Josh – The dark figures you see mean that you have the ability to be aware of what are for most people dream figures. While asleep we can create full sensory, vocal, motor and emotional experience in our dream. While dreaming we usually accept what we experience as real. A hallucination is an experience of a ‘dream’ occurring while we have our eyes open. The voices heard, people seen, smells smelt, although appearing to be outside of us, are no more exterior than the things and images of our dreams. With this information one can understand that much classed as psychic phenomena and religious experience is an encounter with the dream process. That does not, of course, deny its importance.
That is nothing to be scared of; in fact it is now acknowledged to be an advantage. Having had many such experiences I have used them to find meaning and creativity. But in a sense they or simply half way messages, and attempt from a very deep part of us to communicate something important, because dreams arise and are experienced by a level of your mind or awareness that very few people have any concept or experience of – usually called the unconscious. Life dreamt in its creatures millions of years before even humankind awoke and developed self awareness or language. So to understand dreams we need to leave our thinking minds behind and go into our feelings and reactions – a much older level of awareness.
The dark figures are ways of trying to clarify things that are in fact not yet clear, but can become clear ones we use our questioning mind to dive in – for instance by using
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/#BeingPerson They may feel scary, but that is because we do not or have not explored them. See
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/integration-meeting-oneself/#NextStep The last part of your dream, standing in a void shows that you have experienced a very deep level of human awareness, but it sounds like you are not experienced in it, so the shoving and person doing it may again be your own anxiety telling you to go. But the void is what we experience every time we go to sleep – we exist without bodily form, no bodily senses and without our personality – we return to our real self. But most people lose personal awareness of what happens in sleep; and in dreams we have to return almost to waking, so are in a half way state between our core self and our waking personality.
Many people as their awareness reaches beyond what they feel is their normal self and enter sleep without dream images feel scared. Such resistances cause us to create awful dreams and fears as a means of avoiding our own inner world and its wonders. We feel that we will be swallowed up and we will die. See
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/lucidity/ Tony
