Have you ever woken up from a dream and thought, Oh my goodness, that was so real? That’s because it is real while you’re in it.
In a dream, you can be anywhere. One minute you’re in Hong Kong, the next you’re in Buckingham Palace, then in New York, then riding waves at Bondi Beach. You can experience absolutely anything. You might even dream you’re falling.
And while you’re falling, it feels completely real. Your heart races. Then, suddenly, you wake up.
The dream dissolves, and you realise it was only an illusion. But it was real while you were in it. This is where the ancient wisdom of Vedanta invites us to consider something extraordinary:
What if the waking world is like a dream?
In Sanskrit, two beautiful words describe this: Maya, meaning illusion, and Mithya, meaning neither real nor unreal.
The dream is real while we are dreaming. The waking world is real while we are awake. But when we wake from the dream, we see the dream for what it was.
Similarly, Vedanta says that there is another state of consciousness we need to realise. Then we will see this waking world for what it truly is.
