By Ethan Maurice | March 2, 2023
We are dreamers.
We dream not just when we’re asleep, but when we’re awake. We dream not just as individuals, but as a group. We’re so good at dreaming that we can hardly distinguish between dreams and the ground on which we dream.
I’m still figuring and playing with all this, so don’t get bogged down in the specifics. Rather, try and feel for the big picture:
By the ground on which we dream, I mean the raw materials and laws of our universe. This includes: the laws of nature, space and stars, sun and earth, rock and water, plants and animals, etc.
By dreams, I mean all that exists only in our culture and cognition. Things like culture, language, stories, money, politics, systems, art, and handshakes. All were dreamed up, repeatedly enacted, and over time, woven into the collective dream of our group.
What’s so different between dreams and the ground on which we dream is this: dreams are made up.
This is amazing. We are so good at dreaming that our dreams and the ground on which we dream are almost indistinguishable. Dreams exist only in our cognition, yet they are so interwoven in our experience that we can hardly begin to untangle them from everything else that is more or less “real.”
Most humans live their entire lives as if there is no difference between dreams and the ground on which we dream. But there is a difference. And learning to see the difference is a form of waking up.
Because, unlike the ground on which we dream, dreams are malleable. We can play with and bend them. An aspect of the dream can be ignored — if only temporarily — allowing us to act outside the bounds of what seems possible.
This is tremendously exciting. It’s like The Matrix, when Neo starts to see the matrix as as ones and zeros, which opens him up to act in a larger realm of possibility. We too can “wake up” and gain an uncommon agency.
We can wake up in the middle of a dream.
Thinking back, I believe it was a clip of advice from Steve Jobs I watched back in college that opened my awareness to the malleability of the dream:
“When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.
That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact and that is — everything around you that you call life is made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
The minute that you understand that you can poke life, you can push in, something will pop out the other side. You can change it. You can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing: to shake off this irronious notion that life is there and you’re just going to live it, verses embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it. I think that’s very important.
And however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, because it’s kind of messed up in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be same again.”
I offer this as a simple incitement, a thread you can take hold of and follow to a more spacious and creative relationship with the dream in which you reside.
