A thought experiment: What if could chose content of dreams?

I keep coming back to this one as well…

Alan Watts suggested this exploration:

What if I could chose the content of my dreams, and each dream contained lifetimes of experiences, what type of dreams would I chose?

I may start out with choosing to get everything I want. (Everything my personality wants). Wealth. Leisure. Success. Security. Tropical beaches. Intimacy. Pleasure. Happiness.

After a while, that may get a little boring and stale, so I would introduce something to spice it up, maybe some light challenges. Some minor snakes in the paradise.

But knowing that it is a dream makes these challenges less interesting, so I may chose to forget that I am dreaming, as I am dreaming, just to spice it up further.

Even forgetting that it is a dream, light challenges may get a little stale, so I may chose to make the challenges more heavy, more dramatic. Poverty. Disease. Violence. Fall from grace.

To spice it up even further, I may chose to realize – or have an intuition – that it is a dream, and then strive to recognize it as a dream in the midst of the dream. Strive to know that it is a dream, even as it unfolds. And to recognize this consistently, through the different dream situations.

And then to live from it, with as much integrity, kindness and clarity as possible. To mature in how this is lived and expressed through my dream figure in the dream world. There is no end to this challenge, and at this point, it may be the most rewarding challenge.

Any one of these on its own would get stale and less interesting, so I would want to mix them up. In any one lifetime, I may want to emphasize one or more of these, and also mix in the other ones.

(And that is also true of any one of the goals and strivings within each lifetime. If it is repeated over and over, it gets stale and less interesting, so I want to mix them up. And since the striving to wake up is one of many, and not more valuable or important than any other striving, that one may be emphasized in just a few of the lifetimes.)

In exploring this for myself, I see that this is already how it is. This is life as it is.

What I see in the world, in how life unfolds in the world, is already like this. 

What I would chose, is life as it is.