THANK GOD IT WAS ONLY A DREAM AFTER ALL

 
You are really the Infinite Soul but you identify yourself with a finite mind and so have to suffer. You have your moments of happiness and sorrow. Whether your pains outweigh your pleasures or your pleasures outweigh you pains, you worry all day about something or the other until your finite existence retreats at night into sound sleep. There you unconsciously merge in the Infinite.

In sound sleep you completely forget yourself and your surroundings, your thoughts and emotions around which are ranged your ideas of imagined happiness and sufferings. But this respite is short-lived.

From the sound-sleep state you come down to the normal awake state, and as you come you have necessarily to pass through a dream state even though it be for only the fraction of a second.

Now, at one time you have a very happy and sweet dream in which your ideal of happiness is fulfilled. But being a dream it lasts only a little while, and waking pains you so much that you sigh, What a pity it was only a dream!

At some other time you have a horrible dream in which you experience great suffering. Time seems an eternity. As you wake you feel such relief that you say, Thank God it was only a dream after all.

In the dream state you enjoy and suffer. When you wake you realize that your enjoyment and suffering was nothing but a dream — an illusion. But know that your present state of consciousness which you call being awake, when compared to the Real Awake State, is nothing but a dream state. Your life is a dream within the mighty Dream of God which is the Universe.

From your present awake dream state you have to go through many sleeps of death before you get established in the Real Awake State. After ordinary sleep you awake in the same surroundings; after death you arise in a new environment. But this does not bring the end of your suffering, for the Thread of Action (Karma) continues unbroken and unfailingly keeps on determining your life. The humour of it is new settings create new worries.

The grip of illusion is so tight and deceitful that you cannot help worrying. So your life in your awake dream state becomes an endless chain of suffering.