Article May 28, 1910 Issue

DREAMING AND WAKING

RUTH INGRAHAM.

A young girl, the circumstances of whose life had called her far from home and kindred, suffered much, a stranger in a strange land, from homesickness. She used often to dream of being once more among her loved ones, only to find the awakening to the hard facts of her daily existence increasingly bitter. At last the sense that she was dreaming entered into her dreams themselves, and she disbelieved the reality of these experiences. One night she thought she picked a rose from the bush which grew in her own garden. "Surely now I can prove whether this is real," she said to herself. "If the thorn pricks and gives me pain, I shall know this cannot be a dream rose, but that I must truly be at home again." In an anguish of hope and doubt she pressed the thorns into her hand, and the pain was so genuine that she awoke; but only to find that she held in her hand a pincushion which she had somehow laid hold of in her sleep. How often do we, "heavenly homesick looking away from earth" (Science and Health, p. 365), demand proof through the senses that our poor dreams are real! And as often are we harshly undeceived, for error has no continuity or proper sequence; it lures and deceives itself, and is powerless to fulfil its own glittering promises. We wake from one sense of error to find ourselves in another, often more bitter, seemingly more hopeless of home and heaven; but the pains of sense are more salutary than its pleasures, since they drive us to spiritual things, to the only realities.

As the day dawns through the drawn curtains of his chamber, the sleeper gradually awakes. First his slumbers become lighter, his dreams less fantastic, more nearly in accordance with what he knows as the reality of his waking hours. Presently the growing light completely rouses him, and the fancies that peopled the dark are gone; his consciousness has become that which he has been taught to consider normal. So does the light of Truth, shining steadily, illuminate and rarefy our mortal dreams. Clearer and clearer it dawns on material sense, dispelling illusions with its divine radiance, until that perfect day when we wake in His likeness. Then, in the radiance of "the new heavens and a new earth," "the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind." False consciousness shall have faded into its native nothingness; and no longer homesick, weary children, seeking to be satisfied with vain dreamings, we shall find ourselves—here, now, and forever—in the home that none can ever really leave,—the very heart of Love itself!

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

REASON RIGHTLY DIRECTED