This Reality is a Lovely Place, But I Wouldn't Want to Live There

“We were on a job. Exploring dreams within dreams. But we didn’t understand how your mind can turn hours into years, how you can get trapped, trapped so deep that when you wash up on the shore of your subconscious, you can lose track of what’s real … fifty years … we built, we created a whole world for ourselves. It’s not so bad at first, being gods. The problem is knowing that it’s not real. It became impossible for me to live like that … She accepted it. At some point she’d decided to forget that our world wasn’t real.”

Inception (2010)

Adelphoi, I think we’ve forgotten that we don’t live in the real world.

 

The real world, looking weirdly surreal decked in all those pretty lights.

This, this around us; this earth and this sky; this ground we stand on and this air we breathe; this universe, this wonderful, bizarre, orderly and chaotic, glorious and pathetically broken, excellent and appalling universe; these bodies by which we exist in it and these senses by which we experience it; this isn’t the real world. It’s not. This is some Inception dream-world. In actual fact, that’s not a bad analogy – though it’s not by any means the only one I could have chosen – so I’ll run with it.

This current reality is very much like the dream-worlds of Inception.¹ Like them, it exists and there’s stuff in it and it can represent the whole of a person’s experience at a particular time; good and bad things can happen to people in it; they can live in it and build things in it and make contributions to what sort of world it is; and it’s even the case that what goes down in the dream-world can even have a genuine long-term impact in the real world as well. But crucially, the dream-world isn’t the real world, and furthermore it’s highly dangerous to get it in your head that it is.²

Many people go about – of whom I would often tell you, and now also tell (while) crying – hostile to the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose God is the stomach and glory is their shame, those minded towards earthly things. For our citizenship exists in the heavens, from where also we eagerly expect a saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform the body of our lowliness (to be) conformed to the body of his glory, according to the exercise of his ability even to subject all things to himself. – Philippians 3:18-21

According to faith these all died, not having received the things promised, but from afar having seen and greeted them, and having acknowledged that they were foreigners and sojourners on the earth. For people saying such things show that they are seeking a homeland, and if they were remembering that (land) from which they had come out, they would have had an opportunity to return; but as it is they strive for a better (land), that is, a heavenly (one). Therefore God is not ashamed of them, to be called their God, for he prepared for them a city. – Hebrews 11:13-16

Do not treasure up for yourselves treasures on the earth, where moth and corrosion consume and where thieves break in and steal, but treasure up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor corrosion consumes and where thieves don’t break in and don’t steal, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. – Matthew 6:19-21

For we know that if our earthly dwelling of a tent is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made by hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this (tent) we groan, longing to put on our home from heaven over (it), if indeed having put (it) on, we will not be found naked. For those being in the tent groan, burdened, to the effect that we don’t want to take off but to put on, so that what is mortal might be swallowed up by life … we prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord. – 2 Corinthians 5:1-4, 8

This world isn’t home. It isn’t where we ultimately belong; we’re just visiting. If God were to issue us passports, they’d list our nationality as of heaven; we’re expatriates here, foreigners, exiles. This world is just temporary accommodation. It’s mortal, and what’s in it wears away and is consumed, and it shall one day be brought to nothing. Compared to the eternal heavenly homeland we’re waiting for, that makes it a mere dream-world. We can’t be settled here; whatever we may build or treasure up for ourselves here, we know it’s of no account next to the building and treasure in heaven that awaits us. We might have business in the dream-world for the moment, but we wouldn’t want to be hanging out here forever and ever. Or, to readjust that last idea slightly, we blooming well shouldn’t want to be hanging out here forever and ever.

 

Ancient Egyptian pharoahs, of course, thought they were storing up treasure for the life to come, but, um, that’s not quite how it works, guys. Sorry.

According to the section of the film script I appropriated as an opening quotation,³ Inception’s protagonist Cobb and his wife Mal initially started hanging out in the dream-world because they had business there, but they got distracted. For one thing, the time they spent there started to feel like an awfully long one, so that the knowledge of the real world waiting for them felt more and more removed from where they were. And for another thing, forgetting about the real world allowed them to kid themselves that they were gods, able to make and do whatever they wanted without consequences. Ultimately, Mal chose to make the reality that was in front of her into the only reality she would acknowledge – but that didn’t mean it actually became so. It didn’t mean the real world actually stopped existing, only that she ended up with a totally skewed view of what actually mattered. The dream-world, after all, was transient and mortal, and all the while, somewhere up in the real world there was an actual and substantial body of Mal’s, waiting for her to leave her dream-self and take possession of it. Somewhere up in the real world also was her real family and her real life.

Every time we lose sight of the heavenly homeland we’re waiting for, we’re like Mal in the dream-world. Once, we understood that we were only here temporarily on business, and the only things that it really mattered for us to do here were things that had implications for the real-world we would one day go home to: preach the gospel, make disciples, and all that. But the time we’re spending here has started to feel like an awfully long one, and the knowledge of the real world waiting for us feels so far removed from where we are. And on top of that, if we forget about the real world, we can make ourselves into gods, doing whatever we want without consequences: if, that is to say, we let the fact drift from our minds that God is ready and waiting to hold all things to account – to reward the righteous for having suffered and denied themselves in this world for the sake of the world to come, and to destroy those who have made this world their everything along with it – then suffering and denying ourselves in this world stops looking like a particularly great idea, and we start living to satisfy our own earthly desires instead.

Maybe we don’t take it quite as far as Mal did: maybe we don’t actually stop saying that we’re waiting to go home to the real world. But if we live as if home is here, and not there, then functionally, the reality in front of us has become the only reality we acknowledge. And that’s so, so dangerous, because whatever we do or don’t acknowledge, the real world still exists. The dream-world of the present age is still transient and mortal; our inheritance – actual and substantial glorified bodies, our real family as sons of God and co-heirs with Christ, real life that will never end – is waiting for us up in the real world. Lest we forfeit that inheritance, we cannot and must not risk letting the dream-world of the present age become the only reality we acknowledge.

That’s going to be a hard battle. We’ve never even seen the real world we’re waiting for, after all; we have no actual experience of a reality other than this dream-world. Still, to counter that, God grants us to walk by faith instead of by sight: living so as to acknowledge the coming real world as our home is something that, by the help of his Spirit in us, we are actually able to do. And if we’re wondering whether we’re doing it successfully, there are a couple of good litmus tests to be extracted from some of the passages I quoted above. First off, are we groaning over our absence from our true home with our Lord? Does that bother us, the way living in the dream-world bothered Cobb because he knew it wasn’t real? And second, where are we treasuring stuff up for ourselves? Are we investing ourselves in making and doing stuff that will only last as long as the dream-world, or rather in stuff that will have an impact on the real world too?

If not, and if the former – and indeed, none of us is doing this jazz perfectly – then the response is to fix our eyes and our minds once again on the real world, our heavenly homeland, and on everything that, because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, is waiting for us there – the most crucial of such things being, of course, our risen Lord himself. We may have business in the dream-world for the moment, but we must never forget that where he is, is the real world we’re waiting to go home to.⁴

Footnotes

¹ I’m basically writing this post under the assumption that you’ve seen the film, O Culturally Aware Reader, but here’s a trailer in case you need to familiarise yourself with the premise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoHD9XEInc0. If you in fact haven’t seen it, I’d definitely recommend doing so, by the way.

² Links to whole chapters for you: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=philippians+3&version=ESVUK; https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=hebrews+11&version=ESVUK; https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+6&version=ESVUK; https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+cor+5&version=ESVUK. You’ll have noticed that those are all ESV, but as usual of late, I’ve given my own translation above.

³ I consulted the script here, http://www.raindance.co.uk/site/scripts/Inception.pdf, which I think differs slightly from the dialogue actually used in the film, but whatever; it served my purposes.

⁴ And before I go, a tip of the hat to Owl City for supplying my title (or close enough). Here’s a really cute fanmade video for the relevant track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUvYIrytxE8.