys, and we were all listening in anticipation, as she made a funny joke about stealing his car. Then in another dream, I was with a group of friends at a concert hall listening to dance music, and to my surprise my friend started doing choreographed dance moves, mostly locking and popping. After I joined him, as I was dancing he stuck his finger out to me playfully. At first I couldn’t figure out why, but then I grabbed his finger, and he pretended to make it disappear and incorporated it into his dance moves.
Although these dreams seem pretty silly, when I woke up I appreciated that these dream figures had an ingenuity about them that seemed to be an intelligence outside of my own, doing things in my dream that could surprise me, that I wasn’t able to predict, even though it was my dream and they were dream figures that my mind created. It is apparent in dreams that the unknown is a bit of an illusion. How can the mind that creates the entire dream not know what the dream figures it creates is going to do? What intelligence can the dream figures have that is outside of the mind that is dreaming it? So although I might not be consciously aware of it, there is a part of my mind, maybe subconscious or higher mind, that knows all but is playing a trick on itself.
So why would the mind dupe itself into creating elements of the unknown? Why not know everything that is going to happen in the dream? The ego tends to fear the unknown. It wants to know everything and predict and control everything. But when you release that fear, you realize that if you were to know everything that was going to happen, what everyone was going to say or do at all times, then life would be very dull. There would be no growth or change or wonder. It is because of the unknown that grabbing my friend’s finger to trigger his dance moves was such a funny surprise. There is no creativity without the unknown.
I can understand now why an omniscient Divine Source might want to dream an illusionary world of small separate minds, like dream figures, with the illusion of the unknown, to delight in the play of discovery and unpredictable interactions, to grow and know itself in countless different and fascinating new ways. Knowing all along that nothing really happened, that we are all safe in the dream, that it all has happened all at once. So a Divine Source knows all that has and will happen, and it created it all in Love knowing that when we wake up from the dream, we will be safe as one with Divine Source. But while we are still experiencing ourselves as dream figures in the illusionary world, we should cherish and delight in the wonderful unknown.
