Three Insights or Beer for the Dream

Life is as a dream

There is a great wholeness or totality

It is empty






We walked on the sidewalk near the stonewall enclosed river through the little town from one bar to another. Speaking of tipsy thoughts about mind and being. He seemed to be the center man as I was on the periphery, I listened and added little to the conversation. At one point something was said that stuck out in my mind, I was able to talk to him directly about it when we sat down at the next bar. He said, “even though we are in prison, at least they serve beer here”.


I brought up his statement after the group ordered drinks, and asked what he had meant by it. He sipped, and looked up, speaking about a feeling that kept returning to him lately. He said, “I have been feeling like this is all a dream, that life is a dream, and I am trapped in a vacation, or a prison”. It is interesting to note that the tone of the first statement and his explanation elicited laughter from those who heard it. And the conversation was for the most part light and funny somehow.


To try and describe what it is like to feel that life is as a dream, I have tried to understand from an intellectual basis. It is just shy of the feeling of deja vu, where the film over consciousness lends a glare of unreason, doubt perhaps, and a somewhat whimsical sense of finitude and transitoryness. This is how it was described to me. That it is near to the feeling that everyone gets, of everything being ok, present there with a smile, and foggy silent mind. 


These descriptions that were shared with me took me on a bit of a trip trying to get to the root of something that I now believe was personal and not very universal. Although I have found the theme of life as a dream in Buddhist and Hindu literature, as well as poets of all ilk, it is quite a different thing to have the actual experience for oneself. Also, to claim that life is a dream is very different from the description of feeling life is dreamlike. Which brings up another point, one of desiring the experience of feeling the dreamlike quality. I don’t know how to create the experience, and I haven’t heard of anyone needing to defend the belief that life is a dream. Perhaps the seer’s of this insight don’t feel the need to defend it.


One more clue was given that first night sipping pilsners at that bar table, “I look out and see a reality that has form and is material, you can touch it and move it. But my eyes seem off, or just slightly different, I see a shimmer or something, a tinge of fog that makes me feel this way. It’s hard to describe, but it just doesn’t seem real to me, and it makes me feel that it has no meaning”.


I often think about life as a dream, I think about the meaning of such a feeling. I think about the feeling and try to compare it to ones I have had. I often wonder to myself if I really would like to have the understanding, or the feeling … Do I really want to know, really see … that life is a dream?



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