The dream state is often described by the movie analogy. Imagine that you are sitting in a cinema and watching a very exciting movie. You are so immersed in the story that you even forget that you are in a cinema. It is so entrancing that you totally forget about yourself and ‘become’ the character on the screen. You can be so identified with the character that it could feel as if you were the hero in the movie. Emotional responses arise in your body (which is sitting in the cinema but you totally forget about it) when the loved one in the movie dies or when the whole universe is saved by ‘you’. This is a dream. A fiction. But you believe it into ‘reality’. At least it becomes ‘your reality’ until you wake up from this mesmerisation when the guy behind you sneezes. But soon, you fall back into believing to be the saviour of the world.

It can be assumed that dreaming is over when the film ends. You leave the cinema and the reality of everyday life is back again. Isn’t it? Or, you just have fallen into another dimension of ‘reality’, dreaming your life story into ‘existence’?

Awakening from the dream is about realising that there is a fictional story, called ‘my life’, with a fictional character ‘me’, projected onto the ‘inner movie screen’, with other characters coming and going and affecting the me-character, whom the story is supposedly happening to.

Questions may arise…
Is this story of ‘my’ life real?
What is behind the story?
What are you without the story?
Is there an I without the story?