The Pilgrim's Progress: Are Dreaming and Sleeping the Same?

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Is Dreaming and Sleeping the Same?

"As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I came to a place where there was a den. There I lay down to sleep: and as I slept, I dreamed a dream."

This great and simple opening of The Pilgrim’s Progress may tell us that in the late 1600s Bunyan is trying to talk about his dream to the public to get his message through to the people. Before I get into this essay I need to clear out the true meaning of Dreaming and Sleeping. Sleeping is when your body is resting and mostly you are unaware of your surroundings. In sleeping state there is no desire in particular emotions. Dreaming happens when you're sleeping, It's basically a fake reality. Dreaming happens when a series of events in our awaken life is taking place, but we are denying that it is. Most of the time dreaming is like a message to your soul about what you're denying and trying to say in your awake state.

Everyone has their own definition and perspective about dreaming and sleeping. Bunyan's perspective about dreaming is that in dreaming you see God's truth and you communicate directly to God as we see in the book Pilgrimage Progress (which is all a dream). Throughout the text, he reminds the reader that all of this he knows to be true precisely because he dreamed it.The fact that a dream happens only in a person's mind highlights the importance of the internal and personal aspect of the whole pilgrimage. Bunyan describes sleeping, on the other hand, as blindness to God's truth. By blindness I mean the way everything got slowed down. An example is when Christian sleeps in the arbor and when he wakes up he realizes that it's late and he needs to continue his journey, while walking he notices that he has lost his certificate....

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...asleep sleep brings him a vision of spiritual improvement. He cannot dream without sleeping. Bunyan is dreaming about heaven, he longs for it to come true, and so that people can know about it that's why he wrote this book.

In conclusion, sleeping and dreaming are two very different things. Sleeping and dreaming are the most widely used symbols in the book. Actually, the story starts with the dream of the author. Sleeping is mostly perceived as sin and potential danger for the pilgrims on their journey to the Celestial City. It is a kind of blindness towards the God whereas dreaming is accepted as the direct relationship to the God. Basically in Pilgrim's Progress Sleeping is the potential danger to reach salvation and to the Celestial City. It is more like a spiritual disaster. When pilgrims sleep they lose their control and their direction to the Celestial City.

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