What Is A Dream?
“It seemed to me that a dream is like a huge great key that dangles in front of people – a personal experience that can unlock doors of experience and insight. It hangs in front of people but often because of their religion, or belief, they do not take the key to meet themselves. It is the key to their own inner life. What do their political, scientific or religious views say about this key.
There was part of the music here that left a wonderful image in my mind of a great central flash of light radiating like crystals in patterns like a great cross with spokes. At the centre was the transcendent reality of life. As a transcendent reality life simply exists and shines out its being. It is forever beyond definition, yet is ever being enshrined or embodied in some form by the various religions of the world. They point to something beyond them shining forever. They collect around the central radiance like spokes or shapes that are not the reality of life, but which do take form from it.”
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.
Dimensions Of Human Life
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.
The second dimension is totally different and is experienced in dreams or deep mental activity. It will surprise many people to realise that in this dimension you have no physical body, although most people are so locked into thinking that their reality is their body, that they create a dream image of themselves. But that is not all they carry with them, because they believe so much that everything is ruled by their body life and experience, they are also terrified of falling in dreams, they believe they can be torn apart by savage animals, also they frighten the life out of themselves with dream images of demons or even the devil, or are horrified of being shot or raped, etc.
Another feature of this dream and imagination dimension is that it often deals with timelessness. Babies and young children live all in timelessness / eternity. So we already had it but lost it in the maze of words and thinking we created. See HelenK
“At this point I felt as if that great inner mind had opened to me and that I could ask a question of it. I asked to be given words in my own tongue that would clearly explain to others and to children what this path was and what is involved in it. I asked that I might understand clearly what is required of someone taking this inner path to meet the divine, what they will face and what it is about. What shall I say to them? What shall I say to myself?
My experience here was a powerful sense of losing myself. I suppose you could call this loss, the melting away of all that one is. It was a feeling of losing, of letting go of control, of surrendering myself. As this happened to me I had a complete feeling of trust and was able to let myself fall into that nothingness, a nothingness in comparison with my sense of existence anyway. And that is what I learned about the entrance to the path. It is a readiness to drop into that nothingness that is the core of life, and as you drop into it the thoughts, the feeling that you have is, “I love you!” You go to that meeting, that union, that losing of oneself with the feeling of love. And that is marriage. That is the spiritual marriage.”
If you find it difficult to believe the above statements see Dr. S. Grofs book Realms of the Human Unconscious where he covers Plant Identification 181
Oneness with Life and with All Creation 183
Consciousness of Inorganic Matter 184
Planetary Consciousness 185
Extraplanetary Consciousness 185
Out – of – Body Experiences, Travelling Clairvoyance and Clairaudience, “Space Travels,” and Telepathy 186
Spatial constriction of Consciousness 191
Organ, Tissue, and Cellular Consciousness 191
Experiential Extension beyond the Framework of “Objective Reality” 194
Transpersonal Experiences in LSD Sessions 154
Experiential Extension within the Framework of “Objective Reality” 158
Temporal Expansion OF Consciousness 158
Ebryonal and Foetal Experiences 158
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.
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
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.
Dreams Are communications from the mysterious Life We Are
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.
Dream Images Are Just That – An Image
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 when we think of our friend or partner our thoughts are not them – just our thoughts and feelings about them.
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
What Emotional Age Are You?
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 70’s, 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.
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.
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