A debate

[Akashic_Librarian]

What is a dream? What is a dream MADE of? How can they exist? Do they have meaning? Is there a difference between waking reality and Dreaming reality?

I put the questions forward in the hope we can get a healthy debate going.

[escogido]

I'll observe then only :lol:

[cainam_nazier]

What is a dream.....Well weather you are aware for it or not a dream is just a series of images and sensations occurring in the mind.

How can they exist? That is actually an easy one to answer, in my opinion. The brain really never shuts off. I don't think it can. If it were to power down like the rest of the body I think that there would be complications, maybe even death.

Do they have meaning? Not all, some maybe. But as with most things dreams are a very personal thing. What has meaning to me may mean absolutly nothing to you. The real question has to do with precog dreams. Are they really precognative or are they just a series of possible actions that you are thinking about taking the next day/week. Are you the one ensuring that those events happen?

The differance between dreams and reality? This is some what of a fun one to answer. There is little differance for some people. Thought, physical sensations, and emotions can all be the same in dreams and reality. Some would argue that in dreams all the information and sensations are internally generated. They would say that in reality the information and sensations you take in are externally generated. But you can have a dream that is so real that you think it is reality. The only real differance between dreams and reality as that with reality you have nothing to wake up to.

[kiwibonga]

[My gigantic post of the month; welcome to my brain]

A dream is a scientific term for something that is not well understood... Scientists say that a dream actually lasts for less than 10 seconds despites the feeling that it took place over several minutes or even hours -- that is based on EEG recordings.

In my opinion, a dream occurs when the consciousness is shifted out of the physical and the etheric body is in an expanded state. In this state, we are located slightly above the physical, inside a subtle energy vehicle that is still attached to the physical body. It feels a bit like projecting "into a screen." When we drift off to sleep, we experience this shift automatically.

In the dream state, we are actually projecting inwards, but not necessarily too far from the physical. One thing is sure -- what the "dream body" experiences is not directly reported to the brain, it is periodically downloaded to the brain throughout the night.

The body exits deep sleep and goes into the "REM state" ; I find it very logical that the memory download happens during that time frame, because how deep a sleeper goes seems to also measure how far away dimensionally they are from the physical. In the REM state, the body actually takes the time to exit deep sleep and go back to near-wakefulness, with intense brain activity (read: instantaneous memory recording).

The most puzzling part of dreams is the memory part... I'm currently playing around with this idea that our memory is actually stored out of body, and what the physical brain stores is not the memories themselves but "pointers" to an infinite-sized memory bank in another dimension.

You've probably heard about how kids who have been playing a musical instrument since they were little have certain areas of the brain that are over-developed compared to others, i.e. a violinist has a bigger area of the brain dedicated to the pinky finger than someone who has never touched a musical instrument. This is what scientists refer to as "neuroplasticity" -- the ability the brain has to reshape itself to enable faster and more reliable control over memories and movement for tasks that are repeated often.

Normally, we store things in a "short term" memory that fades away with time. The transformation of short term memory into long term memory is done by repeated action.

I would be inclined to think that our ability to remember dreams stems directly from this phenomenon. Our memories are usually concentrated for the most part in recordings of our physical existence. By keeping a dream journal and using our brain to remember dreams often, we teach the brain to better tap into other zones of our memory banks, namely things that did not happen during waking life, but in other dimensions of the self.

In order to "nurture" this ability, we usually use affirmations and strong intentions to remember before sleep, and avidly record everything upon waking -- we are telling our "other-wordly consciousness" to remember to write back pointers to memories of when we were gone from the physical. That is why, if you remember dreams every night for one week straight and then "lower your guard," you will most likely lose the ability to remember dreams ; you need to force the brain to "encode" this ability into long term memory by repeated practice.

Some people who write down their dreams every day seem to lose the ability too, though... I think their problem may be that they are so used to writing down and forgetting that they don't concentrate on the really important part -- replaying and visualizing dream events in your head. You really have to hang on to those memories when you wake up, otherwise they will go away, and your brain will not learn to store them!

That's slightly off topic, but it brings me to "what are dreams?"

Dreams are, simply put, memories of an out of body experience. The experience does not necessarily occur in the RTZ or the astral, all that can be known is that they are the remnants of events that happened beyond the physical consciousness.

"I dreamt" is simply a way of saying "I had an out of body experience, but I was not fully conscious"

When we sleep, we shift into a consciousness that:

1. Has no physical body or brain, therefore it does not need to remember things, everything is recorded and can be accessed by simple intention. Heck, things are not even recorded -- remember that there is no such thing as time outside the physical ; every event just "is" and can be accessed regardless of when or where it occured.

2. Can experience events of a non-physical nature, events that have absolutely no meaning to an earthling.

What this means is that when we reintegrate the body periodically throughout the night (during REM), two problems arise:

First, the consciousness has no intent to write anything to the brain ; there is no reason to do it since there is no fear of losing the memories. Young children reportedly remember dreams more than adults, yet they also have plenty of non-physical adventures that they will never remember. They face an even bigger problem than adults -- they have to learn that in order to progress, they need to store memories in physical consciousness, something that does not occur immediately, and explains why most people have little or no (physical) memory of their early years.

Second, the physical can only receive information it understands -- this means that events need to be related to the five senses, and also, the brain must be able to relate to dream elements. There is an anomaly during the memory download process which causes severe reality fluctuations -- the brain employs a kind of "nearest neighbor" rule when it interprets unknown symbols.

Just observe what happens when you see a new object (or person) for the first time. The first reflex is to match it to something that is known. When you realize you cannot make sense of it, you automatically start identifying characteristic elements and create a new "record" in your memory that will allow you to identify it quickly next time you encounter it.

Dream symbolism is therefore not set in stone for anyone -- everything experienced has been translated from unknowns to knowns! That is why it takes experience to "see things as they really are" even in fully conscious out of body experiences -- you need to bring certain elements of physical consciousness into those other wordly experiences so that you may bring back memories, but you have to avoid being "too physical," otherwise you will be severely crippled.

I think Robert Peterson keyed the term "earth-sickness" ; when you are affected by gravity in OBEs or can't go through walls due to your physical consciousness being too dominant.

It's all a matter of remembering to remember, but forgetting about human limitations and habits.


I think a dream is not necessarily much more real than physical reality. Perhaps the correct question is "What is the physical plane MADE of?" -- because everything outside of it seems to be "made" of the same thing. The idea is that all matter beyond the physical plane is "light matter" that can be acted upon by consciousness freely. We live in a "dark matter" world that is the extension/reflection of "light matter" on an astral plane. It was specially created so that we could embody living beings that are more or less cut off from the "light matter world" -- i.e. with limitations. The etheric is the "light matter" counterpart of our physical world.

(If I remember correctly, in his Treatise on AP, Robert calls the light matter "thought stuff" :))

I think it's becoming increasingly clear as I read more on the subject that we are just a subset of one among an infinity of astral realms (subjective realms that can be shared among many entities). I'm not sure how many other astral realms do the same thing by putting entities into a "dark matter counterpart world" and whether these other planes' "dark matter" counterparts exist in our physical universe or in another, totally different "parallel universe."

But to make it simple, your dream world is a subjective realm that "belongs to you" ; an astral realm of sorts. Lucid dreams are (usually) astral projections to a personal realm.

Dreams and lucid dreams are pretty much uncategorized OBEs, I don't want to say that whenever you dream or lucid dream, you travel to an astral realm, because that would be wrong. It's possible that certain dreams occur on higher levels as well ; a mental projection for example.


As for meanings, dreams always have a meaning... They affect waking life, but they are rarely prophetic or useful!

[Lion]

A dream is a story, and anything is capable of recieving and broadcasting information. The meaning of that information depends upon whether the energies composing it are mental, spiritual, or physical.

[Nick----]

Scientists say that a dream actually lasts for less than 10 seconds despites the feeling that it took place over several minutes or even hours -- that is based on EEG recordings.

I have an interesting note on this. I had a dream about two weeks ago about walking around in strange nighttime forest like area trying to find this clock tower. Every five minutes or so (dream time) I would hear this chime and I would look at my cell phone because it sounded like the alarm it uses and my phone would show a picture of the clock tower.

Anyway when I woke up, I noticed the chime I heard was part of a song that was playing while I slept. In the song the chime played every 3 or 4 seconds. Now in the dream I probably heard the chime play six or seven times, which would be between 18-28 seconds of dreaming. I wonder if some dream for longer periods than others. Anyway it was an interesting dream experiance.

[wstein]

My view:

A dream is an exploration of an 'inner' world created entirely by us. In most cases 'us' is actually one, ourselves. This differs from say a vision or an OBE in that part or most of those are sourced/created by 'others' than the dreamers. It gets a bit tricky with shared dreams as the definition of 'us' is an arbitrary inclusion. The key part of this is that the dreamscape disappears when all the dreamers 'wake-up'.

Its clear to me that dreams are real. I base this on the fact that they can produce experience and learning. This contrasts with say visiting a memory which adds no new experience. Note that reviewing a memory can create new experience.

The common type dream is primarily made of memories of past experiences stitched together into a new story. As such they certainly have relevance to daily 'waking' life. They also have as much meaning as waking experiences. Although I'm not sure waking reality has any meaning.

The big question is if there is any difference between dreams and waking reality. I am leaning towards the idea that all experienced based 'places' are essentially created by the participants and not fundamentally different. This includes dreams, waking reality, and most Astral travel destinations. This excludes some phasing destinations, memories, and visions. The apparent differences between locations are only because of the imagination base used in creating them. As suggested above, waking reality may only continue because we have not all woken up.

Note that all the above only applies to things with the property of existence. Its a whole other discussion about other types of places.

[CFTraveler]

wstein wrote:
This excludes some phasing destinations, memories, and visions. Why?

[wstein]

wstein wrote:
This excludes some phasing destinations, memories, and visions. Why?
phasing destinations: there are several that lack the property of existence, some locations primarily consist of consciousness or divine essence. Also one can phase into memories (see below).

memories: memories are a representation (symbolic in a way) and as such merely conceptual (again lacking existence)

visions: like memories, consist primarily of symbolic concepts and imagery not based on sensory input

------

The key in my mind is to distinguish whether something has only conceptual/symbolic/consciousness context or if it also has manifest form. Those with manifest form can give rise to experience. Depending on your definition of 'real' it might make some real and some not.

As far as I can tell all experience is the same in nature regardless of source.

Note that learning (gathering/creating knowledge) can occur in either type place.

This is not to say that things without form are any less or any more important, it is just that they produce different types of interactions.

[CFTraveler]

The key in my mind is to distinguish whether something has only conceptual/symbolic/consciousness context or if it also has manifest form. I find this concept difficult to grasp because IMO, the subconscious will give any abstract idea manifest form. The act of trying to figure out what symbol the form I perceive represents, and what it means, makes the distinction a lot harder for me.

[Lion]

I find this concept difficult to grasp because IMO, the subconscious will give any abstract idea manifest form. The act of trying to figure out what symbol the form I perceive represents, and what it means, makes the distinction a lot harder for me.

Let's make believe that you have encountered a great tree which has giant, flourescent, blue pumkins growing on it. With no further information on the setting, discern the nature of this imaginary plant.

It doesn't matter if the object is mental, physical, or spiritual. In as much as you are examining the subconscious attributes of an inanimate object at a distance, it is an act of clairvoyance, not logic.

This is the fundamental flaw in interpretive books. The laws of percentages don't work in the non-spatial realm of clairvoyance.

In fact, from this subconscious realm, you may percieve an experience of incalculable emotional gravity, which you cannot put into written words. It's only your memory that substitutes with abstractions. Indeed, all you know of the imaginary tree comes from the letters on this screen.

What is the underlying truth behind it?