icebergThis idea of dreaming is near and dear to me.  It is near and dear to me because along with a spiritual journey since age nine, I have been fascinated with dreaming and what this very significant amount of time we spend each day is used for.  I have also been fascinated with dreaming because I have had what I consider to be quite fascinating events take place within my dreams and I am also brave enough to simply tell you what I have found and also what I think as part of a CONSIDERED opinion (which stands apart from an opinion that may not be based on significant evaluation of ones own dreaming).  I also like dreaming because its MINE. It is my own landscape, my own stuff. I get to go into the temple of my OWN dreaming and no one else’s.  I can explore and discover and learn.  I have spent years studying my own dreams, by the way, so I know a few things about it that are not in the mainstream and bear mentioning….

The thing I think that is so great about understanding dreams is that we each have the opportunity to be experts with our own dreamscapes.  Since we each dream, just as we live a life, we ourselves can learn a lot from our dreams. I did this by keeping a dream journal starting in high school until I was married, which was a period of approximately ten years.  We want, though, to wait on what others have had to say about dreams in order to understand them, but even the supposed experts haven’t been that great at coming up with a theory that works for how and why we dream.  Freud said dreams were unfulfilled wishes.  Excuse me, but my dreams have had healing elements, points of resolution, I have had what appear to be out of body experiences, and I have also had dreams that have clearly shown the future.  So if the supposed “experts” can be so off on all of this, it stands to reason that our own observations might well be a little more helpful in helping to progress our understanding of dreaming.  Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of fascinating information out there from REM being a way to nourish the cornea with oxygen, to dreams being an expression of unexpressed wishes and desires (thanks Sigmund). It is all sounds very nice, I just think it is woefully incomplete.

It’s probably a problem of clarity, though, why we have so much trouble being able to figure out what dreaming is….. for the simple reason, most likely, that WHY we dream is so broad that any one theory will have trouble containing it all in a neat tidy way that will make a scientist feel good about his or her work and reason for being. It is a bit like asking me what the purpose of LIFE is.  Do you have a few days to have a seat and talk about it?  really, I don’t think you can sum it up in a few sentences, and if you do, it will probably be so hopelessly simplified as to bear very little meaning.   So having said that, I am going to tell you a few things about my own experience in the same way that a tourist might come back and show you a few pictures of a trip, say, to Tuscany, or Greece, or Neptune, or somewhere near the Dog star….

One thing I can tell you is that dreams can be precognitive.  Not maybe, but certainly.  Not only that, but my dreams have not only been clearly precognitive, they have also shown a most interesting phenomenon that an old friend named Rodney called “periodicity” when I walked into my Wednesday night jam session and explained how I had uncovered something incredible about my precognitive dreams. What you should first know is that I have had these precognitive dreams my whole life and second that they have been very detailed so as to eliminate any guesswork over whether they were just a lucky guess or actually seeing “remotely” the events that would take place later.  What I had uncovered in my journal work was a very distinct pattern in my dreams that all showed precognitive elements.  This phenomenon showed that my precognitive dreams all took place on very specific days, and this was tied to the lunar cycle.  Now for some, this might sound a little crazy, but to a scientist, this suggests other forces at work.  What those are, I don’t know, but in the same way that the moon has an effect on tides, it apparently has an effect on seeing the future as well….and as a result may well help us to better understand HOW to bridge the gap between now and the future.  For those who aren’t sure what precognition is, it’s simply being able to anticipate future events. Now I know that for some, such a thing seem preposterous and flies in the face of everything we think we know about time and space.  Well, clearly, we don’t know everything there is to know about time and space or else I would not be going around having these dreams about the future!

But so you can appreciate what I am talking about, let me give you a few examples of my precognitive dreams.  When I was a pre-teen I dreamed that my neighbor was pregnant with twins and that these twins were born and had blonde hair.  The twins were a boy and a girl in the dream. Now the thing to realize is that the mom and dad were both very dark-haired people.  The father had this jet black hair without a hint of gray in it and the mother had chestnut colored hair.  At the time of the dream, there had been no talk about their having children.  They were without children at the time of the dream that I had.  In just a few months, I did find out that the mother was expecting and while I did not pay much heed to the dream, I found that she gave birth to twins who grew up to be blonde, both of them, which was itself a bit odd since there was so much dark hair in the family.  Skip forward in time to 1985 when I have a dream that I am floating above the earth and witness an explosion at a facility in Russia.  I hear the voice of a t.v. anchor narrating the events taking place. He says that there was an explosion over Russia that sent a plume of radioactive gasses into the atmosphere.  I watch as I see a white cloud rise and spread.  This cloud spread to Europe and rained down as radioactive snow.  I watched as people were herded onto freight trains in order to get them out of the area quickly. I saw an odometer type device that was showing the current count of the number of people who had been evacuated from the area.  At the time of the dream I saw a number around 80,000 as it continued to climb.

At the time of this dream, I was more focused on the out of body aspects of the experience, which involved me flying over the earth and walking across a bridge that floated in the sky.  The experience with the  news broadcast began after I observed that the entire scene turned to snow or static and was replaced by a new scene.    At the time, though, I described the entire dream to my roommate, Joe, who in three weeks called me into the living room to watch a news broadcast about an explosion over Russia in the area now known by the world as Chernobyl.  Each element in the dream was exactly as the Chernobyl event several weeks later.  There was a radioactive explosion (not a leak—this was an explosion that sent a cloud up into the atmosphere). This cloud menaced Europe in the dream, which did happen in the Chernobyl event.  People were herded quickly onto freight cars both in the dream and in real life as a way to get them quickly out of the area.  The count I had seen was over 80,000 had been evacuated, which suggested this was a city or town area.  When Joe called me in as he sat amazed at the news report, they said during that report that as many as 80,000 people had already been evacuated from the area.

These are the kinds of dreams that I have had over my life.  They have been specific enough in the ways I have explained to you to be more than merely plucking a good guess out of the air.  The level of corollaries between the dream and the events usually within a month of the dream, have been extraordinarily good in my view.

Now I know what some people have said to me about this in the past, which have been along the lines of “Well, Parker, its easy for YOU to have dreams like this, but you aren’t LIKE other people…”  and to this I have to carefully explain that in each person’s life there is some evidence for unexplained phenomenon.  Maybe you don’t have dreams that came true, but perhaps you find yourself thinking about someone and find that they were mentioning you at the exact same time, or perhaps you get a feeling of foreboding only to find that at the same time a loved one was involved in an accident.  Perhaps you experience this in dream, or waking, or both.  You see, to my mind, dream and waking are all part of life and both serve important roles in our lives. Me, I just don’t ascribe to dreams just being random firings of the brain as it sifts through the days’ material.  I know that dreams are therapeutic, quite literally releasing trauma from the past, working through issues within the emotional landscape as well as deeper soulful issues.  I also know that dreams are a kind of window into other dimensions, dimensions we travel to by traveling not through space but through our own awareness.  You see, we ARE the window to other worlds and that window CAN be found by expanding consciousness.  It is curious that in dream we do the same things as those who meditate and are able to let the ego go in order to experience cosmic consciousness.  The cool thing is that ego is dispensed with the same way you take off a pair of socks or pants as you get ready to go to bed.  In fact, you can’t really do most of your dreaming with ego still all around you.  But when you let go of ego, some quite remarkable things begin to happen.

Now as an aside I will explain why I am talking about ego. I mean, how on earth do I KNOW that we let go of ego when we dream?  My work during my awakening of kundalini has shown me quite clearly that the concept of “ego death” (a term I absolutely dislike for how incorrect it is) goes hand in hand with being able to experience similar KINDS of things while still awake that the mind does -normally- when asleep.  I have also observed how ego has been lain aside while awake in order for certain dream-like phenomenon to arise much like what some people do in meditation or in shamanic practice.  The main feature of doing this is that you are more free to tap larger portions of awareness that naturally get filtered out by the controlling agent called ego.  To show what I mean, perhaps you can remember starting to dream and then realizing that you are dreaming.  What happens when you do this?  In my experience I always stop dreaming.  I have become self conscious.  I have suddenly taken on ego as “I” identifies that “I” am dreaming.  Ego and dreaming don’t work together.  You need to have a loosening of the ego in order for the part of you that can create those dreams to operate properly.  Part of it has to constructing a kind of creative scaffolding where your imagery can spread out and play. This play, though can be mulling feelings over, venting, thinking, hallucinating, seeing the future, and traveling out of body (OOBE) somewhere quite interesting.

The ego can be quite the wet blanket, you see.  It’s a very useful thing, but you have to learn how to put ego aside so you can begin to experience the broader realm of your being.  I promise you that ego limits you absolutely.  And this is, of course, why I LOVED dream so much.  It let me go ego-less during a time when I was simply not yet ready for this thing called ego death (which I experienced during my awakening process).

But this isn’t about seeing the future.  Not really.  I am using seeing the future as an example of what CAN be done.  I figure if I can show you some rather fantastic examples of what has happened to me, you might just realize that you too have the same opportunities.  (Jesus said something about others doing even greater things than he did….) Granted, you might not be so keen about time travel.  Maybe for you its something else, like experiencing the effects of shifting from one brain state to another while “awake” in the dream state.  Clearly the static I saw in the dream of Chernobyl where once scene shifted into another was itself the shifting from one brain state to another.  I have actually been able to fool my brain into thinking I am asleep when I am actually awake and the exact same thing will happen, and I am able to observe it while I am awake and it is VERY much like a wall of static filling the view and my body and I simply vibrate into a different state and scene. It is, I do think, a way for the brain to travel dimensionally by changing its own energetic signature via its brainwaves. it turns out that this technique has been used for thousands of years by Tibetan monks and is a way for them to dream awake, or to have lucid dreams while being fully awake instead of asleep. You might think that dream and waking are fundamentally different, but I am telling you that you can and will break down the barriers between waking and sleeping when you begin to become more inclusive or broader in your awareness of these different states of being.  And don’t worry; all will not be chaos.  Instead, what will emerge is a sense of unity of awareness.  You simply wont see dream as some strange land anymore.  It will be understood as a very useful tool for relaxing, sleeping, as well as having all sorts of adventures both fictional and nonfictional.

Dreaming can be a way to expand your own energetic signature and mobility of consciousness.  The more aware you are of what you do in dreams and HOW you FEEL in dreams can lead to being able to relate to certain energetic states that correspond to deep shifts in consciousness within those dreams.  If you can learn how to FEEL the way you FEEL in a dream, you are actually that much closer to being able to experience an expanded state of awareness while awake.  You don’t need mantras, you simply have to remember.  The more you do, the more likely you are to see the phenomenon in a dream begin to make its entrance into waking.

I recently read a comment someone made about dreaming and meditation and the person described meditating as a form of self-hypnosis.  The sense I got from the commenter was that this was somehow bad or not desirable.  But really, the vast amount of self-improvement that we do, whether in meditation or in the therapists office is actually attributed to hypnosis.  What many people don’t fully realize is that MOST hypnosis today is done while the subjects are completely awake. Hypnosis might work at deeper levels of the self if you are put into a deep state of relaxation (the “trance” as it is called) but everyone in the psychiatric field knows that this is by no means a requirement. So anytime you want to change, you simply make he suggestion to yourself that you want the change.  That is the nature of suggestion.  You can go into a deep state of relaxation, you can even make hypnotic suggestions as you lie down to sleep that you will use the dream state to do lucid work in that dream.  This is much like I did when I experienced Quetzalcoatl in dream work from the same year that I had the Chernobyl dream (1985).  In THAT dream, I was attempting to use the dream state as a way to springboard into an OOBE. The technique I used worked really well, and that technique was as simple as a suggestion I made prior to falling asleep.  You can read that entry HERE.

As an aside, my observation about out of body experiences (OOBE’s) is that they can allow you to experience broader states of awareness than you might otherwise.  In some ways, it can be a catalyst for greater change because it seems to me that once free from the body to a great degree, the experience of energy is so much larger, or broader.  The reason for this, I sense, is that the consciousness is not so tied to the body.  The body itself, not just the brain, is a series of blocks of an emotional nature that inhibit the flow of prana or universal consciousness.  When these channels are cleared sufficiently, there can be a powerful flow of energy released which the Hindu call Kundalini and what we often simply call “awakening.”

To some, this is kind of the holy grail of inner work since kundalini acts as an accelerating catalyst for inner change. This is nothing more than life force now flowing in abundance, but the effect this prana or life force has on you is that it stirs every inch of you and if you surrender you feel freedom and bliss and if you hold on, you feel paranoia and pain.  The stirring, though, is the stirring of the old blocks that reside in your body.  When these blocks are cleared, you experience the moment differently than before. Think of it as a kind of cosmic tune up that involves releasing lifetimes of pent up karma that has been recorded in your light body and is stored in your physical body.  It is itself a powerful process and can be akin to riding a roller coaster; you get on and there is no getting off until the ride is through.  But I suspect based on my own experience is that OOBE’s can provide the same unlimited flow of energy as in awakening without bringing it into the body.  This could have some advantages.  It COULD be used to gradually acquaint you with what its like to have this kind of energy flowing through you, to overcome what seems to be some anxiety or fear of such incredible flows of energy coming in and learn how to cope with it.  Now I say this based on my own experience with the out of body state, which was nothing short of a grand face to face experience with significant amounts of energy.  And where there is energy, there is consciousness.  That means your consciousness will expand. That sounds a bit like some of the goals of meditation, right? Find out who you are, what you are, what you are capable of?  Your birthright, right?

There are many ways to reach what it is you are looking for.  We are all in some way looking for it, even when it seems dysfunctional.  The thing we seek is what this prana force is.  It is love. I will just tell you now and get it over with because in time, if you clear the way, you will feel it so utterly that it will be entirely obvious.  But when that day comes, you will know this love less as a thing you feel for someone as it is a force as gravity and the wind are forces in nature.  It might be hard to imagine how love might be a force like that, but it is.  When you clear the way then you will feel love in all of its different dimensions or aspects.  And this is good because in doing meditation work based on curiosity about what you are, you discover the most beautiful thing about yourself. And that is a whole lot of good!

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