T. 18. II. 1 – 6. Jesus: “Does not a world that seems quite real arise in night-time dreams? Yet think what that world is! It is clearly not the world you saw before you slept. Rather, it is a distortion of the everyday world, planned solely around what you would have preferred to see, though not perhaps overtly.
In the night-time dream, you are ‘free’ to make over whatever seemed to attack you, and change it into a tribute to your ego, which was, of course, ‘outraged’ by the attack. This would not be your wish unless you saw yourself united with the ego, which always looks upon itself with guilt, and therefore makes you feel guilty, under attack, and highly vulnerable to the attack.
Night-time dreams are often quite chaotic, if but because they are governed by conflicting wishes in your mind, and so they have no concern with what is true in any sense. Yet they are the best example you could have of how perception can be utilized to substitute illusions for the truth. It is readily apparent that you do not take them seriously on waking, given the fact that your daytime ‘reality’ has been so outrageously violated.
Yet they are a way of looking at the world, and changing it to better suit the ego. They provide striking examples, both of the ego’s inability to tolerate reality, and of your willingness to ‘change reality’ on its behalf. You do not find disturbing the differences between what you see in sleep and on awaking. You recognize that the world you see on waking is blotted out in dreams. Yet on awakening, you do not expect it to be gone!
In dreams, though not consciously, you do arrange everything! People become what you would have them be, and what they seem to do to you, you order. No limits on substitution are laid upon you. For a time it seems as if the world were yours alone, to make of it but what you wish. You do not realize that you are attacking that world, trying to triumph over it and make it serve your purpose of projecting the ego’s guilt!
Dreams are perceptual temper tantrums, in which you literally scream, ‘I want it thus!’ And thus it seems to be! And yet the dream cannot escape its origin in your mind. Anger and fear pervade it, and in an instant the illusion of satisfaction is invaded by the illusion of terror. For the dream of your ability to control reality by substituting a world that you prefer, is terrifying. Your attempts to blot out reality are very fearful, but this recognition you are not willing to accept. And so you substitute the fantasy that ‘reality itself is fearful,’ denying what you would do to it. And thus is guilt again made real!
Dreams show you, by example, that you have the power to make a world as you would have it be, and that because you want it, you see it. And while you see it, you do not doubt that it is real! Yet here is a world, clearly within your mind, that seems to be ‘outside’ while you are dreaming it. You do not respond to it as though you made it up, nor do you realize that the cause of the emotions the dream produces must actually be coming from you. To you the dreamer, it is the figures in the dream and what they do that seem to make the dream. You do not realize that you are but making them ‘act out for you,’ for if you did, the guilt would not be theirs, and the illusions of satisfaction and relief would be gone!
In this brief look at dreams, these features are not obscure. You seem to waken; and the dream is gone. Yet what you fail to recognize is that what caused the dream has not gone with it. Your wish to make another world, one that is not real, remains with you. And what you seem to waken to is but another form of this same world you see in dreams!
All your time, in fact, in time, is spent in dreaming! Your sleeping and your waking dreams have different forms, and that is all. Their content is the same. They are your protest against reality, and your fixed and insane idea that you can change it. In your ‘waking dreams,’ the special relationship has a special place. It is the means by which you try to make your sleeping dreams come true! From this delusional state, you do not waken when the sun comes up! The special relationship is your determination to keep your hold on ‘un-reality,’ and to prevent yourself from waking. And while you see more value in ‘sleeping’ than in waking, you will not let go of it.
The Holy Spirit, ever practical in His wisdom, accepts your dreams and uses them as means for waking. You would have used them to remain asleep. I said before that the first change, before all dreams disappear, is that your dreams of fear are changed to happy dreams. That is what the Holy Spirit does in the special relationship.”