Every morning, we wake up into our personal stories. Certain memories wake up with us, coming to the forefront of our minds, and we find ourselves thinking about things that have become central to our lives in one way or another. Maybe those things make us feel good, or maybe they make us feel anxious, angry, or sad. We wake up to certain thoughts, and also to an experience and image of ourselves in relation to those thoughts, but is any of that real? What if we’ve only partially woken up, and we’re actually still dreaming?
If the alarm went off while you were still dreaming this morning, then you were jolted out of one world to wake up into another that you probably believe is more real. In your dreams, your consciousness is focused on characters and a world that are entirely its own creation. Even if you appear as yourself in your dreams, when you wake up you probably understand that your dream self isn’t the “real” you, though you completely identified as being that character in the dream. The thing is, this sublime and powerful ability of the mind to identify with its own creation is not confined only to the dream state—it continues after we wake up each morning, and its strongest expression is what we relate to as our own identity.
When you wake up from a dream, you consciously or subconsciously tell yourself, “I was dreaming.” You then carry on your day from the perspective of that apparent “I” who was dreaming. In your dream, the identity of the characters and the context may have been intertwined, and you might be able to recount the dream, saying something like, “I was a member of this ancient tribe on a forested island, and we danced around the fire at night and hunted during the day.” There was a sense of time passing within the dream, and this allowed for complex identities and contexts to emerge. If the dream resonated with you on some deep level, it might stick with you after you wake up, and you may even dream that character and that world again. Once you’ve woken up though, another story that has also revealed itself in much the same way comes into play, being the story of your life, of “you”.
You were born, and a great deal of time has passed since then. And in that time, you’ve accumulated a variety of experiences that are stored in memory. Those experiences inform the way you perceive yourself, others and the world; they collectively make up the various levels of your identity. We can see how alternative identities can emerge in a short time in the dream state. A certain scene arises with certain characters, and suddenly we’ve identified ourselves as members of a primitive tribe, or perhaps as a fugitive on the run in some technologically advanced society. In the span of our waking lifetimes, another identity has emerged, and it’s also contingent on time, context and characters. We were born into a certain scene with certain characters—into a particular family, community and society—and we derive our identities from out of this context. This is the dream of identity we wake up into every morning. Not unlike the dream character or the dream world, it’s actually the mind’s own creation, which it weaves from its own memories and projections and pins to an image of self. It unfolds in the same realm as your dreams, being your mind, and is composed of the same substance—thought. This understanding is fundamental to teachings about Maya, the Great Illusion, found in certain esoteric Hindu traditions.
The shift away from this time-bound, thought-centred identity towards a more expansive self can be drastic, but it can also emerge in subtle ways.
When we wake up in the morning and our minds take over with the usual thoughts and stories, we can gently notice this, and gently notice ourselves identifying with these thoughts. Repressing or trying to change this can be a stressful activity in and of itself, so it’s best just to passively observe without any intention for it to be otherwise. We can also become aware of the contrast between the more open mental and emotional state that sometimes inhabits the space between waking and getting on with our morning routine, which includes certain thought patterns. We might ask ourselves, “Who is identifying with these thoughts?”, and pay attention to the answer our mind gives. If it’s just another story, we can notice that and continue inquiring in this way. Ultimately, there is only an unconditioned conscious presence here, and with the right inquiry you can discover this for yourself.
We can also notice what’s right here, in front of us. We can bring our attention to the fact that reality and our direct experience of this moment actually require no thinking at all. Our senses wake up with us each morning, and they are awake and alive without any effort on our part. Looking at a flower, hearing the sound of wind or passing cars outside—these activities actually require little or no conscious psychological effort (although the conscious mind usually insists on stepping in and falsely claiming agency and control).
Introducing mindfulness into our morning routine, we can bring some spaciousness into those minutes after waking that allows for a bit more objectivity about these stories that automatically start up. We can see that these stories arise from memory as opposed to our direct experience of the present, and that they are rooted in an identity that is itself a story. We can consider that these stories, and the central identity behind each one, are all secondary to our true, unconditioned self, which is effortlessly aware of the coming and going of all phenomena and experiences, including thoughts. We can perhaps notice this silent, effortless awareness as we sip our morning coffee, or look out the window to see what the weather is doing.
So, we wake up from our dreams, but we only wake up partially; we wake up into the dream of the personal identity that has become the foundation for the way we live our lives, for the way we see ourselves, others and the world. It’s a sublime play of memory and self, and seeing the dream quality of this dance as it starts up in the morning can help us wake up in another way, moving beyond the limits of the dream character we previously took ourselves to be.
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All Roads Lead To Now 