As a dream is to its dreamer, so is the manifold of this universe to that unknown, which is called in our tradition “God.”
If the world is a dream God is having, then God is asleep somewhere else — outside the world, which only exists inside his head in the dream he is having. All about him it slowly unfolds charged with a meaning he never intended and yet, without knowing he did it, created. In it things happen he can’t understand, though each one was secretly chosen — a message to God the dreamer from God the sender of dreams, both of them lost in a trance. So there are two Gods, not just one, or there is one God split in two and between the two-in-one/split-in-two a great gulf yawns — too wide for anything living to cross except the stuff of dreams. It comes to him not as a message that means but as a world. It just is. What does the dreamer need to know that the sender of dreams needs to say? What makes God commune with his unknown other this way? It is a mystery surpassing, for he is asleep. He knows nothing. For all we know, he dreams the world for the same reason we dream dreams: because he needs to hear that voice in him and of him but not him, and yet there in the very heart of him, telling which way he must go. So he goes — sending his dream soul into a world to suffer, to undergo, to endure, to see, through that cloud of unknowing, darkly, and yet face to face. . . .
