You dream you are sitting before an easel sketching a roadside scene. You fill in, line by line, the rocks and trees. Now you begin to pencil in the cows... At that moment you wake up. Question: What happens to the cows? To the picture itself?

Consider a parallel. You dream you are ill. The ailment develops. You begin to fear... At that moment you wake up. What happens to the symptoms and the sickness?

In a far more fundamental way than the night-dream, the fact is that all sickness is a dreamlike state of false consciousness. Christian Science shows it to be a mental delusion, unreal because it is contrary to the real status and condition of man as God's spiritual likeness.

Once we grasp or even glimpse this fact, we see how spiritually scientific prayer, letting in the light of all-harmonious Truth, heals disease. We also begin to understand why healing can be instantaneous.

Christ Jesus performed instantaneous healings repeatedly. Look up "immediately" and "straightway" in a Bible concordance and you'll find he healed people at once of many kinds of maladies. The Gospels make clear that he healed fever, leprosy, congenital blindness, hemorrhage, spinal deformity, paralysis, without delay.

Jesus' early followers were able to prove the Christly healing power the Master taught them. In some instances they too demonstrated its immediacy. In the town of Lydda, Peter found a man named Aeneas, who the Bible says "had kept his bed eight years, and was sick of the palsy." Straightway Peter invoked the power of Christ and the man was healed; as the Bible says, "he arose immediately." ^{Acts 9:32-35.}

Miracles? Not really. Radio transmission seemed an improbable miracle until electronics became understood. Likewise, healings by spiritual means may seem improbable too—until Truth and its universal spiritual laws, together with its method of demonstration, become understood through the Christ Science.

The Christian Science textbook explains, "Disease is an image of thought externalized." ^{Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 411.} Its author, Mary Baker Eddy, further writes, "To the Christian Science healer, sickness is a dream from which the patient needs to be awakened." ^{Ibid., p. 417.}

In his own healing work Christ Jesus consistently relied on the all-powerful Father-Mother God. He said, "I can of mine own self do nothing." ^{John 5:30.} And, "The Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works." ^{14:10 .} Truth is the healer. Jesus proved beyond question that when Truth is clearly understood, it awakens mortals from nightmares of suffering.

On the basis of the Master's teachings, Mrs. Eddy also proved the immediate healing power of Truth in numerous recorded instances, including cure of severe and supposedly terminal conditions. ^{See for example: Science and Health, pp. 192-193; Unity of Good, p. 7; Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), p. 140; Clifford P. Smith, Historical Sketches (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1941), pp. 65-86.} Many who study and practice Christian Science today are also demonstrating for themselves and others the immediacy of Truth's healing power.

Such an awakening to the truth of being can come at any point. Science shows that disease has no inexorable course to run. Disease has no more power to hang on and on than does the nightmare we experience in sleep. The active, awakening law of Truth and Love is ever available.

On one occasion I was healed in a few minutes by waking up to the fact that the same spiritual law and Truth that identified Jesus as the Christ is ever present, always available, always capable of bringing the same wonderful results. Christ, Truth, is capable of meeting every dream of discord by awakening us to the perfection and uninvaded harmony of man reflecting God. It brings to light the presence and all-power of sustaining, ministering, ever-active divine Love.

Sometimes we need to wake up sufficiently to challenge dreamlike beliefs we've been unwittingly accepting. Do we assume, for example, that time is the healer instead of Christ? Then we may be believing that a disease has to "run its course"—and that if it is healed "this would have happened anyway." Do we assume that healing comes about through laws of nature—physiological action, that is—and that prayer just helps such action toward a speedier result? Then, we need to radically change our thinking from a material to a truly spiritual standpoint.

We will not harbor such inconsistencies if we rely on the pure saving truth of Christian Science. This Science shows us that man's real substance is Spirit, not matter; that his real life is in God, not in physiological action; that he is forever sustained in wholeness and immortality by irreversible Truth and Love; that divine Principle governs every action of his being.

Only harmony and perfection—not disease—are normal to man. Jesus knew this and proved it. As Mrs. Eddy writes: "It was the consummate naturalness of Truth in the mind of Jesus, that made his healing easy and instantaneous. Jesus regarded good as the normal state of man, and evil as the abnormal; holiness, life, and health as the better representatives of God than sin, disease, and death." ^{Miscellaneous Writings, p. 200.}

In scientific Christian healing, what restores the body is a change of consciousness from mortal fears and beliefs to the radical spiritual truth of God's allness and man's indestructible, harmonious being as God's expression. Matter is the objectification of mortal thought. It is a fallacy to believe that any disease is real, resides in man, and therefore has a course to run. Repudiating this fallacy, Mrs. Eddy writes, "Some people, mistaught as to Mind-science, inquire when it will be safe to check a fever. Know that in Science you cannot check a fever after admitting that it must have its course. To fear and admit the power of disease, is to paralyze mental and scientific demonstration." ^{Science and Health, p. 376.}

Even so: an admission that a fever (or any other malady) must run its course would check one's efforts in Science to heal it; but the denial that it has any course to run—because it is wholly a mortal dream-state—is scientific and is a vital step toward healing.

When Christ, Truth, awakens us to the facts of man's true being as God's idea, we see the delusive nature of the dream-state called disease. And with this awakening we see that disease and suffering are like the nonexistent cows, easel, and sketchbook in that night-dream of a drawing expedition—unreal and no part of man in God's likeness. The result is healing.

DeWITT JOHN