A comparison of the waking with the dream state yields two striking similarities. Firstly, neither in one state nor the other do we make our planetary environment, or the other persons who figure in it, or cause all its happenings. We are born into our waking world--it is there ready-made. We find ourselves abruptly in our dream world. The other persons just happen to be in both worlds with us. We do not deliberately prefabricate most of the everyday happenings in the waking world and we do not do this with the dream happenings either. Secondly, in neither world can we predict exactly how we shall behave, react, or feel in all their situations. This is all intended to say that our waking life is really a kind of sleep, from which we need to wake up; that just as the dreamer only awakens when his fatigue exhausts itself or when someone else arouses him, so we, too, only awaken from life's illusions when we are exhausted with all the many different kinds of experience we get from many different incarnations or when a teacher appears to reveal the truth to us. Further, what we have done or desired in former incarnations predetermines a large part of the picture of our present one. Yet, the connection between this cause and this effect is unseen by us until someone else, a master of insight, shows it to us. Until then we are like sleeping dreamers.
-- Notebooks Category 19: The Reign of Relativity > Chapter 3 : The States of Consciousness > # 40
-- Perspectives > Chapter 19: The Reign of Relativity > # 14
