What is animal magnetism, error, false belief, and the Adam-dream?
Animal magnetism is the belief that there is a power or Mind other than God, and that there could ever be any separation between ourselves and God. As Mary Baker Eddy wrote on page 275 of Science and Health: “The starting-point of divine Science is that God, Spirit, is All-in-all, and that there is no other might nor Mind, — that God is Love, and therefore He is divine Principle.”
Anything which comes into our experience which seems to go against Truth and Love is merely a claim of another power, truth, or intelligence. Simply a false belief! Since it is not Truth, we can confidently call it error, and there is no reality in the claims of error, though they can appear very real! Since we all have been tricked by it at various times, we can have compassion — and even pity! — for anyone who is acting as though that error is their current reality.
When someone is being tricked like that, we call it the Adam-dream, because of what Mrs. Eddy on page 282 of Science and Health: “Whatever indicates...God's absence, is the Adam-dream, which is neither Mind nor man.” Though that dream can seem real, and perhaps happy or sad or scary or frustrating, the dream is always unreal. Until the person “wakes up” from the false belief, it often is best to “Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him;” as Christ Jesus said in Matthew 5:25.
We all know it can make for a bad day trying to reason with a dreamer, and so the best way to meet the need is to not react or argue verbally, but simply to love because “Love is the liberator.” (S&H, p. 225) What the dreamer is doing is not, and never has been, a personal attack against you — after all, they are only dreaming! Soon enough they will wake — divine Love will liberate them! — and they'll be back to their true, God-created self, as loving and joyful as ever; and you will be there, as happy to see them back as the Father was when the prodigal son returned! (Luke 15:11-32)
And, since we now know that what the dreamer did was not personal, it becomes clear that the claims themselves are not personal. When those claims do come to us, we can shut them down by truly understanding that our loving God, good, did not send these false beliefs. As Mrs. Eddy said in Collectanea, error “comes to you to give it life and you give it all the life it has.” If you refuse to give error life or power, then error will not find a home in you, nor have any power over you!