Posts Tagged ‘reincarnation’

The House of the Ancestors

An excerpt from the book House of the Ancestors

Some months into our connection with Dakota, a woman I loved, I dreamt I was in a large empty house alone.  Perhaps I should call it a building, as it had several floors and extended in size beyond what I knew.  I was on what was perhaps the second floor, or as it is known in Britain, the first floor.  The room I was in was not brightly lit and although dark with age, was in no way a ruin or damaged.  I was standing looking at a hole in the floor.  I knew my ancestors had lived in the area or rooms below me, and I was trying to see if I could bring any object from there up to where I was.  To do this I was swinging a rope or wire around through the hole.  But I made no connection with anything and gave up.  Then I realised I had the key to the door of the rooms below and went down to enter the apartments.

The door was of very solid construction but easily opened with the key.  It led into a large area with much the same feeling as the floor above – old and empty but not ruined.

Then suddenly, as if he were a caretaker or butler, Lurch, the character in the TV series in which he plays Frankenstein’s monster, stepped out from the shadows.  I observed him without feeling any anxiety, and noticed he had a large kitchen knife in his belt.  I asked him why he needed such a knife, thinking that perhaps he might threaten me with it.  He said that there was a large puma that sometimes jumped out on you unexpectedly from the shadows, and you needed a knife to protect yourself.  Having said that he handed me such a knife, knowing somehow that I had come to explore this house of my ancestors.  The suggestion in handing me the knife was that I killed the puma if it leapt on me.  Then he and I started to walk into the shadowy areas of the house to begin my search.

We had only gone about ten yards into the dim space stretching before us when a very large puma leapt on me.  As I felt its impact on my chest I held it firmly in my arms and realised that I had no intention to kill or hurt it.  Its head was close to my face, and with surprise and love I could see that, although it had the face of a big cat, it was the face of Dakota.  The puma was, I saw, her beautiful and wild sexual love for me, and an embodiment of her spirit self ready to share the journey into the house of the ancestors.  So I put Puma down, and Lurch, Puma and I walked together into the darkness.

During the day following the dream I spoke with Dakota, telling her the dream.  She has strong links with the Native American traditions.  But what I had not previously known, and she then told me, was that the puma is her totem animal.

During the next days, weeks and months, I began a conscious search of the House of the Ancestors.  I did this by identifying as fully as I could with the images and environments in the dream; by literally imagining myself within the form and or being of the person, creature or structure, and allowing feelings, associations and insights to arise.

I always find I penetrate much more deeply into that inner ocean if I make the exploration with a friend who is supportive and not disturbed by what I express.  In fact my first entrance into the house of the ancestors dream was incredibly emotional.  I was visiting my friend David, who I was helping to do some maintenance on his house.  So after we had finished work for the day I asked him if he would give me some time while I explored the dream.

What arose is too long to report in detail but I will summarise.

When I identified with the house it took a while to really experience it as a living process rather than simply an intellectual interpretation.  But when I did become the structure and experienced the extent of the house, I realised it as my body.  But it was not my body as I had been taught to see it through my training as a nurse.  I did not experience it simply as a biological process, or a physiological machine.  I experienced it as an incredibly ancient thing, carrying or incorporating in its form and functions lessons of life gathered over millions of years of human and animal evolution.  I felt that it holds within its darkness – the presently unconscious areas developed and lived in the past – enormous amounts of information or memories.  We fail to be aware of these because our attention is so fixed on the world outside of us.  But of course, even there, if we look carefully, we can see we are the result, our culture and language are the result, of the events and lives stretching back into the ancient past.

The great house of my dream, as I felt its atmosphere and quality, as I gave it attention and allowed what was sensed within to become more fully conscious, I knew to be not only the impersonal past out of which my present identity had been formed, but also the very personal links with my ancestors.  As I met this I felt some anxiety because there are so many unknowns in such a huge place.  But I wanted to become aware of the real dimensions of myself.  And it must be understood that I use the word ancestors in a wider sense than referring just to my physical predecessors.  But this will become clear as the exploration unfolds.

The hole in the floor was simple to grasp.  Most of my adult life had been given to attempting, in many different ways, to gain entrance to and explore what is generally known today as the unconscious.  I don’t mean by this Freud’s view of the unconscious as repressed infantile trauma and adult sexual drives.  I mean any and every aspect of oneself that has not as yet been made conscious.  And that includes not only trauma, but also talents or potentials not yet claimed; buried creative insights; the hidden and mysterious processes of the body and mind; the problem solving processes of the non-rational mind; awareness of the deep core of our being; and an awareness of the Odyssey our being has made to reach this moment, this condition, now!

So the hole depicted glimpses I had gained of the influence of my ancestors in my life of today. The glimpse had arisen through my lifelong delving into the unconscious.  But the hole is not the real door to the ancestral life, just a way of seeing it exists.

A previous dream depicts this in another way.  In the dream I was crossing the rooftops of houses and came to one that I recognised as a home I had once lived in.  There was a hole in the roof and I could see into a room that had being sealed off.  It contained things I had once owned, but had lost and forgotten when the room was sealed off.  So I decided I must sometime enter the room to see what was relevant and useful in my present circumstances.

In that dream there is once more reference to a hole, and my looking through to realise that there are things from my past, from previous dwelling places, that I want to reclaim or investigate.  It gives the very powerful suggestion that my present personality can reclaim things from its long past that will be useful in the life of today.

The key, I realised, were qualities that gave me the right to enter the dwelling place of my ancestors. It shows the ability to enter more fully into what had been glimpsed through the hole.  These qualities or abilities were gained slowly over years in which I practised and learned the skills of entering the unconscious and dealing with what was found there.  I tend to call this lucidity.  I don’t mean just waking up in a dream, but the ability while awake to enter into a condition that allows what is existing unconsciously to be known.

I also realised, as I explored, what was suggested by the key. I saw it was forged out of confidence in moving around in the extraordinary realm of experience that is the unconscious.  That confidence or sureness, allows penetration into oneself that anxiety or disbelief would prevent.  Subtle ideas, beliefs, attitudes or opinions, are the very material or “world” that make up the top levels of our personal awareness.

Terminology is difficult here because I have to use the word awareness to represent the whole realm of self that includes what is conscious and what is unconscious.  Using awareness in that sense for a while, I believe there is no real separation between what or who you are consciously and unconsciously.  But there is a borderline, a doorway, between the two.  Perhaps it would be better to call it a filter or tuning system as with radio or TV.  If that didn’t exist you would have all the memories/signals from the unconscious bombarding consciousness at the same time.

The filter is controlled by what you fear, what you allow yourself to feel or experience, whether you instinctively pull away from pain, and what you believe or disbelieve.  It usually is tuned quite without your awareness unless you start carefully observing what you repress, what you edit out of what plays in your consciousness.  Over the years I have learned to work with the filter to allow more to flow through.  But I think my ability is still rudimentary.

Nevertheless, using that key allowed me to enter more fully into a dimension of experience I had only glimpsed previously.  So to state it clearly, the key depicted the abilities I had forged to work with what I have called the filter or tuning.  I have learned to gradually manipulate my conscious attitudes, beliefs and fears, enough to allow more of myself to surface.  And the door was that natural threshold between the conscious and the unconscious that we all have.  Self-awareness, or what we call our identity or personality, is a very new and fragile thing in terms of evolution.  The door or threshold that exists between this fragile personality and the unconscious protects us from being overwhelmed by what really is an awareness of reality.

Love, security and persistence in love, were also part of that key.  Dakota had helped me cut the last few notches in that key and thereby enabled me to open the door to the house of the ancestors.

When I opened the door I was overwhelmed by such a huge awareness of what had been left me as an inheritance by my ancestors that I sobbed for many minutes.  It wasn’t pain causing me to weep, but the intensity of what I experienced.  The strength, persistence, ability to love, as imperfect as it was, the sharpness of mind, the ability to exist within a modern community, were all gifts hammered out of raw human material by my forebears, enabling me to take the few further steps in life that I have.

This is so important that I want to see if I can describe it more clearly.  Recently I travelled to Namibia and stayed in the capital city Windhoek.  Perhaps this is a simplification, but there are several tribal groups living together in that community.  There is a dominant tribal group, a competing tribal group, and a group or tribe that were once the slaves of the now dominant tribal group.  There is still enormous segregation within the community, and the old tribal feelings and views are still very much influencing them.  So what I am saying about my ancestors is that they left me the heritage of being able to stand above those older patterns of behaviour.  They had already dealt with many of those issues, and the gift they left me was that I could move on from there.  That is an extraordinary gift, to find myself capable of thinking and moving in ways that are still very difficult for many people in the world today.  I am capable of moving beyond some of the rigid forms of loving and working that my ancestors battled with and developed strategies to deal with.

For instance one thing was that my forebears lived for generations within a very rigid and in some ways punitive religious system.  So one of the great gifts they left me was the ability to recognise the limitations of that system and stand beyond it.  That wonderful gift was a heritage from my ancestors, along with the ability to work independently, to be creative, to learn easily, to integrate and cooperate with males or females, to be no longer a tribal being.  Those are phenomenal gifts to have inherited.  That was why I wept and felt such gratitude for having received so much.

Then stepping into the area beyond the door I met Lurch.  In identifying with Lurch to explore what he depicted, and in watching what feelings and associations arose, I almost immediately knew Lurch to be, or to represent the guardian, the door keeper of this realm.  I realised that as Lurch I am the Guardian of the Threshold.  There can be no entrance into this realm unless the seeker passes me.  And there are tests he or she must pass also.

As I experience these realisations I was once more amazed how our dreaming self uses images so carefully and precisely.  And although I quickly got some insight into what part Lurch played in my growing awareness of what was a new realm of experience for me, it took longer to appreciate some aspects of his significance.

As a young man I had read about the Guardian of the Threshold in the writings of Rudolf Steiner and the Rosicrucian Order, where there is an initiation into the Guardian.  It is a name given by western mystical traditions to a process active in what those traditions called the psychic world.  Before you can enter that world you meet your past negative deeds.  You meet and deal with pains and actions that still imprison you, or in some way are still unmet.  In eastern traditions the Guardian is simply called karma.

Lurch, as the Guardian I met, is partly a scary figure, but is a comic character too.  So in my dream I meet the guardian, but I did not turn back through fear, or the pain of experiencing past tragic events.  I passed into the house of the ancestors.

Later I realised that Lurch also embodies important aspects of the house.  He is Frankenstein’s monstrous creation.  As such he is created out of the dead bodies of many different people.  That is a truly powerful image, showing that your present life is a weaving together of many people who have lived and died in the past.

Lurch also tested me in giving me the knife.  Love is an important strength in the inward odyssey.  If I had killed Puma I believe I would have been rejected from the house, and have had to learn that lesson.  As it was, I neither felt fear, nor had any desire to kill, so the journey could begin.  That wasn’t because I was squeaky clean, just that for years I had being clearing out the infant and childhood miseries that were like blockages in the way.  I had worked hard to change old destructive patterns of behaviour.  There was still a lot to do, but apparently I had done enough for Lurch to let me through.

I set about exploring the further realms of the house of the ancestors.  I had explored the dream itself with David.  But now I planned to continue walking into the darkness that confronted Lurch, Puma and me at the end of the dream.  Suzanne was my listening friend this time.

I started by imagining myself standing in the shadows of the house with Puma and Lurch.  Then we walked together into the darkness.  The subjective images took on a life of their own and I saw we were walking in a large underground space like great catacombs.  The light was dim but we could see our surroundings, and not very far into the cave like space was a tomb on our right.  It had the form of a low wall about a foot high in an oblong, and the wall surrounded a long stone in the centre, which was roughly body shaped .

As we drew level with the tomb an enormous change occurred in me.  Suddenly I became a woman.  It was no longer imagination.  I was now completely experiencing myself as a woman whose tomb we had approached.  As such I was torn by an immense pain of loss.  As my complete identification deepened my body curled up with the pain as I was torn by wretched crying.  Suzanne told me my voice changed as I cried out again and again for release from the pain of losing all my children, my husband, even my parents.  My hands were clawing my legs in an effort to express the misery, and I was screaming that I could not bear to live any longer with such pain.  I cried out to God to take me, for there was nothing left for me to live for.  “Why?  Why did this happen to me?  Why has everything I loved been taken from me?”

There was no response to these awful cries and tearing sobs.  But slowly a shift began.  It seemed to me as an observer witnessing this awful pain, that by entering this place the spirit of that woman had woken in me.  But as she had died in such unresolved agony of loss, that is what was met when she awoke.  But gradually she realised she was alive again in a new way.  She began to recognise that I was holding her within me.  Because I was not frightened of pain and emotions, the misery could play itself out in me.  And because my understanding of what was happening flowed into her awareness, she slowly saw and felt her loss in a different way.  In fact we were both realising she was experiencing resurrection, and that in turn meant there was no final death as believed by many.  Therefore there was no loss as she had originally felt it.

At this point something truly incredible occurred.  She and I both realised she was one of my past dwelling places.  But for her the viewpoint was slightly different; for she saw me as a continuation of a life that she had failed to be a part of because of the awful pain of loss. It had kept her from flowing into what was her future as my life.

From my perspective she was one of the past dwelling places the spirit that was at the core of my present personality had lived in and as.  She was not one of my past lives, because the personality that I am was unique and had not lived that woman’s life.

What Shaun had explained about the gradual loss of his personality, and its absorption into something more inclusive and connected with all life, illustrates this.  If we give the name of spirit to what Shaun was absorbed into, and if we see that spirit dips into aspects of itself in the life of the body, and develops a unique personality, then we begin to grasp the relationship between the woman and myself.

Perhaps a clumsy analogy of this is to say an artist might paint many pictures.  Each picture is unique.  The artist learns from the work and difficulties in creating each picture, and can use what is learned in the next painting.  But the next painting is not the reincarnation of the previous.  The only link is through the artist.

Because I was gradually becoming aware of the spirit that had given me life, I was meeting the previous personalities, the previous life experiences and lessons my personality was shaped out of.  The woman was a previous dwelling place of my spirit.  To know her was to know more of my spirit and its eternal odyssey.

In knowing me the woman’s grief melted away, for in our meeting we both realised we gained existence out of an eternal spirit flowing into our lives.  I could feel the change in her as she knew she was part of ongoing life here in the present, and the children and family she thought dead were also part of that river of lives.

It was a wonderful thing to witness and experience her resurrection.  I could feel that she was a part of myself I had not known, a part of my potential I had not claimed.  But the greatest feeling was of wonder that her life of the past could be resurrected into the present and given a new being, a new body, a new heaven and earth.  This is a very moving thing to remember.

Looking back at this I feel that the term previous dwelling place really fits what I experienced.  The woman’s personality and life events were where the spirit that lies behind my life had dwelt at one time.  Remembering it meant that I was realising the continuum of experience that had, over ages, led to my present personal existence.

As I felt her integrating into my present life I asked her what she brought to me.  I asked because I wondered what quality or ability this enormous experience brought to my present life.  Her simple reply was, “A woman’s love.”

The dream of being on the rooftops and recognising a place I used to live in, and the decision to see what had been walled up there, was, I believe, a very clear precursor of the experience.  The pain of loss had been walled up, and needed to be felt and integrated – resurrected and given life.

 

Meeting Dakota

So, I dived into the ocean and moved through the huge creatures that are the denizens of that realm – great thought forms created by the beliefs of millions.  Such beliefs as death being the end of existence; the body and the material world being the only reality; these are living influences at that level, moving in that ocean, ready to engulf you and hold you in thrall unless you can see them for what they are – beliefs, attempts at understanding reality – never reality itself.  And so, I moved among them, occasionally finding myself lost in and possessed by one of these leviathans, until liberation was found again by becoming naked awareness once more.

Then suddenly I felt the presence of Dakota with me in the ocean.  But I could not see her, and called out, “Dakota, can you hear me?  Are you aware of being here with me?”  There was no response, and I wondered if I was creating the feeling in some way.

But just as suddenly as her presence was felt everything changed.  In that realm where thoughts and emotions take on form, and form itself is fluid, Dakota and I faced each other as magnificent wolves.  And I, in the manner of wolves, put my head low to the ground and tail high in the posture of invited play.  Then we danced around each other in mock battle rushing headlong, bumping, rolling, pushing shoulder to shoulder, or breathlessly nose to nose.  I, grabbing a stick in my mouth and throwing it in the air to distract her, or feigning indifference.  She, at each new twist of the dance, came back at me, ever resourceful, ever full of vigour and intensity.  And in the dance, we discovered each other, tested strengths, explored responses, found a living connection.

Then, when the dance was finished, we changed forms and expressed other qualities to each other in the shape of the Native American Indians.  As such I stood before my lodge as the elder of my tribe, greeting her and saluting her qualities.  For she wore the feathers showing her achievements as a wife maintaining her own family lodge; as a woman in her culture who had carved a position for herself in the world of work; as someone who reached beyond her own nearest kin and gave of herself.  So, I saluted her and invited her into my lodge, and she accepted.

It was with those experiences freshly imprinted on me that I emerged from the ocean eager to tell Dakota of what had arisen.  I carefully wrote the events in my journal, then copied them to send as an email.  But just as I was about to send, an email arrived from Dakota.  Its title read, “Dances with Wolves.”  And the message was a quote from Nietzsche.  It said, “Those who watched them dancing thought they were mad because they couldn’t hear the music.”

I still weep when I read those words.  As much as I have roamed the immense ocean of mind I am still a man of my culture and penetrated by its blindness.  To dance as wolves beyond closed eyes was one thing, but to know it was shared in some way released a blossoming wonder that is still growing.  We can believe things as a defence against our own insecurities and littleness.  But to experience something that was real within, and have it confirmed as an external fact is an extraordinary thing to confront.  It unifies.  It opened me to influences that perhaps I was previously suspicious of at some level.

 

                     To see the whole book go to HOUSE

Dream Interpretation Example 3

Story of Reincarnation

Before I went to sleep that night I focused on the question -Who am I, really?

The dream was vivid, and still gives me shivers to this day. I dreamed that I looked up and there was this incredible star that was emanating points of light in the sky. It got brighter and brighter and the bottom-most point reached down to where I was and transported me up to the star. The points of light came out from the centre in all directions, and I found myself on the end of one of the horizontal points. A wonderful (female) voice spoke to me and said this is who you are, and I had the strong sense of being located at the end of the horizontal light bar. Then she said and this is who you are and carried (transported in some way) me to the next bar of light, where I saw another version (incarnation?) of myself (in a different time and place, although I knew that the essence of this version of me was really me)

She continued transporting me from bar to bar where I experienced myself in many different versions in the past, present, and future. I had different skills and interests that were the focal point of each version of myself–a musician in one, a farmer in another. Some of the versions were females, although I experienced the same sense of self in all of them. Then she returned me to the horizontal bar of my current self and said to me that all of this is who I am, but that now she was going to show me who I really am. Then she drew me into the centre of the star (light, energy source) where I merged with her and could see each of the emanating points of light as manifestations of a single source or spirit.

It was one of the most incredible feelings of being integrated and whole that I’ve ever experienced, and I basked in the feeling for awhile just absorbing and soaking it in. Then she returned me to myself (with a cosmic wink) and I slept peacefully for the rest of the night. Ever since then I haven’t felt the need to ask who or what I am, and I’ve seen my various abilities and struggles in life in a totally new way. C.A.

Reincarnation And Dreams

When people have accepted the idea that they may have had previous lives, they frequently then wish to remember what was experienced in the past, who they were, and what lessons were learned or failed. And of course one of the biggest arguments against past existence is the very obvious lack of memory. ‘If I had lived before,’ they say, ‘then I would surely remember it.’

People tend to believe their life began at birth or at conception. That is quite a false concept, for the seed or cell that you developed from wasn’t a new thing, for 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.

Remember your memory as a seed/cell stretches back much farther than your brain memory, so an old house can represents a past dwelling place. Although most of your actions arise from your conscious personality, behind that lies the immense experience of the long past, so your mind that is unconscious gives you stature, breadth, and quality, like the body beneath the clothes/personality.

Before we can properly understand how to work with dreams to recover our lost selves, we must see just why we do not, in general, remember our past. Imagine a tulip bulb in the earth, unseen, unexpressed. In the spring it produces leaves, a stem, and a flower. If the flower were a conscious being, it might look at what was visible of itself. From such a study it might say, ‘I have a physical body which has never existed before. I am a unique individual, I am born, I live, I will fade again and perish.’

The self and the Overself

Indeed the tulip flower and leaves perish, but the bulb draws back into itself their essence as they fade. Next spring up comes another tulip. Once more it may look at itself as if it were a conscious being. But suppose this one were more persevering than the first, and went beyond the obvious: supposing it went beyond its personal awareness into consciousness of the bulb which gave rise to it. Then it might say, ‘I am certainly a unique being who has never previously existed. Yet, at the same time, I am created from the essence of other tulips existing in the past, and the part of my being which lies beneath normal awareness exists beyond my personal death, and holds in it the experience of many other tulips.’

This is a helpful but not perfect analogy. Our present personality has never existed before. Searching within its own experience and memories it could never find memory of our past lives, for it has had none-but yet it has been created out of the ‘essence’ of other past personalities. Tendencies, unaccountable fears or talents, give the clue to these past selves. But behind the personal consciousness lies what Jung calls the Self, or Overself, the Spirit, which gives rise to being after being, in search of self-realisation, and only when we become aware of this aspect of self do we become aware of our link, in the overself, of all these past selves. Our personal consciousness does not reincarnate; it is the overself that unfolds into physical life in order to experience itself in particular ways. See Mushrooms

Example: The plan of man went into action. Downward he went from heavenly knowledge to mystical dreams, revealed religions, philosophy and theology, until the bottom was reached and he only believed what he could see and feel and prove in terms of his conscious mind. Then he began to fight his way upward, using the only tools he had left: suffering, patience, faith, and the power of mind.

At present man is in a state of great spiritual darkness – the darkness which precedes dawn. He has carried his scepticism to the point where it is forcing him to conclusions he knows intuitively are wrong. At the same time, he has carried his investigation of natural phenomena to the point where it is disproving all it seemed to prove in the beginning. Free will is finding that all roads lead finally to the same destination. Science, theology; and philosophy, having no desire to join forces, are approaching a point of merger. Scepticism faces destruction by its own hand.

Things other than pattern concern the soul in its selection of a body: coming situations in history, former associations with the parents, the incarnation, at about the same time, of souls it wishes to be with and with whom it has problems to work out. In some cases, the parents are the whole cause of a soul’s return; the child will be devoted to them and remain close to them until their death. In other cases, the parents are used as a means to an end-the child will leave home early and be about its business.

The personality is shaped by three or four incarnations, the portions of the earthly experience on which the individuality wants to work. The emotions and talents of the person reflect these incarnations. The dreams, visions, meditations-the deep, closely guarded self-consciousness of the personality is the pat­tern of experience among the other states of consciousness of the solar system. The intellect is, roughly speaking, from the stars: it is the mind force of the soul, conditioned by its previous experi­ence in creation outside the solar system, and dimmed or brightened by its recent experiences within the solar system. Quoted from The Story of Edgar Cayce

If it is our eternal overself that holds the awareness of many lives, and if we lack consciousness of our eternal nature, then it is obvious we will also lack memory of past existences linked with our present life. And because we are woven of the wisdom and folly, hates and loves, of these past selves, we carry with us yet another possibility of forgetfulness. Many of us, even in this life, have no memory of our own childhood and infancy – I mean detailed memory. But thousands of people undergoing psychotherapy where they meet the traumas of their past, recover a detailed experience of their infancy, or even their birth and life in the womb. Painful past experiences causes us to shut out memory. Such barriers are also built between the small self we know as our present identity, and the enormity of the self we are in our eternal aspect.

Thousands of people at present only know tiny parts of their complete nature because of this. If you cannot remember your childhood in its unfolding; if you cannot remember your life in the womb; if you cannot remember your life in eternity, then you really only know a tiny part of yourself. No wonder you cannot remember the much greater and more challenging memories of past lives linked with the present. Such remembering needs courage. It needs the gradual melting away of the subtle and crucial barriers built between consciousness, between our present identity, and our fuller memory of self.

These three things (a) different centre of consciousness between overself and ego (b) wilful turning away, and (c) barriers of bitterness, grudges, pain and unforgiveness, effectively shut us off from knowing who we are in our entirety.

But there is one other excellent reason our present ego is exploring experiences it might never gain if it knew all. One of the reasons the Overself takes up physical life is to develop waking awareness in a self-conscious state. To be self conscious we must of necessity exist within very small boundaries of awareness. If we were aware of ALL-there would be no self – or self would be very difficult to hold onto. Certainly we would not be able to experience the world in the way we do. Once this ego, this self, has been developed and is strong enough, then gradually the boundaries can be enlarged, but not too quickly, for the ego is a very vulnerable thing. In an evolutionary sense the self aware identity is a tiny infant newly arisen on the world scene. In fact enormous numbers of people breakdown into mental illness, alcoholism, drug addiction, medical sedation or depression because of this vulnerability. And we must remember it is difficult enough to cope with the problems of this life. Memory of others would bring back the urges, fears, pains, and talents of the past.

First of all heal the present

Therefore, if we are approaching the study of dreams for the purpose of discovering our relationship with our overself and through this our experiences, karma, and talents from the past, we must expect to meet certain activities in our dream life.

Firstly, it does not often happen that dreams show us our past lives until we have fairly well integrated the aspects of our present personality. When we first come to dream study, we usually have to work for some years on using the dreams to integrate our present psychological state. If one is a woman, one has to learn properly to express to a fair degree one’s own femininity and also to be capable of meeting and expressing the masculine side of self. Conversely, the man has to meet and integrate his feminine nature. The problems of our infantile relationships with our parents; our sexual nature; our ambitions; all have to be faced in some degree before any real entry into past life contact is made. Some memories may arise before this if they are important to what is being met in the present, but to begin to actually integrate the past cannot take place until we have integrated the beginning of this present life. See Ages of Love

The simple fact is, if we have not the mental, spiritual, or moral strength and ability to integrate our present life we obviously also lack the equipment to face and integrate the past ones, and this is why integration of the present stands like a barrier in the way of exploring the past. But another barrier also stands before us: like the barrier of integration, it exists in the invisible realms of our soul, intangible but very real.

It lies in our relationship with the overself. As memories of the past are only in our eternal nature, to reach them we must relate to, enter into, or become aware of, our overself. Therefore, when we have begun to develop qualities that enable us to deal with psychological problems, our dreams begin to instruct us more and more how we may then nurture attitudes in our soul which will extend and deepen our relationship with the overself.

Such dreams may instruct us in certain types of meditation or the development of particular attitudes of mind or behaviour, and we should apply them to the best of our ability.

Only then does a particular type of dream begin to occur, marking the start of a process which, if persevered in, will frequently lead to the unconscious life actually breaking through into waking consciousness, bringing direct experience, of past lives.

A man of twenty-one who was interested in dreams but had not particularly worked with them had the following dream.

‘I seemed to be a young man, not myself as I am, living in Germany in a past age. As this man I was a well-known writer or poet, yet I was of peasant stock and lived in the forest. My writings had become fashionable, however, and because of this notoriety I had been invited to a ball given by the local nobility. This was not because I was liked or admired by these people, but to enable them to say they had seen me. In fact, I was somewhat despised or looked down on because of my background even though I was well educated and capable of the necessary social graces. Because of this, at the ball, the younger men took every opportunity to discredit me. But I did not seem at all perturbed, dancing with the best of the ladies, young and old.

‘As the evening drew on, however, the young men became more aggressive. I was pushed or tripped in ways meant to look accidental. They wanted me to lose my temper so they would have an opportunity of attacking me. When I did not respond as they wanted me to they became openly aggressive and encircled me, pushing, insulting, and trying to start a fight. I knew if I did, they would beat me badly. Suddenly, when violence could no longer be avoided, I cried out a call. It was the call of the Zimmermen (the woodsmen) for I had expected the crisis. Immediately, my friends of the forest, who had been waiting at the windows and doors, leaped into the room with a shout, and a battle royal began. Nobody was really hurt, but both sides relieved their dislike for each other, and afterwards my comrades and I walked back through the dark woods to our homes . We sang the song of the Zimmermen as we marched, and this song I remembered even when I woke.’

This dream may seem to contradict much of what has been said, for the person had not given time to self study, but it is typical of the occasional dreams people do get before a substantial contact with the past has been made. The dreamer had recently stayed in Germany for some months and had begun to write poetry there. During the years that followed he in fact wrote much poetry. No further dreams of that nature followed.

This dream may seem to contradict much of what has been said, for the person had not given time to self study, but it is typical of the occasional dreams people do get before a substantial contact with the past has been made. The dreamer had recently stayed in Germany for some months and had begun to write poetry there. During the years that followed he in fact wrote much poetry. No further dreams of that nature followed.

Example: I noticed a large rag doll on the floor. I seemed to know the doll belonged to Joan, and was unconsciously used as a substitute for her deep longing for a son. I held out my hand to the doll, with love, and it came alive and crawled to me. It came to me as a lonely child might come into one’s arms hungering for love. I held it close to me, and Joan came over and I held her too. Then all barriers seemed to melt, and everything disappeared from view. All that existed was I as a united being and consciousness. It was, I think, beautiful. I used the word think, because I find it difficult to describe the experience. We melted into each other beyond the sense of being separated by the surface of one’s skin If one literally entered during sexual intercourse, and melted together like drops of water uniting, this is how it would be.

We stayed like this, in a sort of darkness, for some time. Then I seemed to be just myself again, and was blowing down my nostrils clearing mucus. Breath came out and out and out without having to breathe in. In some way I breathed into the rag doll and it became an actual child. But then I explained to Joan that the doll had been a lifeless manifestation of her longing for her son. But her longing was part of what a mother does on giving a child an inner life. I had breathed life into the doll and it now had a soul, which was why it was now human. But it would soon die. This was because it needed to die in order to reincarnate as one of their family. Its soul would be born soon in a body they would form – in a baby they would have – a boy child.

But We Are Dealing with the Dream Process

The Guardian of the threshold

In this type of dream a fairly straight memory is presented, and is not repeated. It is a spontaneous event, a gift as it were, from the Self, and it cannot be repeated because the personality has not forged they key which opens the door to its source. The dreams which arise when we develop into higher awareness are usually of a different nature and nearly always bring, not only memory, but also the lessons to be learnt from the memory. They come loaded with comment from the Overself on how these memories relate to present situations we face.

To understand this process let us look at a series of dreams experienced by a man over a period of about three years. He had been studying his dreams seriously for a long time, and had even been shown in dreams a particular type of meditation, which he had thereafter practised daily for at least two years.

Dream 1.

Before I went to sleep that night I focused on the question -Who am I, really?

The dream was vivid, and still gives me shivers to this day. I dreamed that I looked up and there was this incredible star that was emanating points of light in the sky. It got brighter and brighter and the bottom-most point reached down to where I was and transported me up to the star. The points of light came out from the centre in all directions, and I found myself on the end of one of the horizontal points. A wonderful (female) voice spoke to me and said this is who you are, and I had the strong sense of being located at the end of the horizontal light bar. Then she said and this is who you are and carried (transported in some way) me to the next bar of light, where I saw another version (incarnation?) of myself (in a different time and place, although I knew that the essence of this version of me was really me)

She continued transporting me from bar to bar where I experienced myself in many different versions in the past, present, and future. I had different skills and interests that were the focal point of each version of myself–a musician in one, a farmer in another. Some of the versions were females, although I experienced the same sense of self in all of them. Then she returned me to the horizontal bar of my current self and said to me that all of this is who I am, but that now she was going to show me who I really am. Then she drew me into the centre of the star (light, energy source) where I merged with her and could see each of the emanating points of light as manifestations of a single source or spirit.

It was one of the most incredible feelings of being integrated and whole that I’ve ever experienced, and I basked in the feeling for awhile just absorbing and soaking it in. Then she returned me to myself (with a cosmic wink) and I slept peacefully for the rest of the night. Ever since then I haven’t felt the need to ask who or what I am, and I’ve seen my various abilities and struggles in life in a totally new way. C.A.

But although not as dramatic, here is a dream that sums it up.

Example: ‘I dreamt I was in the jungles of Vietnam, standing near a railroad track, when I felt a sharp pain in the back of my neck. I felt myself rise out of my body, enter a large room, and sit down beside a young man. I asked him what had happened. He said: `We were both dead. I was killed in an automobile accident.’ I didn’t believe him. I saw two doors through which people were coming and going. Some looked happy, others unhappy. Then my name was called, and the young man said I was to go through one of these doors. I found myself standing in a large room facing a group of people seated behind a long table. The man presiding had an open book in front of him at which he looked from time to time. He spoke to me and said: `John Walter Mc-Gregor, you are physically dead and this is where you are judged. You have been found wanting because of your failure to heed the teachings of the woman, Nancy McGregor, your mother in this life.’ I insisted I was still alive. The man took me to the jungles of Vietnam and showed me my physical body lying there dead. He said again: `You are physically dead. You will, however, have another chance. You will return to earth in the body of a newborn baby, once again to learn these spiritual teachings.’ ”

One month later, in September of 1965, the man was sent to the jungles of Vietnam.

I believe this dream came as a symbolic warning to change his destructive attitude toward life lest his own life be cut short. This dream had a profound effect on him. He began to take religion seriously, and I am thankful to say that, after two years of service in the jungles around Danang, Vietnam, he is out of service and planning a career as a psychologist. Through this dream experience, the High Self was most effective in bringing about the desired change. Quoted from Dreams Your Magic Mirror.

Here is clearer evidence

Captain and Mrs Battista, Italians, had a little daughter born in Rome, whom they called Blanche. To help look after this child they employed a French-speaking Swiss “Nanny” called Marie. Marie, the nurse, taught her little charge to sing in French a lullaby song. Blanche grew very fond of this song and it was sung to her re­peatedly. Unfortunately Blanche died and Marie returned to Switzer­land. Captain Battista writes: “The cradle song which would have recalled to us only too painful memories of our deceased child, ceased absolutely to be heard in the house … all recollection of it completely escaped our minds.”

‘Three years after the death of Blanche the mother, Signora Battista, became pregnant, and in the fourth month of pregnancy she had a strange waking dream. She insists that she was wide awake when Blanche appeared to her and said, in her old, familiar voice, “Mother, I am coming back.” The vision then melted away. Captain Battista was sceptical, but when the new baby was born in February, 1906, he acquiesced in her also being given the name Blanche. The new Blanche resembled the old in every possible way.

‘Nine years after the death of the first Blanche, when the second ‘was six years of age, an extraordinary thing happened. I will use Captain Battista’s own words: “While I was with my wife in my study which adjoins our bedroom. We heard, both of us, like a distant echo, the famous cradle song, and the voice came from the bedroom where we had put our little daughter Blanche fast asleep. … We found the child sitting up on the bed and singing with an excellent French accent the cradle song which neither of us had certainly ever taught her. My wife asked her what it was she was singing, and the child, with the utmost promptitude answered that she was singing a French song. “Who, pray, taught you this pretty song?” I asked her. “Nobody, I know it out of my own head,” answered the child.’

Here is another experience, received in a dream state.

‘I lay in my bed unable to sleep, and because of this decided to try an experiment. We had been discussing earlier the possibility of emptying the mind completely and I decided to see if this could be done. After quite a time had passed in trying I felt it was impossible, gave up and fell asleep. The next thing I knew I was suspended above my body which was asleep on the bed. I felt as if I had returned to the womb, but it was not the physical womb but the cosmic womb. There was a wonderful feeling of love and bliss and being cared for, that completely enveloped me. There was also an awareness of my oneness with God and every other creature and being in the universe, and yet also remaining an individual. There were several questions on my mind at that particular time, and I found that without actually being told the answers I knew them intuitively. I knew my forthcoming marriage was right; also the doctrine of reincarnation and karma which I had at that time been wondering about. I knew that I was surrounded by a love and protection that made all my actions right because I could not go against that which was right in the face of this experience. I wished that I might stay always in this wonderful state and knew that this was akin to what death felt like, and knowing this one should not fear death which was an expansion of oneself. Gradually I returned to my normal sleep-state and woke up, but the feeling of the experience stayed with me for quite a while afterwards.’ B.C.

But here is one with proof.

Example: It began after a father-son bonding trip to the Cavanaugh Flight Museum outside of Dallas. Bruce picked up a video of the Blue Angels navy flight exhibition team for his 2-year-old son, James, who had become instantly enamoured with the jet fighters in high speed formation.

However, soon afterwards James began to smash his toy airplanes repeatedly into the coffee table screaming that the aircraft was on fire. It was then that the nightmares began. His mother Andrea would find her son thrashing around on the bed letting out blood curdling screams, shouting, ‘Airplane crash on fire! Little man can’t get out!’

The disturbing nightmares were physical too, with James kicking upwards on his bed as if trying to kick open the canopy from inside an aircraft.

It was over a bedtime story that James suddenly began talking to his parents about the nightmares, turning them from night terrors to lucid details and conversations.

James told his staunchly Christian parents, that he was flying a Corsair during the Second World War and that the Japanese shot him down. ‘Mama, before I was born, I was a pilot, and my airplane got shot in the engine and it crashed in the water and that’s how I died.’

He told his parents he flew off a carrier called the USS Natoma Bay and his name was James and that he had died during it in a horrific plane crash. The growing implications of what their son was telling them began to trouble the religious beliefs of Bruce and Andrea. When James was two-and-a-half he was sitting on his father’s knee going through a book on the Battle for Iwo Jima.

Opening the book to a picture of Mount Suribachi, James exclaimed, ‘That’s where my plane was shot down. My airplane got shot down there daddy.’ James began to draw disturbing pictures of fiery plane crashes – Dr Tucker believes this kind of compulsive repetition had all the hallmarks of how children deal with PTSD.

Bruce in particular wanted to get to the bottom of his son’s insistence that he was indeed describing the past lives of a downed pilot named James. He attended a reunion for USS Natoma Bay veterans under the ruse of writing a book and was stunned to discover the only pilot killed during the Iwo Jima operation was a 21-year-old from Pennsylvania named James Huston.

Further unnerving research revealed that Huston’s plane had been hit in the nose and lost its propeller – exactly where James had intentionally damaged all his toy planes.

As their belief in their son’s extraordinary claims grew, Bruce and Andrea began to take what he said seriously. One night Andrea said that she was told by James that his past-life father was an alcoholic and when James Huston was 13, they put their drunken dad in hospital for six weeks.

By now they had tracked down Huston’s sister Anne, who was in her 80s by now and asked her if these claims were true – which she confirmed. More staggering coincidences began to occur. James knew details that no four-year-old or even 40-year-old would know about the operational details of a Second World War fighter.

		He knew that Corsairs were notorious for getting flat tires and when handed a model of the FM-2 planes he would fly aboard the USS Natoma Bay he noted that a small antenna was missing from the side, which research by his father noted to be true.The most incredible moment though was when James attended his first USS Natoma Bay reunion. There he was stopped in the hallway of the hotel by Bob Greenwalt, a NatomaBay veteran. When he asked ‘do you know who I am?’ James replied, ‘You are Bob Greenwalt.’ Asked how he knew that by his father, James replied that he simply remembered the man’s voice.
James Leininger with his parents Andrea and Bruce

Indeed, after that, back at home in Dallas, James was sweeping the front lawn with his dad when Bruce bent down to hug his son and tell him that he loved him. James replied that when he saw Bruce and Andrea eating dinner in Hawaii on Waikiki Beach he knew that these were the right parents for him.

Bruce still has no idea how his son knew about the romantic trip he and his wife went on to start their family – before James was born. After this he was invited to Japan where he was shot down and was honoured by the Japanese officials who said he was obviously a reincarnation because he knew so much about them.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2509769/New-book-reveals-children-believe-reincarnated.html#ixzz2uWJkLKb1

Maybe we don’t want to see who we were?

One dream was that my wife was mad and had to be locked up, the other that she had suddenly become religious and had retired from the world. I treated her like an animal. She had in fact nearly gone mad, but had developed a real religious inner life of forgiveness and surrender which had saved her from insanity and had also given her an inner beauty which was apparent, and which angered me still more. Now I made her strip naked and washed her in front of my friend, doing so with much roughness. The friend begged her forgiveness for the part he had played in this, as he had never seen her before.

The dream not only shows a past relationship but also depicts the mans inner life and his relationship with his own femininity and emotions. He realised he had to accept the feelings of being a prisoner, just as his wife in the past had done. If he allowed them full consciousness in his life, and yet did not seek to escape, they would burn out and he would have dealt with that part of his karma. He managed to do this, although sorely tried, and it worked. Not only did the feeling of being trapped gradually fade, but he began to find spontaneous love for his wife. Of course, this was not a quick process.

There then followed a number of dreams, well spaced, about the integration of his feminine self, i.e. his marriage to her. In one he dreamt he had intercourse with an Indian girl on a beach and afterwards he wanted to marry her. But although nothing seemed to stand in the way of illicit relationships with her, to legally marry her presented enormous difficulties and he had to prove himself worthy. In fact, he had taken LSD twice prior to this, and longed to further investigate the inner world it exposed. He knew the Indian girl was this inner life, and his illicit, easy intercourse, the LSD. But he wanted to be personally capable of experiencing the inner world, not have to depend on a chemical, and the dream showed him the difficulties he would have to meet. Nevertheless he decided to do this rather than use an artificial method.

In a later dream, he was going with a dark, slightly oriental girl, to the Quaker Meeting House in Euston Road. Some big event was taking place. As they reached the entrance, however, they were asked for tickets. The girl had a ticket, so only she was admitted; he was ushered through another door into the Euston Road, where a battle was raging. He lay down on the ground feigning death.

The dream shows how he still did not have the ‘ticket’ the capability to enter the innermost part of himself, where the big event will be experienced. It again implies marriage or unity with his feminine nature. It also says, to do this, he must first face his conflicts, which he is avoiding by not wishing to become involved in them.

Through determining to face his inner conflicts, and allow himself to experience them, he gradually began to have dreams in which he was dressed as a soldier.

 

In his dreams this meant he was now inwardly willing to become involved in his inner battle or conflicts. He then had the following dreams.

Dream 5. I had dreamt I had joined the army, and was going to face the enemy. With many other troops I was on a boat. It was night time. Ahead, land loomed. On the left, flashes of gunfire showed, raining shells on a defenceless and innocent town on the right. Our task was to deal with these guns.

About a week or fortnight after this, I not only dreamt earthquakes occurring releasing prehistoric monsters from the depths of the earth, but also of battle. I was in the trenches. We were all keyed up. In the previous dream of war, I had experienced a tremendous fellowship, or mystical union between myself and the other troops. Now I wondered how I was going to face open combat when it occurred. But there arose in me a feeling of certain commitment to face whatever came. Then it was upon us. Bullets were flying, the signal was given, and I was out of the trench running toward the enemy, all fear gone, only the total feeling of destiny, or complete involvement. Whatever happened, I would face it.

In the light of the other dreams, I think these speak for themselves. The gunfire on the left was the arising to consciousness of the effects of inner conflict and fears. The town on the right was his outer life, being devastated by inner explosive emotions. I will let the dreamer describe the result of these years of working on himself.

The Door Opens

“The very day of dreaming I was going into battle; I began to express an uneasy trembling. The years of inner search, coupled with as much or more outer search through books and organisations, had readied me for this. I had read of others having similar experiences, and in fact had been through the same thing with LSD. But never before had it occurred naturally. I lay down and let it happen. To my astonishment not only did I remember and actually relive a childhood scene, I went right into an event from my past of great painfulness, and relived it, thus healing and integrating the emotions it had locked up.

After that time, I could enter this inner experience anytime I opened myself to it. Events from my present life and childhood were slowly brought to consciousness and healed. Then, still slowly, a wider awareness gradually emerged showing me how this life was part of a continuum stretching from the far past. But quite apart from the past, I began to be able, over some years of entry into this inner world, to be capable of moving around in it, asking questions, being taught, and discovering who I was in eternity and not just in time. It had taken me, not just counting working on dreams and meditation, but also with my exploration of occultism and so on, twenty years of searching to find this. Nevertheless, it was worth it. But of course, this must not be thought of as an end. No, it is only a beginning, for like so many others who discover their own inner immensity, in this new world I am but a baby.”

See: The House of the Ancestors; deja vu; past lives in dreams.

 

Dreams Death and Dying – Eastern cultures describe death and dying.

In most of the great faiths and traditions of the world, there are similar teachings about the relationship with the dead. The Egyptian Book of The Dead, one of the oldest books in the world, explains how the soul of the dead person is brought before the gods and has to answer their queries. The Tibetan Book of The Dead gives detailed instructions for a living person to read to the dead. The text explains how the soul of the person will face his or her own deeds, thoughts and fears in a new way, and will come face to face with the gods. It explains how each of these can be best dealt with. Even the recent investigation into near-death-experiences echoes this theme of the person facing their deeds when they have died.

Although The Tibetan Book of the Dead arises from a very different cultural standpoint than that of the West, it is more than simply a strange or superstitious document. It encompasses a profound attempt to look at the subtle side of the human mind and speculate on what we face in death. See Levels of Awareness

In ancient China, the tradition of ancestor worship was of tremendous importance. Here again we see the personal value of relating to the dead. Most aboriginal races have a similar strong feeling of connection with, and remembrance for, their dead. In Catholic Christianity, there are a whole series of sacraments linking one with death or the dead. From the very first, baptism aims at bringing one into a new relationship with God, and making one ready for direct and conscious entrance into Heaven at death. The sacrament of the Mass applies not only to the living but also to the dead: Mass by the living being given for the dead.

This question of what fate human consciousness faces at death is in fact explored by most past races. Looking at these ideas from the standpoint of what we now know about sleeping and dreaming, perhaps some light can be thrown on these ancient ideas.

Two possibilities may exist in sleep, and therefore perhaps in death also. One is that we may penetrate sleep with self-awareness, as happens occasionally in lucid dreams. The other is that we may be carried along by images and emotions, influences and drives, whether we like it or not, as occurs in nightmares. Some of the images and experiences may be beautiful, and some may be terrible. In using this approach to understand ancient texts about death, it is helpful to clarify exactly what it is we experience in a dream. Whether what we experience is beautiful or terrible, are they anything more than tremendous experiences of virtual reality? If they are not, then any horror or beauty we meet are self-created. If this can be accepted, that the apparently real people we meet in dreams are not more real than the experience of colour we have when we look at a rose – considering that we are not seeing the colour, but nerve impulses sent by the eyes to an area of the brain where it is translated into what we apparently see – then we are dealing with our own unconscious creations. But this still leaves us with the question of what is the difference between that and our so called waking experience. Possibly the only big difference is that our waking experience is less prone to change than the dream state. See You Are a Dual Being; Dreams are a reflection of your inner world; Inner World

The Eastern texts mentioned state that if we lack the ability to stand back from involvement in these swirling impressions and fail to see them for what they are, we will be carried wherever the seeds of thought, emotion and fear move us. This much is not speculation. We need very little examination of our own experience to see how time and again our ability to coolly respond to situations is swept away by unbidden emotional or physical responses. If we can see these powerful feeling reactions, or subtle influences for what they are – our own swirling thoughts, emotions and sense impressions – we enter another level of experience entirely. In this sense our identity is like a small boat swept along in a rushing river. The river in this case is our sense impressions, our emotional responses triggered by glandular secretions such as the adrenals, and our imagination or anxieties. See Avoid Being Victims

If you can accept for a moment that when you are totally involved in a dream, you are immersed in experiencing your own largely unconscious attitudes, fears, longings and ideas are external realities, then it gives a starting point to explore these ideas about death. We can begin to understand from our own observable experience rather than from subtle oriental philosophy.

The example of a nightmare you have experienced at some time will be helpful in this. During the nightmare you were almost certainly convinced that it was real. All your actions and feelings also arose directly out of feeling that the nightmare was an external reality, and not a play of internal emotions and fears. Most likely only waking was able to begin dispersing the fear you felt. But supposing you had become aware in your nightmare that what you were facing was not an illusion, but a projection of internal memories, past experience and attitudes. What would that be like?

It is not necessary to speculate too much on this, as many people have been able to become lucid in this way. (See: Buddhism and Dreams for some examples.) What people meet who have done this is a breaking through the apparently real images and events of the dream into direct personal insight. In other words the images of the nightmare give way to direct memoirs of past events that lay the foundation of feelings out of which the nightmare arose. For instance Robert Van de Castle writes that when he has helped people explore nightmares about a ghost, it has always led back to the childhood memory of a parent coming to the bedroom and lifting them or moving them to prevent bed wetting. See Our Dreaming Mind by Robert Van de Castle.

Such direct experiences also help us understand what happens when we fail to face the images of a nightmare, or in fact any other troubling fears and anxieties. We know from personal experience that they remain to haunt us. They continue to influence the way we deal with life, with opportunity, with relationships. It is this influence in the present arising out of the past that Eastern peoples call karma.

 

interaction of past and present

If we create a scheme of the levels of the mind in meeting a nightmare, first of all we meet the dreams images. In most cases this is as far as we go. Our experience of the dream people or creatures is that they are as real as any object or person we meet while awake. Because of this we react to them as if they are real, and can harm us.

So at this first level of interaction we are victims of the virtual reality of the nightmare. Our actions and reactions arise out of acceptance of the reality of the dream characters and situation.

Moving to the next level, from the experience of people who become lucid in their dream, the characters, drama and objects of the dream are experienced as a projection from our own past, from our own fears or imaginations. So the nightmare can be equated with life events. Using the Eastern term of karma, we can say that in the nightmare we are experiencing our karma – outflow of past experience and events.

The doctrine of Karma in Eastern cultures states that our experience of life and its events depends upon the actions, thoughts, desires, longings, that have become built into ourselves from the past – this life and others. When we break through the images or surface life events, we come to the realm of Karmic influences. That is, we discover the pattern of past habits, attitudes, fears, pains, plans and aspirations that have projected into our conscious life and its events.

Therefore this second level of experience is one of penetrating what is at first an apparently external virtual reality, and in penetrating it discovering the influences, the processes or energies that create it. I have summed this up by using the word karma. So we begin to see the karmic influences out of which our life is woven.

Imagine what it would be like to penetrate deeply into your own mind in this way. Again, many people have done it, so it is not a ‘What if’? When it happens the events and directions we have taken in life are seen to be the outworking of deeply etched patterns of behaviour; of passionately made decisions, perhaps from the experience of betrayal; out of lessons learned sometimes over generations of our family. Our conscious biases, opinions, abilities, fears, failings and illnesses, are seen to emerge from this matrix of past experience.

If we think of our past deeds as a colour transparency in a projector, and our conscious self as the screen, we gain an idea of this. Hatred, love, fear, built into us in the past, act as images on the transparency, influencing, colouring, the life-giving energies of our being. If we experienced something that has hurt us sexually or emotionally, and we thus deadened parts of ourselves rather than face our pain, then our present sexuality and emotions will be lacking the full outflow to that degree. These blockages are dense areas on the transparency of our Karmic nature, blocking the light. The light itself is all the range of our experience, sensual, sexual, emotion, mental and spiritual. This is not altogether a good analogy, because our Karmic matrix may contain frozen lumps of our life energy.

If we could consciously meet our fears or pains, our passionately felt decisions of the past, we might arrive back to awareness of the ‘transparency’ or matrix. In the Catholic sense, we would have now ‘admitted’ to consciousness – to ourselves – our past ‘sin’ or error. Becoming conscious of such patterns often wipes them away. In modern psychological terms, awareness transforms. If we see some of the ancient teachings in this light they are less esoteric, and more easily understood as amazing expressions of past psychological insight.

 

healing force

Coming back to the experience of a nightmare, or in fact any dream, while we are alive we can wake up. But what ancient cultures say is that when we die we cannot wake from this world of dreaming, or perhaps of nightmare. This is precisely why masses are said, or why teachings of the East expound ways of helping the dead find their way out of the apparent reality of a strange and perhaps disturbing environment.

In the ‘Bardo Thodol’ (Tibetan Book of The Dead) the dying or dead person is told to hold himself or herself in the Clear Light, without letting anything such as thoughts or karmic influences claim them. What this means in today’s terms is that a living person reads to the dead, telling them not to get lost in their own thoughts and feelings. They are told that underlying the apparent reality of the ‘dream’ or mental landscapes and environment they find themselves in, is the clear consciousness without form. All the mental images and emotions, terrors and wonders experienced, are things the mind creates. But it is all a moving torrent of experience that is not ultimately satisfying. Only the clear consciousness gives the person an experience of their fundamental nature.

In Christianity this clear light is called Christ the Redeemer.

If we gain some concept or feeling of the power that has grown us from conception onwards; that has unified the millions of body cells; that organises all the functions and organs of our body and mind, we have an understanding of this unifying power. Modern psychology has also shown us how hate, fear, shock, jealousy, interfere with this activity as it attempts to keep us whole and healthy.

If we think of the totality of our past experience as the karmic matrix mentioned, we might see even more clearly how hate, fear, shock, jealousy interferes with the principle behind our own growth and stable existence. The Catholic sacraments look upon the negative influence of this karmic matrix as our ‘state of sin’ and tell us Christ can redeem us.

When we experience the power of this internal life principle in the way healing or ‘redemption’ takes place in us during and after illness, our awareness of its power and reality becomes very great. It is the energy that upholds our existence, and which we can either, co-operate with or work against.

The ‘Bardo Thodol’ calls this the Secondary Clear Light. In experiencing it we are aware of the effect of the Clear Light and its power on and in us. But we are not conscious of the Light itself. The ‘Bardo’ says that very few people can actually remain fixed in the Clear Light itself. The reason being that it is formless, impersonal, and transcendental.

Again, in the ‘Bardo’ it says, ‘The common people call this the state wherein the consciousness principle (object knowing principle) hath fainted away.’ These teachings declare that if we cannot hold onto this condition, we drop into the next level, which is experiencing the effect of the Clear Light. If this is not possible to maintain, we drop into our karmic matrix. If this is not maintained, we become lost in images and ‘dreams’ arising from the karma we have gathered, i.e. our loves, hates, fears, and aspirations. This means we are back in the nightmare situation. 

four levels

Looking at the previous statements, we can see that four levels of experience are defined. These four levels are not difficult to understand if we look at our own experience of waking and sleeping. If we once more look at sleep, we will perhaps understand what the ‘Bardo Thodol’ is saying. For instance, experiments in sleep laboratories have shown that when we sleep, at first we drop into a deep dreamless state. Then we gradually move to a condition nearing waking consciousness in which we dream.

In dreamless sleep our ‘object knowing’ self disappears. There is only ‘being’, pure consciousness, without images, emotions or sense of self. We experience it every night when we sleep. So it is not anything strange or unknown. But because we usually lose any sense of our ego in this ‘dreamless sleep’ state, we usually say we were unconscious or asleep. Nevertheless, we went into the void of dreamless sleep, and we emerged from it again. Some people even mange to maintain a level of awareness, as in lucid dreaming, and so carry back a memory of the void.

Those people, who have melted into the void and carried back awareness of it, describe it as the basic level of existence, universal, imageless consciousness. Another way of attempting a description is to say it is unchanging and self-existent, as opposed to the ever-changing experience of our senses, emotions and thoughts, all of which are linked with other phenomena, and so not self-existent.

Because few of us can even begin to grasp that this daily experience of dreamless sleep, this seeming absence of being, as a reality – The Reality – we cannot, do not wish to, are frightened of, maintaining it. As the Bardo explains, most of us cannot maintain the Clear Light, so we enter again into the acceptance of the world of sensory experience, of dreams.

Working from outside in, if we break through the experience of our senses and dream images to the karmic matrix, and dare to meet the passions and pains out of which our life is woven, we have now woken up at the dream level. At this point we are no longer completely dominated by, and at the mercy of, the passions and pains that previously moved us unconsciously. See Steiner Life after death

From here we can begin to see why the sacred teachings of many races have said the living can help the dead. In their book ‘Dream Telepathy’, Krippner and UlIman tell of their years of scientific research into the sensitivity of sleeping persons to the thoughts of others. Their research at the Dream Laboratory of Maimonides Medical Centre in New York has now become world famous.

Many people who were not a part of Krippner and Ullman’s research have also noted how the thoughts or prayers of others frequently alter the pattern of their dreams.

 

We can understand this further if we think of it in the terms used generally in these articles. The state of hell can be thought of as being personally submerged in the images and experiences of one’s own violence, hate, terrors and incohesiveness.

Purgatory is the same as this, but with one main-difference, the personality before death had, through baptism and confirmation (i.e. opening consciousness to and fixing it in a transforming influence) contacted the unifying principle. The expressed power of the Clear Light, God, has the effect of integrating and redeeming the images and energies we would otherwise become lost in or possessed by, in the sleep or death state.

Free will, for nearly all of us, is missing at that level, as is the ability to stand apart from the images. Nevertheless, those who have contacted and opened consciousness to the unifying power causing their existence, find the nature of their dreams changing. The integrating power is actually opened to even in dreams, and relates us differently to the images and events being faced. This psychological fact seems to explain a great deal about he theological catholic statements in regard to the power of baptism and the laying on of hands to give a different ‘quality’ to the soul, and making the difference between being lost in hell, or being capable of direct or indirect entrance into heaven. If we equate baptism and confirmation with the opening of consciousness to the unifying principle, these statements can be understood.

consciously work on a dream

The question of helping the dead is one of the clear will of the living, being used to pierce through the confusing images of the dream state, to aid the central ego of the person to open to the influence of God. We can achieve a very clear impression of what this means when we ourselves consciously work on a dream, or directly face images we ran from during sleep. Consciousness can decide to do things that are not possible during sleep.

It has been said above that if the unifying power has been a conscious experience, the quality of dreams is changed. It is also true that when our conscious understanding of dreams is clarified, another type of change occurs.

A different approach results, which leads to seeing beyond dreams to their causes. This relationship between our own conscious understanding and our sleep experiences also appears to exist between the living and the dead. They complement each other in a very real sense. For waking consciousness limits, defines and decides. In this way it can direct energies through understanding them.

This rational defined and separate consciousness is generally better developed in occidental peoples, and has been the basis of our technological culture. The interior sleep awareness is unlimited, ranging through space and time, possible and impossible, fact and fancy. It is not defined.

Almost any dream one attempts to analyse has a great power of avoiding final analysis. One can only arrive at general understanding. This is more the tone in which the oriental peoples are masters. Then one cannot easily go beyond the visible or obvious; the other tends not to be tied down to defining in external abilities or creations their interior life.

help of prayer

If we therefore pray for the dead, in the sense of opening ourselves and them to the unifying principle, this releases a power into the condition they may find themselves in. Such prayer will aid in releasing them from images and psychological difficulties being experienced. Also, if we have a clear View of the after death state, and talk to our dead as the Tibetans and others do, this brings to them the clarity of our consciousness to aid them. We, in return, through this subtle contact, receive impressions of wider awareness and understanding. If the experiments of non-physical communication between the living were practised and remembered, some idea of how this communion is experienced will be yours.

In Spiritualist ‘rescue circles’, someone with this type of sensitivity acts as the connecting link between the living and dead. The group then throws the light of their waking consciousness, argument and explanation, into the experience of the dead person being helped. Thus, those trapped by suicidal urges, ignorance of their situation, uncontrollable desires or fears, are aided to find release.

Subud members also practise what they call a ‘latihan’ (spiritual surrender to the unifying power) for the dead. They say that the dead have very intimate contacts with their living family. If one of their family opens to the unifying principle, or life force, and thus becomes themselves more integrated, this influences the condition of the dead. If this surrender to God is done in the name of the dead person, family or not, it has, they say, a tremendous power to help, and ‘wake them up’ in death.

Although all these methods are very different in outer form, we can see a thread of similar aims and ideas passing through each. Something to be dealt with later on, but not out of place here, is to say that the dead have a similar relationship to us as our own sleep consciousness. This is only an extension of what has already been said, but may easily be overlooked. To put it into a few words: the dead are now parts of our own interior, and often unconscious, being. They are aspects of our own total psyche. The insight, love, prayer, release of healing power, or attempt at understanding we bring to them, influences them in precisely the same way it influences ourselves.

The ‘cult of the dead,’ as it is sometimes called, if persisted in long enough in an attempt to aid a soul through the miasma of unconscious truth and error to the Clear Light, is also a legal spiritual path. The soul we help to the clear light is a part of our greater being, and its attainment is for us also a consciousness of the highest. If there is a criticism, it is only that most such attempts give up at the level of communicating chit chat and proof of survival.

‘When through illusion,’ says the Bardo, ‘I and others are wandering in the false images, Along the bright light-path of undistracted listening, reflection and meditation, May the Gurus of the Inspired Line lead us:

May the etherical elements not rise up as enemies; May the watery elements not rise up as enemies; May the earthy elements not rise up as enemies; May the fiery elements not rise up as enemies; May the airy elements not rise up as enemies; May the elements of the rainbow colours not rise up as enemies;

May it come that all the sounds in the death state be known as one’s own sounds;

May it come that all the Radiances will be known as one’s own radiances;

May it come that the Clear Light will be realised in the state of death.’

See: Near Death Experiences Journal; Near Death Experience; Levels of Awareness; Journeying Beyond Dreams and Death

Australian Aborigine Dream Beliefs

The Australian native peoples are divided into more than 500 tribal groups. These tribes are also of two major types – those who live inland, and those who live along the coastline. The separation of tribes and the division provided by the environment led to differences in views about the nature of human life and death, and the part dreams played. But some beliefs, such as reincarnation and the ‘Dreamtime’, were universally held.

Dreamtime refers to an experience and to beliefs that are largely peculiar to the Australian native people. There are at least four aspects to Dreamtime – The beginning of all things; the life and influence of the ancestors; the way of life and death; and sources of power in life.

Dreamtime includes all of these four facets at the same time, being a condition beyond time and space as known in everyday life. The aborigines call it the ‘all-at-once’ time instead of the ‘one-thing-after-another’ time. This is because they experience Dreamtime as the past present and future coexisting. This condition – See: altered states of consciousness – is met when the tribal member lives according to tribal rules, and then is initiated through rituals and hearing the myths of the tribe.

Although Dreamtime may sound rather mystical or mysterious to the Western mind, the experience is based on understandable and observable facts of social and mental life which are unfortunately little valued in Western society. For instance the present is observably the result of past actions or events. Present society is particularly the result of past great men and women and their – heroic – deeds. For the Australian native peoples, as with many other ancient races, the heroic deeds of past ancestors were remembered with great veneration. It was seen that all present life, and even the personal skills and character of tribal members, arose out of the life of the ancestors. The ancestors, their deeds, and what arise from them into the life of the tribe in the present, are all held in the Dreamtime beyond the shifting events of things happening one-after-the-other.

The aborigine people believed that each person had a part of their nature that was eternal. This eternal being pre-existed the life of the individual, and only became a living person through being born to a mother. The person then lived a life in time, and at death melted back into the eternal life. See Archetype of the Big Bang

In writing about the state of mind – the mental world – of early races, J. B. Priestley – in Man and Time – says that if we are to properly understand the ancient peoples we must never project onto them our own state of mind and rational thought. Studies have shown that ancient people experienced what is called an undifferentiated state of mind. Their sense of being a separate and independent person was much less than is commonly experienced in modern life. They did not separate their religious life, their social life, their economic life, their artistic life and their sexual life from each other. This is obvious to even a casual observation of such societies, or even third world cultures, where religion and eating, and work are all very much connected. To be banished from the tribe was tantamount to death for primitive individuals, so deeply were they identified in psychological and practical ways to the rest of the tribe. But it is not an unusual thing for a modern man or woman to leave their place of birth, their family or their country, and live abroad. Such simple facts illustrate the deep divide between the modern and ancient state of mind.

If we remember our early childhood, with the absence of an awareness of passing time, the fullness of each day, the eternity of a week or a month, the enormous and unquestioned – if still untraumatised – sense of connection with our family, then we will have an idea of the mental world of the older races. For the aborigine these facts of their life were tangible realities, known through their inner experience in dreams and waking visions. Prior to the development of the reasoning and questioning mind, people did not consider things by thinking about them in neat ideas and definitions. Like the parables in the Bible or Aesop’s fables, which say so much, but do so with images and through the relationship of one thing or person with another, early human beings thought in pictures or dream like images. So the aborigine would meet the influence of the ancestors in their life as an actual visionary person, rather than thoughts about tribal history. With the visionary meeting would come deep feelings and insights, making it a real educational experience. This is exactly how dreams express, and in this manner most creative or problem solving ‘thinking’ was done by ancient peoples. Therefore the entrance into dreams, or into a condition in which the imagery of dreaming could function while awake, as in visions or altered states of consciousness, was important for the aborigine. Common ways of accessing this state of mind were through ritual or initiation rites. In this way enormous learning experiences could be met, a sense of complete identification with ancestors and tribal history achieved, and personal change or growth accomplished.

This condition of mind or being in which time is ‘all-at-once’ and the past is felt as intensely close as the present, is a natural and fundamental state. It is what the baby experiences in the womb prior to the separation at birth and the development of concepts through the learning of language. So the rituals which enable the aborigine to return to the womb of all time and existence enables them to feel connected once more to all nature, to all their ancestors, and to their own personal meaning and place within the scheme of things. The Dreamtime is a return to the real existence for the aborigine. Life in time is simply a passing phase – a gap in eternity. It has a beginning and it has an end. The life in Dreamtime has no beginning and no end.

The experience of Dreamtime, whether through ritual or from dreams, flowed through into the life in time in practical ways. The individual who enters the Dreamtime feels no separation between themselves and their ancestors. The strengths and resources of the timeless enter into what is needed in the life of the present. The future is less uncertain because the individual feels their life as a continuum linking past and future in unbroken connection. Through Dreamtime the limiatations of time and space are overcome. It is a much observed feature of aboriginal life that knowledge of distant relatives and their condition is frequently displayed. Therefore if a relative is ill, a distant family member knows this and hurries to them. Often the intuitive knowledge of herbal medicine is gained also.

For the aborigine tribes, there is no ending of life at ‘death’. Dead relatives are very much a part of continuing life. It is believed that in dreams dead relatives communicate their presence. At times they may bring healing if the dreamer is in pain. Death is seen as part of a cycle of life in which one emerges from Dreamtime through birth, and eventually returns to the timeless, only to emerge again. It is also a common belief that a person leaves their body during sleep, and temporarily enters the Dreamtime.

The aboriginal tribes are connected with their local landscape in a way that perhaps no other race of recent times is. The landscape is almost an externalisation of the individual’s inner world. Each tribe had a traditional area of the land which was theirs alone, and it was believed that in the Dreamtime the ancestors shaped the flat landscape into its present features. Each feature was in some way an act of the ancestors, and therefore the tribe. Like many tribal peoples, the Australian native people were deeply dependent upon their beliefs, the landscape and their inner life for their identity and strength. This makes them vulnerable to anything which disrupts their beliefs, although, apart from such vulnerability, they have a greater psychic sense of wholeness and identity with their tribe and environment than is common in Western individuals.

See the feature Spirit-Child: The Aboriginal Experience of Pre-Birth Communication.

Meetings with an Unborn Child

Elisabeth Hallett

In these columns, we go out on a limb to catch a glimpse of patterns that can’t be seen from safer ground. The “limb” on which our explorations depend is the premise of pre-existence-that we exist in some form before conception. With that premise, we’re free to consider the implications of parents’ pre-birth communication experiences and the revealing comments of young children. As we shall see, it is exciting when the evidence from these two sources overlaps.

The stories in this installment suggest one of the most intriguing patterns of possible connection between parent and child. Imagine the situation: In childhood, you encounter your own future son or daughter as a companion who visits your dreams and reveries or flashes across your mind’s eye at odd moments.

Margaret writes, “I knew and played with my three sons (two yet to be born) when I was still a child. I had many recurring dreams, around age seven, of riding bikes with three boys who were my sons, even though they were about my age or older. Always the oldest was the most clear to me, and the other two didn’t connect quite as strongly, though they were all firmly present. I always thought the oldest was cute. He was also really nice, smart, thoughtful, and took his responsibilities seriously, looking after his brothers and guiding our play. But he was still fun.” Margaret clearly identifies her childhood dream playmate with her firstborn son. The next story is more complex and raises the question of how such an identification is made. Donna recalls: “Right around the time I reached menarche, I became aware of a loving, guiding female presence. I think I always knew she would be with me as my daughter. I don’t remember analyzing much, only accepting. I decided then that my first child would be a girl and her name would be Kirsten. Later I decided wedlock was a horrible idea and I’d never bind myself thus, nor would I ever bear a child. Still Kirsten was with me. Certain places, certain people would bring her to mind. A blond girl would appear, spontaneously, in my mind’s eye. As I approached my twenties, I began to ‘see’ her as a four-year-old. I could ‘see’ or be aware of the little girl in my peripheral vision-and only as long as I didn’t look.

“A few more years and the desire to have babies struck. Suddenly marriage seemed tolerable. My first child was a girl, and I named her Kirsten. Once we were home and settled in and starting to learn each other, I realized that this little person wasn’t Kirsten. After a bout with colic we fell in love and still are.”

Donna bore three more children, all boys, and felt that her family was complete. She thought her youngest son might be the embodiment of the female presence she had sensed for so long. However, she continues, “As the kids grew, I started having the emotional freedom to start meditating again. When I relaxed, I began noticing a glowing white disc with a lavender rim. It was always waiting. Then I read “Models of Love” and was overwhelmed at one point by the beauty of childbearing. As I was glorying, I saw a pillar of light next to me, and I knew I would have another child.” Finally, Donna conceived her last child. “In a meditation the glowing white disc featured a purple fetus. I knew I was pregnant. I knew it was my girl.” Cicely was born eleven years to the day after Kirsten. “Cicely has always been with me,” says Donna. “This being is her.”

We may ask, “How do you know?” But the answer is a mystery. The sense of recognition, which may be completely convincing to the one experiencing it, is really not open to objective validation. Linda, an English mother, identifies her firstborn daughter as the girl she met in a vivid dream years earlier. As she says, “There has never been any doubt in my mind that it was her-I knew it the moment she was born.”

There is a hidden aspect to these stories which may be coincidental, or it may point to a deeper meaning behind these experiences. Linda was eighteen-nearly grown up-when she dreamed of her future daughter. She says, “I knew that this girl was my daughter… I remember feeling so happy that she had shown herself to me, especially as I had quite a hard time growing up and it was like a little message of hope and happiness for me to help me along when I needed it. I wasn’t planning on kids at the time as I was preparing for University and travel. I also didn’t feel any urgency with the dream-she wasn’t saying, ‘Have me now.’ She was just saying, ‘Hello-this is what you have to look forward to!'”

Like Linda, each of the young girls in this survey was coping with difficult situations around the time of her initial experience-from simple loneliness to sexual abuse. Donna moved at thirteen to a place she hated, and recalls that she “retreated into herself” for years. Margaret, who dreamed of bike riding with her three sons, says, “I think they felt bad for me because I didn’t have many friends, and I had been recently assaulted by a distant family member. The nice innocent fun we had riding our bikes, plus the slightly protective feeling I got from the eldest boy, helped me get through that time.”

With these circumstances in mind it would be easy to say, Aha!–these girls created imaginary friends to help cope with their stressful situations. But it seems equally possible that here is a special grace and kindness in life’ s patterns, whereby an unhappy child can be comforted and companioned by her own future children. After all, they would have an interest in the welfare of their intended mother.

What of the enigmatic memories that little children express, usually between the ages of three and seven? Do they ever provide evidence for these early connections? Brent was six years old when he began relating what seemed to be memories of a previous lifetime with an abusive father, ending in an early death. Among other details, he told his mother that he had chosen her. She took advantage of a moment when Brent was quietly absorbed in play to seek more information.

“I asked him why he chose me. He told me very matter-of-factly that he knew he couldn’t stand to live like that with that other dad any more, and his mother had somehow disappeared, and so he looked for another mom. And he saw me, but when I was a little girl. Then he came back to me when I was an adult and chose to be born to me because he liked me. He answered promptly, without thinking about any of this for a second! As I wrapped my arms around him and gave him a big kiss on the cheek and looked into his blue eyes, I told him, Brent, I am so glad that you chose me. I love being your mom and you don’t have to worry ever, because I will keep you safe and love you forever. He smiled and withdrew to get on with his playing with his army tank!”

The final story is a rare treasure because it includes evidence from both sources: a mother’s childhood experience and her child’s mysterious remark. From Australia, Jenny writes: “When I was 10 years old I did a drawing of how I would like to look if I was beautiful. It turned out great, which was weird because I was just past stick figures. My eleven-year-old sister instantly grabbed it and criticized it. “The eyes are too slanted, cheekbones too high, jaw too square for this kind of face,” she said. She then changed it, saying she just wanted to fix it for me. I was really upset and took the drawing away to make it right. I couldn’t start again because I couldn’t really draw. To me it was a miracle. The drawing seemed to take on a life of its own. I began talking to the girl in the picture. She was the classic ‘invisible friend.’ I could really sense her there and occasionally I thought I heard her answer.

“Then when I was fourteen our family went to see ‘South Pacific’ at the movies. When the girl called Liat on Bali Hai came on, I thought, ‘Wow, she looks a lot like my ‘invisible girl.’ On the way home, I was thinking ‘I wonder why she looks like her. Maybe I should call her Liat.’ Then I heard her respond! ‘Because I’m part Islander and my name is Lee but you can call me Liat.’ She was yelling in my ear and I looked around to see if anyone else could hear. Naturally they couldn’t.

“I guess I had always been kind of weird compared with other people. My Scottish Nanna said I was fey. This time I thought, I’m really crazy now. My invisible friend refused to go away so I asked her who she was. She said she was my daughter. That was a stunner. I asked her when she would be born. ‘When you’re thirty-six.’ ‘Don’t I have any choice?’ ‘You have already chosen,’ she said.

“Liat hung around for years. We continued to talk and argue, discussing all kinds of metaphysical things. Sometimes she didn’t know much more than I did. Other times she amazed me with her knowledge. Occasionally I would get images of her at different times in her life. She was really beautiful.”

By the time Jenny was nearly thirty-six, she was twice married and divorced and had four sons. Now Liat started communicating about being born soon. “I banished her,” says Jenny, “but she came back and sat in the background not saying much.” Jenny soon found herself involved in a love affair and despite precautions she became pregnant. “I told Colin all about our future daughter and described her. He brought me a photo of one of his sisters. She looked uncannily like Liat. When I explained about the island girl, he said ‘Yes, that’s the Samoan in her.’ He just accepted everything. When she was born, Colin named our little girl Amy-Lee. I hadn’t told him the name I had used all those years.

“When Amy turned three she said, ‘Mummy, I used to know you when you were a little girl, didn’t I.’ It was a statement. She is six now and beautiful. Who knows what the future holds for her-she is already extraordinary and much loved by many people.”

Editor’s Note:

Special thanks to Jenny Strong for permission to reprint part of her story. Her full account can be read online at MuseNet.

Who Said Death Was The End

For the shorter Dream Dictionary entries see Death and Dead and also see the series Life and Death.

There is also a longer version published in eBook format – Dreaming about Death

Links to section headings:

Death can represent a fading or dying of some aspect of you

Who Said Death Was the Final End?

Death is an Energy Release

Journeying Beyond Dreams and Death

Death of oneself Death of someone close to us

Dreaming of a dead body

Dreaming of our own death

Some dreams are showing the state of those we love after death

Talking with those who have passed on

Death can represent a fading or dying of some aspect of you

The death of someone we know

The walking dead or rigor mortis

Thoughts about death

We can deal with our feelings of death

You can continue contact with the dead through your dreams

After death What Happens

Meeting death in any way can be awful, especially if you shy away from the awful caricature of death  presented today as THE END. But if you dare to look the shrouded figure of death directly in the eyes, it transforms into the Naked Beauty. See Near death experience

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. If we allow ourselves to realise that it illustrates the meaning of the phoenix – it is consumed by the flames, and yet it arose anew. We have the fire of life within us, we eat and feed the fire that consumes us and gives birth to us continuously. It is the warmth of our body, the warmth, even passion, of our emotions and that is life – continuous through death.

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

 Our bodies renew themselves every day: stomach cells renew every five days;

our skin cells are replaced every month; the skeleton is replaced every three months;

the raw material of DNA is replaced every 6 weeks; our brain cells are completely new every year.

The whole body is replaced every two years.

Every cell in your body listens to your self-talk and out-pictures the results Dr. Bruce Lipton, author of

“The Biology of Belief“

Who Said Death Was the Final End?

I have heard it said or written times uncountable that nobody has ever come to tell us what is the other side of death. As no one has come back – so the argument goes – and so there is obviously no life after death.

That is a stupid argument because hundreds of thousands have come back and told us. It is an argument put forward by people who desperately keep their eyes closed and then say they cannot see anything. Because there is a massive collection of thousands of records of people who died and revived and so told us their experience of death.

See  Near Death Experiences – The Wisdom Of Near Earth Experiences – The Truth Revealed – Life After Life – The Returning Dead – The Wonder of You

Death is an Energy Release

Many modern physicists, working with the information arising in experiments with quantum theory, tell us that our view of the world is based upon our blindness, and is very limited, and through its limitation, unreal. The implications of the theorem are enormous. Something can be in two places at once, in fact everywhere at the same moment. Apparently distant objects, or people, are intricately linked in an immediate way. There is no separate existence as we previously thought. Our view of the world is not one supported by the facts of physics. Time and space are transcended. People’s experiences of this dimension:

But death of anything also involves a tremendous release of energy as the form breaks down. But the various levels of energy involved in the death of a person are never lost, for energy cannot ever be lost, it is transferred and used elsewhere. A transformation takes place. The consciousness and energy that gave the body life also goes through a process of transformation into universal life.

It is not surprising therefore that the subject of death figures in many dreams. As with any major life event, in our dreams we meet death in various forms as part of our attempt to develop a working relationship with it. For instance we died when we left behind our childhood self to become an adolescent.

Such dreams enable us to become aware of what our deepest fears or feelings are regarding our own death, or the death of someone we love or know. But they also have the possibility of showing us what our fullest inner wisdom or intuitions are about what it means to die.

If we cannot meet the spectre of death, then our ability to live a full life will be diminished. At every turn death faces us in one way or another, and if we have not met and transformed fear into wonder, then we will be paralysed in expressing freely and lovingly to what life offers.

We have to remember though that what we first meet in dreams about death are the family and culturally inherited images and ideas of what death is. For instance Western culture gradually developed a view of the world based on early scientific theories. Namely that life is purely physical, and so there can be no survival of ones personal awareness at death. It is a view gradually being eroded by findings in quantum physics, and is not shared by many other cultures.

A man describes his experience when his father unexpectedly died.

A man had died. I was his son and had just been told. Walking along the road to my home in the dark evening I passed an empty house. –  It silently said to me DEATH.

On my left as I walked was the undertaker’s. Again it spoke DEATH.

In the empty street a cold wind blew fallen leaves., telling me of my fathers DEATH.

Further along the way a house was brightly lit from within, and I could see people inside. It shouted to me LIFE.

A girl child rode by on a bicycle and she was LIFE.

Nearer home I met my young son and carried him in my arms, wrapped in my coat against the wind and I was holding LIFE.

And in that way I realised that always and everywhere, everything is living and dying. And pain dropped from me.

The skeleton in the image typifies this Western view of death. But the view in older cultures is that life continually flows through birth and death, as in the second illustration. (See: the book The Field, that examines latest findings in quantum physics in an understandable way).

But many people dream that they have died and become distressed by it. But as far as I can tell such dreams are a necessary part of a natural development. The experience of death is a part of learning to go through change – as caterpillars do as the transform into butterflies. You cannot go through such personal changes unless you willing to let yourself die.

I feel strongly that all the new breed of children will need to learn how to die. It is like a process of transformation such we see caterpillars going through. In our life today there are stages of growth and points of massive transformation as one period of growth ends and another stage begins.

Learning to die was a method of passing through the transformation into the next stage of growth, and we are carving a way for children if they attempted the further stages of growth. Dreaming of our own death In the example below the dreamer does not face any great fear of death itself. The strongest feelings are of loss. Over a period of time the dreamer may move beyond such feelings of loss into exploring other possibilities of death.

I was due to be executed – what for I don’t know. I was not especially afraid of this, but my most vivid feelings were of great sadness at the people I was leaving behind, and for all the things I wanted to do in life, but would not now be able to. Then at the end I was watching myself being hanged. D.

This theme of facing death is quite frequently met, and it often leads to confronting what we really want to do before the end of this present life; what we want to express, say or give to those we love or are involved with; and what we want to achieve. So such a dream may wake us up from spending too much time in trivialities.

Examining many dreams dealing with death, it is noticeable that some dreamers are stuck in fearful or grief laden feelings, while others move on into a positive relationship with the ending of life. The difference appears to be centred on what level of emotion the dreamer can tolerate and accept, and how daring they are. Many people, on meeting death in their dream, awake with feelings of pain, fear, or dread. If they could fully meet those feelings they would pass on to develop a very different experience of death in their dreams. The following dreams illustrate this.

A young woman told me she had experienced a recurring nightmare of a piece of cloth touching her face. She would scream and scream and wake her family. One night her brother sat with her and made her meet those feelings depicted by the cloth. When she did so she realised it was her grandmother’s funeral shroud. She cried about the loss of her grandmother, felt her feelings about death, and was never troubled again by the nightmare. The dreamer in the following example meets her feelings through the actual events of the dream.

My mother in law died of cancer. I had watched the whole progression of her illness, and was very upset by her death. Shortly after she died the relatives gathered and began to sort through her belongings to share them out. That was the climax of my upset and distress, and I didn’t want any part of this sorting and taking her things. That night I dreamt I was in a room with all the relatives. They were sorting her things, and I felt my waking distress. Then my mother in law came into the room. She was very real and seemed happy. She said for me not to be upset as she didn’t at all mind her relatives taking her things. When I woke from the dream all the anxiety and upset had disappeared. It never returned.

Here is quote from a student of Jung.

“Most significantly, Herzog suggests that the experience of dying in a dream can symbolise a life-transformation. But this occurs only if the dreamer (1) can transcend the negative reaction to death’s image, and (2) be touched “by the dream’s deep resonance with the experience of death as transformation and also by the elemental power of enthusiastic joy in life.”5 This “transformation” occurs if one’s waking activity is affected such that the dreamer comes to terms with the vicissitudes of life, as well as the reality of death.”

 Death can represent a fading or dying of some aspect of you

So dreaming of death is often not about the end of your or someone else’s life, but a means of showing how some aspect of your outer or inner life is fading, lost, or being superseded by a changed approach, so may be shown as dying. Other possibilities are that your love or drive to achieve something might die, and be shown as death in your dreams. The change from adolescence to puberty, or maturity to old age, is also often depicted in a dream as oneself dying. In this case it is a past way of life and identity that is passing away.

Dreaming of a dead body

This shows another aspect of death in dreams. Lost opportunities or unexpressed potentials in you are frequently shown in this way. All of us unconsciously learn attitudes or survival skills from parents and others, or we have a talent or gift that has got buried, denied or even killed out by events. If these or other facets of our personality are unrecognised or ‘buried’ they may be shown as dead. Sometimes we have killed the child or teenager in us because of difficulties or trauma at those ages, and these may be seen as a dead person in your dream, or even a corpse you find buried. Of course we may have ‘killed’ our parents in our dreams and find them buried. It is important to explore such dreams and bring the parts of you back to life. See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams

Some death dreams may show the awakening of new life in the dreamer. For instance, Sue explored a dream in which she was told her baby had died. She woke shaking with grief and tears. When she explored the dream she felt it showed her becoming alive enough to feel the grief of past pain, and the death of her hopes and love in a relationship that had just ended. She had suppressed her pain for so long. In now coming alive enough to feel her emotions, she was feeling at last that something she previously loved had died in her.

 Example: My hands moved to my genital area and I had the strange and awful feeling my hips were not mine – that I was touching someone else’s body. The thighs and waist were my own, but in between was a dead, wasted area. I knew my sexuality was this stagnant, dead area. It was my manhood that had been wasted, the many wasted years of my life. My body felt such a stranger. I took my trousers off to feel myself more easily. Gradually I felt the area connected and my own again. I felt that I had dealt with the causes of my dead sexuality in past experiences, but I had never felt the actual deadness quite like this

We can deal with our feelings of death

Each of us meet our feelings and fears in different ways, and the next waking dream shows a very full meeting with death and its possibilities.

I knew I was dying and it was incredibly real. So real I wept deeply because I knew this was the end of everything and I would lose my children. All that I had created in life would be at an end too. But there was nothing I could do about that and I died. Then I seemed to be at a slight distance watching my dead body, and I saw my father, who had died some years before, come and carry the body over a threshold into a heavenly meadow. There a resurrection took place. My dead being was given new life. And the new life came from all that I had given to others, and all I had received from others, during my life. That was my spiritual life that survived death. A.C.

As can be seen from this beautiful experience, the dreamer meets the depth of feeling connected with the final ending of life, and then moves beyond it. So the last part of the dream is not an avoidance of pain, but an acceptance of the finality of death and how it is transcended by giving ourselves away to others, and receiving from them. It says that our spiritual life is a form of integrating all of our life activities and seeing what can be transferred from our limited life into the life universal. All that cannot be a part of the eternal cannot be a part of our life after death is burned out. Because dreaming about death is a very frequent theme, and has many aspects, you must look at any death dream you have had and see each part of it in context with the other parts of the dream. For instance the context of death in the first example is connected with hanging and final loss. In the second it starts similarly but ends quite differently.

Death of someone close to us

As explained above, this often refers to ones own feelings or talents that have been hurt, denied, or ‘killed out’ by events and your response to them. The following example illustrates this.

 Example: ‘My son comes in and I see he is unwashed and seems preoccupied and as if he has not cared for himself for some days. I ask him what is wrong. He tells me his mother is dead. I then seem to know she has been dead for days, and my two sons have not told anyone. In fact my other son has not even accepted the fact.’ Anthony.

Anthony is a divorcee. Processing the dream he realised the two sons are ways he is relating to the death of his marriage – the children’s mother. Although the unconscious has a very real sense of its eternal nature and continuance after physical death, our conscious personality seldom shares this. Also we all we all carry within us ideas, behaviours, talents and ways of life from those now dead. The farmer today unconsciously uses the collective experience of humanity in farming. What innovation he does today his children or others will learn and carry into the future.

This aspect of a life beyond the physical is shown in many dreams. For instance a man I knew dreamt of walking with a friend of his. As they walked they came to a river. The friend crossed, but the dreamer was unable to. Even in the dream he felt crossing the river meant his friend had died. Some time later he discovered that his friend had died at about the time he experienced the dream.

As the dream points out, the friend died, but continued another type of life ‘across the river’. A woman told a similar dream to me. Her teenage son came down to breakfast looking very unhappy. When she asked him why he said he had a dream that deeply disturbed him. In it he was walking with a friend and the friend walked through a door. When her son tried to follow he could not pass through the door.

They could not find a rational explanation for the dream, but on arriving at school, her son heard that his friend had been killed in a motorbike accident on his way to school. The river and the door are often used in this way, suggesting a change to another dimension of life usually unreachable by the living. But some experiences give us a much clearer example of contact with our dead. The following is taken from the writings of Dr. Stanilav Grof and is a personal experience he met.

 “In one particularly unnerving session a young man suffering from depression found himself in what seemed to be another dimension. It had an eerie luminescence, and although he could not see anyone he sensed that it was crowded with discarnate beings. Suddenly he sensed a presence very close to him, and to his surprise it began to communicate with him telepathically. It asked him to please contact a couple who lived in the Moravian city of Kromeriz and let them know that their son Ladislav was well taken care of and doing all right. It then gave him the couple’s name, street address, and telephone number.

The information meant nothing to either Grof or the young man and seemed totally unrelated to the young man’s problems and treatment. Still, Grof could not put it out of his mind. “After some hesitation and with mixed feelings, I finally decided to do what certainly would have made me the target of my colleagues’ jokes, had they found out,” says Grof. “I went to the telephone, dialled the number in Kromeriz, and asked if I could speak with Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a broken voice: ‘Our son is not with us any more; he passed away, we lost him three weeks ago.’”

Here is a beautiful experience expressed as a poem.

Example: Today I noticed for the first time
A small brown mark on my left hand.
True I have been out in the sun,
But I never grow freckles.
This is one of those marks
Old people have on their hands.

I thought – or perhaps it was a hope
That I would never have
Such brown discolourations.
In my imagination of ageing
I had seen my skin wrinkled,
But clear and vibrant.
The mark was something
I noticed in the morning,
Looked at for a few moments
And passed from to other interests.

The day was full of things to enjoy.
At fifty I feel happier
And more vigorous
Than ever before.
Then, in the afternoon,
Sitting among friends
And in the midst of our enjoyment
The thought struck me –
Supposing I fall over!
Supposing I dropped to the floor
Right now.

I was with friends,
Friends to have wild fancies with.
So I followed my mood,
Allowing it to grow leaves and stem,
And remembered,
Though I had never really forgotten,
That my father had – one day –
Fallen over on his garden path.
Busy as ever with things to do
He was walking the path
Fell over
And never got up again.

That’s when I knew
More clearly than ever before
That I am slowly dying.
If I were a leaf on a tree,
The small brown mark would be
The first sign of Autumn
As change touched me
Making me golden.
Then I would fall
From the tree.

But I am not ready
To drop.
Though I am turning brown
There is something I need.
I have a will to spend myself
On my friends,
That I might fall
Feeling well
With the coming of winter.
Of a sudden
I see the face of Death.
I hear its voice.
I know it –
For we have met
Often and always.

Death has the features of
A child I made cry;
The profile of
My loved woman;
Your countenance.
Have I known you?
Then I have known Death.
Have I betrayed any?
Then I have betrayed Death.
And its face is beauty
For it is all things –
Naked,
Undressed of flesh,
Leafless,
Exposed,
Unclad Life –
Without the garment
That our selfhood is.

And the waters in me rose
To tears.
Bathing me in regret
That I had
So often
Forgotten
My love
For the
Naked Beauty.

Relating to The Dead

Our relationship with the dead should not be seen as the same as when alive, for we have left the body life behind and live in a dimension of experience without boundaries. Of course dreams try to help us with this but it can be difficult to understand. Below are parts of communications received.

“I am now part of your life. In this place of no boundaries it means our lives roll together. And this is part of the love that links those in life and those in death. I am also creating possibilities and situations in your life here and now.

From this dimension life and death are not separated, and that my friend Kevin partook of my life through the love developed between myself and him. The link was so pronounced that he also experienced my life as I lived it as there were no boundaries.”

You can continue contact with the dead through your dreams

There is yet another level connected with dreams about people we have known in life. This next dream and exploration of the dream shows how we can continue contact with the dead.

 Example: Our son passed away on 12/22/2012. he was 24 years old. Today my 13 year old daughter told me she had a dream last night. She said she was looking in a mirror and saw her brother. She said at first it scared her then she was okay. She said she joined her brother. She said they were on a beach but it was nothing like she had ever seen. She said he was in a bright yellow shirt and tan shorts which she thought was a bit funny because he would have never worn that when he was alive.

She said the first thing she asked him was if there was a hell. She said he told her no but there was a place for those who had done really bad things to learn from them. She said that she asked a bunch of questions that he told her he wasn’t allowed to answer. She said she asked him if he missed everyone and he told her no because he could be with us whenever he wanted to. He told her he could go everywhere. He said both to beautiful and not so beautiful places. It was all his choice. He told her tell everyone he was okay. She also said he looked really good but not quite the same as he did when he was alive.

The above dream is exactly what can happen when we meet someone we love in a dream. Usually people’s minds are so full of beliefs and information that clogs up their ability to have such a clear dream. The mirror is first an indirect contact, but then the girl joined her brother in his experience of death. The answers she was given to her questions are exactly my own findings in regard to death.

Example: Yesterday my wife told me I had been calling out in my sleep, obviously dreaming. She said I had been calling my mother. She described it not as a cry of pain or anger, but as if urgently trying to get my mother’s attention.

My mother had died shortly before this dream, so I tried to explore the feeling of calling to my mother and experienced a spontaneous waking dream of my mother being in something like an old people’s home. She was very withdrawn and non-communicative, and as I explored the feeling of this I sensed she felt as if she had been abandoned and felt resentful and angry about this. She had died from multiple strokes and so was not aware of her process of death.

I could see that in fact she had not been abandoned, but was in a place where she was creating her own environment through her emotions and attitudes. I attempted to communicate with her but she refused to respond at all, and I was unsure if she really was withdrawn to a point where she couldn’t hear me, or if she was angry and so not responding. So I called to her aloud and said she must realise she was dead, not abandoned. She had failed to realise her new condition and so through resentment from feeling we had all left her, had created a growing isolation and barrier to being with others. I explained that if she remembered something of the love she had given and received in life, this would release her from the bondage of her loneliness, and bring her into contact with many people who wanted to be with her who were dead.

Here is a different approach.

Example: Did I tell you my dream about my Mother the day after she died? I kept hearing my name spoken (calling me) just as I’m waking up in the mornings……it was so strong today that I had said, “Yes”   before I realized there was no one here but me.

And another thing…. the phone keeps ringing and no one is there when I pick it up…….it happens too many time to be a wrong number. I am thinking, who is out there trying to contact me? But some experiences give us a much clearer example of contact with our dead.

The following is taken from the writings of D. Stanilav Grof and is a personal experience he met.

 “In one particularly unnerving session a young man suffering from depression found himself in what seemed to be another dimension. It had an eerie luminescence, and although he could not see anyone he sensed that it was crowded with discarnate beings.

Suddenly he sensed a presence very close to him, and to his surprise it began to communicate with him telepathically. It asked him to please contact a couple who lived in the Moravian city of Kromeriz and let them know that their son Ladislav was well taken care of and doing all right.

It then gave him the couple’s name, street address, and telephone number.

The information meant nothing to either Grof or the young man and seemed totally unrelated to the young man’s problems and treatment. Still, Grof could not put it out of his mind. “After some hesitation and with mixed feelings, I finally decided to do what certainly would have made me the target of my colleagues’ jokes, had they found out,” says Grof.

“I went to the telephone, dialled the number in Kromeriz, and asked if I could speak with Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a broken voice: ‘Our son is not with us any more; he passed away, we lost him three weeks ago.’”

Some dreams are showing the state of those we love after death I believe the following dreams can really give a wonderful picture of this.

 I walked around the corner, looked into the room my son was in when he was living here just a few months ago. He was in his bed, on the opposite side he slept on, alone, and sick. His face was pale white with large red areas on his cheeks from fever, he had a thermometer in his mouth which he removed to say, “Ma, I’m really sick.” Maybe he also said he feels terrible, I cant recall that specifically. Most people dream their loved ones smile, or tell ,them they are ok… this dream made me cry, and feel fearful for him. Despite the difficult feeling the mother felt in response to her dream of her dead son, it describes very clearly a stage of after death experience, the burning up of physical desires.

The next dream is even more clear in its symbolism.

 My mother in law just passed on Aug 7th, 2010, she had cancer, and the process of her dying went rather quickly, we are a very close knit family, and my husband, sister in-laws, and especially the grandchildren are really having a hard time with her passing. However, I had this disturbing dream last night. In this dream, I was in a small soft lit room, and in this room around the 4 corners of the wall, there were framed pictures of my mother in law from a baby until adulthood even pictures of when she was ill before she passed. She looked up at me and it was my mother in law, her eyes were bulged and red, and she had tears coming down her face.

The pictures on the wall shows a full life review. This is recognisable what happens when you die. Of course it can be disturbing, after all you are reliving every moment.

Phyllis Atwater, who is an expert on near death experiences, and who has experienced them herself, says:

“For me it was a total reliving of every thought I had ever thought, every word I had ever spoken, and every deed I had ever done; plus, the effect of each thought, word and deed on everyone and anyone who had ever come within my environment or sphere of influence, whether I knew them or not (including unknown passers-by on the street).”

The fever shown in the previous dream is caused by the loss of a physical body. Without body we lose all physical desires, and that can be very difficult for some. It is like burning up of those desires that link your material life. There are other stages that we go through that you can read about in Rudolph Steiner’s Philosophy of Life and Death.

Several months after he started dreaming, Herb received some of the answers to questions he held at the time of his mother’s death. Did his mother have a message for him? Where had she gone? The veil between this life and the next was swept away in a dream:

 I meet my mother as a young woman on a beautiful campus of higher learning, where there is always light. She is playing a violin here in a symphonic orchestra. She tells me that my ability will surpass my hopes and that my dreams will be a large part of the revelation of knowledge which will come through my higher self. “I had read of great Biblical prophets, such as Joseph, who had important dreams,” Herb says, “but I thought such talents were only for men such as he was, and not for such an insignificant person as myself.”

The next show how the dead can be helped by knowledge of the after death state.

My 20-year-old son, Max, died less than a month ago. I had a strong feeling when I first learned of his death that he had remained “earth bound”.

I can’t describe it exactly, but I felt very strongly that because his death was sudden and he wasn’t ready to go that he hadn’t moved on to the other side. I have prayed for a sign from him and he came to me in my dreams the past two nights.

The first night he said he wasn’t dead and I couldn’t convince him otherwise. He even said that he wouldn’t be ready to go for another “year and a half”. But I got to hug him and feel him and it was him. Last night he came to me at my house. He was sitting at the kitchen table and we just talked for a few minutes before I brought up the fact that he HAD to go into the light. He got a bit angry.

Then I told him that I knew about the drugs in Utah and he hung his head in shame. Then I told him he overdosed. At first he disagreed, I began to think about things that I could show him that would make him understand…like stuff from his funeral, but then he understood. Like he knew what I was thinking and was kinda like “don’t bother, I get it.”

I started to cry and we hugged and I began to tell him about all the books that I’ve read on the afterlife so that he wouldn’t be scared. He hugged me and asked me if our souls would always be together and I said yes, that if you’re close on earth that means the souls always stay together.

We left my house then and went to the other side. He was leery of going so I told him that once he got there he would probably see grandma Josephine and grandma Jean and that Baxter, his old dog, would probably even be there. I went further in with him, to try and find the souls he was meant to be with so that he wouldn’t be scared.

As we looked he began to feel more at ease. Drifting away from me and looking for himself. Then a crashing booming voice said something, I don’t remember what, but I knew I had to leave. So I went back to the tunnel that we had come in through and Max came, with another young man, about his age, they were wildly happy, riding what kinda looked like skateboards, but not. He took me back through the tunnel. He said he understood and that the other soul that was there with him was his friend and that they wreak havoc on the other side playing pranks and acting rambunctious.

I started to cry and he hugged me so tight and I told him I loved him so much and he whispered in my ear “I will see you soon”. He was completely calm and not upset anymore…like someone saying, “see you tomorrow” – like time wasn’t a big deal. I watched him skateboard away with the other soul and he turned back and gave me a huge smile and waved and I felt all over that he understood everything now.

The tunnel began to close in…getting smaller and smaller at his end of it so I had to turn around and walk through my side because I had to come back. I knew, even in the dream that I had helped him get there. Was this my sons spirit? Did I help him? I feel it was…and waking up today I feel better. I miss him terribly but I feel like he is safe and where he should be.

I put the above dream in because it is so clearly a healing dream. I know from personal experience what it is like to meet and know the joy you felt in helping your son. I know also that we are almost hypnotised into believing that when someone dies that is the end of them. But there are some dreams that are about the person still alive who is grieving so much it is a real pain to the dead person.

 Example: Perhaps the most common dream experience in spirit communication is related to the message which in essence says, “I am fine and happy. Your grief, however, is holding me back and making me sad. You can help me greatly by trying to overcome your sorrow. You must stop grieving!”

People who grieve because of someone they love has died fail to understand the the person has not gone or left them. In fact, the ‘dead’ person is now more fully aware of those left behind, and is very influenced by what they feel. Please read Ex or a dreamed of ‘soul mate – what can I do?;  Talking with the dead

Death can represent a fading or dying of some aspect of you.

Dreaming of death is often not about the end of your or someone else’s life, but a means of showing how some aspect of your outer or inner life is fading, lost, or being superseded by a changed approach, so may be shown as dying.

Other possibilities are that your love or drive to achieve something might die, and be shown as death in your dreams. The change from adolescence to puberty, or maturity to old age, is also often depicted in a dream as oneself dying. In this case it is a past way of life and identity that is passing away.

Dreaming of a dead body

This shows another aspect of death in dreams. Lost opportunities or unexpressed potentials in you are frequently shown in this way. All of us unconsciously learn attitudes or survival skills from parents and others, or we have a talent or gift that has got buried, denied or even killed out by events.

If these or other facets of our personality are unrecognised or ‘buried’ they may be shown as dead. Sometimes we have killed the child or teenager in us because of difficulties or trauma at those ages, and these may be seen as a dead person in your dream, or even a corpse you find buried.

Some death dreams may show the awakening of new life in the dreamer. For instance, Sue explored a dream in which she was told her baby had died. She woke shaking with grief and tears. When she explored the dream she felt it showed her becoming alive enough to feel the grief of past pain, and the death of her hopes and love in a relationship that had just ended. She had suppressed her pain for so long. In now coming alive enough to feel her emotions, she was feeling at last that something she previously loved had died in her.

If the death is someone we know

Sometimes, as in the example below, this shows a desire to be free of someone; or unexpressed aggression; perhaps one’s love for that person has ‘died’. We often ‘kill’ our parents in dreams as we move toward independence. Or we may want someone ‘out of the way’ so we do not have to compete for attention and love.

 During my teens I was engaged to be married when I found a more attractive partner and was in considerable conflict. Consistently I dreamt I was at my fiancé’s funeral until it dawned on me the dream was telling me I wanted to be free of him. When I gave him up the dreams ceased. Mrs D. 

Death of oneself

Death is an extremely important event facing all of us, and yet it is a mystery, so we often experimentally confront and explore it in our dreams. A dream about one’s own death may also show a retreat from the challenge of life, or a split between mind and body.

The experience of leaving the body is sometimes an expression of this schism between the ego and one’s life processes. Other possibilities are to do with the death of old patterns of living – one’s ‘old self’, the loss of the boundaries that limit your awareness to an identity connected only to your body. This latter is usually a willing surrender of self to the process.

The next examples depict what was mentioned above. It is a way of reminding ourselves to do now what is deeply in us before we die – especially regarding love.

 I dreamt I have a weak heart that will be fatal. It is the practice of doctors in such cases to administer a tablet causing one painlessly to go to sleep – die. I am completely calm and accepting of my fate. But I suddenly realise I must leave notes for my parents and children. I must let them know how much I love them, must do this quickly before my time runs out.’ Mrs M.

Talking with those who have passed on

A friend I know, Sheila, her mother died suddenly about three weeks ago, on the seventh I think. Not knowing this I received a message to ask for healing in her name. I surrendered in LifeStream and experienced dying, rising out of the death of the body, saying farewell to physical experience, meeting in wonder, loved ones, and opening to the pulse of the inner life. I knew from this that Sheila’s mother was dead or dying. When I telephoned I discovered she was dead. Never before had I honestly felt I was in contact with the dead. A new world has opened for me.

I know from personal experience what it is like to talk as the apparently dead to the living. This is because I had an extraordinary out of body experience. I had suddenly felt as if I were shooting upwards and experienced a feeling of coming out of pressure and was now free – like a cork out of a bottle. Then I was awake and looking down at my sleeping body and suddenly felt terrified (I realised afterwards it was terror that I was dying).

Then I remembered reading about experiences such as this and was laughing uncontrollably through release from terror. Then I was travelling across the German countryside where I was living, curled up with my knees to my chest, and found myself standing in our sitting room at home in London. It was such an astonishing experience I stood in shock looking down at my body, feeling it and trying to understand.

My body felt solid and real and I was dressed in outdoor clothes not my pyjamas. Then with great enthusiasm I looked up and saw my mother sitting alone knitting, our Alsatian dog lying asleep in front of the gas fire. I felt sure my mother would see me because I felt physically present and absolutely and vitally awake in a way I had never experienced before.

So I called out to her, “Mum, look what has happened.” She stopped knitting for a moment but obviously didn’t see me or hear me. So I felt if I shouted this would reach her. “Mum” I shouted, “look it’s me Tony”. There was no obvious sign that she had heard me, but two things did happen. One was that I saw or realised that she had an upstairs side of her and a downstairs side. Her upstairs (conscious) side had no awareness of me, but her downstairs side (unconscious) gave me a wonderful welcome and I had the awareness of us knowing each other in a formless love.

Then at the same time my dog must have heard me shout because he woke and came rushing to me and was so full of love for me he rushed around where I stood barking and showing his joy.

I later heard from my mother saying she had had been alone that night as my father was out, and she had seen the dog get up and bark and jump around for no apparent reason. I learned enormous and important lessons from that. I realised that having no physical body the human living cannot usually hear us. They need physical sound to know we are present, but yet another part of her knew and responded. So I saw that if she had thought of me and spoken to me I would know, even though she might not be able to hear my reply – unless she was a medium or learned to listen to thoughts. The reason being that in the body most people cannot communicate via thoughts.

Since then I have learned more and see that whenever we think of the dead with warm feelings we are immediately in their presence. So all you need to do is to imagine them and talk to them, as if you would if they were there physically. Talk to them saying whatever it is you want to communicate.

In dreams you will be able to receive their answers. I learned also that my dog could hear and see me, and that he loved me. I know it sounds simple but it is. Communication with the dead is easy, but we make such a big thing of it. Remember that at death we have no physical organs to speak through, so it all has to be done through thoughts. Also that at the level of thoughts we create huge difficulties by what we think. So a thought such as, “I am not a medium so I cannot talk with my dead son” is like a brick wall that we have created and cannot get through.

Thoughts and imagination are incredible powerful and are real at the level of dreams and the dead – and of course our own inner world. I think that reading this book would help you to clearly tell you about the after death state. http://www.amazon.com/Closer-Light-Melvin-Morse/dp/0804108323/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1307353595&sr=1-1-fkmr0

 Thoughts about death 

There is a disinclination to deeply consider death in North Western culture. What passes for this is the excuse that physical death ends all life, when such a statement is observable not true. Nothing that we can see in the physical world exists outside of evolutionary connections with past objects or forms. Our language, our body, our personality, have all arisen out of what existed previously. The past is obviously alive in the present, so how can there be death to anything except the limited awareness people consider to be themselves, their ego?

Death is the great adventure of the psyche. The great undertaking of individuation takes us into the meeting with our birth and infant traumas. We face the monsters created by our sense of being unloved, of parental desertion or betrayal. The demons of self-doubt, of self-destructiveness, of worldly struggle and fear spring up to meet us on the journey and we have to do battle. The negative habits of our lifetime pull at us or bind us to our past unless we can break free. The instinctive hungers and drives, of reactive fear, challenge us.

Can we take the tiny boat of our self-awareness across their swirling and torrential waters? Can we swim in the whirlpool of desire and use its energy to achieve a new awareness and transcendence? Can we meet the unconscious influences of the archetypes and find some ability not to be lost in them?

Even if we can, after all these great feats, should we find our way through them, lies not an upliftment of our being into wonder – but death! What will we make of it? 

Example: I was walking with my two sons, who were young children about seven and nine. We were in a huge cave like tunnel that was natural, and reasonably light. The boys were running around on a raised bank about five feet high that was against the cave/tunnel wall. They were looking for my mother and father who had gone into some holes of potholes in the cave wall. As they looked I became worried that they would get lost down the holes, especially my youngest son. This was because I called them – shouted for them in my anxiety – to come to me and get away from the holes. I could see Peter and he had stopped searching, but David was out of sight. Then I shouted again very loudly and with an urgent tone, and David came,

I woke at this point and went to the toilet. As I lay down again, thinking about the dream, it seemed obvious it was about death, and the fact my mother and father had gone into the blackness of the hole, and never been seen again. I wondered if the boys searching was to do with my own search in the unconscious for my parents, and what is death? Or now, as I write, whether it is about the danger of death for David.

Semi awake the dream carried on. I called the police and civil authorities to search for my parents. They could find traces of their passage deep down into the holes, but no sign of them. Then I decided to equip myself and go alone. The problem was that the deeper I went, the more inertia I felt. I was then saved myself by the civil authorities.

Then I find my parents in the depths, but they are no longer physical. They have gone deep, like a burrowing creature, to undergo a transformation, and have left physical life.

Example: It seemed a terrifying thing to be dead and descends into a crypt, lifeless and without motivation. Here I felt or experienced a very strong sense almost like a dead body, if it had awareness, might feel in a crypt.

This is quite difficult to describe. I suppose what I was experiencing was a sort of ready made or social image of death. The sort of fears we have about it. It had in it the sense of dust, decay and cobwebs – the quiet dead silence of the tomb. But here, right in the midst of death, I had the sense of eternal life, of resurrection. It seemed to me as if you could not have one without the other, and this was the meaning in Christian doctrine where it says you must experience death to be reborn.

I am not sure if it was at this point that many images of the mixture of death and birth came on me. I had the experience that one needed to be bitten by the snake and die before one can be reborn into that transcendent life.

But what came next was a long experience of exploring the view of life arising out of being a biological bag of water, wind, and shit. This went on for image after image of rampant wet sexuality or eating, of seeing nothing in life except physical existence. Again it is difficult to describe because of the huge variety of the images and scenes. I suppose the underlying thing I was searching for in this series of feelings and images of the very physical side of life, such as eating and fucking, and the question was, is this all there is?

There was an underlying morbidity in what I saw and felt. I think it is all summed up in the much used phrase, “Life’s a bitch and then we die”. But I think my view that I wanted to find the transcendental in all the aspects of life, but it was difficult within the way I was looking at these feelings or parts of life experience.

I thought, or at least I came to the conclusion, that they expressed the preoccupation with the body and the physical that most of us have in present times. We are preoccupied with the physical and with examining it in detail. We are all trying to arrive at an understanding of the meaning of things, of death, through this minute examination of the physical world. The longer I was involved in these images, the more it seemed ridiculous in the light of everyday knowledge that all things rely on each other, and that everything exists as an integrated part of the cosmos.

The theme of the dream then changed. The day before this session I had a long conversation with B. She had described some of the people she works with or cares for in the old people’s home. B. had described how frightened some of the people are of dying. Although they had lived a long and varied life, they had still not come to terms with death. In the dream I realised I was looking for some way of communicating certainty about the goodness of death to B. I wanted to be able to look her in the eye and tell her she would be cared for.

Tracing it back, when we go into death through the jaws of the hunter, the lion, what do we meet? If we go back far enough we discover not anger or lust, but the lion’s desire to feed its cubs, or to survive. We find ourselves back in, back behind things. Behind the snake, behind this tiger, behind the human being, behind the decay. If we go back far enough we find ourselves in the awareness of the pack, in the species, in the formative forces of survival and reproduction that lies behind things. We find ourselves in that mystery, in the jungle where the essence of life pervades the various forms.

From that place the viewpoint that we are nothing but a physical form, that we are a small cog in the wheels of life, that we must put up with what we have, seems ridiculous. From that place we look at ourselves and see what a fantastic piece of equipment our body and mind is. As a conscious person we are right in the middle of everything. To say, “Oh God, we are nothing but a piece of slime, a helpless pawn in the hands of destiny,” is ridiculous. We are the culmination of everything that has existed before. We are that growing tip, that exploring awareness, in touch with unimaginable potential. We are everything that can be. What can we do?

The walking dead or rigor mortis

Aspects of the dreamer that are denied, perhaps through fear. Dancing with or meeting death or dark figure: Facing up to death and experiencing or exploring possible ways of relating to it. Death of someone close to us:

As explained above, this often refers to one’s own feelings or talents that have been hurt, denied, or ‘killed out’ by events and your response to them. The following example illustrates this.

 ‘My son comes in and I see he is unwashed and seems preoccupied and as if he has not cared for himself for some days. I ask him what is wrong. He tells me his mother is dead. I then seem to know she has been dead for days, and my two sons have not told anyone. In fact, my other son has not even accepted the fact.’ Anthony.

Anthony is a divorcee. Processing the dream, he realised the two sons are ways he is relating to the death of his marriage – the children’s mother.

 McCall recalls dreaming about her father a month after he died in September 2000. She was at a joyous community gathering where a hot air balloon was being launched. She saw her father sitting on a bench with her sister, in front of a church. “He was talking and laughing just as he had been in life. He was always the life of the party.” She leaned over to her sister and asks, “Dad’s so funny. Does he know he’s dead?” “Yes, I think he does,” her sister answers.

To McCall, the dream was powerful and healing. “It made me feel that he was OK.” Although the unconscious has a very real sense of its eternal nature and continuance after physical death, our conscious personality seldom shares this. Also we all we all carry within us ideas, behaviours, talents and ways of life from those now dead. The farmer today unconsciously uses the collective experience of humanity in farming. What innovation he does today his children or others will learn and carry into the future.

This aspect of a life beyond the physical is shown in many dreams. For instance, a man I knew dreamt of walking with a friend of his. As they walked they came to a river. The friend crossed, but the dreamer was unable to. Even in the dream he felt crossing the river meant his friend had died. Some time later he discovered that his friend had died at about the time he experienced the dream.

As the dream points out, the friend died, but continued another type of life ‘across the river’. A woman told a similar dream to me. Her teenage son came down to breakfast looking very unhappy. When she asked him why he said he had a dream that deeply disturbed him. In it he was walking with a friend and the friend walked through a door. When her son tried to follow he could not pass through the door.

They could not find a rational explanation for the dream, but on arriving at school, her son heard that his friend had been killed in a motorbike accident on his way to school. The river and the door are often used in this way, suggesting a change to another dimension of life usually unreachable by the living.

 

Idioms: Dead and buried; dead from the neck up/or neck down; dead to the world; play dead; dead to the world; dead tired; drop dead; stone dead; at death’s door; brush with death; death wish; kiss of death; sick to death.

Useful questions and hints:

What feelings about death does this dream highlight?

If I imagined the dream being carried forward, how would I change it? (For help doing this see Taking the Dream Forward.)

Am I changing and my past self dying?

If this is someone I know what are my feelings about them – and where are those feelings arising in me at the moment?

What part of myself have I killed?

Did an aspect of my potential get buried or killed in the past – if so what?

 

See: Life and Death; Life After Death; The Archetype of Rebirth or Resurrection – Life and Death – An Amazing Near Death Experience – Death and Dreams – Levels of Awareness in Waking and Dreaming – Near Death Experiences Journal.