Dream and Wakefulness

Sri Ramana Maharshi

(Continued from here)

D: Is then the world nothing better than a dream?

M: What is wrong with the sense of reality you have while you are dreaming? You may be dreaming of something quite impossible, for instance, of having a happy chat with a dead person. Just for a moment you may doubt in the dream, saying to yourself, "Was he not dead?" But somehow your mind reconciles itself to the dream vision, and the person is as good as alive for the purposes of the dream. In other words, the dream as a dream does not permit you to doubt its reality. Even so, you are unable to doubt the reality of the world of your wakeful experience. How can the mind which has itself created the world accept it as unreal? That is the significance of the comparison made between the world of wakeful experience and the dream world.

If, on the contrary, you withdraw your mind completely from the world and turn it within and abide thus, that is, if you keep awake always to your Self, which is the substratum of all experience, you will find the world, of which alone you are now aware, just as unreal as the world in which you lived in your dream.