Dreaming and Waking: The Weight of Identity

There is something revealing about dreams. A few days ago I had a dream with very vivid emotions; the sensation lingered clearly throughout the morning. It felt real. I wondered about the difference between the emotions of a dream and those of waking life, and the reason why the former fade over time without effort, while the latter seem so difficult to let go.

Upon waking, we do not revisit what happened in the dream, nor its characters, nor do we defend ourselves against what they did to us. We let it go by recognizing its illusory nature. When someone wakes up, the scenery ends and they stop interacting with the entities that appeared there.

The emotion itself is perceived the same way in both states, in the mind as well as in the body. The divergence occurs in waking life when an experience arises and we anchor it to a root of identity. We take it as real and solid. We bring it to memory, give it energy, and confront it, making it part of our personal history and of what we believe we are. Thus, an event that could have dissolved naturally becomes stuck as a piece of ourselves.

The distance between a dream that dissolves and an emotion that accompanies us for months does not lie in the intensity of the experience, but in our insistence on claiming it long after it has passed.

Perhaps what we call reality, including the "I" we believe ourselves to be, is also an appearance within consciousness, a dream we have not yet recognized as such. By removing the weight of personal identity, the emotional burden loses its anchor and fades on its own.

Call to Action:

Observe the discomfort accompanying you today and check if you are sustaining it by making it part of your story. I invite you to schedule an Exploration Session to observe this mechanism of the mind together and find the space where that burden can finally dissolve.