First watch others, because it will be easy for you to watch others. Then start watching yourself. Then start catching yourself red-handed. Then sometimes, just walking on the road, suddenly stop and see whether you are here or you are moving somewhere in a dream.

The more you become alert about your dreams, the more you will see gaps arising in your consciousness when dreams are not there and reality can be approached. But we have great investments in our dreams. We may be afraid of nightmares, but we are not yet fed-up with dreaming. We still go on cherishing sweet dreams.

I have heard:

A man was talking to one of his friends. “I had a dream the other night,” said Casey to his pal McGinn, “and it taught me a great lesson.”

“What was it?” asked McGinn.

“I dreamed I was in Rome and I had an audience with the Pope. ‘Would I have a drink,’ he asked me. Thinks I, ‘Would a duck swim?’ And seein’ the whisky and lemons and sugar on the sideboard, I told him that I wouldn’t mind a drop of punch.

‘Cold or hot?’ he asked me. ‘Hot, Your Holiness,’ said I, an’ that’s where I made me mistake!”

“I don’t see anything wrong,” said the friend.

“His Holiness stepped toward the kitchen to boil the water, and before he got back I woke up.”

“What lesson did you learn?” asked McGinn.

“Next time,” swore Casey, “I will say, ‘I will take it cold, Your Holiness, while the water is getting hot.’”

We have investments in our dreams. They don’t exist without our help; we make them exist. Sweet dreams, golden dreams – we have a romance with them, a very long romance of many lives. We go on courting dreams, and of course when we court them they are there and they bring nothing but frustration. Because they are against reality, they can never bring fulfillment. There is no way to make two plus two equal five – there is no way. Whatsoever you do, two plus two will always be four and you go on hoping that someday it is going to be five. Then you are simply in a mathematical error. Dreams can never be real, your thoughts can never be real, your hopes can never be realized, your desires can never be fulfilled. The only outcome can be more and more frustration.