Then again, the Course is not alone in talking about this world as a dream
and our having fallen asleep.
But where the Course is alone and is unique,
in that it not only discusses the metaphysical implications,
of this world being a dream, namely that this is an illusion
but also supplies us with the motivation for why we dream here.
And once we talk about dreams and motivation,
obviously we have to talk about Sigmund Freud,
because with Freud’s work on dreams
that not only really became the jumping off point
for his whole theoretical work and practical work as an analyst
but it’s also the jumping off point for the whole treatment
and understanding of the ego that you find in the Course.
In one of his letters he says,
“There is one wish that every dream is intended to fulfill
though it assumes various forms, that is, the wish to sleep.
You dream to avoid having to wake up because you want to sleep.”
And then in Interpretation of Dreams itself, he echoes that insight and he says,
“Thus the wish to sleep must in every case be reckoned
as one of the motives for the formation of dreams.
Every successful dream is a fulfillment of that wish.”
One of the astonishing things I think when you read Freud in light of the Course
is to see that everything he’s saying about dreams,
and, of course, he’s only talking about our sleeping dreams,
holds exactly for the way Jesus talks about our waking dreams.
One of the things that Freud did in his understanding of dreams
is that he spoke about two levels of the dream,
what he referred to the as manifest content, which is the dream itself.
When you wake in the morning and you want to tell someone this dream you had,
what you tell them is the manifest content, what goes on in the dream.
Underneath that, however, is the meaning of the dream,
what Freud referred to as the latent content.
And, of course, it’s this latent content that opens up the understanding
of what is going on in the unconscious.
That’s why he said, in a very important statement,
that the understanding and interpretation of dreams
are the “royal road to understanding the activities of the unconscious mind.”
As we’ll see later on today Jesus would make that exact same statement,
except what he means by dreams being the “royal road”
would be our waking dreams, our everyday experiences.
And it’s his helping us to understand what the meaning is
of our everyday experiences that opens up for us
the whole idea that we actually do have a mind.
And, of course, since this mind is totally out of awareness,
we would say this mind is unconscious,
but that’s where the thought system of the ego is, and that, of course, that's where
the correction to the thought system of the ego is as well, the Holy Spirit.
For our purposes, we’ll think of “separation”
as really being our having fallen asleep,
and what follows from that will constitute the dreams.
So that when we chose, originally as one Son,
to listen to the ego’s interpretation of the tiny, mad idea
as opposed to the Holy Spirit’s,
the ego’s interpretation being that the tiny, mad idea
of being separate from God is true, in other words,
that we are indeed separate from God, and that’s the birth
of the separated and individual and special self.
And we made that choice because we didn’t like
the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of the tiny, mad idea,
and that interpretation, in effect, is what tiny, mad idea?
Namely, that there is no separation, nothing happened.
And therefore your belief that you exist as a separated, individual,
unique, autonomous, and special person, is an illusion.
It hasn’t really happened.
In a sense, that’s the Course’s equivalent for our having fallen asleep.
Again, it’s the sleep of separation.
What follows then is that the ego
desperately wants to ensure that the decision that the son made
to choose the ego instead of the Holy Spirit,
that that decision will be irrevocable.
That the son would never be able to change his mind.
And so to ensure that the son would never change his mind,
what the ego does is develop a strategy,
and this strategy basically involves
or includes two kinds of dreams
what the Course refers to as the “secret dream”
and then as the world’s dream.
The secret dream is what you find in the ego box,
specifically when you see error is real, serious
and it consists of the triad of sin, guilt, and fear.
As we’ll see that this would be the secret dream.
To use Freud’s terms, this would be the latent dream,
the latent meaning, the latent content.
Now, the ego has this dream, the secret dream,
of sin, guilt, and fear, because we believed
we actually had destroyed Heaven because if I can have a thought
that is outside of perfect oneness,
that stands outside and can choose against perfect oneness,
then perfect oneness must be an illusion,
because you can’t have thoughts outside of perfect oneness.
Separation and oneness are mutually exclusive states.
So by virtue of our entertaining that thought and then believing
that we have this self that stands on that thought
of wanting something other than the everything,
wanting something beyond the all
that thought itself then means that God has been destroyed.
Now the ego has us dream the secret dream, of sin, guilt and fear
because the ego wants us to become so terrified of the contents of this dream
that we would believe that the only hope
was to leave the mind entirely and go into the world.
And since there is no world, was no world, and will never be a world,
we have to make one up and then believe that there is a world.
And it’s the projection of the secret dream of sin, guilt, and fear,
that makes up, literally makes up, the entire physical universe.
That’s what shifts our dreaming from, again, what the Course
refers to as our secret dream to the world’s dream.
The only difference is that in the secret dream
there’s only me and my projections onto God.
In the world’s dream there are all these people,
hundreds, hundreds of thousands of people in my world,
some I know personally, some I just know about,
that are, again, all suitable objects for the projection of the guilt
I do not want to accept in myself.
Which means the world’s dream and the secret dream are one.
However, once we find ourselves in the world’s dream,
meaning we find ourselves in a body, and in the Course body means
not only our physical identity but our psychological identity, too,
once we find ourselves in the body, a veil falls.
and we have no memory of the secret dream.
All we are aware of is again what the Course refers to as the world’s dream,
but for us now this is no longer a dream,
this is what we believe to be reality.
Now again, we can understand that these two levels of dreams in the ego system,
the secret dream of sin, guilt, and fear, which I’ll go into in just a moment,
and then the world’s dream, have as their only purpose,
the only purpose that they have is to keep us in the state of sleep,
which we have already identified with the state of being separated.
Now this understanding is absolutely crucial.
If you do not understand this you will misinterpret everything in this Course.
Jesus tells us many, many times in the Course that purpose is everything.
You understand the purpose of something and that will give you its meaning.
And when you understand what it is for, what its purpose is,
you will understand why it’s there. You’ll understand its meaning.
So again, building on Freud’s remarkable insights,
that the purpose of the dreams, of our dreaming, is to fulfill the wish of remaining asleep.
We understand that the reason the ego made up
this secret dream of sin, guilt, and fear, and then after that made up
the world’s dream of a physical universe, of separation and sin, guilt, and fear,
has as its only purpose, its only meaning, to keep us in the state of separation.
Or to make it more specific, to ensure that we never change our mind
and recognize that separation was a mistake, it was a mistaken choice,
and Atonement is the only sane choice we could ever make.