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Back to the Forum 2006
Archives I have heard people claim they never dream. I don't believe them. Research has shown that everyone dreams. At least, the researchers have found no exceptions to date. I believe everyone has dreams and some people just don't recall them upon waking. I knew one person who claimed he never dreamed and I surmised, by talking with him a reason. I suspect his dreams were so horrible he blocked their memory from his conscious mind. Intellectually he was top notch, but emotionally he was a basket case. He died rather young of a massive stroke. My guess is, stress put his blood pressure out of sight and precipitated the stroke. I always dream and I remember my dreams for a short time after waking. If I want to remember them for more that a few minutes I must record them. The memories fade rapidly. At one period, I wrote down a whole series of dreams over several weeks. I used them in an attempt at self analysis. Dr. Jung has pointed out that analyzing just one dream can be very misleading. It is necessary to have several dreams for any patterns to emerge. This analysis was somewhat successful for me in that I came to understand myself a bit better. Now, I still have dreams, but I no longer record them. Even so, sometimes my soul-self will make a point that I do remember and act on. These usually have to do with current problems I am dealing with and take the form of unique solutions. They are like the gestalt one gets when an optical illusion suddenly shifts and murky things become clear. We usually say, oh, of course! Recently, I have had another unusual change in my dreams. Somehow, while the dream is happening, I will know I am dreaming. I will say something like, "This is only a dream and I can wake up now." I can wake up, but I don't have to. I can let the dream go on for a while. I am not in conscious control and I don't know what will happen next, but the dream does go on. It seems very similar to Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass." I don't really know if it is a true dream of just my imagination going off, but then, what is a true dream? I'm not sure I could give an acceptable definition. To me, a dream state is quite similar to the state of consciousness described by psychics or clairvoyants. There is a different perspective on the universe. Everything is connected to everything else and it kind of all flows together. The whole experience becomes more of a process and less of a separate series of events. Time and space are not as rigid as they normally are. It is as though the rules of Newton and Euclid are suspended and replace by something similar to the rules of the Einsteinian universe. I have also had very short experiences like this in my meditations. Regardless, when I am in this kind of dream state, I often encounter people from my past. Some of them, I know have long since died. Others have just drifted out of my active life, but there they are, walking, talking, and participating. In one case while this was going on, I got a real surprise. One living person who had just been in my dream sent me a psychic email. That's the only way I can describe it. She said very sharply and clearly, "Stay out of my dream!" As I said, it was a real surprise, so much so that I did not respond for a while. Since it was a dream state, I don't know how long that while was. My first thought was one of indignation. After all, this was my dream, not hers. I was not in her dream, she was in mine. When I did respond, I said as much. I don't know exactly how I sent a psychic email, but I sent one. This is approximately what I said: I was not in your dream, you were in my dream. I did not invite you, you just showed up. If you don't want to encounter me, stay in your own version of the dream world and don't come into mine. That's all I said. Psychic email is even more brief than regular email with a much better reason than just laziness. It takes an enormous amount of psychic energy to send a psychic email. Another downside is you are never sure the message got through. Even when people get one they are not likely to admit it in public. The major upside to this form of communication is it is impossible to intercept the message. It seems to contain a target specific component or code. It either gets to the intended target or it gets nowhere. That gets us to the other upside. Spammers can never get your psychic email address. I think people have to know you pretty well to decode your address. After I woke up completely, I thought about my psychic email and thought I could have said more. If I had enough psychic energy, I might have added the following: From your ego perspective my reply may seem rude, but when I talk to you in your dreams I must talk to your total-self. I cannot just talk to your ego-self. You ego-self is the part of you that would like to shut out the rest of the universe. Your total-self includes your soul-self which is aware there is more to the universe than your tight little Newtonian - Euclidian closed world where everything is quantifiable and predictable. In your dreams, your total-self, knowing the truth, will wander. I believe that is how you came to wander into my dream. It was not an accident. Your soul-self brought you here. Instead of getting indignant, you may want to consider why that happened. I suspect your soul-self wants you to discover something. I believe you are no different than me in that regard. When I pay attention to my dreams, I usually find there is a lesson or message hidden in the confusion of patterns and events which constitute a dream. Perhaps, as happened with me, you soul-self wants you to cross a line. I think you know the line I'm talking about. Years ago, you made a choice. You chose a nice safe predictable world. You chose to pretend no other world view was possible. I also lived in that world. I tried for years to live completely in a world where everything was measurable and quantifiable, an engineers world. It was a world where the shortest distance between two points was always a straight line. I was pretty much forced by events in my own life to change my perspective and begin to grow. Now you too come wandering over the line, through the looking glass, into this world view. In this world view nothing is predictable and the shortest distance between two point is not necessarily a straight line. It is very interesting, very exciting, and very scary. If you don't like that, stay on your own side of the line. I cannot stay out of your dreams, but you can keep me out by staying in your world. If you insist on wandering into this world view, since we seem to have an affinity for each other, you will find me. You will also find many other things that will annoy you. Everything flows into everything else here. There are no boundaries. Your tidy little rules do not apply. In this world, you can start out for a nice walk down Apple Blossom Lane and suddenly find yourself walking on Ghetto Street without knowing how you got there. It's not necessarily a straight line. On Ghetto Street, you cannot pretend your nice safe upper-middle-class suburban community is all there is to reality. The ghetto is right there in your face. Think it through. If you really want to come into this view I will welcome you, but not on your terms. You cannot make up your own rules here. You cannot build a nice little corner and hide in it. This world view has its own rules and you must learn them. You must enter this world view on the terms it establishes. I did not make up those rules. I am just trying to understand them. It's fun. It's like learning a new science or a new language. It has its own rules and exceptions. It has its own flow and logic. So come on in if you like. Come into this dream. Come on in and play a scary, but interesting and exciting, game. Maybe you will learn something. Maybe I will learn something. Maybe we will learn something together. This invitation to enter this dream world is not just for the person who invaded my dream. It is an invitation to everyone. It is not just from me. I believe it is an implicit invitation from the universe and is an offer to turn our dreams into a different way of seeing. I believe this different view is closer to reality. Perhaps Castaneda was more right than any of us realized. His books suggested our dreams can be controlled by us and dreams can become tools of growth. Maybe, if we are patient and diligent we can turn this into
a form of meditation. If we could do that, we would have a new
alternate path toward God Awareness. We might grow and move toward
our real goal. The real goal is not to dream of human greatness,
but to become Homo Deus.
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