In A Course in Demonic Creativity, I recommend reading your life like a dream or a creative narrative (a novel, a movie) to discern symbols and themes that can serve as clues to your overall life pattern, your purpose, your creative calling, your destiny and life mission as embodied in the concept of the daemon muse.
The following recent thoughts from Robert Lanza, the renowned scientist and originator of the theory of biocentrism, on the relationship between dreams and waking reality provide lateral support for, extension of, and commentary on the richness and realness of this approach:
The secrets dreams can unlock ultimately derive from the basic fact that reality is a process that involves us―a conscious observer. We assume the everyday world is “out there” in a more real or independent sense than is the world of our dreams, that we play a lesser role in its appearance. Yet recent studies show that day-to-day reality is every bit as observer-dependent as dreams are. . . .
As we go about our lives, we take for granted the way our minds put everything together because the process is effortless, and its underlying mechanisms are baked-in, hidden, and automatic. But you might not have suspected that this same process of fashioning a seemingly external 3-D reality is the one underlying dreams. Since the realms of dreams and wakeful perception are usually classified separately—with only one of them regarded as “real”—they’re rarely part of the same discussion. But there are interesting commonalities that give us clues as to how our consciousness operates. Whether awake or dreaming, we are experiencing the same process even if it produces qualitatively different realities. During both dreams and waking hours, our minds collapse probability waves to generate a physical reality that comes complete with a functioning body. The result of this magnificent orchestration is our never-ending ability to experience sensations in a four-dimensional world. . . .
Dreams are far more than the spontaneous, random firing of neurons that some insist they are. They must likewise be far more than the activation of random memories already contained in the brain’s neurocircuitry. . . . We’re witnessing an awesome occurrence: the ability of the mind to turn pure information into a dynamic multidimensional reality. You’re actually creating space and time, not just operating within it like a character in a video game. . . .
While it’s easier to appreciate the astounding nature of this process when it comes to dreams, it’s the same process that applies to our nondream lives. According to biocentrism, we’re always not just observing but creating reality. . . .
Source: “Dreams Are More Real Than Anyone Thought,” Psychology Today
Biocentrism says space and time are tools of the mind, and dreams seem to be only further proof of the truth of this statement. If space and time were really external and physical as is popularly believed, then how would it be possible to create something absolutely indistinguishable from them within the confines of one’s dreaming brain? We think that our experiences at night are only dreams and that they aren’t real. But dreams and what we perceive as reality are basically of the same nature. By following the implications of quantum mechanics in an unbiased way, we arrive at the unification of everyday reality and dreams. And persistent puzzles regarding the nature of dreams, reality, and our own lives, all fade away.
Even more laterally (or is it?), I recommend reading and considering the above in connection with the following thoughts and insights from nondual spiritual teacher Art Ticknor, who numbers among the more pointedly savvy and insightful members of that set, and who here calls attention to the interface between and implications of, on the one hand, the strategy you automatically pursue for achieving your core implanted desire and, on the other hand, the fact that this desire eventually leads beyond yourself and reveals your dependence on a force beyond your ken or control:
You’re reading this today because you’re pursuing a strategy to get what you want out of life. You may also be reading it because there’s something you need to “hear.” If that’s the case, I don’t know what it is, and you don’t know what it is, so we’ll have to rely on accident . . . or on intelligence greater than human knowing. Would it bother you if you knew you were dependent on such an intelligence to find what you’re looking for in life? . . .
The self is located, intuitively, within. Finding the self could therefore be described as going within. When you recognize that your hunger won’t be satisfied by even the highest external games (for example, the metagames of art, science and religion in DeRopp’s Master Game), then the only possibility for satisfaction lies within . . . the game of discovering what you truly are.
Going within expands the view. But since the view is not the viewer, going within expands the view of what you’re not. . . .
Like the zoom on a camera, when the lens is fully zoomed out you get a close-up view. Retracting the lens expands the view. Eventually you back up to a blank wall or abyss . . . the boundary of the individual mind. And then a reversal of focus leads to a quantum jump or leap. . . .
At the heart of the struggle for self-realization is an opposition of wants: one is to be relieved of your burden, while the other is to maintain the feeling of being the final arbiter. The feeling that you are in control, or should be, is the basic symptom of the illusion of individuality.
It’s no mistake that the first step in the AA 12-step program is admitting that your life is out of (your) control. Have you reached that point of honesty yet?
Source: “Your Strategy“
Finally, springboarding from Ticknor’s metaphor of a camera zooming out, here’s a final and even more lateral/tangential (or is it?) thought, this one from the final line of Thomas Ligotti’s “The Nightmare Network”:
Long shot of the universe. There is no one behind the camera.