The Mortal Dream Is Untrue

MARGET HEYDEBRUCH

Mary Baker Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 250): "Now I ask, Is there any more reality in the waking dream of mortal existence than in the sleeping dream? There cannot be, since whatever appears to be a mortal man is a mortal dream."

The unreal testimony of mortal sense and the remedy for belief in it were illustrated to a student of Christian Science by the following experience. One night, in a dream, a woman had a vivid sense of stumbling and falling on a railroad track. Glancing down the track she saw an express train rapidly approaching. With eyes riveted on the train, she became immobile with fear and horror. Even as the ground underneath was trembling, she found herself saying, "If only I could get up!" But a mesmeric fear deprived her of the ability to move.

With great effort, in the dream, she closed her eyes and turned in prayer to God. She declared the truth about the harmony and safety of God's kingdom. She acknowledged that God endowed man, His image and likeness, with the qualities of unfettered Mind; that there was no power apart from God to deprive man of existence in His perfect universe of ideas; and that God gives the ability to do right, here and now. The interesting result was that, according to her dream, she walked off the railroad tracks in good time; and then she awoke, perfectly calm and composed. How grateful she was that even in the night dream her thought had turned to Truth and found blessed relief!

Perhaps in the waking dream of corporeal sense, with gaze fastened upon error's appearance, one may find it difficult to understand evil's unreality. But, shutting out material sense, and with wholehearted desire turning to God, Truth, we may echo the words from a hymn,

"Yet in my dreams I'd be
Nearer, my God, to Thee,"

until we reach the joy of revelation and our wakened thought, "bright with ... praise," discovers the actual allness of God, good.

Giving God the glory, letting Love fill our thinking, which may once have been filled with error, we find the freedom which must inevitably result from rejoicing in the truth of being. That which may appear to the senses as a fever, a false growth, an illness, an envious, hating person, or an unhappy past has no more reality than had the express train in the sleeping dream. Every demonstration of the truth in Christian Science proves that error, of whatever name or nature, is a product of mortal mind, no more substantial than a vivid dream.

Evil suggestions are mastered and dispelled by entertaining in one's consciousness the opposite truth about God and man, who is eternally the likeness of his Maker, and by knowing that no evil can be added to and no good taken from God's creation, because it is spiritual and real. Even in the midst of war the glorious consciousness of safety and peace has often been proved in the awareness of the presence and power of divine Love.

The reward of taking command of one's thinking and of keeping one's consciousness obediently awake to the truth is the spiritual certainty which dispels the mesmerism, and blesses universally as well as individually.

Neither erudition nor time is necessary to overcome the dream of sense, but only recognition and acceptance of the absolute oneness and allness of God, good. Then comes the awakening, the spiritual understanding, dispelling fear, lack, disease—dreams, all of them—and we are free and ready to enter into the joy which comes from knowing God, to whom Habakkuk exclaimed: "Art thou not from everlasting, O Lord my God, mine Holy One? ... Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity."

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