Do you remember the court scene at the end of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where all the characters revert back into playing cards? Up to this point in the story, Alice was immersed in her dream, falling down a rabbit hole, swimming in a pool of tears, becoming incredibly small and amazingly tall, talking with a grinning Cheshire cat! In the last scene everything becomes too outrageous, with the Queen demanding, "Off with her head!" At this point Alice starts to rebel and so begins to wake up. She suddenly realizes that she has no need to be afraid of these characters and exclaims, "You're nothing but a pack of cards!" This realization breaks the dream and she wakes up.
Disease and suffering could be likened to a dream. But how do we wake up, or help another to do so? An individual experienced in Christian Science healing once pointed to the importance of not getting into the "mechanics" of any difficulty. It is by staying outside the testimony of the physical senses—not analyzing the dreamlike details of what the senses report—that one can think and pray clearly and effectively. Christian Science treatment cannot be given effectively if the one giving treatment is mesmerized by another's dream. Staying in the light of divine Truth, unafraid of matter's claims, spiritually calm and poised, helps one to awaken another to the reality of his being, to his wholeness as God's image, and thereby to gain his freedom.
Christian Science enables us to see that matter is not truly substantive but is the subjective state of so-called mortal mind, of material thought. Science and Health refers to the dreamlike, illusory nature of material existence when it says, "Mortal existence is a dream of pain and pleasure in matter, a dream of sin, sickness, and death; and it is like the dream we have in sleep, in which every one recognizes his condition to be wholly a state of mind."Science and Health, p. 188
