Let’s suppose that you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would—naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams—you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And later several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say “Well, that was pretty great! But now let’s have a surprise. Let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don’t know what it’s going to be.” And you would dig that, and come out of that and say “Wow, that was a close shave, wasn’t it?” And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further-out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death—or shall I say, death implies life—you can feel yourself—not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by luck —but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically—deep, deep down, far, far in is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
