Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: The Dreamer (1965)

About This Lecture

Delivered on February 23, 1965, "The Dreamer" develops Neville Goddard's view that the world we experience is itself a kind of dream. Drawing on the call of Ephesians, "Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light," he describes humanity as God in a state of divine sleep, temporarily forgetful of its own infinite nature. We are, in his striking phrase, the dreamer dreaming, and the seeming solidity of life is the imagery of that dream, projected by the sleeping creative power within each of us. What we take for an objective world standing over against us is, on this teaching, the outpicturing of a consciousness that has not yet remembered itself.

From this premise Neville draws a thoroughly practical teaching about controlled dreaming. Ordinary night dreams are uncontrolled, washing over the sleeper without direction, but the waking daydream, entered deliberately with the attention quieted and the inner senses engaged, can be governed and shaped. By imagining a desired scene as already real and dwelling within it with feeling, a person consciously alters the dream they are living. Neville treats this not as escapism but as the most realistic activity available to us, since the dream is in fact the source of the world. He illustrates the point with examples of disciplined imaginative practice producing tangible results, presenting it as an experiential law anyone can test rather than a doctrine to be believed.

The technique he describes resembles the state akin to sleep he taught throughout his work: relaxing into a drowsy, receptive condition in which the rational guard relaxes and the imagination is most plastic, then constructing a short scene that implies the wish fulfilled and inhabiting it as present fact. In that border country between waking and sleeping, the dreamer can take up the reins of the dream. To daydream in this controlled way is to do consciously what the sleeping God does unconsciously, and so to begin participating knowingly in the creation of one's own experience.

Yet the deeper movement of the lecture points beyond manifestation to awakening itself. The dream, Neville teaches, is purposeful; it is going somewhere. It ends not in mere wish-fulfillment, however satisfying, but in the moment when Christ, the dreamer's own true identity, stirs and rises within the individual. The whole long dream of human history and personal life is, on this reading, the process by which the sleeping God gradually wakes to find that the dreamer and God are one. Manifestation is real and useful, but it is the foothills, not the summit.

Until that final awakening, the invitation Neville extends is to dream nobly and on purpose. Use the imagination deliberately to reshape experience, refuse to be a passive victim of the dream's nightmare passages, and practice entering chosen scenes with conviction and feeling. In doing so one both improves the present dream and moves toward the ultimate discovery of one's identity with the dreamer. The talk thus joins Neville's everyday law of assumption to his larger mystical vision of human destiny, making controlled daydreaming both a practical art and a path of awakening.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Ephesians 5:14, Genesis 1:27, Psalm 42:4.