Dream Perceptions Only Become Real When We Remember Them

It is the growing conscious of a new power in the mind, which enabled it to judge things from a new point of view. Ever since the unfoldment of consciousness we have been led to respond to the inner and outer conditions in a certain conceptual and analytical manner. The discipline of Zen consists in upsetting this artificially constructed framework once and for all and in remodeling it on an entirely new basis. The old framework is called Ignorance and the new one Enlightenment.

D.T. Suzuki wrote those perceptions in his 1927 essay, Satori. The word satori means awakening, and it’s safe to say that human consciousness is awakening to the fact that our physical life is divided into two distinct realities. The first reality is our wakeful reality. We experience our perceptions in that reality, and we create an individual sense of worth because of those perceptions.

Everyone sees and feels their reality differently, but we try to blend our individual realities into one big one, and in the process all hell breaks loose. That hell is a combination of perceptions that conflict with each other. The result is a mass reality filled with the aftershocks of our quest to merge perceptions. Perceptions are the fuel that keep the fire of hell burning in our wakeful world.

The second reality that we live physically is the dream reality. In that reality, we don’t merge individual realities and create the fire of hell in our consciousness. We do the opposite in dreams. We experience what some religions call heaven. We travel through different regions of consciousness and absorb the knowledge that floats through all of them.

In dreams, we prepare our wakeful reality for what can come from our perceptions, but we ignore that preparation most of the time. We live the life of the soul in our dreams and celebrate the union that exists within all consciousness. Perceptions in dreams form a different world, and that world is uniquely individualistic. The dream reality is rooted in our individualism, and our physical reality is rooted in our mass perceptions. And the odd thing is, individual dream perceptions only become real to us when we remember them.