Dream World

The dharma talk that I attended this week talked about duka or suffering.  One of the causes of suffering is our own fabrication of reality.  They spoke of fabrications that affect our perception of the world like the existance of race or that smart and stupid exist as two separate identities.  When pondering this in my own life I came up with other kinds of fabrications.  My own dreams that I live out everyday.  The Toltec belief is that we all live in our own dreams, our own creations of reality.  This is true, and it can cause suffering if we are not aware of what kinds of dreams we are creating.  I was living in one specific dream for a very long time.  In my dream, I had left someone behind who still loved me.  I fabricated a whole story about how I had fled true love and the feeling that someone was waiting for me kept me from forming new healthy relationships.  This one single story that I lived out over and over in my own head was preventing me from living well in the present.  These little dream bubbles that we create for ourselves can be very hard to pop.  Questioning them takes a lot of courage and looking at the truth can be even scarier than living a lifetime in a hurtful dream.  My identity now depended on this dream being true.  When I finally faced this fabrication head on, I realized that it wasn’t the truth.  When my bubble popped, I lost the fabricated love that I was holding on to for 7 years but I gained the freedom to move forward without the heavy burden of someone still waiting for me.  This dream had kept me feeling safe like there was always someone out there who loved me most, but it also kept me trapped in the past unable to be open to new love forming in my present.  Questioning this perception of reality that I had clung to for over 7 years meant losing a sense of security that I had been leaning on; the security of having a true love out there waiting for me if I wanted it.  Suffering the loss of that security was very difficult, but seeing the truth was freeing.  The dreams that we create may be serving a purpose in our life, but is that purpose helping  or harming us?  Examining these fabrications can be scary because it puts into question what you have built your reality upon, but the truth that you uncover will always set you free.