This is a description of a very powerful lucid experienceAt the end of burning through all the imagery, and the recognition of what an extraordinary thing that was, I stood in the middle of something that I did not at first recognise and so was once more caught up in. What I mean by this is that my nakedness burnt through image after image, emotion after emotion, but suddenly one came that appeared to be real to me and so I was carried along by it, became lost in it. And what I became lost in was the sense of purposelessness that I see as underlying much of our culture, and also one of the big driving forces in being consumers. In imagery this was like looking around and seeing okay, I am this naked consciousness, but so what? Here I stand in the middle of rather grubby and ugly streets and houses. Here I exist in the middle of a culture whose games have no great quality to excite me. Is that all I am? Is there nothing else?
What is important here is that for many of us the meaninglessness, the purposelessness, is as real as bricks and mortar.
The experience of being naked awareness, of burning through image after image, feeling after feeling, viewpoint after viewpoint, left a great impression. Out of it realisations were emerging. The major one was that there is no danger in being awake in ones dreams, but one must beware, or be aware of, the fact that sometimes, as happened with myself in meeting the feeling of pointlessness, one can become possessed by the image, at least for a while. When that happens the image, the emotion, the viewpoint takes on a concrete reality, a supreme sense that there is nothing beyond it. Perhaps a way of describing this is to say that if you could imagine that you are standing in an open space, and by some trick of technology an image of a house is built around you, with walls, furniture, windows, etc. If you can imagine that you discover in imagery that the doors are locked, then you are completely trapped. But you are trapped by nothing but what you take to be real.
Perhaps the central secret of this is that what happens in life and in our dreams is that what we do tend to see as real is created out of our own mind stuff. It is created out of our own emotions, our own fears and hopes. There is no way out of that unless we recognise the material it is made out of it is the energy of consciousness.
This is so like the ending scenes in the film Matrix, that I am sure whoever wrote the script had a profound awareness of this. The hero of Matrix breaks through the surface appearance of things and enters into the very programming of the apparent world around him. This is what happens when we wake up to what underlies all our experience whether as a physically external world, or as our own dream world.
The point is that whatever we believe we are; whatever we believe the world is; it becomes that because we create it out of our mind stuff. I am not suggesting that the external world is a figment of our imagination. What I am saying is that our feelings about it, our perception of it, are shaped by our own innate nature. Truly, the Buddhist search for Moksha, or freedom/liberation, does arise by recognising that all experiences are a play of consciousness.
Perhaps the central secret of this, is what happens in life and in our dreams is that what we tend to see as real what is created out of our own mind stuff. It is created out of our own emotions, our own fears and hopes. There is no way out of that unless we recognise the material it is made out of it is the energy of consciousness - our own thoughts, beliefs and convictions. See
http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/questions-2/#Victim also see
http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/martial-art-of-the-mind/ and
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/integration-meeting-oneself/Tony
