Error is a Dream-Narrative
This week’s Lesson-Sermon is “Adam and Fallen Man,” and in section 1 we read from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy that “[t]he history of error is a dream-narrative. The dream has no reality, no intelligence, no mind; therefore the dreamer and dream are one, for neither is true nor real” (p. 530:26-29).
I found a helpful application of this statement by Mrs. Eddy in the January 22, 1949 Sentinel article “Today is God’s Day” by Mabel M. Sheire. The excerpt is as follows:
A student of Christian Science once mistakenly accepted in place of God's day of joy and gladness a day of sorrow. In fact, to human sense, there had been many, many such days, and it had become increasingly difficult to rouse herself from the mesmeric belief that she had suffered much anguish. Seeking spiritual light on her problem, she turned to Science and Health. There on page 530 Mrs. Eddy states: "The history of error is a dream-narrative. The dream has no reality, no intelligence, no mind; therefore the dreamer and dream are one, for neither is true nor real."
The student immediately awoke to the truth that it was her acceptance of the false, mortal belief of a material creation existing in time, separate and apart from God, that had induced her dream of sorrow. But only in so-called mortal sense had she seemed to be the dreamer, and both dream and dreamer were seen to be unreal as she perceived her true selfhood as the spiritual idea of God, the expression of the one Mind, hence eternally awake to the reality of true being. With this awakening she vigorously denounced every suggestion of the dream as it presented itself to her human consciousness, declaring and affirming the presence of God and her forever at-one-ment with the Father. In her firmly re-established awareness of God's allness, the "dream-narrative" faded away, and she found herself once more enjoying the radiant day which God had made, that day in which she could only rejoice and be glad.
And to conclude with a thought from the Hymnal:
Prayer with our waking thought ascends,
Great God of light, to Thee;
Darkness is banished in the glow
Of Thy reality.
(Christian Science Hymnal, No. 287:1)
