Dreaming has become such a well-tuned skill for me that it can be a successful stand-in for my real life. Every day, I find myself paying attention to the content of my imagination as though that content is reality and not a fabrication of my own mind.
Many times this takes the shape of what I am planning to do or what is going to happen. It is almost like the fantasy casts a hologram before my internal attention, and that is what I react to. If I am thinking that I will work in the garden, I see myself working in the garden and have all the feelings of that experience. For an instance working in the garden is as real as a dream.
I sometimes begin thinking of what I am going to say or write to someone. The words form in my mind no less convincingly than if I were actually talking or writing. My feelings are no less powerful than if the person were standing in front of me or I was sitting at my keyboard.
This is my way of seeing reality through my imagination. I get hung up in my imagination and that is as far as my attention gets. My thoughts are led and formed by another part of my mind, and I am usually hardly aware of what is happening with the rest of my body. In fact, my attention on my fantasy can be so intense that I am oblivious to where my body is, or where I am driving the car. I am lost in my imagination, my fantasy.
I want to develop my awareness in a way that frees me from the life of a dreamer. It is, in fact, no life at all because I am not connecting with any reality outside the confines of my mind.
It is actually a good first step if I can become aware how much I am attempting to live in my mind. I become aware, mindful that my imagination is at work. I am freed from the illusion. Then I am able to relax, let go of my imagined world, and be fully engaged with the world around or part of my own body.
It helps me to think of my imagination as being a creation of all those little neurons in my brain. My neurons make connections and create experiences, either remembered or predicted, and project those on my mental computer screen, my vivid imagination. My brain is like another sense organ, and can be stimulated just like the other five. The impulses may be real, but the image they create is not.
If I am not alert, those images in my brain can have all the convincing effect of a real experience. In reality they are only a new assemblage of my past experiences. Sometimes useful, but not real.
When I am mindful, when I am aware, I think I am using another part of me. I don’t know what it is, but it is like looking at my mind’s activity in a mirror or a screen. I know the dream is only an image, nothing real.
I know that when I am mindful, when I am aware, I am both relaxed and alert, peaceful and vigilant. I am not lost in my imagination, caught up in my mind. I am in charge of all my senses and they make me acutely, vibrantly aware of what is happening. That is no dream.