When you dream, the body is motionless and still, yet you experience yourself as moving about and sometimes traveling. You may even fly. The dream seems real to you because, as the eyes of the night slide open, the world that unfolds before you is its own complete reality. It extends before you and behind you, above you and below you, and to either side as well. So even though you go nowhere, you can go anywhere. Even though little time may elapse in the trough between breaths, whole hours or days may pass within it.
‘The Mystery of Sleep’ it is sometimes called, because no one can fully understand it or explain it. But I tell you that waking is just that mysterious, wondrous, improbable, and impossible to define. The daylight world is filled with form, sound, color, taste, scent, and sensation. It encircles you and surrounds you in every direction like a painting with no empty space, no outlines that have not been colored in. You experience yourselves as moving about in the seamless reality of that world, and wherever you go in it, there you are. But in truth, as in dreaming, you haven’t stirred at all.
Dreaming or waking, the soul lies at the center of all you experience. Everything flows from it. The whole world is manifested from it. But nothing can move it. Nothing can add to it or subtract from it. And it cannot be destroyed. Your prayers, every single one of them, have already been answered. But the only way to know this—the only way to know that you are complete and full, unassailable and indestructible—is to pray and experience your prayers as being answered in the world and in time.
There is no other way to gain this deep and abiding faith except through prayer. This is the purpose of prayer. The dreaming heart understands this wisdom implicitly and employs it in every dreaming moment of the night. But you forget it upon waking, and must sleep and pray to remember it again.
[art: The Green Dream of St. Joseph by Escultor Perez Rojas]