Each night we go to sleep and we may have as many as seven dreams before waking up in the morning. Where, I wonder, do all these dreams come from? And who, or what, created them?

If you’re being honest with yourself, then the questions above should strike you as being quite mysterious. You don’t know where your dreams come from nor do you know who, or what, created them.

And if you’re being especially honest with yourself, then you have to admit that your dreams are more sophisticated, nuanced, detailed, and complex than most, if not all, of your experiences in the waking state.

Let’s be even more honest with ourselves, shall we? If you are keenly aware of your dreams (lucidly or via memory upon waking), then it seems quite farfetched to claim that you could have created them, that your dreams could have been spun from somewhere within your finite personal consciousness. After all, the plots are just too intricate, the character development too refined, the resolution too high, the whole thing too ornate and exquisite. Let’s stop kidding ourselves: I’m no great American novelist or filmmaker, and I suspect that you aren’t either. Besides, if we could create such fantastic worlds from out of our imaginations and by drawing from our artistic acumen, why aren’t we actually doing so in the waking state? Our waking state experiences are, in fact, often drab, repetitive, and redundant, especially when they’re compared with our dreams.

The truth is that we don’t have what it takes to create such intricate, lively, multi textured dreams and dreamscapes. Therefore, dreams must come to us.

Realizing this, we should be open to the possibility that some greater form of consciousness is creating all these dreams. What is that? And what are we?