Article May 9, 1994 Issue

Waking up

Mary Mona Seed Fisher

I was asleep, dreaming. Without warning, I found myself in the middle of a hostage situation. There were gunmen holding me captive. I realized my only hope was prayer—prayer that acknowledges the all-power and all-presence of God, good, and the consequent impotence of evil. While in the midst of prayer, I suddenly woke up. There were no gunmen, no hostages, no demands and threats.

As I sat up in bed, a lesson from this dream struck me: I woke up while praying. And what did I wake to? The fact that I was safe rather than in danger, that all the things that only moments before had seemed so very real were only illusions. It would have done me no good whatsoever to try to make those illusions more tolerable or less threatening, because they were part of a dream. I needed to wake up.

What relevance does this incident have to daily life? Christian Science has shown me that the problems of daily living stem from mistaken concepts about the nature of God and man, which in turn create the fears, doubts, uncertainties, of human experience. Yet these threats are just as illusory as the components of my dream, though they appear very real while we're dreaming the dream that accepts them as valid.

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