A few years ago, my husband and I adopted a rescue puppy who delighted in leaping onto the bed in the morning to wake me up. One morning she landed directly on my head with her paws tangled in my hair, jolting me out of a frightening dream. I felt that I wanted to go back into the dream to escape from the danger, but I couldn’t remember anything about it. The dream was just—gone.
As I made the bed a little later, it dawned on me that this was like the effect of the Christ, God’s message of love to humanity, rousing consciousness from what Mary Baker Eddy calls “the belief and dream of material living.” The full passage from page 14 of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures reads, “Entirely separate from the belief and dream of material living, is the Life divine, revealing spiritual understanding and the consciousness of man’s dominion over the whole earth.” Later the book states, “. . . if sickness and sin are illusions, the awakening from this mortal dream, or illusion, will bring us into health, holiness, and immortality” (p. 230).
Sometimes a healing in Christian Science is so complete that even the memory of the problem is gone. I once had a painfully swollen knee that made walking uncomfortable. It was not immediately healed, but with Christian Science treatment there was no need for surgery or medication during those weeks. Months after the healing, in the back of a drawer, I came upon the elastic knee brace I had used for temporary support. I thought, “Oh yeah, my knee.” I had forgotten all about it.
