Article September 26, 1931 Issue

Waking from the Material Dream

WINIFRED L. FENWICK

On page 494 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mrs. Eddy says, "Reason, rightly directed, serves to correct the errors of corporeal sense; but sin, sickness, and death will seem real (even as the experiences of the sleeping dream seem real) until the Science of man's eternal harmony breaks their illusion with the unbroken reality of scientific being." These words were wonderfully helpful to a student of Christian Science who once experienced a repugnant dream.

On waking, though the student was awake in the ordinary sense, her thought, not fully roused, continued trying to find a means of escape from the situation in the dream. This led the student to see that in the dream of mortal existence, which entails suffering, sin, lack, sorrow, even when awakening to the reality of spiritual existence, as revealed in Christian Science, we still try to cling to material means as a way out of our problems. All we need is fully to awaken to the fact that the material condition or problem under which we seem to be suffering or laboring is only a dream of material sense and calls for, not material, but spiritual means of escape. As long as thought tried to find a means of escape from the sleeping dream, so long was it clinging to the dream; but as thought let go of it, the dream faded entirely from consciousness, and soon could not even be recalled.

Mrs. Eddy has written on page 7 of Science and Health, "The relinquishment of error deprives material sense of its false claims." So, in the waking dream of materiality we must let go of material beliefs, and then we shall be free. We must cease trying to find material means of escape from these beliefs, but know them to be false, as unreal as sleeping dreams. Then we shall find the discordant conditions, of whatever nature, losing their seeming power and so disappearing.

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