War Games and Dancing Bears

Last night I had a dream of a large scale sort of war game. In this game there were normal civilians and not military people, not soldiers. And in this war game people were not just fighting. Some of them were talking at dinner, some were having love affairs, some were travelling around enjoying the scenery. But the gist of the whole thing was one of struggle. There were definite battles, mostly small guerilla skirmishes, but it was not an intense battle kind of thing like Normandy or Vietnam or Iraq.

I recall taking a tour on an elevated train and looking down at the scenery. It was one of a hybrid world of forests vegetation and of manmade construction. The buildings were normal city buildings but they were not placed in a sterile city environment like humans create. Rather they were incorporated into the natural world in a more Hobbit-like manner.

I recall looking down at a savannah like scene and thinking how nice it might be to go camping there, and how I could pitch a tent or simply lay down a sleeping bag right there behind what looked like a library.

The theme developed in a weird type of dream “time” that sort of skipped along the way one might jump through a movie stored on a computer to check out the scenes every few minutes or so to see if they wanted to watch it.

Near the end of the dream I was standing in a large crowd in front of a remarkable type of Being who seemed to have mastered the game and who I considered to be the “top” player. This player had become so good at the game that he had essentially taken it over and was directing the whole thing with his mind.

The visual representation of this Master Player was that he was a large sphere sort of stuck up into a corner of what felt like a giant box in which the entire thing was being played out. He was surrounded by a gelatinous, fluid mass that had many tentacles slithering around it as if it were a giant octopus who had been thrown up into the corner of a room and had stuck there all smeared out and writhing.

The main body of this thing was spherical and black. It had a sort of skin over it that had facial features. I could clearly see eyes, nose, and mouth as a thin skin over the wet black substructure like someone had wrapped skin over a giant billiard 8-ball that was visible inside of the eye and mouth holes. I recall that out of the eye and mouth holes came searchlight-beams of light as the Master Player spoke. The effect was one of great power and control.

The Master Player was speaking to the throng of assembled dream characters, myself included, who stood arrayed across a field below him. He was speaking to us all in a sort of empathetic manner, like a caring father. His face was, in its own freakish way, sort of beatific.

He was trying to tell us all that we were “more” than just these players in this fight, that the whole thing was a show, and that we were, underneath of it all, “HUMANS”. The entire assembly stood in rapt attention, all eyes focused on the speaker.

By “HUMANS” he meant that we were somehow greater beings, of higher intellect, spirituality, and capability. He meant that we had power and wisdom and love.  He was trying to show us something that he had learned throughout the conduct of this war game, this struggle. It was as if he had become enlightened while he was forcing us all to fight each other, and that he had finally seen a “truth” he wanted to share.

He appeared to be trying to wake us up to a greater reality, and was asking us to move beyond this fighting game into something "more". He was trying to take us to a higher level.

My attention was distracted from the Master Player by a sort of Wizard-looking old man standing a few feet from me. The Wizard was not paying attention to the speech. He stood in the spotlight beam from the Master Player’s eyes and he made shadow puppets with his hands. In front of the Wizard stood what appeared to be two bears that were fascinated by the puppet show, and were dancing along with the shadow figures made by the Wizard’s hands.

I wondered briefly why the Wizard was not listening to what sounded like a profound revelation. Instead, he seemed to be playing childish games, with some apparent glee, and enjoying the company of the two dancing bears. The trio seemed to be almost in another world of their own making, as if the great and weird scene before us did not interest them.

And then it occurred to me what was happening.

The Master Player was lying to us.

The Wizard was conducting his own revelation. He was showing us the triviality of the Master Players speech, and therefore of the Master Player himself.

We are in fact NOT great and powerful “HUMANS”. We simply are not that.

The Master Player was not revealing a truth. Rather, he was entrapping us further into his game. He was simply laying down the groundwork for another, higher level of the same game. He was tricking the assembled players, which I am certain represented in my dream all of humanity, into continuing to play his game, only now perhaps on a higher level into which he wanted us all to go.

And since he was taking the time and effort to convince us of something, even though it was false, and not simply forcing us all to go there, it seems to me that he could not force us, and that he needed us to go there voluntarily, which was the point of the speech.

The Wizard was pointing out the lie. He was ignoring the Master Player and flaunting the fact. The frivolousness he showed in the face of what seemed to be a serious and important revelation from a serious and important “master” indicated that the master was in fact nothing of the sort, and that the revelation was therefore nothing of the sort.

What became apparent to me at that moment was the Wizards message –

ALL forms are false.
ALL game scenarios are false.
ALL fighting and struggle is false.

All of these are merely games crafted by the Master Player, games in which we “volunteer” to participate, and in which we find ourselves forced to fight, or to love, or to go camping.

But the volunteering is not a true act. It is one that flows from lies and deception.

The Master Player does not follow the concept of informed consent. He is a fraud and we participate in his games because we are ignorant of the basic truth of our identity. And once we fall into the game, once we agree, even if that agreement flows from having been fooled, we believe in the fight, in the game, and we believe we are only those players, those characters in the game.

And if we become aware of that truth, that we are acting in someone else’s production, the Master Player has a trick for that as well. In this dream that trick was named “Waking Up”. To trick us all into continuing the game, the Master Player was offering us "Enlightenment".

It was exactly the same trick that was played in my previous dream of the military aircraft accident. When the edges of the stage props became visible to me the director of the drama simply changed them; he layered over them with another false prop and then incorporated my new awareness into the play as a line in the script.

What the Wizard showed me is that all forms are illusions, that all dramas are false, and that the Master is a faker.

The Master Player did not strike down the Wizard for making fun of him. He could not. The Master Player simply went on with his production, capturing those who failed to see the Wizard, who failed to hear his message.

And the Wizard did not fly up in the air and make a great show of his wisdom. He simply played his own game with his own friends for any with eyes to see.

The Wizard showed me that there is something else going on here.

He showed me that we are the makers of shadow puppets, the friends of dancing bears.

We are the Wizard.