The Dream of Life: A Waking Meditation from Alan Watts

The Invitation Into Dreaming

Imagine, if you will, that you possess the divine power to dream—not the fragmentary, fleeting dreams that dissolve with morning light, but dreams of such lucidity and duration that they become entire lifetimes. You are the architect of infinity, the weaver of worlds. Tonight, and every night thereafter, you may dream whatever reality you desire, for as long as you wish.

What would you dream?

This is the question Alan Watts posed, not as mere philosophical conjecture, but as a doorway into the deepest mystery of existence itself.

The First Dreams: The Gardens of Pleasure

In the beginning, you would dream magnificently. You would conjure palaces of impossible beauty, where every desire materializes before the wanting is even complete. You would be the hero of every adventure, the lover in every romance, the genius of every insight. You would taste fruits that exist nowhere in waking life, hear music that would shatter the heart with its perfection, and know the intimate secrets of the cosmos.

Night after night, you would drink deeply from the fountain of every fantasy, swimming in seas of pure pleasure, flying through architectures of light, experiencing the absolute fulfillment of every hunger. You would be loved completely, celebrated endlessly, victorious always.

For a while, this would be paradise.

The Creeping Shadow of Boredom

But something strange would begin to happen in the paradise of total wish-fulfillment. The edges would start to blur. The victories would become hollow, the pleasures predictable, the adventures scripted. Without the possibility of failure, success loses its savor. Without the contrast of sorrow, joy becomes a monotone hum.

You would discover what prisoners of infinite luxury have always known: that to be given everything is to be given nothing at all. The soul requires resistance the way the body requires gravity. Without something to push against, we collapse into formlessness.

So you would begin to experiment.

The Architecture of Challenge

Perhaps tonight you would dream a dream where things don’t come quite so easily. You would introduce obstacles, limitations, puzzles to solve. You would make yourself mortal, vulnerable, incomplete. You would create situations where you must strive, where the outcome hangs in genuine uncertainty.

And oh, how thrilling this would be! The sweetness of water after real thirst. The triumph of a summit actually climbed. The earned wisdom of mistakes survived. You would remember what it means to hope, to fear, to struggle, to overcome.

But even this would not be enough. Because in the back of your awareness, you would still know—you would remember that this is your dream, that you are ultimately in control, that you can wake whenever you wish. And that knowing would rob the experience of its deepest authenticity.

The Ultimate Surrender: Forgetting

So you would make one final, audacious choice. You would dream so deeply that you would forget you are dreaming at all.

You would forget your divine nature, forget your creative power, forget the eternal consciousness that you truly are. You would become utterly convinced that you are merely this character, this limited being, born into a world not of your making, subject to forces beyond your control, mortal and small and uncertain.

You would believe, completely, that the dream is real.

And in that forgetting, you would finally achieve what you sought all along: genuine experience, authentic surprise, real stakes, true mystery. The suffering would hurt because you would believe it could destroy you. The joy would soar because you would believe it could save you. Love would matter because you would believe the other is truly other, and that you could lose them forever.

The Recognition: This Is It

Where would such a progression lead you? What would be the culmination of this divine game of forgetting?

Precisely here. Precisely now. This moment, this life, this world with all its beauty and horror, its ecstasy and anguish, its randomness and pattern, its questions without answers.

You would dream yourself as a child in ancient Sumeria, as a mother in medieval Japan, as a soldier in a forgotten war, as a lover in a midnight garden, as a prisoner, as a king, as a beggar, as a saint. You would dream yourself into every perspective that has ever witnessed this turning world.

The Cosmic Game of Hide-and-Seek

What Watts revealed through this thought experiment was not a doctrine to believe but a way of seeing to consider. He drew from the ancient Hindu vision of lila—the divine play—and the notion that behind the multiplicity of forms, there beats a single heart: Brahman, the Godhead, the One without a second, dreaming itself into the magnificent illusion of the Many.

We are That, playing the cosmic game of hide-and-seek with itself. The universe is not happening to you—you are what is happening, the happening itself, consciousness exploring what it means to be conscious by temporarily pretending not to know what it is.

Every person you meet is You wearing another mask, another costume in the great drama. When you look into their eyes, You are looking back at yourself, though neither of you remembers. The great joke, the cosmic comedy, is that we are all God, pretending very convincingly that we are not.

The Transformation of Suffering

This vision transforms suffering from meaningless affliction into essential texture. The dark threads are not mistakes in the tapestry but necessary contrasts that make the bright threads visible. Without the valley, the mountain has no meaning. Without silence, no music. Without the ache of separation, no joy of reunion.

You chose—in that original dreaming, in that divine forgetting—to include the hard parts because you knew they were necessary. Not as punishment or as lessons, but as the full spectrum of experience itself. To edit out the difficult would be to paint with half the colors, to compose with half the notes.

The suffering is real. The pain is not dismissed or diminished. But it is held within a larger context, where even dark experiences are part of the whole story, the complete dream.

The Playful Universe

What emerges from Watts’s meditation is a vision of existence as fundamentally playful rather than grim. Not trivial or silly, but playful in the deepest sense—creative, spontaneous, purposeful in its purposelessness, meaningful in its meaninglessness. The universe is an artist that creates for the sheer joy of creating, an improviser that makes up the song as it goes along.

You are that artist, that musician, that divine comedian. This life is your performance, and you have given yourself so thoroughly to the role that you’ve forgotten there’s anyone else. That’s not tragedy—that’s brilliant method acting. That’s commitment to the craft.

The Eternal Return to Now

And perhaps—as the dream cycles through infinite variations, as You exhaust every possible combination of experience—perhaps You occasionally wake up, just a little. Perhaps in moments of profound beauty, or deep meditation, or unexpected grace, the veil thins. You catch a glimpse. You remember.

You remember that You are dreaming. That this is Your dream. That underneath all the names and forms, there is only One dreamer, endlessly creative, endlessly curious, endlessly willing to forget itself for the sheer adventure of remembering again.

This is it, Watts would say. Not the prelude to something else, not the test before the reward. This is the point. This ordinary, extraordinary moment. This breathing, this awareness, this very consciousness reading these words.

You are That which you have been seeking. The dreamer and the dream are one.

And the dream is still going. The universe is still creating itself, through you, as you, in this eternal now that never ends and never stops beginning.

The Question That Remains

So what would you dream?

You are dreaming it.

And having dreamed yourself into this particular corner of infinity, having forgotten so convincingly that you are the dreamer, what shall you do with this precious, improbable, miraculous lifetime?

That is the question Watts leaves ringing in the air—not to be answered with words, but with the living of each moment, the full embrace of this wild, beautiful, heart-awakening, impossibly improbable dream we call being human.

This is it.