A DREAM REMEMBERED

By Vernon Nemitz

January 10, 1980 (edited April 1, 1998)

Groggily, automatically, you reach for the alarm clock, and shut its jangling off. But you awaken surprisingly quickly, because you are thinking, What an incredible dream that had been! Could it really have lasted for only a few seconds? You recall that that's what the psychologists say. An external stimulus during sleep is first detected by the subconscious, which then has a few seconds of objective time (but at the speed of thought that can seem equal to many hours) in which to fabricate a whimsical "explanation" for the stimulus, before it penetrates your consciousness and wakes you up.

Now that you are awake, though, even momentary thoughts are distracting, and your awareness of that dream -- however fantastic it had been -- begins to fade. There had been an angel -- yes, one of God's Own Angels! -- and before you could properly digest what it had said, your clock had gone off.

Disgustedly you look at the offender. In this age of electronic gadgetry and atomic accuracy an old brass alarm clock that gains three minutes every day is an anachronism that almost deserves the fate of Entropic Limbo: to be allowed to run down and then left that way.

But you have possessed that clock for many years, and have grown fond of it, and accustomed to the crudeness of its precision. Why your subconscious should disguise its ringing as a collection of church bells is a mystery fit for a psychiatrist, but you are well-adjusted to life and don't have a psychiatrist. Out of habit, therefore, you rewind the clock, set it back three minutes, and begin your day.

By now your dream had diminished to a few vague scraps which you must struggle to remember. You happen to wonder about just why an honest-to-God angel should appear before you, of all people...and suddenly you are shocked to know that you had called it to you (and that at the time it had seemed a perfectly rational thing to do). And it had congratulated you, and had lectured you about God, and it had warned you, also....

You try to recall exactly. It was something about the ego -- your own ego -- undermining something, and betraying you... -- and it had sounded very prophetic.

In the effort to remember your dream you perform routine morning activities automatically; when you encounter other people you greet them each appropriately, though failing to consciously recognize even the most obvious differences between friends, acquaintances, and outright strangers.

The angel's warning remains just out of reach, tantalizing you. Perhaps if you backtracked, and sneaked up on it from the dream's beginning? Why, for example, had you asked for an angel to appear? Your previous involvement with religion had been rather more lip-service than genuine devotion.

But that question your memory doesn't answer; all you know is that it had been a perfectly rational request.

Come to think of it, it seems unlikely that an angel would appear just because you had asked for one. After all, hadn't people all through history asked for considerably lesser things from God, and then failed to receive them? That is the basic reason for paying only lip-service to religion: not enough experimentally repeatable evidence.

A dream-fragment surfaces, revealing that the angel had congratulated you for

-- of all things -- your faith!

Now that could explain something, no matter how ridiculous the notion that you might have so much faith. People were forever demanding evidence from the clergy so that they would have reason to believe -- and the clergy turned right around and said that if the people believed, then they would get their evidence! It is the kind of argument that produces a great deal of heat, but very little light. No wonder religion has historically been such a volatile subject, what with peer-pressure causing so much lip-service...but yes, if you really had enough faith, then the clergy's doctrine would have practically required an angel to appear.

Frustration begins to gnaw at you. The dream! How did it begin? Every little side-thought distracts you from your desire to remember. Psychologists say that you never really forget anything, but they don't tell you how to recall....

It's no use; at the last instant the only things you can recall of the dream's beginnings are that they had something to do with free will, and energy-conservation, and causality -- and the dream is finally, definitely, gone.

Depressed, you continue to ignore the day that is mechanically passing by, and so you don't notice that nobody notices anything withdrawn about you, or notice your anguish at an incomplete prophecy of betrayal....

A tiny thought, a ray of hope, now intrudes upon your depression. You are an intelligent person, goes that thought. You know that the dream started with the ideas of free will, energy-conservation, and causality, and had proceeded with seemingly perfect rationality to your dream-request that an angel appear...can you not figure it out?

You are aware, of course, that the rationale of any given dream is often specious to the point of spuriousness -- but this dream was different. It had had the rationality of utter realism. You therefore decide to make the effort, to give it a whirl, to try to figure out what had been -- if only approximately -- the course of your dream.

So. How are the ideas of free will, energy-conservation, and causality all related to each other?

Well...free will and causality (otherwise knows as the law of cause and effect, the cornerstone of the philosophy of determinism) have been at odds with each other for centuries -- but energy-conservation...? In this modern world of expanding population and limited planetary resources energy conservation is frequently on people's minds -- and this sidetracks your thoughts to the obvious solutions: Population must be limited, and expansion beyond the planet's resources, into space, must be carried out -- but somehow this kind of energy-conservation doesn't quite seem to be...what?

At this point an old memory makes itself known, and you suddenly experience that wonderful of course! feeling: not energy-conservation as in the energy crisis, but conservation of energy as in "The Law of....!" Someone had once pointed out to you that the law of cause and effect was analogous to the law of conservation of energy.

It worked like this (and you savor the beauty of its logic once more): "Every event has a cause, which is itself an event, which must therefore have its own cause...and so on. In a Universe governed by the energy-conservation law an event without a cause is clearly prohibited, since all events involve energy. And the idea of a cause not followed by an event is simply ludicrous, since the definition of 'cause' depends upon the fact an 'event' is an 'effect'."

Or is it? You recall that "free will" is tied to this argument somehow....

Aha! You find the hole! If every event has a cause which is itself an event, then by sufficient extrapolation you arrive at the first event, commonly known as "The Big Bang". What was its cause...?

This question is doubly interesting to you because modern cosmological theories indicate that not only did all the matter and energy in the Universe explode loose during the Big Bang, but so also did then come into existence the still-expanding volume of space it occupies and the very flowing of its river of time. "Prior" to the Big Bang there was Nothing, not time nor space nor mass nor energy; afterwards all these things...were.

But if Nothingness was Original State, then the cause of the Big Bang must have been...Nothing? You recall that others have met this problem before, and that they had devised a number of schemes for explaining this or that aspect, yet each such explanation invariably incorporates the word "spontaneous," as if it were a magic way to avoid confronting the basic argument of causality. Any physicists, however, who accept "spontaneity," or "randomness," as the cause of an event...are quite simply also accepting a hole in the law of cause and effect, and therefore a hole in the energy-conservation law.

Of course, in order to make this statement you must have a concrete example of a violation of the law of energy-conservation already at hand -- and so you do. Through the recent marriage of quantum mechanics with relativistic cosmology has come about that most stimulating of creatures, the "naked singularity".

Now a singularity is ordinarily found only inside of a black hole, invisible behind something called an "event horizon." But if a singularity were to somehow be stripped of its event horizon, to be dragged out of its black hole and be exposed nakedly to the Universe, then all the laws of Physics would go mad, not just energy-conservation. And although the madness itself would exist only in the vicinity of the naked singularity (as it does in a black hole, hidden behind the event horizon), the consequences of that madness would escape to the rest of the Cosmos....

It has been shown that a naked singularity must now exist at the site of the Big Bang, and in all probability not only caused the Big Bang, but is still, today, Banging away as flagrantly as ever. This naturally permits you to ask, "Was Nothing the cause of the existence of the naked singularity?"

No wonder people tend to bring up the subject of religion....

But you know perfectly well that the causality argument can chop up the notion of Creation just as efficiently as it hangs a conventional cosmologist out under a limb. If the Universe was Created, then some sequences of cause-and-effect relationships must have led to its Creation; in the backwards direction, however, that same sequence must inexorably lead to the origin of the Creator. The argument that the Creator had no origin has no foundation, as you well know, since any existence "prior" to the Universe's must nevertheless incorporate its own version of the March of Time -- otherwise the Creator wouldn't even be aware, much less able to Create. "Time", "events" and "existence" are so inseparable that if Nothingness is the only State, then you can't bring up the notion of Time's Passage. And that is the reason you can't speak of "a time before the Creator began to exist", rather than simply claiming that the Creator hadn't any origin. The law of cause and effect demands an origin for the Creator, and at the same time shows that it couldn't have been caused!

You thus arrive at the interesting position of knowing that, ultimately, the existence of the Universe had no cause, regardless of whether or not it had been Created! This in turn represents an unfillable hole in the philosophy of determinism, which finally brings you back to the concept of free will -- it is allowed. You can even define it accurately: It is a "cause" that is not itself an "effect".

Well, now. If free will is by definition a causality-violating phenomenon, then you realize that it follows that free will must be capable of violating the energy-conservation law. And so you naturally think of the wide-open field of psychic phenomena. Although you know that a great many charlatans, cheats, and fakes grow there, you also know that careful weeding occasionally reveals a few genuine psychics (usually distinguishable from their imitations by a generally lower profile). Their acceptance as genuine is based on sometimes-impressive experiments, which could be interpreted as violations of the law of conservation of energy.

You think of psychokinesis in particular, and of the two ways it can operate. First is a modification of the effect of random chance upon causality; ordinarily you don't necessarily know which of several possible effects a particular cause will have, but through psychokinesis a free will can apparently direct that cause to a pre-selected effect (such as willing to die to turn up a "two"). Second is the free will acting as a cause in its own right, as when it uses psychokinesis to push electrons through a circuit, their flow being measured by a sufficiently sensitive ammeter. Of the two, you note that the latter is more likely to involve an outright breaking of the energy-conservation law.

Now this whole business of free will and psychic phenomena is obviously leading you directly to the domain of metaphysics, but since angels are not likely to be found anywhere else, it is nice to know that you're on the right track.

But you have no intention of racing in blindly; the charlatans that live there are to be avoided at all costs. You therefore decide to first examine the logical consequences of the concept of "free will" a little more thoroughly.

You begin with a new definition: "Free will" can be thought of as being a contraction of the phrase "freedom of willpower". When compared to your other definition, you see that "willpower" and "cause" are synonymous, while "freedom of..." equates with "...that is not itself an effect."

There is thus no great mystery as to how a free will can dig into Nothing and pull out Something, thereby violating the energy-conservation law: Since the Universe exists regardless of whether or not is was Created, you have in effect shown that either way could work to explain that existence. A free will can choose to wait until a particular event occurs spontaneously, or it can choose to cause it...now. (Of course, if you want the precise details of the operating process that is a free will in action, then you must invent a theory on a par with quantum mechanics...and although some such "quantum metaphysics" will probably be developed someday, you doubt that you will be its inventor....)

The ability to choose whether or not to cause...this is the "freedom" aspect, an inherently unlimited part of a free will's existence. One of the obvious consequences is: That same ability includes the choice to put limits on its own freedom. And why would anyone choose to do that?

After a moment's thought you realize that it could very well be because once a free will chooses to do something and then does it, a cause-and-effect sequence of events will come into being, and which likely or not will come full circle and...affect the free will??? But if the definition of free will permits it to make choices without respect to any previous event ("a cause that is not itself an effect"), then by that same definition a free will cannot be affected by anything!

So why do people worry about what unpleasant consequences their actions may have? Because they have previously chosen that some things will be considered unpleasant. For example, getting too close to a fire may be painful to most people, but there are some who don't mind walking barefoot across a bed of red-hot coals. These people must have made their own choices as to what will be unpleasant.

A free will, therefore, cannot be affected by anything it does not choose to be affected by. This viewpoint lies but a short distance from the domain of metaphysics, since it embodies the spirit of the notion that a free will is immune to whatever might happen to the particular physical body it inhabits, and furthermore can extend that immunity to that same body.

Now you know that all this is a fine and dandy piece of reasoning, but its only support is the apparent existence of psychic phenomena. Is there enough evidence to make a thorough investigation of the logic of metaphysics worthwhile? This question can only be answered unambiguously when a choice results in a certain violation of the law of conservation of energy....

As it happens, you know of some experiments that have been done along this line, although to a slightly different end. In those experiments the researchers were trying to find the basis of the connection between the particular event they monitored and the psychic who caused it. Of the known physical forces available as explanations of psychic-caused events, only the electromagnetic force has both the strength and the range needed. The experiments, however, revealed that not only was there no detectable electromagnetic force between the psychic and the event, but that placing electromagnetic shielding between the psychic and the event does not prevent the occurrence of the event.

In essence, then, there was no physical cause for those events, a clear violation of the energy-conservation law. Only the metaphysical free will of the psychic is left....

So between the available evidence and your desire to find out exactly what sort of betrayal had been prophesized by your dream-angel, you find it necessary to take a safari through the domain of metaphysics, a place most unfriendly to skeptics. But as you intend to remain on the best-known pathways, religious philosophy (for that is where angels may be found), you should be fairly safe.

In fact you have one more reason to pick those particular pathways, a rather odd fact that you picked up somewhere and have just now remembered: Almost without exception, every genuine psychic is a highly religious person. The oddness of that fact lies in the similarity between psychic phenomena and "witchcraft", and the antipathy of religion towards same; you recall, for example, that something must have caused all the hysteria in the old Puritan community of Salem...had perhaps a few psychics been born there? -- And now that you recognize the connection between psychics and religion, you are stunned by the thought that follows: Were the legendary miracles of Jesus all psychic phenomena?

Then why does organized religion persecute psychics? Perhaps the answer lies in the fear of what psychics could do with their talents, since any selfishly motivated psychic activity could be dangerous to others and therefore interpretable as "witchcraft". And according to the general rule that power corrupts, one must certainly be at least suspicious of psychics. But anything more than suspicion should not be permitted without concrete evidence of wrong-doings....

Oho...! Suppose for a moment that the existence of metaphysics (because of psychic phenomena) is equal to proof that God exists; in all likelihood the conventional-religion theory that Man was Created in God's Image must be modified to read: Man's soul was Created in God's Image. As such, then, the free will must itself be the soul (you recall that your definition of it is essentially a decree of immortality, stating that it can't be affected by anything), and therefore a free will must be capable of God-like activities, such as performing miracles....

You are aware, of course, that there is somewhat more to the matter than simply choosing to do miraculous things. One is first supposed to choose to align one's goals with God's goals...which puts the sheer power necessary for the grander scale of miracle (such as parting the Red Sea) into the hands of the chooser. But even so, a highly religious psychic should be considered as being rather more aligned with God than a highly religious non-psychic, since the psychic's ability to violate the energy-conservation law is impossible according to physical science, and therefore qualifies as miraculous (however small the scale), or God-like. And since it is a truism that any bureaucracy blindly acts to preserve its own existence, is it any wonder that the established religious bureaucracy comes down especially harshly upon those psychics who go around spouting such metaphysical anti-dogma as reincarnation -- and who back up what they say with miracles?

So you feel irony at the hypocrisy of some of today's organized religions, which were likely founded by great psychics, and yet have deteriorated to the automatic persecution of psychics. But the irony doesn't last long, because of a chilling thought that suddenly pops up: It was because Jesus kept pointing out the religious hypocrisies of His own day that He was finally crucified....

In other words, metaphysics is a risky place even on the well-known paths of religious philosophy, simply because of the sheer number of lip-service "believers" who stroll there....

Yet you have committed yourself to this safari, and you choose to continue. A little further down the beaten track, in fact, you encounter a rather imposing side-path. It is protected from the domain of metaphysics by high walls of fine marble, all inlaid with jewels, and the path itself is paved with gold, and curves out of sight down behind a hill. A continuous stream of people is running down the pathway (well, the walls would protect them from any charlatans that might happen to be about). But no-one appears to be paying any attention to the gorgeous silky banner which is draped across the entranceway, boldly proclaiming: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"....

Hey, wake up! Stop fantasizing! This is dangerous territory hereabouts! Obviously one must choose to ignore the sign, choose to travel that path, and, even then, choose to abandon one's hope. And still there remains the basic fact that a free will cannot be affected by anything it does not choose to be affected by. The concept of Hell, you now realize, is more than a little ridiculous. In fact, if the notion of Hell has any rational foundation at all, it is as a device useful for keeping social power in the hands of its hypocritical, threat-wielding proponents....

But eliminating Hell as a valid concept leaves you with its competitor, reincarnation, to seriously consider. In theory, as you know, reincarnation is accompanied by another concept, that of karma, which is a kind of obligation to make up for mistakes made in previous lifetimes. But why would a free will choose to accept that kind of handicap? Unless a good explanation can be found that will fill this hole, you are likely to consider reincarnation as being invalid, also.

Eliminating both concepts, of course, means that your safari gets to return its attention to the search for angels.

Therefore you consider: If the existence of psychic phenomena can be taken as evidence of God's existence, then angels, God's messengers, almost certainly also exist. Since one of the standard doctrines of Metaphysics is simply, "Anything is possible", then it must be possible for you to summon one of those angels. All you need is sufficient faith (another standard doctrine), and, you suppose, sufficient reason. According to what you recall of your dream, though, while you know that the angel had lectured you about God, and had congratulated you on your faith, you don't really know why you had summoned the angel...so you must speculate. You know, of course, why you would want to summon an angel now -- you want that prophecy of betrayal clarified -- but you need to know the reason you used in the dream: that one worked.

Well, then.... Even though the angel had lectured about God, it seems fairly obvious that the lecture was about things that you didn't already know. Could you have asked for that information? After all, if there is really as much religious hypocrisy around as your earlier speculations led you to notice, then could not the truth about God also have been distorted? It is all you have to work with.

Now the first question you must ask along this trail is obviously, "What do I think I already know about God?" so that you may easily recognize how the consistency of an angel's lecture matches against the probable non-consistency of your knowledge. This question also gives you the chance to try to make that information consistent, in advance....

You begin with a couple of standard metaphysical notions: that God created everyone's souls because He desired companionship, and that the physical Universe was created as a school, the ideal environment for those souls to grow up in. The Universe was created first because it needed time to evolve into readiness, and to generate the necessary variety. (You note how easy it would have been to simply set off the Big Bang and then, through sheer omnipotence, to time-travel past its next fifteen or so billion years of development....)

And suddenly the rationale of karma is clear: Only by making up for past mistakes does a growing soul prove it has learned the lessons embodied in those mistakes....

But how did God know that His Children would need to grow up?" Why didn't (or couldn't) He create companions who were already fully equal to Himself? (A companion, of course, is by definition an equal.)

You need only a little thought to discover the obvious answers: Since free will is a cause that isn't itself an effect, its ability to cause is potentially unlimited. Therefore God's Children are equal to God -- except for lack of practice. One must use one's free will in order to increase its power, to amplify the complexity-manipulation skills that is the only way of measuring such power. And God knew this because He, too, experienced growing up!

And a fleeting vision crosses your inner eye, a vision of a Being newly aware of its Nothing-spawned free will, a baby alone amidst Eternity, thinking, "What to do with this toy?"

If your existence serves God's Purpose, then what Purpose does God's existence serve? Answer: Since Existence has no Cause, it also has no Purpose. It simply is. In accepting that fact a free will must create its own purpose: a goal of some sort.

So what is God's goal?

You know that standard Church doctrine insists that God is perfect in all ways, and infinitely powerful to boot. It thus seems reasonable that when God was growing up, those were the goals He set for Himself. Why shouldn't an immortal Being strive for an infinite goal...or even several such goals? But has God actually reached those goals?

The physical Universe, when you consider the evidence, is a very large finite object, and therefore infinite powers are not needed for keeping track of its every micro-event. Only very large powers....

And if perfection includes a total lack of faults, needs, desires, et cetera, then doesn't God's reputed desire for companionships qualify as an imperfection? -- Maybe not. Perhaps companions are simply necessary for reaching the goal of infinite power. But certainly the existence of the hellfire-and-damnation branch of religious philosophy, if correct, is not very good evidence in favor of a completely perfect and loving God....

At this point you take a moment to consider this concept, this theory of a loving God, wondering about its rationale. Conventional religion, of course, adds it to the Hell-concept as a means of gaining social power -- the carrot-and-stick psychology. But it is equally an integral part of what the genuine psychics have been claiming for thousands of years: that God does indeed love His Children.

But why? Why would God devote so much of Himself to loving you and everyone else when it is your choice whether or not to help God reach His goals -- and God most certainly knows that a free will's choice cannot be influenced if it chooses not to be influenced. Not only that, but ranked against God's love-as-an-influence are supposedly-unthinkable concepts: that God would stoop to trying to influence your free choice; that you are -- potentially, anyway -- God's equal (and therefore serious competition); and the simple fact that you exist only because God chose to make you exist -- He didn't even ask your permission....

That's it! If God strives for perfection, then He must respect the concept of karma, and therefore must try to make up for creating you without asking your permission -- which means that God must love you.... (And of course the impossibility of asking you whether you wanted to exist before you existed is not really a relevant point; the point is that you were created anyway.

Having now settled that little matter to your satisfaction, you return to the question of whether God is actually now infinitely powerful. Only a short time ago you had measured will-power-magnitude by the level of its complexity, on the basis that the ability to simply cause events is inherently unlimited. But precise control of a series of events is a different matter. You therefore realize that you are not actually asking whether God has infinite power, but whether He has infinite control of that power.

A passing thought catches your attention, and disappears. There is some relationship between complexity and infinity that you once read about -- and you suddenly feel it is a crucial concept.

You try to recall it -- and fail. But you feel that you must recall it; you insist on recalling it...and a light suddenly dawns. "I will exercise my free will," you declare, "and I will recall it! I will! I will! I will -- "

And it actually works....

Amazed, you start to sort through the sudden deluge of memory -- and you are doubly amazed. You have recalled it all....

You remember not only what it was that you had read word for word (an essay entitled "Varieties Of The Infinite," by Isaac Asimov, reprinted from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as Chapter Three of his book Adding A Dimension, Library of Congress Catalog Number 64-15340, copyrighted in 1964 by Isaac Asimov, and published by Doubleday and Company, Inc. of Garden City, New York; it was even a first edition....), but also where you had read it down to your physical position in which particular chair of the library, and when you had read it down to the minute. Well, the psychologists say that you never actually forget anything....

The essay had been about how the mathematical concept of "infinity" had been so defined as to allow the description of different kinds of infinity, an entire series of infinities (an infinite series, of course). Each member of the series has a different "intensity" of infinity than any of the other members of the series.

First in that series is the ordinary kind of infinity, represented by counting: "one, two, three, four, five..." and so on forever. It is difficult to affect infinity. You can subtract from it, add to it, multiply it, divide into it...and still end up with the same kind of infinity.

But you can affect it this way: Multiply infinity by infinity, and then again by infinity, and then again, and again..., and so on forever. The ultimate result of this concept is the creation of a new kind of infinity, one which is infinitely more "intense" than the ordinary "counting" variety. It is the first example of what is called "transfinity," and it has been named "aleph-one." ("Aleph" is a letter in the Hebrew alphabet.)

It is even represented by a familiar concept: the mathematically perfect line. A mathematician's line is a continuum of points; there is no space between one point in the line and the next. There is an infinite number of points comprising the line, but it is not a countably infinite number. While you can select any point in the line from which to start counting, you cannot even locate the next point, because it is infinitely close to the first! And therefore you cannot count the total number of points in a line. It is simply a more intense kind of infinity than the counting variety.

The next member of the series of transfinities is called, of course, "aleph-two." It is created by multiplying aleph-one by aleph-one, and then again by aleph-one, and then again, and again...and so on forever -- but to an aleph-one intensity of forever. It happens that there may be a connection between aleph-two and the mathematically perfect plane, but it has not been proved. So Dr. Asimov is in no way responsible for whatever conjectures and conclusions you reach from the information available in his essay.

"Aleph-three" is created by multiplying an aleph-two quantity of "aleph-twos" together, and it is possible that a relationship exists between aleph-three and the mathematician's concept of "volume" -- but this hasn't been proved either.

A line is a one-dimensional object; a plane is a two-dimensional object; a volume is a three-dimensional object. Suppose that there is an exact relationship between "aleph-N" and an N-dimensional object. You know that the mathematics of transfinity is consistent throughout an infinite number of aleph-levels. And you know that the mathematics of multidimensional objects is consistent for an infinite number of geometric dimensions.

Suppose, just suppose, that God does have infinite control of power -- how much is that really? The ordinary counting variety of infinity is equal to "aleph-zero" on the transfinite scale....

The physical universe is thought to possess only a few geometric dimensions ("time" may be a dimension, but it is not a geometric dimension); exactly how many (from four to eleven) depends on the particular cosmology-model you examine. This implies that God, as a Creator of the Universe, has surpassed the merely infinite, and has reached the fourth (or better) level of transfinite control of power.

And then again, maybe not. Physics marches on, and its most powerful tools, the various divisions of quantum mechanics, are on the verge of showing that existing physical space may be actually composed of vast numbers of individual, tiny, "volume-units." If true, then existing physical space is only an approximation of the mathematical concept of "space", being quantized and finite rather than a continuum. This in turn would tend to demote God back to possession of a less-than-infinite level of control of power.

But even so...if space is quantized, then you get to ask the obvious question, "What lies between the individual volume-quanta?" The answer to that must be the same sort of Nothingness which was the Original State...but if Nothing exists between the volume-quanta, then what is the difference between quantized space and continuous space?!? (And for sure, you think, there would be some sort of difference between, say, a three-dimensional space-quantum and a four-dimensional space-quantum....)

Whatever the outcome of this argument, you realize that regardless of whether or not God's goal is the infinite control of power, or the infinitely transfinite control of power, He apparently needs His Children in order to achieve it....

You now feel the need to take stock of your speculations about God. They seem to be fairly consistent: God's existence had an origin, but it was not a caused origin; He grew up, and by using His free will discovered such concepts as causality and karma; He found that existence was meaningless without a purpose, and so He set Himself a purpose, an infinite goal to match His immorality; He discovered that His goal was unattainable without help, and He therefore Created Helpers; presently those Helpers are themselves growing up....

It this enough? That is, are these speculations as complete as you can make them, so that your next step can be...to do what? Invite an angel to lecture you? Your original intentions, you recall, were to try to figure out how you can possible have had enough faith, in your dream, to successfully summon an angel....

Hmmmm....could perhaps the sheer consistency of all your recent speculations, assuming they duplicate your dream-logic, have led your dream-self to believe sufficiently....? Well then, how about your real self....?

But what you would actually want from an angel -- assuming you could in reality summon one -- is a clarification of that dream-prophecy of betrayal by your own ego. Wouldn't such an inherently selfish goal as asking that particular question be something of an anti-inducement for an angel's appearance? You therefore need a greater goal, a goal which includes the selfish one but is not itself selfish...and after a little thought you see what it must be.

Basically, what you are seeking is information. And as you hope that that information will aid your own life (by permitting you to avoid your ego's betrayal), so you can see that that information could also aid others -- for they have egos, too. As an angel would be a teacher to you, so should you be a teacher to others -- a kind of, well, karmic responsibility.

And here you pause, clinically examining your distaste at having to use the word "karmic" with respect to yourself. Distaste is a mild form of hate, as you know, but you also know that hate is always caused by fear. What are you afraid of? That maybe an angel would teach you too much, and thus karmically require you to become that kind of teacher that Jesus was crucified for being? But fear in its own turn is always caused by ignorance, and so if an angel were to really teach you that much, then you would also learn exactly why there wasn't anything to be afraid of!

Therefore you realize that you only need to act upon the answer to a simple question: Do you really want the information that an angel can make available to you?

As you dither for a time on this question you suddenly realize that you are actually starting to believe that you really could, if you chose, summon one of God's Own Angels in very truth. A surge of fear races through, and it becomes a struggle to think straight. All that logic you have so proudly worked out today tells you that you should believe you can summon an angel, but the only way to prove it is to do it....

Somewhere in the confusion a new thought begins to glimmer, and you reach for it in desperation. You can use your will-power to recall the dream exactly, even now, and so hear out your dream-angel's statements without acquiring the responsibilities that go with meeting a real angel.

It is a wonderfully efficient cop-out, but you decide to do it anyway.

"I will recall all of this morning's dream," you begin, "I will recall all of it...."

The process takes time. Earlier, when you had surprised yourself by recalling that essay on the transfinite numbers, the main memory had spontaneously bubbled to just beneath the surface of your thoughts, where your attention had spotted it. Thus it had been fairly easy to get at. But to recall a dream, and after quite a number of hours, you must dig, and dig deeply.

"I will recall all of this morning's dream!"

You focus your will power intensely, and pile on the pressure. "I can recall it, and I will!"

Oh, yes, it takes time. But the time passes, and you don't let up....

The memory pours forth! Gleefully you begin to skim through it -- and come to a screeching halt, shocked...for this is the way the dream began: Your alarm clock had just awakened you from a dream in which an angel had prophesied that your ego would betray you, an angel which you had summoned somehow, so you decided to attempt to figure it out....

Gingerly you follow the thread of your dream-logic, and so glaringly open to inspection it now is that you can see that it is the same as what you had devised today, awake -- exactly the same.... And the dream had proceeded to the point of summoning an angel, but instead, in the dream, the previous dream had been summoned....

And that dream, too, had been the same...and the dream before that one...and the dream before that...and the dream before that....

Panic rises within you, and bursts forth. "Dear God! What's been happening to me!? Where is the angel?!?"

You seize upon the thought -- yes! Where is the angel? It has somehow disappeared from your memory of the dream -- and all the other dreams, also....

"Where is the angel?" you insist. "I will recall it! I will recall the angel!..."

It does not take very long, not very long at all....

How would you recognize your dream-angel? comes a thought.

"What?"

How would you recognize your dream-angel? No, it is not a thought. It is a Voice.

"This is a dream-memory???"

There is no difference between a dream and the physical universe; the only reality is that you exist, that others exist, that God exists. All else is make-believe, a figment of the imagination. It has been said that one must become as a child in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and it is true. When you realize that a child's joy in playing make-believe can be extended to include the totality of your perception, then you have indeed reached the Kingdom. What has been called the Fall of Man is no more, and no less, than the continuing choice to ignore this simple truth. The physical universe is a quasi-reality that you and your brothers have make-believed yourselves into, and therefore is one which can only be left through make-believe.

A dream, now, is real only in the sense that it is just one more part of the physical universe, but a part which you have chosen to consider as being make-believe. A lucid dream, in which you are consciously aware that you are dreaming, can be altered as you choose, successfully, simply because you consider it to be make-believe. The key to the Kingdom is to consider the rest of the universe as being, truly, make-believe, and the only responsibility incurred by this decision is that of helping others to make it also. The physical universe was made logically consistent in order that it be self-supporting. It was not meant to obscure one's freedom of willpower -- and indeed it does not. One must choose to ignore the full extent of one's free will.

And yet, in general, it takes a certain amount of faith, of belief without evidence, to begin to dare to experiment with one's free will, in order to gain the evidence which would support the faith, which would provide reason to experiment further...which would eventually lead to reunion with the Father. Why, then, is it so difficult to take that first step? God has vowed to help you succeed in the end, and although He asks you to assist others along the road, He will also aid you at that task.

The source of the problem is known. It is the ego, a thing which each soul in the earth has chosen to create, to create by permitting the instincts and habits of the physical body to use the soul's free will. The ego is but a figment of its creator's imagination, and its existence is not logically consistent enough to be self-sustaining -- unless the ego is permitted to use the soul's free will, perpetually. Well, since it is what it is, a creature of instinct and habit, it follows that the ego will apply the Law of the Jungle to all interpersonal relationships, including the relationship between itself and its creator. The goals of the ego are those that benefit the ego, and not the creator of that ego, which inevitably results in betrayal by the ego of its creator.

For if the soul were to take back control of its free will, the ego would perish...so the ego strives mightily to maintain control. It does this by insisting that only it knows what is real, and by generating fear at the implication of anything else -- and as long as the soul chooses to believe this, it is so.

Control of the ego lies in the free will of its creator. It has been said that those who live by the sword must die by the sword, and this is true, for only the ego lives by the sword. It is necessary for a soul to learn that the ego's use of force, the Law of the Jungle, must be limited. The differences between bodies are many, but the only difference between souls is their relative amounts of education. This is not enough to make one person superior to another. Bodies are important only in that they provide opportunities for souls to learn; it is proper that those souls who consistently choose not to learn be separated from their bodies, that they may then learn of the extent to which they had permitted their egos to betray themselves. Keep in mind that a soul does not choose to incarnate unless it expects to learn something, and that failure is always caused by the ego, as it attempts to obscure its creator's free will and so unleash itself. It was the ego that caused the Fall of Man.

Since permitting the ego to exist results in great difficulty for a soul attempting to take even the first step of faith along the road that leads back to the Father, you are to be congratulated for the faith that you raised from so little evidence. But even so, it was largely only faith in yourself, that your logic was so correct that your conclusions must be Truth. You must beware of this attitude, for it smacks of the ego, which will surely betray you.

And as to your speculations concerning God...they are incomplete. You have not given enough consideration to the details of His origin beyond the obvious fact that it was not caused. But neither could it have occurred all at once, since spontaneity cannot directly yield complexity, but can only add to it slowly, and at random. Another thing: The relationship between God and Man is a two-way street, yet you have only examined it from one direction. In the other direction it is necessary to know that the concept of "worship" is entirely an invention of the ego. If people concentrated instead on simply loving one another, then the correct attitude towards God will be both automatic and continuous, and will not require a special occasion. Lastly, you need to re-examine the reason behind your attempted analysis of God; if correct, what would you then do with it? All knowledge should be used in a manner which is beneficial to others. You know full well that one of the ego's Jungle tricks is to tear down someone else's reputation in order to make itself look better in comparison. Your analysis, therefore, is egotistical in that it fails to be beneficial to others; it needs to be completed, to show why Man should choose to return to the Father. The key to this is to be found in the purpose to which each soul chooses to devote its own immortality, and in how far it can expect to go alone.

It must be understood that only the soul is immortal; the ego perishes with the body. It must also be kept in mind that the physical universe is, after all, only make-believe, and so death is not a real experience. It is helpful here, to recall how many nightmares one has awakened from, for if life can be called a nightmare, then death is but an awakening. It is the ego's false insistence of its own reality, coupled with its creator's free choice to pay the fear it generates any attention, that has confused Man's relationship with God. Since the ego's continued "existence" is dependent upon maintaining that confusion, it will try anything, any ploy, to convince its creator that it alone knows what is real.

And you, particularly, are having trouble learning this lesson. The mistake of permitting your ego to use your free will is one that repeatedly has the same consequence, just like any other mistake that is repeated until the lesson is learned. Your ego will undermine your belief in the true reality, and thereby betray you....

In the calm that descends as the Voice fades away, all that percolates through your stunned awareness is the merest whisper of a thought, that that Voice had been no dream-memory.... But gradually you recover, filing away all the new data for later, in-depth analysis. On the surface it makes a great deal of sense, and it is transparently obvious how to complete your speculations about God --

A bell, pure vibrant, peals away in the distance.

"Huh?"

A second bell, of different tone, begins to peal. And a third....

"What is going on here?"

The energetic chimes continue. More bells are added. They begin to lose harmony, yet each note is pure.

You try to analyze it, but the pealing of the bells interferes. They make no sense, and yet they continue, and grow louder. In fact, they have lost all harmony, and have begun to sound raucous, a cacophony of noise, beating at your awareness.

And yet you must know what's happening to you -- you will know, you will....

Suddenly you do know: But of course....

Groggily, automatically, you reach for the alarm clock, and shut its jangling off.