AWAKENING FROM THE ADAM-DREAM

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.

Recounting and dwelling upon the details of a night dream will never relieve one of the seeming unhappy memory of the dream. Freedom must come in the realization that nothing really happened; it was all an illusion. There is one thing certain about a dream: everything which seems to take place in it disappears with the dream.

A child awakening from a frightening dream cries out for his mother. When his mother comes to him and he hears her voice, his fears are quickly dispelled and he feels safe. We can feel just as secure and protected in the realization that our Father–Mother God is always present and that no matter what the material condition may seem to be, it is never true because it is not God–created and has no power over God's child, who dwells forever in the arms of divine Love. If we would take as firm a stand against the dreams of material sense as we do against the false conditions of the night dream, how quickly our problems would be solved.

Mrs. Eddy writes (ibid., p. 418), "Tumors, ulcers, tubercles, inflammation, pain, deformed joints, are waking dream-shadows, dark images of mortal thought, which flee before the light of Truth." Christian Science awakens the earnest student from this mortal dream and unfolds to him his God-given dominion and inheritance as a child of God, dwelling in reality—not in dreamland. As we awake we discover that God is and always has been here; that He never was absent, being the divine omnipresence, in whom "we live, and move, and have our being."

Someone may say: "Yes, I understand that I must awaken from the night dream in order to be free from it, but how do I free myself from the Adam-dream of mortal existence with its discords of sin, disease, and death? These seem very real to me, and I find it difficult to put aside the fears which accompany them." The answer is: "Wake up! Cease to accept the illusion of substance as matter, of life as mortal, and of intelligence as finite and demonstrate more of man's real nature as the expression of Spirit, Life, intelligence, which has no limit of goodness." We must learn the falsity of the arguments presented by the five personal senses, which show us only the illusive side of everything, and gain spiritual sense, which sees nothing but perfection and which is conscious only of purity, rest, and peace, and gain also the abiding health that is found through the demonstration of the ever-present power of divine Life.

The dream of material living has nothing to do with the Life that is God. It was Jesus' realization of man's coexistence with God, his oneness, or unity, with God, his oneness, or unity, with divine Life, which enabled him to speak with authority when he healed the daughter of Jairus. "And all wept, and bewailed her: but he said, Weep not; she is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn, knowing that she was dead. And he put them all out, and took her by the hand, and called, saying, Maid, arise. And her spirit came again, and she arose straightway" (Luke 8:52–55). Jesus "put them all out." He put out all beliefs of grief, separation, limitation, selfishness, and the error of death itself. He knew the presence and power of Life.

When we are confronted with a similar situation, or any other phase of the Adam–dream, all false thoughts and fears attendant upon the belief of death must be put out. While we may think we understand that God is Life, yet we may still not have overcome the sinful elements of thought which lead to death or the belief that there is life in the material body. God is Life, and there is but one Life. Man expresses infinite, eternal Life and therefore has no personal life of his own to lose. As we realize the presence and power of the one Life, the one Mind, we awaken from the nightmare, or the dream of life and intelligence in matter, to the realization of perfect God and perfect man.

We are forever safe in the arms of infinite Love. God never sleeps or dreams, and His image and likeness never dreams. The awakening to the fact that man is the image and likeness of God, Life, Truth, and Love, and the putting of this understanding into practice, will enable one to express the qualities of this triune Principle. To the extent that we are living in obedience to God and are conscious of His all-supporting power we enjoy health, harmony, and peace. This awakening requires consecrated and persistent effort in studying and applying the truth as taught in Christian Science.

The human mind is prone to believe that the healing of a material condition is all that is needed; whereas the actual need is always for spiritual awakening. The mortal, with its false sense of good and its seeming evil, will become less and less real as we study and demonstrate the truths of Christian Science, until we finally awake entirely from this Adam-dream. The earnest student of Christian Science is finding his way out of dreamland and is awakening to the realities of being and to his true selfhood. Let us not be satisfied with the dream of material sense, but be satisfied only when we awake to see man in His likeness.

In Science and Health is the assuring statement by our Leader (pp. 218, 219), "When we wake to the truth of being, all disease, pain, weakness, weariness, sorrow, sin, death, will be unknown, and the mortal dream will forever cease." The awakening to truth is a present possibility.