What We Need to Remember About Dreaming

In reading the many dreams you are sending in, I am reminded again and again that we have been brought up to be afraid of life. We believe that there is nothing in us apart from our conscious self, our ego, which has become almost the most important thing.

So I feel a need to point out some facts about life – your life.

Some Facts About Dreaming and Life

1. Dreams are a magical mirror in which your innermost hopes, longings, fears/terrors and genius are made real. They are made real as external environments, people, animals and relationships. Unfortunately this wonderful virtual reality world is usually felt as dealing with other people, as externals, like something that can damage us, or something like the Devil that can possess us. But the greatest truth I have found in exploring dreams – not interpreting them – is that we are alone with ourselves in the world of our dream. If we can acknowledge and admit that our terrors we dream are actually our past hurts that we have not faced presenting themselves for us to heal; that the ghosts and demons that can rampage about our night are embodiments of our fears and ideas presented to us as truths; that our wonderful visions and insights are an expression of our own infinite potential, then we can walk a pathway to finding what we really are. Audio Introduction to Exploring a Dream
2. If you imagine for a moment that you live alone in a world, and you people  it with your imagination, fuelled by what you feel, fear, despise, love and fear; and all those people  in your dream world become real and interact with you. Then you build surroundings out of the same things, animals too. But you do not realise what you are doing, and you take it to be really independent people and animals. The things that frighten you like falling and being shot to are made of the same stuff and are harmless. What you do not realise also is that this is your own inner world brought to life. It is not an imaginative fantasy, but a real representation of the world you live in ‘inside you’ a mirror in which usually unacceptable or unconscious truths are shown.
3. No person is the same, and everyone starts from a different place in their growth, so you cannot give anyone one path to tread. So dreams are all so individual and start you from where you are.
4. Dreams are virtual realities that we create in our sleep. Even the wonderful dreams of God and angels are an external virtual reality, and mirror of our own inner immensity and our enormous variety. Unfortunately people either accept them as externally real, or as fantasy. But they are reflections of your potential, that cannot be seen in your daily life so dominated by your   physical senses, hungers and fears. So the images and fears we experience in our dreams are projection upon the vast screen of our mind. They are all projections from you. Running from them is like trying to escape from yourself. See Autonomous Complexes.
5. In life and sleep we have two powerful actions working in us. The first is our waking experience based on having a body, its limitations, vulnerabilities and a particular gender. Our second is the power that gave us life and continues to express as dreams.
6. While we sleep our conscious self is largely or totally unconscious, and while we sleep our voluntary muscles are paralysed – so another will or motivating force moves our body. So we have a Conscious Will, and what I will call a Life Will. The first one we have experience of as we can move our arm or speak; but the second will takes over when we sleep.
7. This Life will can move us to speak, to move our body, and in fact do things that we cannot do with our Conscious Will. As Freud pointed out this inner will has full access to our memories. It can do so many other things that are described else where – See ESP in Dreams; Edgar Cayce.
8. This Life Will or motivator has been active for millions of years and we see it working all the time in animals. We are partly split in half because we are often opposed to what our Life Will in us wants. So the only way to express what is good for us is in dreams when our conscious will is largely passive.
9. Life Will created your body and pre-existed you as a person you know today. It was working in you prior to your ability to speak or know in the way you do now. But of course it has fantastic wisdom and skills, as can be seen in animals.
10. Life, if you look around you at Life’s creatures, can take any form. So Life itself is without form. In fact the recent advances in quantum physics suggest that what gives us existence is beyond space and time – beyond understanding.
11. So dreams do not come from the human unconscious, but from the formless origins of Life. To express in a way that is understandable to us as a person with limited understanding, dreams use all the common imagery and ideas. So people who say that dreams are a mish mash of common everyday events are mistaken. See Levels of Awareness in Sleeping and Waking.
12. Our core self can be explained by realising that we are all dependent on the universe. We often feel that the universe is way beyond our understanding, but a few simple facts may help. The first is that the universe as we know it began with what has been called the Big Bang. But before that there was a situation prior to the creation of time and space. That situation is very much like the experience of Edgar Cayce who had an awareness reaching beyond time and space. But that original situation prior to the Big Bang, as it were died in the formation of our universe with time and space. But that enormous explosion created everything we know and experience, every atom and form of energy. So at the heart of all matter, all life is that condition of timeless and spaceless existence. In fact modern quantum physics hints at it.
13. In the world of dreams our most intimate fears and longings are given an exterior life of their own in the form of the people, objects and places of our dream. Therefore our sexual drive may be shown as a person and how we relate to them; or given shape and colour as an object; or given mood as a scene. Our feeling of ambition might thus be portrayed as a business person in our dream – our changing emotions as the sea or a river; while the present relationship we have with our ambition or emotions is expressed in the events or plot of the dream.
14. You cannot be killed in a dream. All you can experience is the anguish and perhaps fear of dying, but in dreams you cannot die – or drown, or burn or any other threatening thing. We make the mistake of taking our very real values from our outer life into our inner life of dreams.
15. In dreams, what ever moves away from you in our dreams is going out of your life; and whatever moves toward you is emerging into consciousness. Whatever it is that is coming toward us is giving us something whether it is energy, insight, or a frightening dream that is trying to shock us to wake up and clear out the inner mess we are in.  The fact we give it a frightening image is because we are brought up to be scared of ourselves and to not trust Life/God. If you know the tenets of the AA, you will see that is what they are about – to trust Life.
16. Most people are frightened of life. I see this in so many dreams sent in. They do not trust themselves to the powerful action of Life flowing through them. See Life’s Little Secrets.
17. We have been brain washed to believe that our existence depends upon nothing but accidental events, the survival of the fittest, the chemical and biological mechanical actions. Yet every time I have gone deeply into my ‘unconscious’ and yet maintained awareness, I have found a wonderful power of Life there.
18. So if your dreams frighten you, I want to say you are frightened of something wonderful that has grown you and enlarged your experience of yourself. The thing that was full of fear was your own fear put into an image, and yet was a wonderful gift that you avoided receiving.
19. I too was full of fears and often woke up screaming. Then I learned to trust Life. It is like learning to swim. So please go back into your dream and let the fearful thing be fully experienced instead of waking up in fear. Then it will unveil itself as a thing of light and love.

Examples of fear and Pleasure in Dreams

Here is an example of something I experiencing with my wife ‘H’: “We can run from pleasure and wider insight, just as much as from pain or fear.

On the first night I slept with my present wife I noticed she struggled with her breathing. While she was asleep I spoke to her suggesting she would relax and allow her breathing to be easy. Within moments she responded. This encouraged me and I suggested her whole body would relax, and the barriers within her dissolve, allowing Life to heal and bring her well-being. Within ten minutes she suddenly awoke and told me a dream. She was at the rear of a house sunbathing with her family, feeling very relaxed and happy. As she sank into the enjoyment waves, like a tidal wave began to roll up her body. The pleasure was so intense she couldn’t take any more and woke up.

This is an example of how we are afraid of life, but it is a wonderful illustration also of how dreams use imagery.

An Experience of Meeting Life

Many years ago I had an experience that assured me the wrongness of believing the scientific view of human life. At the time I had an unforgettable experience of lucidity that after all these years remains a fount of inspiration and guidance. I had relaxed deeply and entered a state of lucidity in which I felt like I was falling down a very deep hole. This wasn’t frightening, but reminded me of Alice in the rabbit hole. As I fell I passed through memories of things that had hurt me during my life, like the time I broke my nose. Then I hit the bottom, experiencing a womblike feeling of great peace. I realised as I observed, that it wasn’t the womb, but the very basic level of my personal awareness. But there was still a current carrying me back further, and I resisted, fearing I would lose my identity. Then I suddenly realised there was nothing to fear. After all, I did this every time I went to sleep – trusting myself to the bosom of the deep. So I slipped into what I have called the ocean of consciousness, and it caught me and started growing me as if from a tiny seed. I knew as this happened that it was this power that had grown me in the first place, and that there was so much more of me to discover than I presently knew. Then the immense Life spoke to me. “Come to me each day like this (with an open heart to the power that had grown me) and I will know myself in you.” See People’s Experience of LifeStream.

Western science has in the past painted a picture for us that suggested nature and the universe is one vast impersonal and almost mechanical process. When you travel beyond the frontier of your own personality and contact the life that gives you existence, a completely different viewpoint emerges. What you find is the mysterious love that leads a crocodile mother to carry her babies in her mouth unharmed. You discover the wonder that drives birds to fly hundreds or thousands of miles to an exact location to mate again with their dedicated partner. You meet the indescribable beauty that lies behind a flower’s miracle of colour and intricacy. You meet the creative impulse of the universe that has woven your being throughout eternity. You exist beyond Time and Space.