This article begins a four-part series on the nature of dreaming.
“In the dream experience the dreamer is undeniably also the content of the dream, the direction of the dream, the performer of the dream, as well as the audience and the theater in which the dream presents itself. Thus in sleep and within the magic of dreaming, we experience the relationship that the Universal Source has with the entirety of the created worlds.” ~ Robert Lawlor
The Brain, Dreams & Inner Realizations
“In a manner of speaking, your physical brain is a doorway that triggers activity in your mind.
Your beliefs then are largely responsible for the areas of the brain that you activate, and for the resulting nonphysical action of the mind.
Physical focus provides you with a magnificent reality, intent and specialized.
Were it not for dream activity however you would be, relatively speaking, enclosed within it, afraid to try out new concepts and intuitive realizations in the face of what seems to be such rock-bed reality.
In physical terms it may take some time before your conscious mind accepts or recognizes a diagnosis given in a daydream.
It may come to you later in altered form as a hunch or sudden intuition, or an urge for action.
If you do not trust yourself you may ignore such impetuses and not take advantage of the answers.
The enlightened conscious mind is always alert for such messages.”1
Dreaming & the Existence of a Non-physical Reality
“The ability to dream presupposes the existence of experience that is not defined as physical fact.
It presupposes a far greater freedom in which perception is not dependent upon space or time, a reality in which objects appear or are dismissed with equal ease, a subjective framework in which the individual freely expresses what he or she will in the most direct of fashions, yet without physical contact in usual terms.
You must realize that the self that you know is only a part of your larger identity—an identity that is [also] historically actualized in other times than your own.
You must also understand that mental activity is of the utmost potency.”2
Dreaming
“Often in the dream state you become truly awake, and grab a hold of your spirithood and creaturehood with both hands, so to speak, understanding that each has a far greater reality then you have been led to suppose.
More often, however, there are instead only blurred glimpses and tantalizing views of a more expansive kind of experience.
To make matters more confusing you may automatically try to interpret the dream events according to your usual picture of reality, and switch channels, so to speak, as you waken.
In dreams you are so “insane” that you do not feel yourself locked in a closet of time and space, but feel instead as if all infinity but waited your beckoning.
To some extent you form physical events while you are dreaming.
Then, freed from waking limitations, you process your experience, weigh it according to your own intents and purposes, correlate it with information so vast you could not be consciously aware of it.
In most dreams you do not simply think of a situation.
You imaginatively become a part of it.
It is real in every fashion except that of physical fact.”3
Dreams – True or Imaginary?
“Dreams, you have been taught, are imaginary events.
In larger terms it is futile to question whether or not dreams are true, for they simply are.
You do consider a dream true, however, if its events later occur in fact.
In the life of the psyche a dream is no more or less “true,” whether or not it is duplicated in waking life.
Dream events happen in a different context – one, you might say, of the imagination.
Here you experience a valid reality that exists on its own, so to speak; one in which the psyche’s own language is given greater freedom.
Dreams serve as dramas, transferring experience from one level of the psyche to another.
In certain portions of sleep, your experience reaches into areas of being so vast that the dream is used to translate it for you.”4
What Happens when we Dream?
“In dreams your energy pulsates back toward the being that you are.
In a manner of speaking, you travel back and forth each night through atmospheres and entry points of which you are not aware.
In your sleep you do indeed travel, again, those vast distances between birth and death.
Your consciousness as you think of it transcends these leaps and holds its own sense of continuity.
All of this has to do with pulsations of energy and consciousness, and in one way, what you think of as your life is the apparent “length” of a light ray seen from another perspective.
Dreaming is not a passive activity.
It demands a peculiar and distinctive mixture of various kinds of consciousness, and the transformation of “nonphysical perception” into symbols and codes that will be sensually understood, though not directly experienced as in waking experience.
You take dreaming for granted, yet it is the result of a characteristic ability that is responsible for the very subjective feeling that you call conscious life.
Without it our normal consciousness would not be possible.”5
Dream Location
“Space is a psychological property. So is time.
The universe did not, then, begin at some specified point in time, or at any particular location in space—for it is true to say that all of space and all of time appeared simultaneously, and appear simultaneously.
You cannot pinpoint the location of consciousness.
When you are dreaming you cannot pinpoint your dream location in the same way that you can determine, say, the chair or the bureau that may sit on the floor by the bed in which you dream.
That inner location is real, however, and meaningful activity can take place within it.”6
The Dream State
“Thoughts and ideas have their own electromagnetic validity.
In waking life you test your ideas in the world of facts. Facts are only accepted fiction, of course, but the ideas must make sense and fit into the accepted “story.”
In the dream state you allow yourself greater freedom, trying out certain ideas and beliefs in this more plastic framework.
You may therefore accept new beliefs initially in the dream state, and the intellectual or emotional realization may only come “later.”
In dreaming, the conscious mind itself is far more lenient and playful.
It can afford this greater permissiveness because it well knows that it need not immediately test out theory in the daily context.
It very willingly looks inward toward those areas of the inner self’s experience to see what it can find for its own use, quite like an explorer searching for resources in virgin territory.”7
The Need for Dreaming Consciousness
“Many of the most powerful aspects of consciousness are at work precisely when it seems to you that you are relatively unconscious and asleep to physical reality.
It would be impossible for you to handle the vast amount of material available, in the context of time as.you presently experience it.
To operate adequately in your highly specific field, an almost infinite amount of information must be instantly assimilated, probabilities calculated, and certain balances maintained of which you are not even aware.
Latently, your consciousness is capable of performing these feats, but the work cannot be done with the part of your consciousness that is strongly attached to the space-time relationship.
What you think of as your conscious mind is given the task of assessing the “facts” of daily living.
It then forms beliefs about reality, and these are used in the dream state as one of the main yardsticks, so to speak, that activate the emergence of certain probable events rather than others.
You have within yourself the condensed knowledge of your entire being.
This information cannot appear in any complete fashion within a consciousness connected with a physical brain.
The multidimensional reality simply cannot be expressed.
In the dreaming state, when consciousness relates opaquely to physical concerns, glimpses of the multidimensional self can appear in dream imagery and fantasies that will symbolically express your greater existence.”8
Dream State Consciousness
“The earth-tuned consciousness must deal within the space-time context, for only inside this framework can it clearly perceive events.
In the dream state consciousness ignores space-time relationships to a large degree, and yet it is still firmly based upon the body’s corporeal mechanism.
Dreams then are physically experienced.
You perceive yourself running, talking, eating, in quite physical activities—except that they are not performed by the body that lies on the bed.
The orientation is that of sense data lived most vividly, and yet, again, at an opaque angle.
In other words, in most dreams data is still being received and interpreted in the light of corporeal life. These are the dreams most remembered also.
Beyond this there are experiences but seldom recalled, in which the usual identification of your consciousness with physical-life orientation is gone.
Images as you think of them are based upon your own neurological structure, and your interpretations of these.
In some dream situations you enter a state of awareness quite divorced from the kind of sense data such as perception without images.
Images as such are not involved, though later they may be manufactured unconsciously for the sake of translation.
In those conditions you come close to an understanding of what your consciousness is when it is not physically oriented at all.”9
The Dream World
“The dream world is not an aimless, non-logical, unintellectual field of activity.
It is only that your own perspective closes out much of its vast reality, for the dreaming intellect can put your computers to shame.
I am not, therefore, putting the intellectual capacities in the background —but I am saying that they emerge as you know them because of the dreaming self’s uninterrupted use of the full power of the united intellect and intuitions.
The intellectual abilities as you know them cannot compare to those greater capacities that are a part of your own inner reality.
Currently, mankind has little knowledge of the interior dream world, his place in it, or its effects upon his daily conscious life.
Because you are physical creatures even your dreams must be translated through the reality of your flesh.
In the same way each of you form an overall dream world in which there is some general agreement, but in which each experience is original.
The dream world has its reaches as the physical one does.
In waking reality, beliefs take time before their materialization is apparent.
From infinite probable acts, only one can be physically experienced as a rule.
The dream world operates as a creative situation in which probable acts are instantly materialized, laid out in actual or symbolic form.
From these you then choose the most appropriate from physical expression.
In the dream world, your emotions will often form their own landscapes, utilizing dreams as their creative medium.
You have a part to play individually in the creation of the dream landscape.
In the dream world, your thoughts and feelings become “instantly” alive, springing up one upon another, coming full blown as it were.
The dream world exists in terms of energy also, but simply at ranges that are not physically obvious.
Much of your interior creative work and planning is done at this level.
Both privately and en masse mankind utilizes the dream world as a preliminary working ground.
From these “fantasized” realities and probable dream events come all the physically accepted “facts” in your world of true and false.”10
Types of Dreams
“Dreams occur at so many levels of reality that it is quite impossible to describe their true scope.
For one thing, that scope includes levels that are consciously unknown to you.
Dreams serve as backup systems also, for example, in the important communications between various peoples or nations – and, particularly when physical communication is cut off between such groups, dreams provide the continuation of information’s flow from one part of the species to another.
There are dreams of different import, some triggered genetically, that serve as sparks for particular kinds of behavior – dreams, in other words, that literally span the centuries in that regard, coiled latently in the very chromosomes; and no level of consciousness is without some kind of participation in dream states.
In that regard even electrons, for example, dream.”11
All Species Dream
“Dreaming touches upon both microscopic and macroscopic events, or realities, and is not simply a human characteristic, appropriately appearing within your own range or within your own species.
It is instead one area of subjective experience that is everywhere prevailing within the universe.
As I have mentioned many times, animals dream, as do plants, insects, and all forms of life.
All molecular constructions exhibit that certain kind of introspective activity, as if the inner working of some giant computer was intimately in touch not only with its own programming and the probabilities connected with it, but with a deep psychological awareness of the activities of the electrons and various visible and invisible particles that form its own physical construction.
There are certain kinds of dreams in which the various species then communicate, and in which the energies of the environment and its inhabitants merge.
These include a kind of horizontal psychological extension, the translation of one kind of dream into another kind – the transference of information from one system to another, in which the symbols themselves come alive.”12
Dreams Connected with Experiencing Your ‘Basic Being’
“In your daily life you may suddenly know something without knowing how you know, without being aware of any particular image or sense impression.
The knowledge is simply “there.”
This kind of activity approaches the sort of knowing of your own consciousness when it is uninvolved with any kind of ordinary sense stimuli. It simply knows.
In those certain dream states, then, you know in the same fashion. You experience your being unallied with flesh.
That kind of dream awareness can literally regenerate your life, though the original impact will be forgotten, and the entire event will usually be translated into images before awakening.
Such dream events may be called experiences of basic being.
During them, the self or consciousness literally travels to the source of its own energy.
On another level atoms possess this same kind of knowing.
It may seem that such comprehensions have little to do with your daily life, particularly since they are so seldom recalled, and then only in translation; yet they provide you with additional energy—and when you need it most.
In periods of stress, the physically attuned consciousness will often momentarily forsake its usual orientation and let itself fall back, as it were, into the source of its own being, where it knows it will be regenerated and indeed reborn.”13
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1979
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- Roberts, Jane, Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1986
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1986
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
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