Chesterton here describes the idea that we are all just people walking around in god’s dream. Someday when he wakes up, we’ll vanish.
This idea stands out to me because I was introduced to it at such a young age. I remember watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my parents when I was probably eight years old. There is an episode called “Ship in a Bottle” where a character in a Holodeck simulation becomes self-aware and kidnaps several of the crew. They are finally able to trick him by seemingly beaming him out of the simulation and into the “real world”. Except they only transported him to another simulation, one that looks like the ship. At the end, Picard muses that we ourselves may only be a construct of someone’s imagination, “running on someone’s desk”.
One of the few video games I remember playing hard growing up was The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, for the old Gameboy. It was a winner too. The plot line though? You have wrecked your ship on an island. It turns out the island and everyone on it are just part of the dream of the “Wind Fish”, a sort of demigod who is trapped in his sleep. After defeating all the nightmares and collecting the eight musical instruments, you wake him up at the end and everything (including Link’s new girlfriend, *sob* *sob* disappear).
I think the philosophers/theologists are right though that this really isn’t THAT much different than reality. As far as where God is in the picture, his creation of us, our utter dependence on him. You can even work passive predestination (not active) in there too. Perhaps you yourself are a character in your own dream sometimes? Big parts of it work. Still, it is a sort of despair. Like Chesterton says here, it’s remarkably closer to the Christian/Jewish idea of God than anything else paganism ever came up with.
Here and there in all that pagan crowd could be found a philosopher whose thought ran of pure theism; but he never had, or supposed that he had, the power to change the customs of the whole populace. Nor is it easy even in such philosophies to find a true definition of this deep business of the relation of polytheism and theism.
Perhaps the nearest we can come to striking the note, or giving the thing a name, is in something far away from all that civilisation and more remote from Rome than the isolation of Israel. It is in a saying I once heard from some Hindu tradition; that gods as well as men are only the dreams of Brahma; and will perish when Brahma wakes. There is indeed in such an image something of the soul of Asia which is less sane than the soul of Christendom. We should call it despair, even if they would call it peace.
This note of nihilism can be considered later in a fuller comparison between Asia and Europe. It is enough to say here that there is more of disillusion in that idea of a divine awakening than is implied for us in the passage from mythology to religion. But the symbol is very subtle and exact in one respect; that it does suggest the disproportion and even disruption between the very ideas of mythology and religion, the chasm between the two categories. It is really the collapse of comparative religion that there is no comparison between God and the gods. There is no more comparison than there is between a man and the men who walked about in his dreams.
-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.110