The moment you are willing to become aware of the fact that you are dreaming, in that moment, you will no longer be floating in the dream. As you continue to observe the dream as a dream, you see a transformation take place: it becomes thought, no longer real.

Seeing the dream as a delusion of thought, and observing the deceiver behind the deception, you are no longer confused. You do not follow. You are no longer compelled to react and obey.

You begin to take charge of your own life. You begin to function from a wordless, common sense knowing, and a new world begins to work itself through you. At last, life is meaningful.

Just be careful not to develop a false sense of confidence from the fact that you are making some changes in your belief system—like dropping one friend for another, or switching investments.

The impetus behind these changes might be coming from your same old dreamworld; you must not regard them as a sign that you are waking up. But as soon as you separate from your imagination to see the dream as thought, the true open-eyed awareness will save you from continuing in the direction the dream “reality” was taking you.

You will no longer react with terror and hopelessness to the shadowy things of your imagination that you were not even able to share with anyone else, not even for the sake of seeing them “exorcised.”

Just become perfectly conscious of what you are doing, and you will immediately begin to know for certain what is wise or unwise, real or unreal, deceptive and emotional or logical and objective.

When you develop the confidence that comes from not being a victim of deception, you will automatically respond in a right way. You will no longer experience traumatic shocks.

You will know the marvelous power that comes with being awake, the power to respond in a right way as the result of being able to see what the right way is.

People lose their power to take advantage of you when they see you watching them calmly from beyond your thoughts. They will know that their game is up and you are their master when you fail to respond to their schemes.

Once you are committed, you will find it impossible to continue in the error of your ways and hang onto your consciousness at the same time. Slowly, your guilts, dark moods, fits of rage and anxiety, will diminish.

"A fantastic power dwells in the objective state of consciousness to affect you and everything around you for the good"

You will be less able to hurt, or to be hurt by, others, and death will lose its sting. Even your nervous habits will give you up. You simply won’t be tempted by the vices you once found so appealing, like drinking, smoking, taking drugs, or whatever else you once turned to for relief.

A fantastic power dwells in the objective state of consciousness to affect you and everything around you for the good. Until you learn to “be still and know” that power, you are doomed to be led by your imagination and the demons beyond it.

Emotion-based mental activity is strangely compelling because we are so guilty, and the only relief from guilt, other than repentance, lies in escape from the awareness of it.

We manage to do that (or so we think) by delving deeper into our mind stuff with a greater determination to plan and scheme and make things work out, to “get even.” After all, “thinking will make it so,” or so we think.

The nagging, barely conscious awareness that it won’t drives us to worry, and all worry can do is set off another flurry of mental activity.

In the beginning, your hope, a primitive kind of faith, was that your dreams would lead you to the reality of a material, ego-satisfying paradise of success and happiness, but they never do.

As failure follows failure, you become upset and frustrated, and your frustration drives you to a constant preoccupation with the defense mechanisms of thinking, dreaming, and worrying.

You may even see more tragedy ahead, the inevitable end of the road you have chosen to take, but you don’t know how to turn around.

When you try, it’s like driving with the brakes on. You keep “willing” all of your schemes to “work,” but you will be caught in a vicious cycle until you become committed to waking up.