Life Is But a Dream — But Whose?

When I was 17, I set out in search of my dream, as if a dream was something out there — a hidden treasure waiting to be found.

I thought that if I could just discover it, I would regain my happiness and sense of purpose.

So I searched.

In high school, my debate teacher introduced me to Zhuangzi’s Dream of the Butterfly — the story of a man who wakes up unsure if he was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. It shook something loose in me, made me wonder: How do I know what’s real?

In college, existentialism gave me another answer — Sartre’s Roads to Freedom introduced me to bad faith, the idea that we live inauthentically, trapped in roles society assigns us. Maybe I wasn’t just dreaming — I was performing someone else’s script.

In grad classes, I studied Gnostic Christianity, which teaches that the material world is a deception, a trap set by the Archons, and that true knowledge (Gnosis) is what liberates the soul. Now the dream wasn’t just a performance — it was an illusion, imposed from the outside.

After college, I found Advaita Vedanta — Hindu philosophy that says we are trapped in a conditioned, collective dream. Atman, the true self, is already free, but we don’t realize it because we mistake illusion (Maya) for reality. I started to see a pattern.

Buddhism echoed the same truth: suffering comes from attachment to false beliefs, to illusions that we mistake for real.

Even the Toltec tradition, with The Four Agreements, spoke of breaking free from the illusions imposed by society, unlearning the rules we never chose in the first place.

And yet — I still kept looking.

There were moments of Fool’s Gold along the way. Conspiracy theories offered freedom wrapped in hidden laws and secret loopholes, tempting me with the idea that if I just understood the system well enough, I could escape it.

But, then I remembered, way back in 1993, a sensation hit bookshelves across America: Magic Eye: A New Way of Looking at the World.

If you relaxed your eyes and stared long enough, a three-dimensional figure would materialize from the depths of a computer-generated image on the page. It was always there — but you had to stop trying to see it. The trick wasn’t in looking harder. It was in letting go.

Not everyone could do it. Some never saw the image at all, no matter how hard they strained. Others, once they saw it, couldn’t unsee it.

And that was the realization I had been circling all along.

The dream wasn’t something I needed to find. It was something I was already living.

It wasn’t out there. It was here.

Seeing it meant taking off the glasses of inherited ideas — culture, parents, upbringing, the stories I had been told about reality.

The real journey wasn’t about discovering something new. It was about unlearning what was keeping me asleep.

And then I remembered, like every other child, learning that fabled nursery rhyme:

Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

The funny thing is, life truly begins the moment you wake up from the dream.

Until that point, you feel separate from it — adrift, searching, trying to grasp something just beyond your reach. But when you experience what all those traditions call an awakening or enlightenment, it’s not just that you suddenly see the powers pulling the strings at the top of the pyramid.

You see yourself — the dreamer and the dream. You are all of it.

The kingdom of heaven (or hell) is here and now — which are you helping to create?