*Dream World

“We are such stuff As dreams are made on;and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.” Shakespeare, The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158

When I was a little girl, I had epic dreams, night after night. Sometimes they spiralled down into nightmares of the most horrific kind and I would wander into my parents’ bedroom in the dark in search of solace. There had been nothing in my life to date to warrant the machinations of the mind that I was getting. My life was stable and happy. I had a lovely complete family around me and all seemed well. So from where was I sourcing the material about which to dream?

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 1, scene 5, 159–167

As I grew older, the dreams kept up a lively pace, and some of them were understandable, while the majority remained a complete mystery to me. I learned to live with them, discussed them with no-one and just kept going. By the time I was about forty, they were prolific and even more emotionally charged, adventurous and elaborate. This surreal aspect of my life had been accompanied by one other phenomenon, which was painful and debilitating – migraine attacks.

Then I had a mid-life crisis, where just about everything I had known and relied on as the constructs of my life collapsed around me. After the climax of that crisis had passed I gradually recovered. During that time, for a short while, I slept all day and stayed awake all night. Then I became psychic. (I was not and never have been ‘psychotic’)

I could see in a very different way, non-physical things and the symbolic overtones of material existence, and I had out-of-body experiences where I was fully conscious. It was because of these OBEs that I knew my consciousness operated away from my body. I was over here, thinking, in a conversational way, to myself. And my body, which I could see physically, was over there, fast asleep. And I could go right away from it, visiting other places. The mode of transport was thought. But travel was outside of time – instant. I could also accurately dream future events, into which I stepped, later in time.

I met someone in 1991who changed my life regarding this – Dr. Serena Ronay Dougal, a psychiatrist and healer, who gave a talk on dreams and lucid dreaming. After that I really started to tap into what my dreams meant, and most of them stopped, especially the nightmares. The ones that kept coming were very different in nature, and very interesting.

Next, I discovered that all the major planets in my birth chart were in the night-time hours. This seemed to be having a direct influence on how I related to the world. I have had nocturnal tendencies most of my life. I am captivated by the night sky. I am a ‘day-dreamer’. I love to go for a walk in the dark. I have often journeyed out at night and enjoyed the silence of a world at sleep. I love driving in the early hours of the morning. I write late into the night.

After all this my migraines stopped.

I had never really thought of myself as having a particular gift, but looking back, I can see that this talent for dreaming has given me a source of enlightenment. It is a source of inspiration, imagination, different perspectives on things and I have learned the value of symbolism. I believe it is the language of our spirit. It is the language of religion, of energy and dimensional mathematics, of spiritual knowledge, of the esoteric wisdom that has been passed down through the centuries and every aspect of the natural world. And all those aspects of the visible and unseen world communicate through our dreams, in a language of pure symbolism, which is colourful, exciting, adventurous, alarming, magnificent and dramatic – just like an epic film. Stories and metaphors are the writer’s art of using a language of symbology that speaks directly to the spirit.

The scientific fraternity would like to convince us that a dream is just the brain having aberrations – chemical reactions, electrical impulses firing off randomly, or the memory replaying like a badly recorded video, and none of the content of a dream important.

“To sleep — perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub!

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,” Shakespeare, Hamlet (III, i, 65-68)

Surely, dreaming has to be more than the functions of the physical brain. And dreaming has to have a purpose. If the brain is the processor, a bio-computer, and the physical senses help us respond, what are we responding to, and why? The MIND, known as the aspect of our thinking processes, may not be in the brain, as I experienced when it was active outside of my body. We are all far more than bio-electronic machines, and we all know it. Each of us seems to be able to use our minds in different ways, sometimes to great and important effect and sometimes for nothing much at all. It seems we can choose.

If the mind is a link – like a telephone cord from a transmitter to a receiver – who, what or where is the transmitter and likewise, the receiver? Perhaps both the body and the spirit can transmit both ways, via the mind. Thought is an electro-energetic pulse, a vibration, travelling via the mind. When thoughts are received they arrive like ideas, inspiration, revelations, and they appear to come ‘out of thin air’, ‘out of the blue’, or ‘off the top of your head’. When thoughts are created from inside, from fears, worries, anger, jealousy, regret or hurt, or pre-occupation with the mundane, they are transmitted but where do they go and what effect do they have?

Studies have shown that when we are asleep these thought processes continue without our conscious or physical participation. Sleep developed during our evolution, probably to give us time off at night when we couldn’t see what we were doing and perhaps to digest food. Some animals evolved night vision to capitalise on the dark hours, probably because it was cooler, and they sleep, and dream, during the day.

When this communication is very active but the information does not filter through to the conscious mind, it can cause difficulties, and pain. It is as though we are asleep when we are awake and awake when we are asleep. I think this is what happened to me. I didn’t know how to externalise the thoughts I was receiving. It was only when my life was disrupted and my nights and days were reversed, that I finally ‘woke up’.

Many spiritual awakenings occur after a personal crisis, when the individual experiences a breakdown of some description. This is followed by a new lease of life with radical changes in thoughts and beliefs. Occasionally a mental disorder or anomaly in an individual brings forth a new concept or perception.

NANCY TAPPE

One example is Nancy Tappe, who had a rare brain disorder called synaesthesia. Because of this her perceptions allowed her to experience life conceptually, not logically. She could taste shapes, and see personality types as colours, 15 in all. Then one day she noticed a new colour, Indigo, but it was only from babies. She realised that a new type of personality was being born. (Approx 30 yrs ago).

http://www.psychicchildren.co.uk/1-2-TheIndigoChildren.html

MANDY DE WAAL

Another example is described by this well know journalist, while she was experiencing a mild stroke.

“In that moment I knew that there are two parts to my being. There is the gross physical aspect, which is intimately wedded to my logical brain, which in itself is intimately wedded to my ego. You can think of this as the incessant chatter that fills your being and the mechanical advisory part that tells your body how to function. Then there is another part, an amazing part of who you are. It is as quiet as a whisper. It is huge and expansive. For me the experience of feeling this part was almost like being pure love. In those brief couple of seconds I was the world and the world was me. I was unafraid, and filled with awe and an incredible sense of joy and wonder and connectedness. The experience was huge, almost too much for one small body to contain.” (Mandy de Waal)

http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/ go to subjects a-z, go to ‘s’, click on strokes.

JILL BOLTE TAYLOR

Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuro-anatomist (brain researcher) and she had a serious stroke. Fate gave her a rare research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for. During her brain haemorrhage she witnessed herself, as the motion, speech, self-awareness brain functions shut down one by one. You can watch her video online.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

The practice of meditation, prayer, or quiet solitude in Nature can provide a time when the chattering mind can be switched off and we can hear our received, higher thoughts. Occupations like walking, writing, composing music, inventing, exploring, or doing art, also allows our Higher Knowledge and creative channelling to come through.

If dreams were not important, I am sure they wouldn’t happen. I have been inspired, entertained, intellectually stretched, exhausted and enlightened by my dreams. I have had dreams, in very clear detail, in full techno-colour but also dark, misty elusive grey dreams. I have danced, skated and run, several inches off the ground and willed myself into an upward spiral to fly like Superman. I have learned what I was worried about in my dreams and I have also learned that my mind is definitely not in my body. I went to India once, in a dream, and met a beautiful young woman doctor, who showed me the poor and sick, and her apothecary, all in hundreds of blue-painted little drawers. She had long black hair and wore a turquoise silk sari. When I woke up I was exhausted and it took a few moments to move. I have never been to India, in my body.

This seems to be an important aspect of lucid dreaming – being in a temporary paralysis. It has been proved that there is a small part of the brain that is responsible for keeping us physically still while we journey to the world of dreams, to protect us perhaps, or maybe to limit us, or even to keep us in this world while we travel to another. I don’t know.

I do know that before I could understand and work with my dreams I experienced a lot of pain. My nightmares seemed to be a gathering of the detritus of life, monstrous beings set on destruction and hopeless situations in which I was imprisoned. When I looked around me, I could see these things were real for some people, but they were nothing to do with me in this life. How could I imagine them so completely? How can any of us imagine something we have not experienced? Would not an un-experienced scenario appear as a flat, two-dimensional, lifeless and unfeeling picture with no meaning?

My personal reflections on dreams do not prove anything, but we have adopted the word dream to mean more than what happens to our mind while we are asleep. To have a dream is to have the imagination to envisage something that is not yet manifest. To dream up a new scheme, plan or course of action, implies that to not have the imagination to change things, keeps us in a lower place. And the ultimate dream is of a nirvana, a Utopia, a heavenly state where all the struggles, horrors and pain of this world disappear and we can exist in beauty, grace, peace and happiness.

Famous inventors, composers, scientists, mathematicians, and more have discovered new concepts, answers to problems, and new and beautiful creations to delight the world, through their dreams. I have gone to sleep with a crossword clue in my mind and the answer is there in the morning, without any effort.

Dreaming for an answer is a personal faculty of mine, which I don’t think is difficult, but then I could be called a professional dreamer – I can dream for other people. I put it down to the fact that my conscious memory is not adequate to retain information, facts or figures and so I store it somewhere else, to be retrieved later, or I visit a facility where all information is kept, like a library, and look in a reference book, or ask an expert.

RUDOLPH STEINER talked of the ‘Akashic records’, an esoteric concept of a record of all-that-is for all-of-time.

“From his clairvoyant reading of the Akashic Record – the cosmic memory of all events, actions, and thoughts – Rudolf Steiner was able to speak of aspects of the life of Jesus Christ that are not contained in the four biblical Gospels.” (The Fifth Gospel, by Rudolph Steiner)

The imaginative mind can perhaps use the idea of a library, or wise being, or a data file in some etheric form, where all knowledge can be accessed. I wonder if this is not a use of our DNA, the coded molecular blue-print of all living things. But that suggests that it is a store of what has been, all the way back through our evolution. What about what hasn’t happened yet? Or has it happened as a potential happening, and just not brought into time yet?

Are our imaginings only constructs from the building blocks of what we already know, or can we bring into play a completely new concept, image or creative thought? Whether we understand the exact mechanics of dreaming or not, I encourage and invite everyone to at least take notice of their dreams; to extract any vital message, revelation or new knowledge from them and bring it to the table of discovery for the world to delight in.

“When you wish upon a star,

Makes no difference who you are,

Anything your heart desires

Will come to you.

If your heart is in your dream,

No request is too extreme,

When you wish upon a star

As dreamers do.

Fate is kind

She brings to those who love

The sweet fulfilment of

Their secret longing.

Like a bolt out of the blue,

Fate steps in and sees you through,

When you wish upon a star,

Your dreams come true.

Wendy Salter

(original writing)