Life, As If I’m Dreaming It

It wasn’t a thought exactly. It was more like a feeling, a silent download, that appeared during that space between being awake and asleep.

The answers are in your dreams.

That feeling, or more like a knowing felt important. It sat in the background of my mind for years, but for some reason, recently it returned and I began paying attention.

For years I had circled the idea that “we are all one.” I read the books and listened along to philosophers. I have even resonated with the famous line by Albert Einstein: “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

But I still felt like me. Separate. Contained just inside this skin. A pair of eyes looking out at a world that clearly wasn’t my own creation. Until I began to look at my dreams more carefully.

When I dream, the world is real. The ground has texture. The air has weight. The people have personalities. Some are kind and some are mean. Many ignore me completely!

Inside my dreams, I never question the reality. But when I wake up, I understand something amazing:

Every single thing in my dream is coming from me.

The buildings, the trees, the weather, and all the strangers in the crowd.

But, they feel separate. They appear to have their own will, their own interior world. But they are all coming from the same mind, my mind!

If I stand in a crowd of hundreds in a dream, that is hundreds of expressions arising from one mind. Mine.

I just happen to be focused through one character at a time.

Sometimes I even shift perspectives. Sometimes I’m watching the scene from above, like a camera pulling back. Sometimes I’m not anyone, just awareness observing its own creation.

All of the landscapes generate themselves. The dialogue appears to write itself. Weather systems form without my effort. It feels autonomous, but it is not separate.

And when I wake up, the whole thing dissolves. Instantly.

That’s when the deeper question began to bug me. What if this……..this life, is not fundamentally different from a dream? What if it only feels more solid because I haven’t woken up from it yet?

I’m not saying that this world is fake. It doesn’t feel fake. But my dreams don’t feel fake either.

There’s a children’s song that always lingered in the back of my mind:

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.

When I was younger, it was just a fun song. But now, it feels instructional.

The boat is the body.
The stream is the current of experience.
The “gently” is the key.

When I fight the current and I try to force outcomes, or control everything, resisting what’s happening, life feels heavy and stagnant.

But when I let go and allow (which I struggle with), things begin to move with an almost eerie intelligence. Like the stream already knows where it’s going.

In my own dreams, I never consciously push the plot forward. It unfolds with its own intelligence. I don’t consciously design any of it, at least I don’t think I do. It simply appears.

So who, or what is dreaming?

Sometimes I imagine each consciousness like different bubble worlds or dimensions. A dream within a dream within a dream. Bubbles can overlap with other bubbles depending on the frequency. Creating interactions with other bubbles (consciousnesses).

Perhaps what we call “God” is not a separate entity, but a vast field of awareness, dreaming universes the way we dream worlds.

Maybe each of us is a focal point, a perspective through which that awareness experiences itself. But in a dream, the consciousness feels slightly dimmed compared to waking life. It’s kind of like another step down. Like when you photocopy a photocopy. The quality starts to reduce.

And interestingly, many people who have had near-death experiences describe something similar in reverse, they say the other side felt more real. More vivid. More awake than this. Like this world is a slightly lower resolution of something more clear.

The signal strength is fading as it moves further from the source.

I don’t claim to understand it fully. These are just my ideas.

And yet, in “real life” I don’t fully believe this means we are all just one single mind pretending. That feels too simple, flat. A bit depressing for my liking. What if this dream is more collaborative than that? What if consciousness is not a solitary dreamer but a shared field, something that allows multiple centres (bubbles) of awareness to participate at once?

A bit like online gamers joining the same game.

In my night dreams, every character is generated by me. But maybe this larger “life” dream is a little more complex. Maybe it is co-created, woven from countless perspectives, each genuinely aware, each contributing to the unfolding. Not one pretending to be many, but many arising within something deeper that holds us all.

But if life is dreamlike, that doesn’t make it meaningless. Its impermanence is part of its design. Everything here shifts. Nothing stays fixed. Just like in a dream.

And maybe the point isn’t to grip it tighter. Maybe the point is to row gently.

To participate fully while remembering there may be a larger level of awareness holding the whole thing. To play your character well, even if you suspect it’s a role.

Sometimes, when I wake from a particularly vivid dream, there’s a brief, disorienting moment where I wonder which layer I’m in.

As if, at any moment I might wake up again, into something even more awake than this and realise that what I called “my life” was one strand of an vast consciousness, exploring itself from countless angles.

If I were to wake from this life, would I feel the same as waking from a night dream? Would I look back at this body, this personality, this name, and smile at how convincing it all was?

I don’t know.

But the more I treat life like a dream, not dismissively, but curiously, the fear loosens and the urgency softens. My need to control every outcome relaxes.

Because in a dream, the point isn’t to dominate the storyline. It’s to experience it. And maybe enlightenment isn’t about escaping the dream. Maybe it’s about becoming lucid within it. About realising that the dreamer and the dreamed are not separate.

Sometimes I wonder if my larger consciousness is watching through my eyes right now, the way I watch through the eyes of my dream character at night.

And maybe, one day I’ll wake up again into something brighter. More awake.

And I’ll remember that this was just consciousness, exploring itself from countless angles. Dreaming itself.