Article August 15, 1953 Issue

AWAKENING FROM THE ADAM-DREAM

HERBERT E. BONHAM

And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept" (Gen. 2:21). There is no record that Adam ever awakened. The deep sleep, or Adam-dream, is the material belief of creation.

Often we have had terrible dreams at night, and how glad we were to awaken and find that they were not real—just dreams, illusions. While we were dreaming, the characters and circumstances in the dream appeared very real and we seemed to be affected and influenced by these people and conditions. Yet on our awakening they immediately disappeared, and we found ourselves harmonious and entirely apart from the dream—untouched by the dream experience. Mary Baker Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 188): "Mortal existence is a dream of pain and pleasure in matter, a dream of sin, sickness, and death; and it is like the dream we have in sleep, in which every one recognizes his condition to be wholly a state of mind. In both the waking and the sleeping dream, the dreamer thinks that his body is material and the suffering is in that body."

Dreams! What a word to express the instability and falsity of mortal existence. One does not stand in awe of a night dream. The moment one awakens he knows that it was not real and that it had no power over him. So it should be with the beliefs of sin, sickness, disease, and death, which are figments of the Adam-dream, the dream of life and intelligence in matter, and which are no more real than the night dream.

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