Our Superhero Power
Our world seems to be descending into utter chaos, as if the mass psychosis that has afflicted our species is ever-deepening, wreaking more and more havoc all over the world. I keep wondering, what can we—any of us—do? What can I do that could possibly be of help? One idea, like a recurring dream, keeps on insistently knocking at the door of my consciousness again and again. The idea is that our sleeping dreams are, both literally and symbolically, showing us night after night—if we look at them in the right way—the very solution to our myriad world crises. This is to say that our dreams themselves, though an illusion of the mind, are potentially teaching us—and revealing—the nature of reality and how we operate within it.
The problem is that we—each one of us—have a superhero power beyond our wildest imagination, but we don’t know it. Due to the fact that this power is always operating through us, we have become blind to and don’t recognize its operations. Because we are unaware of this practically magical power in our possession, our superhero power—like a boomerang—turns against us in a way that is disabling our evolutionary potential. This superhero power—which has everything to do with our innate creative genius—is on display, in ways both hidden and overt, in our dreams every night.
Our dreams are not just potentially giving us insight into our personal unresolved issues, compensating our one-sidedness and/or reflecting back our unconscious blind-spots (among many other benefits as well), but are also offering us an even greater gift. Contemplating the very process by which dreams emerge from our consciousness can help us gain a higher-order insight into how the creative nature of our consciousness actually operates. This understanding goes well beyond just receiving the gifts encoded within the particular symbolic content of any specific dream. Speaking in a symbolic language, our dreams are themselves living symbols reflecting back to us the part we play in constructing reality via the creative power of our minds. In showing us the role we play in composing them, our dreams are also revealing to us how we are actively participating—whether we know it or not—in creating our experience of life.
The way to unwrap the freely offered gifts that our dreams are lavishing on us starts with our creative imagination, which makes sense, as our creative imagination is the source of our dreams. As if making a magical elixir, there is a way of combining two of our intrinsic faculties - our unconscious dreaming/imaginative powers and the ability of our conscious mind to reflect upon these creative powers. Through self-reflecting (i.e., reflecting upon itself and its creations), the mind processes information, thereby potentially gaining insight into the internal dynamics of the mental projections that are shaping our moment-to-moment experience. This can potentially unlock a profound realization about the role we play in the arising of our experience, an insight lying dormant within us that has been yearning to be brought into the light of day.
Imagine we are in a dream, whatever it may be. Whatever point of view we are holding within the dream—which is a projection of our mind—is instantaneously, in no time at all, faster than we can think or blink, reflected back to us through the configuration of the seemingly externalized forms of the dream. The dream IS nothing other than a mirror of the very mind that is observing it. In other words, the dream is not separate from—and is, in fact, nothing other than—the psyche itself manifesting as a seemingly real solid universe.
In a dream the psyche has seemingly projected itself outside of itself and then observes and interacts with itself as if it is something other than and separate from itself, forgetting that what it is reacting to is its own creation. If the psyche becomes absorbed in this process—i.e., falls asleep to what it is creating as it is creating it—it becomes conditioned by its reactions in a way that constricts and limits its infinite creativity. In so doing, it uses its profound creative potency against itself, entrancing—and casting a binding spell—upon itself.
Our dreams are showing us that we are such incredibly powerful dreamers that we can unknowingly put ourselves under the spell—in reality a self-created ‘curse’—of an ultimately nonexistent phantom appearance that arises from the immense creativity of our own mind. Unless illumined and seen through, we have an unconscious proclivity to enchant ourselves—via the unrealized creative power of our own mind—into believing that the imaginary, illusory dreamlike apparitions that we have conjured up are more powerful than we ourselves are. The majority of problems of the human race are due to the lack of awareness of how we are participating in and engaging with our own creative process.
In essence, we have forgotten that we have immense reality-shaping powers at our disposal – we are geniuses with amnesia. As if ‘bewitched,’ we entrance ourselves, however, by our own innate, unrealized genius for co-creating reality. We have become masters of unconsciously imposing self-created limitations upon ourselves. We then struggle with trying to break out of our internal prison, forgetting that we ourselves have created what visionary William Blake calls “mind-forg’d manacles.” It is as if we are disoriented and deranged magicians who have unconsciously created a world that is destroying us, all the while thinking that we are just encountering—and being victimized by—an objective reality that we cannot change. Jung writes, “more than one sorcerer’s apprentice has been drowned in the waters called up by himself.”[i] In our case, the sorcerer’s apprentice is all of humanity, and we currently are in the process of destroying ourselves by the multiple catastrophes that we ourselves are unconsciously conjuring up.
Here’s where it gets really interesting. Whatever attitude and viewpoint we are holding in a dream is instantaneously mirrored back to us by the dream, as the dream itself is nothing other than a reflection of the very consciousness that is observing it. Our viewpoint in the dream and the way the dream appears are not two separate processes, but rather, reciprocally co-arise and mutually influence each other, both in no time at all as well as over time. Reflecting our viewpoint, the dream offers us all the evidence we need to make us think that whatever we are seeing in the dream is objectively happening, thereby confirming “the truth” of our viewpoint. Once the dream has “proven” to us that we are simply seeing “what is there,” we become more entrenched and fixed in our viewpoint, which the dream immediately reflects back by offering us evidence confirming our viewpoint, ad infinitum. This is an endlessly self-generating and self-reinforcing timeless feedback loop whose source is our own mind.
This process takes place instantaneously, atemporally—outside of time—and yet, it is experienced by us as unfolding over time, a combination which renders this creative dynamic invisible and unknown to us. Unless we develop the capacity, however, through paying careful attention to how we are playing a part in the moment-by-moment arising of our experience, this process—in which we are unconsciously participating—will remain unseen, and hence, have power over us.
When we are having a self-validating experience such as this, no one can talk us out of our conviction that we are seeing clearly—as our conclusion of seeing “reality” is based on our direct experience—we have all the data we need to convince ourselves of the rightness of our point of view. And yet, via the creative power of our mind to influence how reality manifests, we have literally hypnotized ourselves.
In taking the projections of our mind to be objectively real, we relate to an experience—whose source is within ourselves—as existing outside of ourselves, which is to split ourselves in two. We then think we are awake when we are actually caught up in, reacting to—and playing out—our unconscious. Dreams are, after all, a direct and unmediated expression and manifestation of our unconscious. This process of fooling ourselves via our intrinsic power to create our experience, combined with our insistence that our perspective is objectively true, is the underlying dynamic that is at the root of humanity’s endless conflicts and violence against itself, which is pure madness. When the overwhelming majority of seven and a half billion humans have fallen under this self-created spell, we get collective madness writ large on the industrial scale that we see today.
Our night dreams are potentially revealing to us, via the hidden, almost invisible projective dynamics by which they are constructed, what I call “our sacred power of dreaming.” This is truly a “sacred” power, in that it doesn’t come from us, but from a power beyond—and greater than—ourselves (by whatever name we choose to call it). While coming through us, this is a power that is also creating us (as well as the whole universe) in which we are—knowingly or unknowingly—participating. Our sacred power of dreaming is our intrinsic power to call forth, create and “dream the dream”—be it night or waking dream—into materialization moment by moment. This is the superhero power that we are wielding every moment of our lives - knowingly or not. Becoming aware of this power, however, and using it consciously is where our real healing creative power lies. Every night of our lives our dreams are illustrating—and revealing to us—this creative power that we all possess. This very same creative power that shapes our dreams at night is in-forming (albeit with a greater lag time) our daily lives as well.
In our sacred power of dreaming we have been granted a practically God-like creative power. This places a demand on us that we can no longer remain blind and irresponsible towards these divine creative powers that we unknowingly possess. As long as we choose to stay unconscious of the sacred inheritance that is freely bestowed upon us, however, we are fated to act out our God-given creative power in self-limiting and destructive ways, as we see so overtly demonstrated throughout our world today.
When our life is seen as a dream—and we interpret it as such—the deeper message we are continually getting is that it is imperative for us to know something about the workings of the sacred forces within us. It makes all the difference in the world whether we become conscious of how we are—all the time—interfacing and interacting with the creative power of the divine.
True creativity is a continuation of and co-participation with the on-going act of cosmic creation itself. The Creator created humanity in His/Her own image – a free being gifted with creative power. Humanity was created so that we, too, would consciously create; being creative is our divinely-sanctioned vocation. Humanity is called to actively participate in engaging our creative nature. Our dreams at night are—both literally and symbolically—revealing the dynamics underlying the profundity of our creative capabilities.
In my opinion, the future of humanity depends upon whether or not we wake up to the divinely-sponsored creative agency within us and consciously step into our innate superhero power – but maybe I’m just dreaming. As Christ himself said in the Bible, “You are Gods, you are all children of the Most High…. And Scripture cannot be broken.” It is our prophesied destiny to eventually wake up and consciously realize our God-given superhero power.
There is no better time to have this realization then the present moment. Christ himself said, “Behold, now is the acceptable time. Behold, now is the day of Salvation.”[ii] The present moment—right now—is, in fact, the only time that we ever can realize this, as it is the only time that there ever is.
Footnotes
[i] Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, para. 31.
[ii] 2 Corinthians 6:2
About the Author
A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul Levy is a wounded healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. Among his books are The Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality (SelectBooks, May 2018) and Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil (North Atlantic Books, 2013). He is the founder of the “Awakening in the Dream Community” in Portland, Oregon. An artist, he is deeply steeped in the work of C. G. Jung, and has been a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for over 35 years. He was the coordinator for the Portland PadmaSambhava Buddhist Center for over twenty years. His email is paul@awakeninthedream.com; he looks forward to your reflections.
