All around me a desert. Warm, dry air blows through my hair. Red dirt and rock go on in every direction. Ahead a cactus. Tall, dark, unchanging. Thirsty for the shade. Mesmerized by this lone figure or just curious about the prickly giant, I walk towards it. I find that it’s closer than I had first figured, because I am there in an instant.

“Hello,” it said, as if he could talk.

My journey was long,” I say. “A lifetime.”

“I know your tale, a familiar one. But rest at ease my friend, for tonight you may sleep the sleep of a thousand years.”

Yet, you have never left the comfort of your own home.

Perception.

The way we perceive the world around us.

Since we were born, we have been told how to live in this world. We have been told what is good and what is bad. We have been told how we are suppose to interact with different everyday events.

From all of the input our minds absorb throughout our life, we grow an image of the ways of the world. The way the world interacts with itself.

Now lets suppose that we were wrong. Wrong about the ways of the world. Wrong about which direction is up, or down. Wrong about the desert being warm, and snow cold. Let’s suppose that for just a minute nothing could be counted on to act the way we know that it does. That the weather will change from clear skies to a tornado, that the snow will melt our skin, that everyday actions are miracles in the making.

Close your eyes. Now imagine a peaceful, tranquil island. You are there alone in the paradise. The ocean gently throwing waves upon the shore. The tropical breeze blowing through tropical trees.

Now lets also say that on your little island, you are more at peace and feel more relaxed than you have ever been in your life.

Ahhh, feels so good, so refreshing. Your breath one with the current upon the sand. Total and thorough peace.

The next thing that you experience as you open your eyes is, of course, remembering that you are in the same location you had been a few moments before, namely NOT on the beach.

Bummer huh? But what if you could tell your mind that you really were on the island. What if, for all you knew, the island was real. That you had really been relaxing on the beach. What if you were even sweating from that hot sun?

If we could be convinced that the island was real, than who’s to say that it isn’t?

Take for instance, you are missing some money. Lets say that you and your daughter are the only ones home.

Assuming you didn’t lose the money on your way home, you can be reasonably assured that your loving daughter has confiscated your cash.

Everything you feel, points to her. Everything in reason leads to her. You have no doubt in your mind that the culprit is your very own. So to you, there is no other way. Your daughter has the money.

Now lets examine this. You take in all the information just like you do with every event in your life. You analyze the info and compare it to past experiences, and generalrules of thumb”. You compare it against laws of nature and also unforeseen possibilities. All of which are a common set of factors that you use to evaluate all of your day to day activities. Now of course, after a number of years of this, it becomes our very own nature. Our “Human Nature”. It’s how we judge each other, and how we learn to cope with the world around us.

Back to our money problem.

Now that you know your daughter has the money, you decide it’s time to get it back, right? So you venture downstairs and into the living room where you hear the TV and what do you expect to see ? Maybe you expected her to be deep in her show. Maybe you thought she was reading. Maybe you thought she had made herself a snack.

Of course, and of these would be ok. All of them are normal, everyday occurrences. All are in the norm. You didn’t even give it much thought, because of that norm either. Everyday life happenings that mean nothing, yet are realized by our brain to be “in acceptance” of this world. So when you get to the living room, you are not surprised by the rather comical yet deeply disturbing sight of your daughter playing chess with the upright sitting family cat who, by the way, seems to have the upper hand at this point in time.

WHAT ???

Your cat? The cat, although winning at the moment, has obviously been misled about the role of felines in a domesticated society.

But what if you had expected that also? What if chess-playing cats were an everyday sight? Then you wouldn’t have been so surprised when you saw your little pet take your daughters queen with her rook. But even worse, what if you didn’t expect either one? What if you had no idea how anything acted or reacted to any situation at all. Or that the World around you, although the same, didn’t follow the same rules or lawsanymore. Like being on a new planet, not knowing anything about it. You would have to expect to see green aliens as well as red ones. You would have no past experience in that realm and therefor nothing to use as a guide.

Better yet, what if you could change the world at your own pleasure. What if you could make the world around you bend to your liking. Better still, what if it changed through a subconscious level, so you wouldn’t have to actually think something yourself for it to be as true as the World we live in.

What if this made up World that you create was real, and when you visit, you might as well be in our world, because both are equally as real. Like Dreaming. When you dream you don’t say, “I’m dreaming so this isn’t real”, you react to the dream as if it were real. That’s what I’m getting at, a World of dreaming, only, your wide awake.