The Nature of Dreams
One third of our day is spent sleeping. For a third of our lives, we are asleep. Many people ignore what happens when they sleep and only care about waking up feeling rested. But for someone who is sixty years old, that means twenty years of life that went ignored. You can make use of that wasted time by paying attention to your dreams, which are important for several reasons.
The physical body needs sleep to quietly fix, grow, and recharge itself. Without sleep, the body runs out of the chemicals needed to stay active. Through dreams, the brain sorts and files away those thoughts and images picked up throughout the day before that did not get properly placed into its memory, like defragmenting the hard drive of a computer to make it run better.
For the astral and etheric bodies, sleep replenishes their energy as well. When the etheric body is low on energy, you may feel weak and have trouble paying attention. When the astral body is low on energy, you may feel blah and get easily distracted, not feeling like doing anything creative. To recharge, the etheric and astral bodies may expand in size during sleep and even shift out of the physical body in order to soak up the energies much like a plant unfurls its leaves to soak up the sun.
But for the mind, sleep does something amazing. Through dreams, the mind tunes into important messages that otherwise cannot get through while a person is awake. There are three main ways dreams are useful for the mind.
First, on the most basic level, dreams can tell you about problems concerning what you have been doing, thinking, or feeling recently. Like if you have been doing something harmful without knowing it, letting yourself feel angry and depressed for too long, thinking about starting a new project that will only be a waste of time-messages like these can be shown to you in dreams.
Second, dreams can tell you the future. Important experiences you might go through within a couple days or weeks may show up first in your dreams.
What kind of experiences? Well, positive ones like accomplishments or unexpected surprises, or negative ones that might make you stressed, sad, or angry. If you learn about the future through your dreams, you can actually be prepared to deal with the bad stuff and sometimes even keep it from happening in the first place. In this way, dreams can work like radar to show you what is coming up.
And third, dreams can be educational video games if you learn how to realize inside them that you are dreaming. These are called lucid dreams, where “lucid” means awake or aware. In a lucid dream, you know you are dreaming and can therefore do anything you want. You can fly around exploring the dreamscape, walk through walls or levitate and morph objects into other ones, talk to strange dream characters or listen to dream music-anything, all being created by some part of your own mind. Lucid dreams can also let you speak with dead relatives or other dimensional beings that pop into your dream if you call them.
The first step to using your dreams is to remember them. To do this, make sure you get enough sleep. When waking up, don’t think right away of what you must do that day, but instead try to remember what you just dreamt. Most useful of all is to keep a pen and small notebook next to your bed and whenever you wake up, jot down anything you remember. Not only does this help you recall the dream later on, but it also tells your mind that remembering them is important. Automatically over the next days or weeks you will find that your dreams do become easier to remember.
The second step is to interpret their meaning. This is tricky because dreams are mostly symbolic. This means the message they contain is wrapped in a riddle made of pictures, words, and themes that are not meant to be taken literally. For instance, dreaming that a bear attacks you does not mean you will actually be attacked by a bear, but it might mean you will get some angry words from a mean person. Or dreaming that you are caught in a tornado might mean you will be swept up in an emotionally tense experience soon. By writing down your dreams, you can compare them to what’s actually happening in your life, or anything important that happens to you within several days, and over time you will learn to interpret them more accurately. To get started, you can use a dream dictionary that gives you suggestions on what a symbol often tends to mean.
Also know that negative astral beings, which are lifeforms without physical bodies that feed on your emotional energy of fear or anger, sometimes come around when you sleep to jack into your dreams, turning them into nightmares. They tend to pick on children the most because young people have weaker etheric bodies and are easier to frighten. You can identify these dreams by how much they make you feel angry or scared, and how nonsensical they are. If you often have nightmares, before going to sleep try to remember something happy, then visualize that your room and body is lit up with a bright golden light, then pray or intend that you be protected while you sleep in peace. This helps keep negative astral critters away.
Or if you learn to lucid dream, you can face a monster in a nightmare, tell it you’re not afraid, and ask it what it wants, which will transform the monster into something powerless. Learning to lucid dream takes practice.
There are different techniques, and a popular one is to pick something that you occasionally see or do in your dreams that you also see or do while awake, like a type of animal, a color, a person, place, or action. Then whenever you see or do this while awake, look around and ask yourself if you are dreaming. Do a test like flicking a light switch, remembering what you did for the past hour, looking at a clock or some printed words, or counting your fingers-if you’re in a dream, there will be something wrong with these. If you keep this up for at least a week, then it will become a habit that you will naturally do even in dreams, which will make you realize you are dreaming. Another method involves watching those faint light patterns behind your eyelids as you go to sleep. As you stay relaxed but mentally awake, these will turn into vivid images and then a lucid dream.
Dreams can also teach you lessons about yourself and the world. These tend to play like vivid documentaries that make concise and meaningful points concerning the bigger picture of “all this.”
Generally, dreams give you a “heads up” on things that you might otherwise not expect. By fixing existing problems indicated by a dream, or preparing to handle ones coming up, you can make your life go more smoothly. Instead of stumbling around blind, you get clued into what’s going on behind the scenes. But you will have to separate the meaningful dreams from the nonsense ones that come from your brain sorting its memory pieces or an astral critter trying to feed. Only by remembering dreams and trying your best to figure them out will you learn over time how to sift out the nonsense.
Incarnation and Reincarnation
If your mind can exist without the body, then where was the mind before you were born? And what happens to the mind after the body dies? See, life is like a dream where being born is like falling asleep and dying like waking up again. In between, your mind thinks, feels, and lives through a temporary character just as you might in a dream. Being born is similar to how an actor takes on a temporary role for a movie. The same actor plays different roles in different movies, and likewise the mind is born into different bodies in different lifetimes.
When a person dies, his spirit eventually returns to the nonphysical dimension it came from. There the spirit gets to ponder the life just lived and after making some goals for what to do next time, find the right body at the right time and be born again. This is called reincarnation. It’s like going to an arcade; you walk around, find the right machine, play for a bit, then when game is over you look for a different game to play.
But even while playing, you are still there outside the game, it’s just a part of your mind that is for the moment absorbed in controlling the game character. Likewise, even though we are here in this physical dimension, there is a greater part of ourselves still up in that higher dimension dipping only a small part of itself into your body. That small part is what you think and feel with right now. Let’s call this greater part the higher self and the smaller part the lower self. The higher self is who you are when fully awake outside this dream called life. The lower self is who you are within the dream. So it would be more correct to say that reincarnation is simply the higher self extending parts of itself into different bodies at different times through birth, and pulling those parts back through death. We are like finger puppets-the puppet is who we are to others in this life, the finger in the puppet is our lower self, and the hand is our higher self.
Why do people choose to be born into this world?
There are as many answers as there are people. Some people come here to do something, to experience something, to learn things they cannot outside this world. It is the same reason people play games or watch movies-they get to experience things they couldn’t otherwise.
Being alive on earth in a physical body can be difficult. Life is like an obstacle course, weight training program, or crash course in a tough subject. Besides the fun and joy in being alive, there is also anger, fear, and suffering. But the negative stuff is what makes the game challenging and unique. Life is bodybuilding for the soul, and the challenges we face in life are the weights that build up our spiritual muscles if we have the strength to handle them.
Another reason someone might come here is to help others wake up. Think of a college student who goes back to high school to help other students learn things he has already mastered. The problem is that being born wipes your memories of where you came from and who you truly are, as though the college student joins high school having forgotten he already graduated. The subjects might seem strangely familiar and easy to him, and in this way he can still help others. But should he get sucked up into the distractions that come with being a high school student, he might forget even what he learned in college, maybe even flunk out.
That is the risk these helper souls face when incarnating on earth. They might get so distracted in life that they never discover the higher knowledge within them, failing to do what they came here to do, which is use that knowledge to help others. Maybe you are a helper soul. If you enjoy figuring things out, pondering the mysteries of the universe, and feel happy when other people find ways to improve their lives and themselves, then most likely you are a helper soul. If so, it is very important that you devote some time thinking, reading, learning about higher truths in order to familiarize yourself with who you really are and what you really know.
At the core, you already know these truths but have forgotten them. Remembering is difficult because compared to your higher self the lower self is incredibly asleep and distracted, so recovering what you know deep inside is similar to learning it for the first time. The difference is that if some truth is already within you, learning it again will come more quickly and with an exciting sense of recognition. You will feel something special when you finally understand what you already know deep down. It carries the ring of truth. Instead of going “…okay, uhuh…” as with learning something mundane, you might instead go “Huh! That really makes sense! Amazing!” or “Ohhhh! Now I get it!” That is how you can recognize truth-not only will it make sense, but it will feel right. When both the head and heart agree with an idea, pay attention.
Montalk. Fringe Knowledge for Beginners . montalk.net.
