Imagine you had the power to control every aspect of your dreams and you could dream anything your imagination came up with. Also, you could alter your sense of time such that you would be able to live an entire lifetime in the course of one night’s sleep. Before drifting off each night you would decide what kind of life you wanted to live. Remember, every event and every experience that you had that lifetime was decided by you before you slept. There would be no surprises or freak accidents to blindside you.
At first you’d orchestrate your greatest ambitions and your wildest fantasies. Perhaps you’d meet the love of your life and cherish each other in a lifelong romance that would rival any Hollywood story. Maybe you would land your dream job and achieve wild success making more money than you could spend. You could decide to host extravagant parties every weekend where you rubbed elbows with celebrities, music artists, and the most influential people in the world. If politics and waging war is your desire, so be it. Do you want to care for poor and destitute children all over the globe? Would you want to be the most attractive man or woman and have the craziest sex with anyone you desired? Its all yours to decide. You have the power.
Perhaps after several months of living lifetimes every night, you would think up a new angle. You would step outside the box so-to-speak. You might decide you wanted to be a superhero or supervillain. Maybe you would travel through time and manipulate the past or spy on the future of humanity. You could dream yourself to be a creature of your own creation and live that life. Create your own planet in a solar system of your design on the edge of a galaxy never heard of. Your dream doesn’t even have to be that elaborate. If you wanted you could be a tree in a forest in northern California. You might choose to be someone’s pet turtle. For that matter, the life of a Koala that sleeps twenty hours a day is available.
This would go on for some time, and at a certain point you would find yourself exhausted for ideas. The next step would of course be to decide to live a life in which you forgot you were dreaming. You would become anxious and maybe even swallowed by grief because to you it was all so real. You would get caught up in danger and toy with death. Whatever you decided, no matter how far reaching or dangerously out of hand you let things get, it wouldn’t matter because eventually you’d wake up. Each night you would push yourself further and further in an attempt to see how far you out you could go. Is there a limit to your fear?
Eventually, you would dream the dream of the life that you are living today.
To be the Godhead, the divine source of all creation, means infinite possibility at your disposal. Just like infants and children are enamored with the games peek-a-boo and hide-and-seek respectively, so too is the Godhead. The act of forgetting that you are the creative force of the universe is the only game in town. The journey to discover your true nature spans hundreds of lifetimes if not a thousand. In the end though, you appreciate the adventure and have a great laugh.
I can’t take credit for this metaphor. It was delivered so eloquently by Alan Watts over fifty years ago. I have of course shared the idea with my own literary spin. It may sound fantastical, but I would urge you not to be dismissive. You may find that it isn’t so far fetched after all. At the very least, entertain the notion that anything is possible. I encourage you to discover for yourself.