The ego has convinced us that oneness is the illusion
and separation and individuality is the truth,
and we are still so identified with the separated,
individual, unique, autonomous, independent, and special self
that we are terrified of losing it.
One of the devices that the ego uses,
and it’s a very subtle one and very powerful one,
is what Freud called the “dream of convenience.”
And I want to go back a little bit to Freud
and read you what he said about this.
Now again, he’s only talking about sleeping dreams,
but the parallels between what we do with our waking dreams
is phenomenal, I think, and very important.
What a dream of convenience is, we’ve all had them I think at varying times.
An example of a dream of convenience would be
if you’re asleep at night and a telephone rings in your room,
and you don’t want to awaken, like it's a sound sleep
or you're having a wonderful dream,
what your mind will tend to do is weave the ringing telephone into your dream.
So that the phone now is not being heard through your external ear,
it’s being heard through your dream’s ear,
which means you don’t have to wake up to answer the phone,
you can answer the phone in your dream. That’s a dream of convenience.
I'd like to read you first what Freud said about it
because its implications are very, very important.
I think it will be helpful in large part in avoiding
a lot of the mistakes students make with the Course, specifically
with the figures of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the meaning of healing, and forgiveness.
Everything I’m reading to you is from The Interpretation of Dreams.
And remember what I’ve already read to you,
that the wish that every dream contains is the wish to remain asleep
so that the dream of convenience is simply another expression of that.
“The function of the dream as a guardian of sleep becomes particularly evident
when an external stimulus impinges upon the sensors of a sleeper.
He may wake up, or he may succeed in continuing his sleep in spite of it,
in spite of the external stimulus.
In the latter case, he may make use of a dream
in order to get rid of the external stimulus.
And here Freud gives an example.
If I can succeed in appeasing my thirst in dreaming that I am drinking,
then I need not wake up in order to quench it.
This then is a dream of convenience.
So here, the external stimulus is not a telephone ringing
or a light going on, it’s the body itself.
All dreams are, in a sense, dreams of convenience.
They serve the purpose of prolonging sleep instead of waking up.”
Now as I’m reading this to you, think of our waking dreams
and think of the whole purpose of our life as having the purpose of keeping us asleep,
asleep in the belief that the separation is real.
So this would then kind of leap off the page at you then,
when you could see the larger generalization of it.
“Dreams are the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers.
Either the mind pays no attention at all to occasions for sensation during sleep,
or it seeks for an interpretation which will make the currently active sensation
into a component part of a situation which is wished for
and which is consistent with sleeping.
The currently active sensation is woven into a dream in order to rob it of reality.”
Now again, when you take Freud’s comments about dreams and external stimuli
and you apply them in the larger arena of our life,
And you go back to our chart and you look at the two parts of the chart
that deal with dreams, the ego’s wrong-minded box where our secret dreams are found
and then the world of separation which has the world’s dreams,
and remember the ego’s purpose is to keep us in the wrong-minded box
by having us believe we’re in the world’s box.
So we deny the reality of the secret dreams
and instead make the world’s dreams the reality.
Now what Freud was talking about, an external stimulus,
we could liken to something that comes from the right mind.
Throughout the Course the Holy Spirit is described as being
the Voice for God, the voice within our dream
the voice within the split mind that reminds us of our connection with our Source.
Another way of characterizing the dreams and the right-minded call
is that the dreams all reflect a dualistic point of view.
Dualism is a kind of a reflecting, occasionally, today
dualism is when you have a subject and an object.
That’s the basis of what the Course refers to as the world of perception.
It’s the exact opposite of the world of knowledge,
which is the world of Heaven, which is the world of total oneness, of non-duality.
So the secret dream is clearly dualistic in origin,
because I believe I separated from God, there’s God and there’s me. Two.
And then these two then become at war with each other.
That’s the battleground.
Then we project out the battleground so now it’s the battleground all around me,
but it’s no longer in my mind because I don’t know I have a mind.
And this is in contrast with the non-dualistic call of the Holy Spirit.
He’s the call within our split minds to come back,
to go back to that choice point in our minds when we chose the ego,
and now make the correct choice and choose the Holy Spirit.
So it’s that ongoing call that is outside of the dream.
The “Call to awaken and be glad” is the call of the Atonement
that says the separation never happened,
which means the non-dualistic, loving presence of the
perfect oneness of God, is perfectly intact.
And “not one note in Heaven's song is missed.” Nothing is changed.
So we get this non-dualistic stimulus, this call within our mind,
and our dualistic dream, our dualistic consciousness, our dualistic self,
desperately tries to take the stimulus and weave it into our dream.
So that if one looks at Jesus, for example,
when he appeared on this earth 2000 years ago,
the world didn’t know what to do with him because he was not of this world.
There was a light, there was a love, there was a resplendence in him
that anybody who was in his presence would immediately have recognized
had nothing to do with anything here.
His very presence, in the world’s dream coming from outside of the dream,
was a statement that said, there’s a reality outside of the dream.
It’s the reality that you all chose against,
and my presence among you is the witness to the fact
that even though you chose against it, it is still here.
His very presence was a direct challenge,
a direct challenge to the sleep that the dreams were attempting to protect.
Which left the sleeping son of God one of two choices:
he would either awaken from the dream and follow the call,
but if he were to do that, then he lets go of his total allegiance to the ego.
He is basically saying, I now have recognized that the choice for the ego
was a mistake, for individuality, for specialness, all of this was a mistake,
it has not brought me happiness or peace, it certainly is not the truth.
Or, the son of God could say, I don’t want to awaken from the dream.
Let me, instead, bring the light, bring the call, into the dream.
Let me take this non-dualistic presence
and let me incorporate it within my dualistic dream.
All you have to do is read the New Testament,
it has a large number of very, very beautiful, and inspired passages,
but overall its message is, the world of separation is real,
the world of sin is real, the world of the body is real,
and unfortunately the world of specialness is very alive and very well.
What the world did is that it brought that Jesus into the dream.
So he now became part of the dualistic drama of sin, guilt, fear,
sacrifice and death, and therefore, redemption.
That’s why the opening section in Chapter 3 is called “Atonement without Sacrifice.”
The biblical plan, both in the Old Testament and New Testament
is atonement with sacrifice.
And the point of that section is Jesus saying,
"How can I think this way? How can God think this way? "
There is no sacrifice because nothing has to be atoned for,
you only have to awaken from the dream.
And that, again, was Jesus’ message, to awaken from the dream.