I-MAGI-NATION
“Right now you think this room is real, and tonight you might have a dream and - if you are lucky - remember it as a dream, but not as reality. Well, if to dream is to dwell in unreality now knowing it as such, what is life but one uninterrupted dream? Until you have certain experiences, you will no doubt question my sanity, but when you have them you will know that this which seems real is no less a dream than the dream of the night.” - Neville Goddard
There comes a time when we all face the problem of being in less than ideal situations and not knowing how we got there. Although some adversity is inevitable, the constant suffering that is endured by good people seems unfair or at the very least it is bothersome. Some might say that it just ain’t right. But so it is common.
We need a better understanding of how we create reality, for when they say - you imagined your life to be this way, and so it is. And you answer- I did no such thing, for this is not what I want. Perhaps then it must be that we simply do not know all that we are imagining for ourselves.
After nearly 10 years of recording my dreams I realized one morning that I start every day by writing the words I Am. This is how I have begun nearly every recorded dream. There is the definition that means “to picture oneself” which is fine but I prefer this break down I picked up from a friend of mine:
I Am - ima - to be
Gin - gen - creating
Ation - the act or process of doing something
Imagination meaning then to be in a state of creating something, to exist in a state of creation. So then if it is I who is imagining and therefore creating my problems then I must not know what my problems are, for if I did then surely I would cease my bringing them into being.
If I have a nightmare then I am imagining fear. They ask, what are you afraid of? And I say - “I don’t know. In my dream I was afraid of lions but there are no lions where I live so why would I fear them.” So then what fear am I imagining for myself in my life? Well we would have to re-enter the image to re-imagine it and understand it. We must speak to the dream like our dreaming God speaks to us. As I re-enter the image of my dream I come to the point of terror in which I had previously fled and I stay there, for I am awake now to my dream. I say- Lion, I am not afraid of you, for this is my dream. In an instant the lion stops its speeding towards me and turns around to walk away. But that is not good enough. I say then, Lion, where are you going? And the lion says, Follow me. And so I follow the lion down the alleyway and as we turn the corner I am back in the theater of my elementary school. Today is the day of auditions for the musical. I watch myself about age 12 stand up and sing a song in front of the microphone, and I am overwhelmed again with the feeling of knowing that this was not going well, and then I remember that I was not chosen for any role at all and I never took a stage again. And so there I was, at the waking moment of which I AM GEN ATED a fear of speaking aloud on a stage. So now I have the chance to imagine differently, right at the germination of the original imagining. And so this time, aware of the dream, I sing my song and I get a round of applause from the judges. It was a heroic performance. I now birth myself a love for the stage. See I never knew that I wasn’t speaking in public because I was afraid, I simply thought that I did not want to, or really- I didn’t think of public speaking at all. If I am not conscious of something, how am I to know to change it? The dream shows us, and it shows up at the right time. I would only have this dream now as there approaches an opportunity of which I must prepare myself in ways I could not have imagined. And if I never let the dream bring light to my fears then I might miss these opportunities completely. The dream always comes on time and never gives us more than we can handle.
See dreams show us what we are imagining for ourselves that we do not know we are imagining. Dreams show us what we are creating that we do not know we are creating. Through the dream we can alter our imaginings to our liking in order to avoid ending up in situations of which we would have never consciously hoped for ourselves; or on the other hand, to bring us closer to images that we do wish to bring about.
Perhaps another example. I had become irritated with an acquaintance and they were occupying a large space in my mind, far too large than I wanted. I tried to reason my way through and could not seem to get them out of my mind and it was distracting me. I had a dream one night that they were in a room of my childhood home. They were in my brother’s room next to mine. Their things were everywhere, spread out all over. It was a mess.
Now this dream would seem easy to “analyze” because I was already conscious of the fact that this person was occupying an unwanted amount of space in my mind - my imagination - my nation of magic. Good thing analyzing isn’t the point. What the dream allowed to me was an alternative tool to my Reason Mind, which was not solving my problem (as it solves less of our problems than we might think). So how did this dream help me with my problem? Well it gave me an “in” quite literally. And so to solve my problem I re-entered the image of my dream with a plan. I brought helpers with me, little birds who helped clean my aquaintance’s things up. They folded the clothes and put the objects in boxes. Then they fascended them to the backs of some horses and just like that, all of my acquaintances' belongings were packed up nicely. I arranged for a guide to wait for them at the door of the house, so that I would not be sending them off without some assistance. And that’s what I did. Little by little each day I watched the visions and thoughts of my acquaintance vanish from my attention until they were gone completely, and only once in a while do they cross into my mind. My problem was solved. Not with reason but with imagining. With creation. It’s a direct line to resolution.
Dreams help us understand that we are in a state of creation in a deeper way than we might ordinarily conceive. We want to be consciously creating so we are not making decisions for ourselves while we are (metaphorically) “asleep” or unconscious of our imaginings.
For Neville Goddard (1905-1972) a mystic, lecturer and dancer, the Bible is a parable of the human psyche as opposed to a record of historical events and therefore there is no external God who answers prayers, but rather that "you are the creator".
“You are god sleeping, dreaming horrible dreams mixed with lovely ones; but someday you will awaken from the dream to know you are god. You will then remain a little while to tell your experiences to those who are willing to be disillusioned and will allow their false ideas of the past to fall away; and in the end you will leave this little shadow that walks across the earth to enter eternity.... How do I know this? Because I have awakened from the dream of life. I know that God laid himself down within me to sleep, to dream that he is I; for when he awoke, I was he!”
Now all of life is a dream, both “waking” and “sleeping” states. In this sense, God can awaken to the fact that he is dreaming (as us) just as we can wake up in our sleep dreams to the fact that we are dreaming. We call this conscious (or lucid) dreaming and in this state we can work with our intentions under far less restrictive measures than are allotted to us in our “waking life”. And what if, just as we have awoken to our own dream, god can awaken to his dream of us? Then god too would work under less restrictive circumstances than we have allotted him. Perhaps then god will take the lead of our lives and the divine intention can be known. Then we would certainly be living our purposes, wouldn’t we? And for all those who choose to walk the path planned for them by the infinite intelligence, so might they not suffer so consistently and so often? I believe in Goddard’s world the answer would be yes, and I am also inclined to believe it.
“While I remain in this body of blood and flesh, I must abide by its restrictions and limitations; yet remembering it is a dream, I can change it. If this world is reality I cannot change it; but if I am its reality, I can change my world relative to myself. I can imagine a desire fulfilled and watch it come to pass in my outer world. But first I had to know it was a dream. This I do know, for he who is in the depth of my own being said to me: “I laid myself down within you to sleep and as I slept I dreamed a dream. I dreamed that I am you.”
I like to think then of this. I, Michaela. I am the dream. Now acting as the dream when I am awake, I can go about my day giving hints to the sleeping creator in me in an attempt to wake him up! I get this idea from my sleeping dreams, as this is how dreams act to us -- they give us hints, images, clues to themselves and their nature. No matter how convincing the dream is every single night we are absorbed in it as its image closes around us and becomes our only reality for the time of our slumber. Even in its apparent solid and concrete nature, it still gives us clues and hints to its identity. Often, though, we are still too attached to appearance to get the hint. I am being chased by dinosaurs in New York City in 1929 and I believe fully that this is my only reality, as it always has been and will always be and there could be no other way. The challenge is to break loose of the appearance of things, and this strongly fashioned nail gets loser as we experiment with correct tools of imagining.
[God] [Creator] [Great Spirit] [Infinite Intelligence] is asleep, dreaming that they are me, Michaela. God is asleep dreaming that he is ________ (your name here).
I, as I identify myself, Michaela- I am the dream. God is the eternal reality. I change. I come into being and I disappear, but GS remains, eternal and in all things. This is why I am the dream and god is the reality. I cannot change reality. I cannot change the eternal structure of the Universe, but I can change the dream. I can change myself and what I perceive as my world around me. I do this through I Am Gen Ating it as so.
“Real are the dreams of gods and smoothly pass their pleasure in the long, immortal dream.”
-Neville Goddard
I have an exercise then that you can try it for yourself. I had a dream last night that, although it was not terrible it was also not ideal. I could have tried to pick apart the symbolism but I felt the urge to just change it. The dream shows us what we are imagining for ourselves. The dream showed me that I was still imagining a world filled with dense urban living and although I no longer live in the city that the dream resembled, I know now that there is a part of me still imagining myself in that environment. This will not do. I made up a very simple game that proved itself worthwhile, entertaining and powerful. Dream Madlibs.
I took my original dream and I changed the descriptive words until the dream transformed into a wonderful dream that suited me well. Here is the sample template as an example:
I am in a _______ . Im with_________. There are tons of ________ people. It's kind of just how it is. It almost felt like _____ in a sense. I ________ once with one of the _____ because I was trying to have a conversation with his friend and he kept playing his guitar ____ and I asked him to _______. Typical ____. Anyhow one of those guys was ______ maybe ___ year old. As me and ____ were coming from _____ somewhere we passed the guys or all of us were in an elevator somewhere. Before we all parted ways _______ asked if we wanted to hang out. Yes we did. So we all went on (________ included). It was fun, we kind of just bopped around the city. We stopped in a fancy clothes store and we _______ something to try on so we could all get fancy for _____. ________ looked great in a suit. It was totally awesome. I wind up back at ______. _______ left a painting dedicated for me.
In the original dream those blanks were filled in with things like “dense urban city” and “gutter punks” and “some dude.” In my revised dream I filled in the blanks with things like “clean beautiful city” and “nice young men” and “my divine match”. After that I went back into the image of my dream. I started in the original dream and proclaimed that it was now changed, and I changed it to my new dream. I then proceeded to have a wonderful dream of nice people in a beautiful place doing fun things with my divine date. It was so uplifting that I made my action plan to write a Thank You note to my divine match for gifting a nice painting to me and I stamped it and put it in the mailbox.
There will be more to come on the advances of this experiment, but I’d call it a fine success.
You can try this experiment on your own.
Print a dream of yours that could use some updating.
Change the descriptive words and nouns so that the dream is ideal for you.
Read the dream out loud to yourself, get it good in your memory. Then, close your eyes and reimagine the dream. Put yourself back into this dream but with all it’s new revisions. Play the whole dream out so that each revision is made. We must experience the revisions. For these things to work, it's not enough to think of places, we must think from them.
Enjoy.
Please read for yourself the Neville Goddard text archive for a better in depth understanding on this subject, particularly “Imagination” and “Behold the Dreamer Cometh”.