Summing Up

Summing Up – Or if you can’t find what you wanted about dreams see Questions

Dreams are one of nature’s miracles, not the result of a wandering mind in sleep. A dream is an interface between the process of life, our core self and our conscious personality. Life existed quite capably for millions of years before the self-aware human personality came on the scene. In all that time the ancestors of the modern human being survived without having a rational mind to reason with, or self consciousness to ask such questions as ‘What do I do about this?’ Nevertheless survival strategies were still developed in their unconscious intelligence. Dreams express this unconscious wisdom that was developed in humans and animals through millennia.

Life’s age old unconscious processes are still the major part of our being, yet we seldom consciously meet them – except in dreams. As our physical and psychological health depend upon a reasonable co-operation between the spontaneous processes of life and our conscious decisions and actions, the encounter in dreams is vital. As I often point out to those I am advising we are a human face on a long line of beautiful animals. In fact “You ride an ancient beast.” The ancient beast is your body, and your conscious self is the modern and recent rider of it. Some ‘riders’ do not understand their animal needs – and the fact that we have several levels of brain that are independent of each other proves this. Still active in us are our Reptile Brain, Our mammalian Brain, and our Human Brain, and the reptile and mammalian brains are still very active and constitute a large part of our human unconscious. See Brain Levels and Dreams and Levels of Awareness in Sleeping and Waking.

So, no plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life you developed a new brain, and the memories you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very ancient self.

The main process behind dreams is the self-regulatory or homeostatic one. If the self-regulatory processes of your being ceased its action you would be dead in a very short time. Even a brisk walk causes such enormous changes in the body it would kill you without the action of self-regulation. The production of lactic acid, unchecked, would destroy the system. Also the drop in blood sugar, unless balanced by the release of glucose from the storage in tissues and liver, would result in collapse. The level after level of safety factors built into our system are nothing short of incredible.

Dr. Hadfield writes that, “There is in the psyche an automatic movement toward readjustment, towards an equilibrium, toward a restoration of the balance of our personality. This automatic adaptation of the organism is one of the main functions of the dream as indeed it is of bodily functions and of the personality as a whole. This idea need not cause us much concern for this automatic self-regulating process is a well known phenomenon in Physics and Physiology. The function of compensation which Jung has emphasised appears to be one of the means by which this automatic adaptation takes place, for the expression of repressed tendencies has the effect of getting rid of conflict in the personality. For the time being, it is true, the release may make the conflict more acute as the repressed emotions emerge, and we have violent dreams from which we wake with a start. But by this means, the balance of our personality is restored.”

That suggests that dreams cannot be defined under any one heading. Like human beings, they are enormously varied in what they express. Just as one cannot say the human mind is simply a system of memory, one cannot say dreams are just the reflection of experienced events. The mind also deals with problem solving, predicting outcomes of action, playing with possibilities via imagination, creating the new out of old material, replaying disturbing events in order to find ways of meeting them constructively. Dreams, being the mental phenomena they are, deal with all of these issues and more. The following definitions give the main functions observable in dreams. 

Dreams are:-

What is a dream? No single approach or definition can encompass the many different things dreams are. No approach, whether it is biological, psychological, neurological, philosophical, can give a full definition of a dream, no more than any approach can define any aspect of life, like kissing, or eating. Therefore a dream is a TRANSCENDENT EXPERIENCE – just as any ordinary event in life is a transcendent experience. This means that a dream transcends any attempt to describe or define it – as does any life experience. Life transcends any approach to it, or definition of it. Laughter, tears, love-making, are transcendent experiences. To read on click on – Transend

There is so much to learn about dreams and how to approach, explore and benefit from them. To understanding your dream, you need to realise that the images in our dreams are just emotions, thoughts, fears, traumas, ideas, and feelings projecting out of you and appearing as images, people, or scenes outside you on the screen of your mind.

Also any comments put at the end of a feature may not be replied to. To be able to see such comments I would need to daily check the 1000 or so pages on this site every day. Put such comments in the Forum. Or write to tonycrisp@yahoo.com

1 – While we sleep our conscious self is largely or totally unconscious, and while we dream our voluntary muscles are paralysed – therefore another will or motivating force moves our body. So we have a Conscious Will, and what I will call a Life Will. The first one we have experience of as we can move our arm or speak in everyday activities; but the second will is in full operation when we sleep and in fact runs all our important life processes like heart beat, digestion and also dreams.

So humans live in two very different dimensions. The one most people identify with is the three dimensional physical world of the body. There a lot of rules to learn in this world; when very young we learn not to touch hot things; not to rush out into a road with moving cars. But as adults we have learnt not to step out into space while at a height because we will fall and have a major injury or die.

But in dreams you leave the limited view of the three dimensional world most of us are trapped in, and enter a world beyond the normal. A great feature of this is that instead of only being aware of one thing or one thought at a time instead it is akin to having a whole view of all that you have ever experienced or learn in view at once. But it does not overwhelm gut allows you to seek answers from all your incredibly experience and even the Collective Unconscious. Beyond time we are aware of all time, past, present and future – all at once. So we do not look into the future, but are it. Our body life is to learn important lessons by being locked in time, space and our body, with its gender and limitations.

In this dimension we are in a wider awareness, in this wider awareness you leave the limited view of the three dimensional world most of us are trapped in, and enter a world beyond time and space. Beyond time we are aware of all time, past, present and future – all at once. So we do not look into the future, but are it. Our body life is to learn important lessons by being locked in time, space and our body, with its gender and limitations.

We enter this dimension when we are able to allow the unconscious to be known consciously and when we die. In death we are all the time – unless trapped by our attitudes and beliefs in the old view – so we are all the time aware of those we love and care for as this woman’s experience describes – “Evening draws to an end along with her singed teenage years. She has no place to go, and nothing to do, so she crawls away towards her room. The Victorian staircase casts a shadow, becoming a stoner’s (not Homer’s) odyssey. Pulling herself on hands and knees, one stair at a time, she eventually surmounts the steep incline that leads to her private place of recline.

Steps now feebly conquered, she enters her room tired. In too poor a state to undress for bed, she stands and totters in indecision: “I’ll pause for a moment and later disrobe.” Exhaustion has beguiled her will and brick propped, sagging bed temptation finds her lying back fully clothed. She lies awake, she lies awake, she lies awake. Books line the floor of the shelfless room. She lies awake, she lies awake, she lies, but then a new, other world she espies.

Unlike any dream environments she’s known, her mind feels clear, alert, and free. Is she awake, asleep, or somewhere in between, in this place that’s more vivid than previous reality? Her surrounding is cylindrical, vibrant, and vast; white light emanates with a strength that almost hurts. The only route is up the helter skelter stairs of this lightening bright, snow blindness light-house. Tentatively, so unsure she starts to ascend; round and round she coils windowless walls forlorn, until she reaches the top and it’s sacred platform.

Relief from the piercing light is achieved where windows open on to darkest space. Her anxiety easing, she approaches the central display: an exceptional, universal camera obscura. Far from static it reveals the whole world and with just one thought from the viewer’s mind, a place and a loved one instantly appear presented real time for one to observe. Standing mystified, a presence then joins her and informs her with seemingly no external voice at all: “This is the place where people come after death’s fall.”

With instant recognition of her self-mortification, she spontaneously utters: “Oh, so I’m dead!” The presence inwardly sighs: “No, you’ve misunderstood my intention: I’ve brought you here to show that each of the dead choose someone to guide and watch over on earth. And that you have a someone still loving you. Your self-destruction is unnecessary; you just need to give life a reasonable chance. Please think on this experience and what I have said; your duty is still to life, it’s not yet to death.”

Wide awake and bed room returned, she shakes her young head in disbelief. If it were but a dream, would she not be drowsy? But she feels as alert, as she was in the lighthouse.”

But that is not all they carry with them, because they believe so much that everything is ruled by their body’s life and experience, they are also terrified of falling in dreams, they believe they can be torn apart by savage animals, also they frightens the life out of themselves with dream images of demons or even the devil, or are horrified of being shot or raped, etc.

But whenever we dream its images are not like real life, because a dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen, so that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear; so, all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind. In the early days of moving pictures, a film was shown of a train coming fast toward them; the viewers all fled in terror, fearing the train would crush them. That is exactly the same response if you are terrified of any thing you dream of. See Masters of Nightmares

It is also important to realise that every image, every scary or terrifying thing, is taken place inside you, in your mind, as you sleep. This means that every awful animal, every scary thing, or person, is created out of your own fears and must not be seen as outside you as happens in waking awareness. The problem is that we are often scared of or frightened of experiencing our emotions and so they confront us in our dreams. Avoiding them or controlling them is like running away from oneself – there is no escape. See Life’s Little Secrets – Opening to Life

Example: I was getting ready to leave and this dark haired guy told me I couldn’t leave, I felt scared and was going to leave anyways, he pulled out a pistol and shot me in the stomach, I fell down, but there was no blood. The thoughts in my head was, “OH NO”. Next thing I remember is that I was still on the floor in the same place and I got up and I remembered being shot but I didn’t seem to have any pain or blood and was moving normally etc. I started looking for a way to leave I was sneaking around trying not to get noticed so that I could get out of there w/o the shooter guy seeing me.

The interesting thing in the example is that even though she could see no hurt came from being shot, yet she was still scared of the guy with the shooter. And it is overcoming such fears that can release you from terror and hurts that haunt us.

Even so people waking from a disturbing dream or nightmare say, “It was only a dream”; perhaps to dismiss its importance. But even though the scary or difficult images that we create are only images depicting our emotions and fears, yet they are the very things that rule peoples lives. I remember once helping a man to release tensions by letting go of his body, recoiled in horror saying, “If I let go the devil will take over.”

You might not be terrified of the devil or hell, but many are terrified of death, of not being loved, of losing a partner or their job, of having cancer or Alzheimer’s, or haunted by childlike fears, or of not making their mark in life, of not being recognised and living up to parents expectations – the list is endless. In essence we are often victims of such things. See Victim – Avoiding Being My Own 

But people believe they are nothing more than their body and so are trapped in believing they will die if they fall from a great height. Or are trapped in believing that levitation always requires deep concentration and effort beyond any natural ability that you are capable of.’ But you are not fighting gravity because it doesn’t exist in the dream realm. Try it imagining you are on the edge of a precipitous cliff and you step off the edge. What do you feel? Remember it is simply your own imagined image. It is good to try it several times until you master it; you could simply float in space, or fly somewhere effortlessly, or slowly go to the ground.

2 – Also, a dream is a communication between what has no recognised form – our Core Self – as far as our personality or reasoning mind is concerned. So, to do this it uses images of people, things, and animals, as well as scenes that we might understand if we explore what we associate with the dream images. For instance, a man dreamt of a tarot card reader. But in understanding how dreams work the tarot card reader represent his own intuition, because that is what he associates with being psychic. This next example from Oliver, a boy of six, illustrates how such fears as shown in the above example can be met with a little courage. It is a dream which recurred several times, so his description is of a series of dreams.

Example: ‘I am in my bed in my own room and I hear what I know to be a wolf wearing the sort of clogs worn in Lancashire. When the wolf gets to a certain point, there is a bang, and I wake terrified. My Mother’s reassurances do not help. Each night he gets a bit nearer before my panicky awakening. The night came when I know he will reach me. Sure enough he arrives, and the bedroom door – in my dream – is flung wide open with a tremendous bang. There is no one there. I never dreamt it again.’

When something gets nearer to us in a dream, it means that it is moving nearer to consciousness. So, Oliver’s wolf – or at least, what it represents, namely his response to his childhood fears – is becoming ever more conscious. This means he is facing his fear and thereby dealing with it. If he had run away or fought to keep the door closed, then it would have gone on haunting him. When he met it he saw that it was nothing except his fear. The dream therefore was a great teacher.

3 – All the images, people, animals, places we see in our dreams, are simply your own feelings, fears, hopes and wonder projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind as images. So, it makes sense to take the image of your dream person, thing or animal back into you and own it. In that way, you are meeting and dealing with the things about yourself you are not owning or conscious of. That is why dreams are often difficult to understand, because we are hiding things from ourselves. To do this you can use Being the Person or Thing

 Nearly always when people dream about someone they know or a strange new person or situation they automatically believe the dream is about that person, situation, or animal. But it is usually our thoughts or feelings that are portrayed as the person or even the animal; for when we think of our friend or partner our thoughts are not them – just our thoughts and feelings about them.

A trick dreams often play on us is to use the image or person of someone else to represent you. This happens because we often do not want to see the truth about ourselves the dream portrays.

So, dream images are ways of communicating via our associations not actual things or people. In the world of dreams our most intimate fears and longings are given an exterior life of their own in the form of the people, objects, and places of our dream.

Therefore, our sexual drive may be shown as a person and how we relate to them; or given shape and colour as an object; or given mood as a scene, something that haunts our memory is shown as a ghost or demon. Our feeling of ambition might thus be portrayed as a business person in our dream – our changing emotions as the sea or a river; while the present relationship we have with our ambition or emotions is expressed in the events or plot of the dream. Even dreams of God or angels are in a sense a meeting with your own higher mental abilities. See – Dimensions of Human Experience; Characters and People in Dreams; you are the projector

4 – You may find this hard to believe, but very few of us have managed to mature emotionally beyond babyhood or childhood.

By adulthood I mean the ability to be very independent and at the same time loving others. It means not being hurt when someone you ‘love’ leaves you, for you are aware of the reality that change happens and are not crucified by it. Dying or death is not a great fear, because you have experienced being alive and know that death is a part of living.

It is also about being adaptable, for if you cannot adapt to change then you are stuck in life situations that otherwise would be crushing. Also fear is a part of being a human animal, it guards us against hurt and pushes us to act with strength, but a mature person does not live in imagined fear as is shown in dreams where people are terrified of ghost, demons, the devil, or zombies, also, it means we have a fair or better level of mental health. See Martial Art of the Mind

As an example of what is stated above, for the last 50 years, the developed world has experienced unprecedented peace, prosperity, and technological comfort. And this is the result. Yet in the U.S., one in four women is taking a prescription drug for mental health.

We are mostly still stuck at an age where we are vulnerable to such things. You would expect people to have become less violent. Instead, starting in the ’70s, there was an explosion of violent crime, which was eventually brought under control only by incarcerating the highest percentage of our citizens of any country in the world. Meanwhile, according to the General Social Survey, from 1972 to 2006, women rated themselves less and less happy each year, as by almost every objective measure their lives improved. Please read Beware of Love; Avoid Being Victims

My view is that we have not realised that we are basically instinctive animals that have attained self awareness, and our culture has not helped us to recognise that we have all the worst of animal instincts without any training to help us transform our reactions – as many tribal people do. Also, we are almost all carrying huge infant traumas from childhood. See Levels of the Brain and Dreams

5 – In this dream world, every feeling and thought changes and creates different environments and events. So, because you felt fear you created the event of you falling out of bed as if this dream image could hurt you.

Whether we remember or not, each time we sleep we create an apparently real world out of our remembered impressions, habits and emotions. As the stage managers of our inner theatres, we have the most abundant props, costumes and backdrops imaginable. Yet, because a dream is our own creation, no part of it, no emotion contained in it, no flight of fancy portrayed, is other than oneself.

So, your dreams are a magic mirror that reflects nothing but your own beliefs, worries, fears, wisdom and even genius. To do this it creates characters, situations and drama that are all  reflections of your own inner world. All the images and drama, along with the emotions you feel are simply you looking at yourself. Most of it we do not recognise because we are so blind to our failings and of course our wonder.

So, in dreams we create an amazing virtual reality, but in it we are fully involved, not just witnessing it. Also it is created by our fears, our emotions, our fantasies, hopes and longings as well as the main thing – our self-regulatory process that keeps us alive. So any horror of your dreams is created largely by your fear.

How do we face and over come fear? By saying no to the urges of fear that make us run like frightened mice and hide from our own magnificence. We say no to what destroys our own best human self and live like tiny scared children in our own world of adults. We say no to the many shortcuts we constantly try  to take in diving into holes to protect us from pains we have ourselves created by our avoidance’s to face what we need to grow. See Self-Regulation/Homeostasis

6 – When we meet or confront something we are uncertain about, or scares us, that stimulates us sexually, or threatens us, we either react to it emotionally or try to explain it to ourselves in some way. In a sense, we are symbolising the event by giving it an emotional response, or explaining it in words. A recent research report says that the outer world we are so certain is the real world, is not so solidly real as we believe. The colours we are so sure we see comes from certain properties of what we have in front of us, it absorbs some kinds of light and reflect other kinds of light, which are then received by the eye as formless impulses, which are then passed along the optic nerve as formless nerve signals, and then transformed or translated in our brain into a subjective experience of colour.

In fact, our mental faculty, our brain, is a fantastic interpreter – it interprets formless impressions, scary emotions, into things which we feel make sense to us. So, a scary feeling which we have no rational explanation for may be interpreted as the images of an evil entity or zombies. Sometimes if something we are very uncertain about impacts on our senses, we may even interpret it as a flying saucer or an alien abduction. So, please do not think that the image is about real life, everything is a way the human brain interprets impressions, so everything needs investigating – maybe by using Practical Techniques for Understanding Your Dreams;  Being the Person or Thing.

7 – DREAMS IMAGES ARE LIKE ICONS ON A COMPUTER SCREEN – You have to ‘click’ on your dream images to make them come alive. Thinking about them doesn’t work. You need to open yourself to the magic of them. See Clicking On; Being the Person or Thing

I believe a dream is a complete mixture of our personality, with all its likes, dislikes, fears, beliefs, and convictions, as well as a non-personality experience; a bodiless, formless being – like a hole without any forms in it. It is everything, and as everything cannot take form as something so it remains invisible to us – yet it is our creative centre, beyond time and space. So, our dreams come from a formless cause, but to be understood by our brain, our personality, we clothe the dream with images and drama which is an attempt to understand.

The images or scenes are things we unconsciously take in and we build certain ideas or meanings around them. For example, many films show the living dead, zombies, as things to be avoided. So, our dream maker uses them to show how part of our own nature have become almost dead through ignoring them or being frightened of them. See Working with Associations

8 – You cannot be hurt in your dreams. You cannot drown, you can’t die in a dream, no tiger or other animal can harm you. Of course, you can feel feelings of dying, or being hurt, or drowning, but they are all images you create because you feel afraid and you haven’t faced up to your fears. See Avoid Being Victims; Dreams are Like a Computer Game

So, the animals you feel in your dream will harm you are your own instincts and feelings that frighten you and are harmless. This is because every dream image, animal or person is a subtle or powerful aspect of your own efficient working. Just as car is made up of many parts to work well, so are we. A car without efficient brakes or carburetor works, but not well. So, we do not work efficiently with parts of us denied, held back, or repressed. Of course it might be a good idea to see why they frighten you by using Techniques for Exploring your Dreams and reading Levels of the Brain; Animals; Animals in our Dreams

8 – Most people feel certain their body is them, and are certain that their body is who they are. But dreams have a very different view of the body. They show again and again if anyone takes the time to record their dreams over a period of time that we all have a body, a soul, and a spirit.

The body is in constant change and will age and die. Dreams see it as like a car that we can use to get some necessary life experiences, but the driver can leave the car and the car does not define the driver. The soul consists of all the personal thoughts, decisions, likes, dislikes and memories of the person – of this lifetime. It can be quite limited in its perceptions because we are only aware of only 1% of visible light and 1% of the range of sound – so we are really blind and deaf, and yet we are so sure we know the world and what it means.

The spirit is basically consciousness/energy that can enliven a body but is not limited by it, and can exist as bodiless awareness. So, from the point of view of dreams you cannot die or be destroyed. Also in dreams – your inner life – you can appear as any form, any gender, and any creature. But we are so sure we are the limited world we know through our senses, and we are trapped by this view. See Inner World

Dreams can arise from any of these levels, most dreams are those dealing with the forces of life as they act in or on the body, to rise to consciousness or expression. Thus, dreams would mostly be dealing with the “struggle” or creative activity in the material world that produces consciousness and activity.

Example: While practising dream recall this morning, without seeking it, a very clear realisation came fully formed. This was that dreams are reflections of, or are, a process going on in the deeps of oneself. This is a process of compensation or balance. That is, balancing foods, ideas, emotions, hopes, body, etc. I saw that if this process were well developed, poisons usually causing death could be dealt with. This is but a poor crumbling shell of the realisation, which seemed to have a reality in a dimension of its own.

10 – Whenever we dream all our voluntary muscles are paralysed. That is fine while we are dreaming, but if we become slightly awake or lucid we are often scared that we have lost control. Such fear show how out of touch with our unconscious or core self we are, so we fight for control. Yet our core self is what keeps us alive, and because of the often-ridiculous things we tend to believe or live by, our core self has to regularly – whenever we sleep – take full control again to balance our life again.

So, we have two levels of will, our Awake Self or Aware Will, and our our Life Will. The life will not only continues to beat our heart and keep you alive, it can express as spontaneous movements. So, if you wake while in the middle of dreaming and experience sleep paralysis the best thing is to surrender and let the Life Will act through you for a while. See Life’s Little Secrets

Example: Facing my adversary and becoming lucid in the dream, I allowed the adversary to kill me with a sword, knowing all the while that absolutely no harm could come from this experience. Fully lucid and looking at my dream attacker I said: “You can plunge the sword through me if you wish,” whereupon my adversary did just that. Then I drew the sword out of my dream body and very lovingly and wisely gave it back to the adversary and said: “Thank you.”

11 – Considering that we all have an inner world or dream world which is far more than the limited world shown by our senses, we can contact the so called dead, and also each other, for we are like islands in a sea of consciousness, and the shoreline is the limit of our range of awareness. But our awareness spreads like an ocean in which we are like islands, and beyond the shoreline, beneath the surface, we are all connected.

Also, you can never lose anybody you have lived with, cared for, and loved even when they die. Most people are often totally unaware of the experience they take in and how it interacts with them when we love someone. In other words, the memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. You have taken in millions of bits of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with someone and they are what makes you the person you are. Your dreams tend to put all that in the image of the past person when you are dealing with the influences left in you from the relationship. Therefore, your sense of lose is because your inner life has been distorted by beliefs that we end when we die.

Our unconscious is very open to suggestion. If this were not so we would lack necessary survival responses. In a dimly lit situation we may mistake a shape for a lurking figure. Our body reactions such as heartbeat, react to the mistake as if it is real until we gain fresh information. Whatever we feel to be real becomes a fact as far as our body reactions are concerned. This applies to anything we feel is true – we create it as an internal reality, whether that is religious beliefs, convictions about ourselves such, “I am a failure – I have no talent – Nobody is attracted to me – I am great and everyone can see it” are all terrible things to belief, and will stand in the way of real growth. See Martial Art of the Mind; Inner World; Answer to Critics; Closer to the Light; Jesse Watkins Enlightenment

12 – Also people are very confused about the difference between their waking life and their dream life. They believe that what they dream is the same as what they meet in waking life.  In other words, we take as a truth that what is important outwardly is as important in our dreams. So, you are as upset by a dream as if it had actually happened in waking life. Such mistakes make us feel things that are ridiculous.

This happens with the morals we live by, which may be necessary in waking life, but we try to make them fit to our much bigger and freer dream/inner life, and that causes conflict because the two worlds are completely different. So, in dreams about sex we do not have to live by the same small moral world often necessary in waking life. In dreams, we experiment emotionally and sexually, so dreams often stand in place of actual experience. In doing so we expand our mental and emotional life without any danger or consequences. Through dreams we may experiment with new experience or practice things we have not yet done externally.

Example: Before waking this morning I had an extraordinary lucid experience that involved me in what felt like a real place. The clearest part of this was of myself in a maze. The walls of the maze were made of hedges, as the whole thing was outdoors. But I realised, because I was lucid, that I had purposely created the maze as an experiment. The point of the experiment was that the maze was complicated enough to make it difficult for me to find my way out.

So, confronted by the difficulty of emerging from this dream maze, because of the lucidity, I could understand that this was a dream image, a reflection of the actual world I live in, and in doing so I simply realised that I was not actually in a maze, but only lost in feelings of being trapped in my own mind, and was thereby free of the maze.

I then experimented again and again with this, moving to exist beyond the images I had been, or could be, lost in. This was such an extraordinary experience and realisation it is difficult to put into words with enough impact to make it real. What it led me to see was that all dreams involve us in an environment or situation of one sort or another. Usually we feel the dream to be so real, and the feelings we experience because we are immersed in them, to also be real, that in a very real way we are trapped.

But we are trapped in the feelings, ideas, and beliefs, not the dream. So, if we were in a prison cell in a dream, then there would be no way out of that cell without a key. But realising oneself as being the awareness behind the feelings and images means there is no prison; there is no entrapment; there are no walls to hold you. The apparent reality of the dream is then seen as simply pictures and feelings – stuff of the mind that we have conjured and become identified with and lost or trapped in. Even imagery with positive feelings are a form of trap if we identify with them.

The more I look at the experience the more I realise that virtually everybody on our planet is trapped in a prison of their own emotions, thoughts, and ideas. To recognise this in any reasonable degree leads to an extraordinary sense of freedom. To see that we live our life trapped in the world of thoughts, of emotions, of sexual drives, of fears or beliefs, is astonishing.

Most of us interiorise our morals or beliefs into our dream life. In other words, we take as a truth that what is important outwardly is as important inwardly. Then you are as upset by a dream as if it had actually happened in waking life. Such mistakes make us feel things that are ridiculous.

This happens with the morals we live with, by which may be necessary in waking life, we try to make them fit to our much bigger and freer dream/inner life and that causes conflict because the two worlds are completely different. So, in dreams about sex we do not have to live by the same small moral world often necessary in waking life. In dreams, we experiment emotionally and sexually, so dreams often stand in place of actual experience. In doing so we expand our mental and emotional life without any danger or consequences. Through dreams we may experiment with new experience or practice things we have not yet done externally.

For instance, many young women dream in detail of giving birth. This function of what might be called ‘imagination’ is tremendously undervalued, but is a foundation upon which human survival is built.

13 – We all live in a dual world, light and dark, male and female, creation and destruction, life and death, waking and sleeping. What many people do not realise is that we are all involved in this duality personally. It is only our body that tends to polarize us male or female, but in dreams we are both and often dream of having genitals of the ‘other’ sex – and using them or dream of a man giving birth to a baby.

Also, we are also in the world of waking and sleeping, but we think that sleep is simply to rest our body. We miss realising that we also exist in the wider world of the ocean of consciousness. Most of us are unaware of it because it is the other polarity of us. In waking we are in the polarity of being an individual with focussed awareness on a body and surrounding, like an island. But our other polarity is in the ocean where we are not focussed on any one place or body. See There is a Huge Change Happening; You Are a Dual Being; Life’s Little Secrets

Also, we are all in the process of destruction and creation, we are after all expressions of the Universe. We continue to kill millions of viruses, fungi, and bacteria each day otherwise our body would die. Also in every moment of our life we face the possibility of death. In fact, we only live because we are constantly dying. Our body is all the time dying as thousands of cells die, and in doing so the new and living body can continue.

Example: This was not a dream, but a direct perception during sleep. I saw that a large part of my being was dying, and another part coming to life. Andy

14 – People are very confused about the difference between their waking life and their dream life. They believe that what they dream is the same as what they meet in waking life. So a dream like the following is an example of this.

Example: Before waking this morning I had an extraordinary lucid experience that involved me in what felt like a real place. The clearest part of this was of myself in a maze. The walls of the maze were made of hedges, as the whole thing was outdoors. But I realised, because I was lucid, that I had purposely created the maze as an experiment. The point of the experiment was that the maze was complicated enough to make it difficult for me to find my way out. So, confronted by the difficulty of emerging from this dream maze, because of the lucidity, I could understand that this was a dream image, a reflection of the actual world I live in, and in doing so I simply realised that I was not actually in a maze, but only lost in feelings of being trapped in my own mind, and was thereby free of the maze. I then experimented again and again with this, moving to exist beyond the images I had been, or could be, lost in.

This was such an extraordinary experience and realisation it is difficult to put into words with enough impact to make it real. What it led me to see was that all dreams involve us in an environment or situation of one sort or another. Usually we feel the dream to be so real, and the feelings we experience because we are immersed in them, to also be real, that in a very real way we are trapped. But we are trapped in the feelings, ideas and beliefs, not the dream. So if we were in a prison cell in a dream, then there would be no way out of that cell without a key. But realising oneself as being the awareness behind the feelings and images means there is no prison; there is no entrapment; there are no walls to hold you. The apparent reality of the dream is then seen as simply pictures and feelings – stuff of the mind that we have conjured and become identified with and lost or trapped in.

Even imagery with positive feelings are a form of trap if we identify with them. The more I look at the experience the more I realise that virtually everybody on our planet is trapped in a prison of their own emotions, thoughts and ideas. To recognise this in any reasonable degree leads to an extraordinary sense of freedom. To see that we live our life trapped in the world of thoughts, of emotions, of sexual drives, of fears or beliefs, is astonishing.

Most of us interiorise our morals or beliefs into our dream life. In other words we take as a truth that what is important outwardly is as important inwardly. In other words you are as upset by a dream as if it had actually happened in waking life. Such mistakes make us feel things that are ridiculous. This happens with the morals we live with, by and may be necessary in waking life, we try to make them fit to our much bigger and freer dream/inner life and that causes conflict because the two worlds are completely different. So in dreams about sex we do not have to live by the same small moral world often necessary  in waking life.

In dreams we experiment emotionally and sexually, so dreams often stand in place of actual experience. In doing so we expand our mental and emotional life without any danger or consequences. Through dreams we may experiment with new experience or practice things we have not yet done externally. For instance many young women dream in detail of giving birth. This function of what might be called ‘imagination’ is tremendously undervalued, but is a foundation upon which human survival is built.

We all live in a dual world, light and dark, male and female, creation and destruction, life and death, waking and sleeping. What many people do not realise is that we are all involved in this duality personally. It is only our body that tends to polarize us male or female, but in dreams we are both  and often dream of having genitals of the ‘other’ sex – and using them or dream of giving birth to a baby. Also we are also in the world of waking and sleeping, but we think that sleep is simply to rest our body. We miss realising that we also exist in the wider world of the ocean of consciousness. Most of us are unaware of it because it is the other polarity of us. In waking we are in the polarity of being an individual with focussed awareness on a body and surrounding, like an island. But our other polarity is in the ocean where we are not focussed on any one place or body. See You Are a Dual Being; Life’s Little Secrets

Also we are all in the process of destruction and creation, we are after all expressions of the Universe. We continue to kill millions of viruses, fungi and bacteria each day otherwise our body would die. Also in every moment of our life we face the possibility of death. In fact we only live because we are constantly dying. Our body is all the time dying as thousands of cells die, and in doing so the new and living body can continue.

Example: This was not a dream, but a direct perception during sleep. I saw that a large part of my being was dying, and another part coming to life. Andy

15 – A Dream is like a seed, it is something that comes from a deep part of you; it is something that is working upwards toward becoming conscious. As such it often, like a seed, takes time to break through to the surface, and then it needs to grow. So, often dreams are not recognised for their full meaning until later – sometimes months or even longer.

The dream images are attempts to communicate something that has probably never been thought about or even been conscious before, so has never been put into common conscious thinking. It is a communication from the depths, from beyond thought, and so any interpretations that are given by thinking may completely miss the point. But the source of the dream, which is a process of Life, is intelligent in its own way, and will take part in any attempt to communicate. So, exploring your dreams by entering into their imagery and attempting to understand them will be a two-way process. See Secrets of Power Dreaming – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams

16 – When dreaming you are not operating in the waking world with its rules and laws, because the dream world is a totally different dimension in which things work differently. Your life came about from an egg/seed planted in your mother’s womb. Your mother didn’t create you because the processes of Life did the huge detailed work, but your mother provided an environment and food, water and air.

You are the product of an egg and a sperm that are the descendants of other cells that began when life on Earth began with single celled creatures, so your seed is in a sense, immortal. But no plant or tree grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So you have a very long history and of course memory.

This suggests that in fact your personality is only a small part of a huge memory, the memory people call the unconscious. In fact you were not born with a personality already in you, but it developed out of the new memories and experiences gathered by the new brain in your new body, but beneath that were influences gathered by a long line of seeds/lives, that gave rise to the miracle of your body, the memories of which are only available if you dig deep into your mind or through dreams.

17 – Love and attraction for a partner are full of strange feelings. These feeling are made weird largely by the ideas and feelings we have inherited from our culture – love for ever lasting; the Right one; Soul Mates – and other strange ideas.From the view of Spirit that I have tried to look at life from, we are all whole and have no need of sexual partners or marriage.“..for people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.” Matthew 22:30

But life in the body is a different matter, and because the physical world is all split into dualism/opposites, and because we are mammalian animals who have only recently attained a measure of self awareness, we have  millions of years of instinct in us to seek a partner.That means we find self awareness very stressful for we are bombarded with our instincts to have sex, and at the same time have personal awareness built out of cultural beliefs which in many women are twisted into huge romantic dreams. WOW!!! It is the way it keeps us looking.

In human life our unbalanced life, caused by believing and feeling that we have to have a partner, makes us constantly search for a man/woman. That is fine and natural, but it is turned into a bloody mess by our amazing romantic fantasies, or by neurotic tendencies caused by the misplaced sexual urge. For as far as I understand from three or four partners, and several love affairs, and from looking at people’s dreams of love, the thing we are really seeking is our own wholeness. See Male-in-the- Female or Female-in-the-Male

Of course there are the traumas we experience as a baby and child which accounts for many pf our relationship mix ups. Of course traumas we  received as a baby or child screws us up in relationships sometimes for a lifetime. See Infant Kicks

So we can make do with a decent partner because it takes the edge off the search for wholeness. If we get too deep into believing we have found it in marriage, it tears us apart when it ends. But if you adjust your feelings to see a partner as a good friend and sexual partner without getting yourself screwed up by jealousy or feelings about cheating, or all the other things people ever commit suicide over, you are onto a good thing.”

18 – Being attacked in your dream, or fighting an animal or people, really says in dreams that you are fighting yourself, which is an awful waste of your energy. Here is an example –

I started dreaming about being attacked. Each time it happened I fought back. The attacks kept returning and several men attacked me and were trying to drag me off somewhere against my will. As the dream progressed, or replayed, I began to realise that it only appeared like an attack because I was resisting and fighting them. In fact the men wanted to show me something that was important to me. But because of my resistance, it felt to me like an aggressive act. I then let myself be carried off by the men, and began to feel as if a great chunk of my nature has been held back since childhood because of anxiety. In fact I had been frightened to ‘live’ this part of me. I had held so much of myself back throughout most of my life that I constantly felt there was something I was missing and had to search for. But it wasn’t an external thing – it was the me I had denied. B.M.