I have this dream every so often in which I’m holding someone I love, someone who is gone, and they are smiling and full of warmth, happy to wrap their arms around me, then suddenly I become lucid and think, “I’m dreaming this to comfort myself,” and they disappear.  The warm glow is replaced with an empty ache, and I wake up.

The dreams in which former loves are distant and preoccupied, attending to new loves and expressing little feeling for me, those I take to be real.  I sit back in my dream and let them play out and wake up reassured that I’ve acknowledged the way things are.

The funny thing is that I do have the luxury of knowing that those dreams in which I encounter someone, embrace, and share warmth with them are often shared by the person I love.  Again and again, I’ve had dreams of intimacy and connection that, I soon discovered, occurred for the other person as well, with the same details and intensity.

Why then, all of a sudden, do I not believe my dreaming eyes?  The dreams are vivid and simple and tender.  Someone now gone is suddenly in my arms, present, and I just love them, and they open, and I feel their love for me.  There is no script.  They look and feel and taste like the person I love.  I sense their energy with mine and experience recognition.

Then something causes me to reconsider.  All the evidence in my “waking life” suggests that such warmth, affection, and tenderness are gone.

I wonder which of my dreams are true.  I think, what if they are all true?  People and relationships have many sides to them.  There are many perspectives on the same thing.  It also occurs to me that, if the person in my dream really was present in spirit, I was not the only one who experienced doubt or disagreement and pushed it away.  Which makes me think, maybe it’s okay for me to believe my dreaming eyes and open to the exchange of warmth that transpires in the night.

But then I remember… none of them are true.  Which is to say, not one dream is anything other than dreaming.  Whether the dream is in one mind or two or ten thousand, it doesn’t matter.  A dream is still just dream, and what is that?  Ephemeral, transient, insubstantial.

What in this vast expanse is not a dream?  Not the “solid” objects or people, but this whatever is in front of me.  Not a cross section of space, but here.  Not the present moment as a slice of time between the past and future, but now.  When I try to name it, I’m already dreaming again.  All I know is that awakeness is always right in front of me, and the more I’m tossed and turned by good dreams and bad dreams and everything in between, the more I want it.

The ironic thing is that the moments in which I most wake up are the moments in which love is pouring out of me.  Especially those moments in which love is pouring out despite the dream.  Unconditional love, because conditions are what dreams are made of.  And everything that hinders love is only a condition… everything.  When someone is near and present, and I’m just loving them, I might not believe it, and in fact they might not believe it either, but I just love them anyway.

When you can’t wake up then, and you’re lost in dreaming, dream of love.  And follow its golden thread out of dreaming.