My neighbor as myself

I had a dream early Monday morning in which I felt deep emotions - strong love for the characters in the dream, a sense of the importance of the things in their lives going in the right way for them.

On the bus Monday, a woman didn’t want to move her backpack off the chair next to her to give me a seat. She asked me to ask another person, who was also taking up two seats, to move. While I was hesitating, the young woman across the aisle offered me her seat. I hesitated there, too, unwilling to have her stand in my stead, but she indicated a vacant seat farther back which I hadn’t seen, and moved to it.

Sitting in the seat she left, I felt a little discomfited by the exchange - happy enough to have a seat but uncomfortable that someone else had moved for me; wondering if the young man in the seat next to me was her partner and I was causing them to be separated, wondering about the woman with the backpack. I had noticed the helmet on her pack when I still thought she was going to move it, as I expected, for me to sit down, so I surmised she had her bike on the bus. I then noticed that there was also a fold-up bike inside the bus, taking the space of three seats that fold up for a wheel chair to be accommodated. I wondered if it was hers (it turned out to be). I had been more comfortable asking her to move her backpack than asking the other person - a rather flamboyant person of dubious sex who was deeply involved with something with a large antenna - to stop lounging diagonally over two seats.

Then I had a thought: what if all the people I see on the bus are characters in my own dream? Because the emotions from my morning dream were still lingering, this was not a dismissive thought. It had two accompanying parts - one, an opening of my ability to feel love for them; and two, a sense that they were all part of me, all with messages to teach me, all opportunities, tests, as it were, of my ability to love. I considered that perhaps the woman with the backpack was feeling strong in a newfound ability to stand up for herself, to take enough space for herself. I didn’t really think specifically about anyone else on the bus, but as I got off the bus, I found myself thinking of her as someone who had just taught me a great lesson.

I’ve been trying this out, when I think of it, in the days since. My husband will say something to me, and I’ll think, here is a character in my dream. He is mine to love. He is here as an opportunity for me to test my love. And then I’ll respond. My responses then tend to be kinder, because I’m not thinking he should be a certain way. And there’s no place, in thinking of other people, for things like envy, because everything I see is part of my world, and no one else’s.

I’m not saying that I’m the only one that exists. I’m just saying that I’m the only one that exists in my dream. Every other individual is also a perfect reflection of God. But I don’t have the ability to see them that way from within my dream. How I see them in my dream is up to me. And the more I consider my interactions with them as opportunities to love, the more closely, in my dream, I’ll see them as they really are.

Jesus said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” I’ve been considering, in the last few years, that this can imply that my neighbor is myself. This odd fiction of thinking of everyone I see as a character in my dream, a part of me, can be a working exercise of loving my neighbor as myself. I didn’t think this up and then work on having it happen. It started to happen, and so I started to think about it.