Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi – Inner Wakefulness

Inner Wakefulness
by Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi

English version by Coleman Barks

This place is a dream

only a sleeper considers it real
then death comes like dawn
and you wake up laughing
at what you thought
was your grief

A man goes to sleep in the town

where he has always lived
and he dreams
he’s living in another town
in the dream he doesn’t remember
the town he’s sleeping in his bed in
he believes the reality
of the dream town
the world is that kind of sleep

Humankind is being led

along an evolving course,
through this migration
of intelligences
and though we seem
to be sleeping
there is an inner wakefulness,
that directs the dream
and that will eventually
startle us back
to the truth of
who we are
 — from The Essential Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks

/ Photo by Alice Popkorn /

This place is a dream

only a sleeper considers it real

Dreams and waking up… The metaphor of being spiritually “awake” is used a lot but not
always with deep reflection. The actual experience of sudden opening is very much like
waking up. It’s as if you’ve been drifting through life in a dream state and just not known it.
Nothing around you has changed, but you finally, truly see things as they are. The dream-
like barrier of mental filters and projections that has stifled your perception for so long falls
away like a heavy blanket. You blink, look around yourself, and are surprised to realize
you’ve been in a sort of half-seeing trance all your life… and now you are awake.

Perhaps just as surprising — and much more confusing to the intellect — is the
simultaneous recognition that while you were in that dream state, there was still some part
of your awareness that was always fully awake, quietly, patiently watching in the
background. It’s just that now that inner wakefulness has come to the forefront. …A
reminder to us that we don’t really need to “wake up;” instead, we just need to get out of
the way of that part of ourselves that is already awake.

and though we seem

to be sleeping
there is an inner wakefulness

And from a purely poetic point of view, I really like the lines–

Humankind is being led

along an evolving course,
through this migration
of intelligences

To me this suggests that each experience, each “dream,” each person’s life is part of a
grand migration of the human spirit, a journey of deepening remembrance and renewal.

Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi

Afghanistan & Turkey (1207 – 1273) Timeline

Muslim / Sufi

Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi was born in Balkh, in what is now Afghanistan, on September 30,
1207. When he was still a young man, though, his family fled under the threat of a Mongol
invasion, and after much traveling, finally settled in Konya, Turkey. The name Rumi means
“the Roman,” that is, “from Roman Anatolia.”

Rumi followed the line of his father and his ancestors – scholars, theologians, and jurists.
Until the age of thirty-seven he seems to have been a conventional teacher under the royal
patronage. In 1244 he met the wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz. This recognition
strengthened and galvanized his belief. His poetry filled with a longing to be the Friend, and
close presence he first saw in Shams, later in Saladin Zarkub, the goldsmith, still later in his
scribe, Husam. Rumi died December 17, 1273. During the last thirty years of his life he
became a brilliant unfolding of that recognition, and a cause of its incandescence in others.

– from Open Secret: Versions of Rumi

More poetry by Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi