a dream within a dream

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Feb 25, 2026

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream…

The Arandan believe that Karora, the creator, dreamed the world up in his sleep. As he lay in darkness on the ground, a kind of tree grew from his head all the way to the heavens, its roots planted on Karora’s head. The thoughts, wishes and desires in his head then became real as Karora dreamed them: animals and men sprung from his navel and armpits.
Eventually, when the sun rose, Karora awoke. As he stood up, he left a hole on the ground in the place where he had lain asleep. This hole then became the Ilbalintja Soak, a sacred place for the Arandan, which connects their daily life with the transcendence of their deity. Now awake, Karora lost his magical powers and, to his own surprise, met the animals and men that he had dreamed into existence the previous night. He even cooked and ate some of the animals for, without his magical powers, he felt hungry. Over a series of subsequent nights, Karora again fell asleep and dreamed more creatures into existence, coming in contact with them upon awakening the next morning.
All of this supposedly took place around the Ilbalintja Soak, a location integral to Arandan life. The animals that sprouted from Karora’s dreaming body are animals the Arandan see every day. The myth thus endows their very environment and its inhabitants with transcendence. Their whole existence is colored by the myth. It gives their lives meaning.
One way to look upon the Arandan myth is to take it literally and then proceed to dismiss it as absurd. Another way is to try and look beyond the words, taking the images of the myth as evocative symbols that point to deeper and ineffable intuitions. An extensive analysis of the Arandan myth is beyond the scope or purposes of this book, but it is useful to highlight a few salient aspects.
Clearly, the myth evokes the notion that the world is a mental creation of a deity who dreams it into existence while lacking lucidity. In the stupor of the dream, this deity has the magical power of bringing things forth into existence; the freedom unique to the imagination to concoct images without being bound by logic, resource constraints, ordinary causality or consistency. In other words, during his dream the deity doesn’t know what is supposed to be impossible and, therefore, nothing is impossible. However, he can also enter the dream, as it were, by waking up in it. When this happens, the deity gains the ability to self-reflect but loses his magical powers, for he is now a participant in his own dream, subject to its constraints and internal logic like the rest of his creation. In other words, by waking up he becomes aware of, and subject to, what is supposedly impossible. Yet, it is this act of waking up inside the dream that gives his creation concreteness and solidity, for only now creation is experienced in the state of lucid self-reflection that fixes it in place, as opposed to the ever-flowing slumber of sleep.
The idea built into this religious myth is sophisticated and striking. Karora can find himself in two different mental states: one lacking lucidity, which is linked to the unconstrained freedom to imagine things into existence; and a self-reflective state linked to becoming subject to self-imposed constraints.
Upon waking up inside his own dream, Karora even has to find food, cook and eat There seems to be a trade-off between lucidity and unconstrained creative freedom; they don’t come together. (Bernardo Kastrup)

The Uitoto religious myth

On the other side of the planet, in the Amazon jungle, the Uitoto tribe has a mind-bending myth of their own. According to it, a creator deity, Nainema, also created the world by imagining it while in a state of slumber. Initially, his imaginings were a tenuous and evanescent illusion, which could easily be lost and forgotten. However, Nainema held on to the illusion by the thread of a dream, not allowing it to escape him. He tied the thread with magical glue and then proceeded to stamp on the illusion until he could, as it were, break into it, so to sit down on the earth he was imagining. Now inside his own dream, he spat on the earth, thereby sprouting the jungle from his saliva. At last his original, tenuous illusion had become the actual, concrete world of the Uitoto.

The Hindu religious myth

There are many other examples of similar myths. The Hindu tradition in India, for instance, is particularly rich.
According to a foundational Hindu myth, the primary formative principle behind everything is called Brahman. Brahman thought primordial ‘waters’ into existence, forming the basic scaffolding of the world to come. Brahman’s seed in the primordial waters then became a cosmic egg—a universal motif across the world’s religious myths—from which Brahman Itself was born. Having achieved self-generation by being born inside the basic scaffolding of its own creation, Brahman gave it content: through further acts of thought, It created Heaven, Earth and all the concrete elements of the world. In some versions of the myth, the utterance of a sound, or the Word, is what fills the world in with content.

The common motifs behind the world’s religious myths

Alert readers will have noticed conspicuous and even striking similarities across the myths discussed. In all cases, the world is seen as the mental creation of a deity; that is, a kind of thought in the mind of God. The universe begins as insubstantial imaginings—‘illusions’ in the Uitoto case; ‘dreams’ in the Arandan case; thought-up primordial ‘waters’ in the Hindu case—which then gain concreteness and solidity once the deity itself enters the dream—by waking up in it, in the case of the Arandan; by stamping on it, in the case of the Uitoto; or by birthing itself into it, in the Hindu case. The deity always undergoes a significant change in its state of consciousness—from dream or illusion to a lucid, self-reflective, deliberate state-once it enters its creation.
These motifs recur across time and cultures, the West being no exception. For instance, according to the Christian myth, God also enters His creation by being born into it as the Christ. The broader notion of a cosmic mind holding the world within itself as a thought is also present in Western mythology. Consider the following words of the Corpus Hermeticum, basis of the Hermetic myth that underlies Western esotericism:

That Light, He said, am I, thy God, Mind, prior to Moist Nature ... Mind is Father-God. Not separate are they the one from other; ... He [God] thinketh all things manifest.

Changes in the state of consciousness of such cosmic mind—dreamless sleep, dream and wakefulness—are integral to the cycle of creation according to many of the world’s myths, as revealed in Joseph Campbell’s monumental work on comparative mythology. Indeed, Campbell recognized a consistent message in many myths regarding the nature of reality and the process of creation. He called it the cosmogonic cycle, describing it “as the passage of universal consciousness from the deep sleep zone of the unmanifest, through dream, to the full day of waking”. In the waking state, creation is experienced as “the hard, gross facts of an outer universe”. In the dream state, it is experienced as “the fluid, subtle forms of a private inner world”. In the dreamless sleep state, there is no experience as such and, therefore, only the potential for creation exists. The different phases of the cosmogonic cycle thus entail different states of cognition of the universal consciousness.

Now, therefore, whereas in the West—in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions—we have thought of God not only as a monarch but as the maker of the world. And as a result of that, we look upon the world as an artifact—a sort of machine—created by a great engineer. There’s a different conception in India where the world is not seen as an artifact but as a drama, and therefore God is not the maker and architect of the universe but the actor of it and therefore is playing all the parts at once. And this connects up with the idea of each one of us as persons, because a person is a mask—from the Latin word persona, the mask worn by the actors in Greco-Roman drama. So this is an entirely different conception of the world and—as I think I shall be able to show you—it makes an amazing amount of sense.
So we start from the premise that you—and you don’t know who you are, you can’t see yourself and, as I’ve pointed out, you don’t know how you grow your body, how you make your nervous system work, how you manage to emerge in this environment of nature. And so this unknown you—the you that is not you, the you that is not the ego—this is God. That is to say, not the cosmic boss but the fundamental Ground of Being—the reality that always was, is, and will be—that lies at the basis of reality. That’s you.
Now, let’s go into a more mythological kind of imagery. Suppose you are God. Suppose you have all time, all eternity, and all power at your disposal. What would you do? I believe you’d say to yourself after a while, “Man, get lost!” It’s like asking another question, which is: supposing you were given the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream every night. Naturally, you could dream any span of time—you could dream 75 years of time in one night, a hundred years of time in one night, a thousand years of time in one night—and it could be anything you wanted. You’d make up your mind before you went to sleep. “Tonight I’m going to dream of so and so.” Well, naturally, you would start out by fulfilling all your wishes. You would have all the pleasures you could imagine, the most marvelous meals, the most entrancing love affairs, the most romantic journeys. You could listen to music such as no mortal has heard and see landscapes beyond our wildest dreams. And for several nights—oh, maybe for a whole month of nights—you would go on that way, having a wonderful time. But then, after a while, you’d begin to think, “Well, I’ve seen quite a bit. Let’s spice it up Let’s have a little adventure.” And therefore, you would dream of yourself being threatened by all sorts of dangers. You would rescue princesses from dragons, you would perhaps engage in notable battles, you would be a hero. And then, as time went on, you would dare yourself to do more and more outrageous things, and at some point in the game, you would say, “Tonight I am going to dream in such a way that I don’t know that I’m dreaming.” So that you would take the experience of the dream for complete reality. And what a shock when you woke up! And you really scare yourself. And then, on successive nights, you might dare yourself to experience the most extraordinary things, just for the contrast when you woke up. You could, for example, dream yourself in situations of extreme poverty, disease, agony. You could, as it were, work on the vibration of suffering to its most intense point, and then suddenly—WOOP—wake up and find it was, after all, nothing but a dream and everything’s perfectly okay. And you would say, “Wow, man! That was a gas!” (Alan Watts)

The creator can afford to descend into his own creation. He can afford to shed his memories (of his identity) and his supernatural powers. Then he can test his own creation. But he cannot afford to get stuck in it. The creator deliberately plants clues in his irreal creation — clues which he cunningly knows in time (eventually) will restore his memory (anamnesis) of who he is, and his powers as well; he will then know that his creation is irreal and has imprisoned him in it, thus freeing himself and restoring himself to Godhood. So he has a fail-safe system built in. No chance he won’t eventually remember. Makes himself subject to spurious space, time and world (and death, pain, loss, decay, etc.), but has these disinhibiting clues or stimuli distributed deliberately strategically in time and space. So it is he himself who sends himself the letter which restores his memory. No fool he! (Philip K. Dick)

The Hymn of the Pearl is a passage of the apocryphal Acts of Thomas. In that work, originally written in Syriac, the Apostle Thomas sings the hymn while praying for himself and fellow prisoners. Some scholars believe the hymn predates the Acts, as it only appears in one Syriac manuscript and one Greek manuscript of the Acts of Thomas. The author of the Hymn is unknown, though there is a belief that it was composed by the Syriac gnostic Bardaisan from Edessa due to some parallels between his life and that of the hymn. It is believed to have been written in the 2nd century or even possibly the 1st century, and shows influences from heroic folk epics from the region.
The hymn tells the story of a boy, “the son of the king of kings”, who is sent to Egypt to retrieve a pearl from a serpent. During the quest, he is seduced by Egyptians and forgets his origin and his family. However, a letter is sent from the king of kings to remind him of his past. When the boy receives the letter, he remembers his mission, retrieves the pearl and returns.
The hymn is commonly interpreted as a Gnostic view of the human condition, that we are spirits lost in a world of matter and forgetful of our true origin. This state of affairs may be ameliorated by a revelatory message delivered by a messenger, a role generally ascribed to Jesus. The letter thus takes on a symbolic representation of gnosis.

The alien is that which stems from elsewhere and does not belong here. To those who do belong here it is strange, unfamiliar and incomprehensible… The stranger who does not know the ways of the foreign land wanders about lost; however if he learns its ways too well then he forgets that he is a stranger and gets lost in a different sense by succumbing to the lure of the alien world and becoming estranged from his own origin… The recollection of his own alienness, the recognition of his place of exile for what it is, is the first step back; the awakened homesickness is the beginning of the return.