Little-Understood and Mysterious, but Part of Us All

Everyone
has their own ideas of what dreams are, and what they mean – if
anything! Dreams might be the most often discussed yet little understood
phenomenon common to all humans – though animals also dream. Certain
professions claim dreams as their exclusive turf to define and label –
but seem to want to insist that dreams are always symbolic. That is
nonsense.

What Are Dreams?

Though
superficially dreams seem similar one to the next, not all are of the
same character. Dreams can actually be many different things, from a
random creation out of imagination and experience with no additional
significance, to a spiritual experience that is actual. At times they
seem to offer a door into an unexplored and supernatural realm;
sometimes they offer a glimpse of incredible beauty. While most seem to
be happenstance, some appear not to be. Here are some of the things
dreams can be:

• Random creations of a person’s mind, recombining experience and imagination.
  This may be the most common type of dream. When remembered after
  awakening, often the events, objects and concepts make no sense at all,
  even though they made perfect sense in the dream. Some concepts can’t
  even be expressed! This is a fascinating aspect of dreams. The way I
  figure it out is this: if you suppose that each human being has his or
  her very own self-created spiritual universe, completely apart from the
  physical universe we all interact in, composed of the mind and anything
  else the person has put there, then it is possible to see that events,
  ideas, and objects can be created within that universe which bear no relation to our own, and can’t even be expressed in physical universe terms.
• A
  reflection of troubling or threatening events or ideas, or of
  delightful, pleasant or exhilarating events or thoughts, changed, mixed
  and magnified in the mind
• A reflection or elaboration of some actual incident or thought the person had while awake
• A
  response to a person’s conscious desire to dream about something
  specific, such as the creative development of a storyline that a writer
  wishes to explore. When I am in the frame of mind of creating
  stories, I sometimes dream a story. Sometimes I am viewing it as an
  outsider, and sometimes I am participating in the story!
• A
  recollection of an intense or beautiful experience or ability from the
  person’s distant past – even a past he doesn’t know he has, such as
  past-life existences. Over my lifetime, I’ve had vivid dreams
  in which I had the ability to create in art forms I didn’t know in real
  life. I have vividly dreamed of singing improvisationally in an
  intensely beautiful, otherworldly manner; I’ve improvised beautiful
  music on the piano; I’ve danced in a medieval castle with such grace and
  power that I literally flew; I’ve felt love as a spirit in an amazingly
  intense manner never felt while awake. From all of these dreams I
  gained a new reality: a wonderful sense that, having had these dream
  abilities and experiences, I had the potential to experience these sensations and abilities for real.
• A perception of one’s own spiritual universe, or those of others. When
  a person sleeps, it’s possible that his/her abilities, normally limited
  to those of their body’s senses  when awake, can expand unfettered. In
  such a state, we can be in someone else’s presence, and perhaps share
  the thoughts and images of their own mind/universe.
  
• A trip to another place as a spirit during sleep (out of body, or through viewing at a distance).
  A couple of times, with my body asleep, I have found myself
  inadvertently in someone’s private space where I shouldn’t have been
  (OK, someone’s bedroom!). In one instance, the person became aware of me
  and demanded to know what I was doing there! It sounded like they were
  yelling, though it had to be thought transference.) I hightailed it out
  of there and awoke in my own bedroom! I have also felt myself (as a
  separate awareness) floating distinctly above my sleeping body that was
  lying in the bed – a most wonderful sensation.
  
• A
  communication from another person to the sleeper via the thought
  wavelength, where the recipient receives the communication in thoughts
  and images during sleep. A type of this kind of dream is a
  lesson sent from a spiritually aware person or teacher to the sleeper,
  in moving, living images in the dream, such as in story form. Such
  experiences can be interactive, containing 2-way communication, with
  both the teacher and the recipient affecting and changing the images in
  the dream.
• A dream foretelling events in the future. I
  believe it is true that some people have the ability to foretell the
  future. But I am personally not interested in this ability, because I
  also believe we all have the ability, even if not always realized, to
  change and direct our futures in directions we determine. We need not
  fear the future, because it is ours to create. 
  
• A symbol of some existing condition or omen of a future event in the dreamer’s awake life.
  Here we get to symbols – things in dreams that stand for or mean
  something else. For example, different cultures or groups may have
  traditional understandings about dreams and what they mean. These
  understandings, being widely agreed upon in the group, therefore do
  prove true among their members, even if untrue beyond that culture. An
  example is one group’s belief, told to me by one of its members, that if
  a woman dreams about fish, it means she is pregnant. She related
  several personal experiences in which that actually had occurred. Her
  comments were a revelation to me, because it showed that the nature of
  dreams varied widely from person to person and group to group, and may
  indeed be carried along with a person’s culture.

As you can
see, dreams can be useful and revelatory. They can provide us clues to
our own spiritual natures that might otherwise be difficult to
experience on our own. All that said, I have realized something very
important about this subject.

We shouldn’t let ourselves become
too caught up in thinking about dreams, introverting into them or our
own minds, and in trying to understand them or assign meaning to them.
We should always prefer the real world by doing our best to
live a vital, full, rich existence in it, filled with actual
communication, face-to-face with other people and facing the real
environment around us. We should live and love in the real world. We
should put away the smartphones whenever we can and develop interest in
and relationships with the real people around us. Therein lies the real
satisfaction and happiness of a life well-lived.

All the best!

D.E. Lamont

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Copyright 2012 by D.E. Lamont. All Rights Reserved.