Are dreaming and sleeping the same thing?"As I walked through the desert of this world, I came to a place where there was a den. There I lay down to sleep : and while I was sleeping, I had a dream." This large and simple opening of the Christian's Pilgrimage could tell us that in the late 1600s Bunyan is trying to talk about his dream to the public to get his message to the people. . Before delving into this essay I must clarify the true meaning of Dreaming and Sleeping. Sleeping is when your body rests and you are mostly unaware of your surroundings. In the sleep state there is no desire for particular emotions. Dreams happen while you sleep. It's basically a false reality. Dreaming happens when a series of events occur in our awakened life, but we deny that this is the case. Most of the time dreaming is like a message to your soul about what you are denying and trying to say in your waking state. Everyone has their own definition and perspective regarding dreaming and sleep. Bunyan's perspective on the dream is that in the dream you see God's truth and 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 he knows all this to be true precisely because he dreamed it. The fact that a dream occurs only in a person's mind highlights the importance of the internal and personal aspect of the entire pilgrimage. Bunyan, however, describes sleep as a blindness to God's truth. By blindness I mean the way everything has been slowed down. An example is when Christian sleeps in the pergola and when he wakes up he realizes that it is late and he has to continue his journey, while he is walking he realizes that he has lost the certificate....... middle of paper... ... sleeping sleep brings him a vision of spiritual improvement. He can't dream without sleeping. Bunyan dreams of heaven, longs for it to come true, and so that people can know it is why he wrote this book. In conclusion, sleeping and dreaming are two very different things. Sleeping and dreaming are the most used symbols in the book. In fact, the story begins with the author's dream. Sleep is mostly perceived as a sin and potential danger for pilgrims traveling to the Celestial City. It is a sort of blindness towards God, while the dream is accepted as a direct relationship with God. In essence in Pilgrim's Progress Sleeping is the potential danger to achieving salvation and the Celestial City. It's more like a spiritual disaster. When pilgrims sleep they lose control and direction towards the Celestial City.