Joshua – Being more aware in your dream than in any others is a sure sign a shift has taken place in your dream, maybe you were lucid or on the way to achieving it. See
http://dreamhawk.com/inner-life/lucid-dreaming/ Why were you so scared? I see that belief is different to conviction. I believed in life after death from the age of 11, but when I came face to face with it I had a secret terror of death. We are complicated beings. A modern view of the personality says that our mind is made up of many modules which are quite distinct. These modules, such as the sexual drive and the ability to speak, usually function in a way which is reasonably integrated. But many areas of dissimilarity are evident if we closely observe the workings of our own responses to life experiences. Actions arising from a module of oneself which does not express our accepted self-image, may give rise not only to fear, but sometimes a sense of evil, or being possessed by evil.
My sense of your dream is that recently you had been wanting or thinking that you would like to communicate with your dead cousin. At least it was at the back of your mind, a very powerful mental state.
Your brother is a part of your inner world. Many people do not realise that they have an inner person equally as powerful as the external person you know. You have taken in millions of bit of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by meeting or living with them, and they are what makes you the person you are. 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. I guess he represents a worldly person who lacks the sensitivity to the world of the dead; in fact, your own doubts – “My brother could not see him.” Dream images are ways of communicating via our associations, and do not represent 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.
As I said, you were yourself in a new level of awareness, being new you were stumbling around in it, trying to adapt to it. The dark and scary place was a shift to a new dimension, the land of the dead. So what happens when I meet the dead? Well, you are now in the dimension of the dream. As such you experience, as in dreams, surroundings and people and animals that appear as external and solid. You will usually see yourself in the body you experienced in life, and you may feel as if you have woken for the first time because your mind, your awareness is super alert.
Drunk has many meanings in dreams, but often, as may be the so in your case, it means the spirit entered you, “'I will pour out my spirit upon every sort of flesh, and your sons and your daughters will prophesy and your young men will see visions and your old men will dream dreams."
You were actually faced with the experience of death, and were afraid. Don’t worry, it will change as young grow used to the new level of vision. I too was gasping for air and could hardly breathe.
These thought are simply said, hopefully, to guide you. But they are my thoughts. See
http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/ Tony
