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Chapter 20
Housekeeping or
Voyaging the Astral Plane?
Where Do We Really Go When We Dream?
Where do we really go when we dream? Do we travel
the astral planes of dimensions beyond the physical universe, freed from the constraints
of both physical body and time? Do we commune with the spirit world, interact with our
living friends, share in learning and healing experiences, exchange notes with
extra-terrestrials, talk with God, Buddha or our Dreamtime ancestors? Do we then return to
waking life with a dose of amnesia or a limited ability to comprehend the enormity of our
travels leaving us with inadequate impressions called ‘dreams’?
Or do we journey the hills and valleys of the
contours of our physical brains, mentally flicking the dust off old memories, cleaning out
the crevices of useless behaviour patterns and processing and filing yesterday’s
experiences and thoughts? Deep in the computer-like centres of our brains, do we monitor
the biophysical feedback systems to get a mental snapshot of our physical health while we
check out the neurological wiring along the way?
Are our dreams the symbolic memory of our
mind-body housekeeping, or are they remnants of a greater experience in another dimension:
the ‘astral plane’? Or are they both? Or are they the same thing?
The emphasis until now in Part Two of this book
has been on how to interpret dreams in terms of the mind and body, so we cannot give
justice to this question without first examining the case for the astral: the soul.
The phrases ‘astral travel’ and
‘astral plane’ are widely used in everyday language, but there appears to be
much confusion and uncertainty about what these phenomena are, and whether they are
‘real’. One person will say, ‘I astral travel every night when I dream.
That’s what dreaming is!’ while another will say, ‘I’ve dreamed
I’ve been all over the world, looked at the Earth from the stars, had lucid and
precognitive dreams, but I’m really looking forward to doing some astral
travelling!’
This chapter is concerned with the question of
the astral in dreams: is it ‘real’, imagined, or make-believe, and how does all
this fit in with dream interpretation?
Astral Travel and the Astral Plane:
Towards a Definition
My twelve year old daughter looked over my
shoulder at the computer screen and said, ‘That’s not how you spell plain!’
It transpired that she had always envisaged the ‘astral plane’ as the
‘astral plain’, a kind of big, flat, starry stretch of land
somewhere off the planet Earth. There has been much confusion with the terms ‘astral
travel’ and ‘astral plane’. According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary,
‘astral’, in this sense, means ‘Relating to or arising from a supposed
ethereal existence with oneself in life and surviving after death’. It gives
‘ethereal’, in this context, as ‘heavenly, celestial’, and
‘plane’, in astral terms, as ‘level of attainment or knowledge’. Of
course, ‘plane’ is also used to imply a different dimension or perspective of
experience.
In simple language, I suggest the following
definitions capture the flavour of the dictionary definitions:
Astral plane:
A level or dimension of learning which is experienced by an immortal soul.
Astral travel:
The process of experiencing the soul as a separate part of our being which is not
constrained by the whereabouts of the physical body (place) or time.
Since astral travel, by this definition, is
associated with freedom from the physical body, we need to look at the ways in which we do
free ourselves from our bodies before we can consider which of these, if any, are astral
experiences and how astral travelling does or does not relate to dream interpretation.
Freedom from the Physical Body
The Out-of-the-Body Experience (OBE)
Basically you have had an OBE if you have
experienced the sensation of existing at a location outside your physical body. This may
occur while your physical body is awake, asleep, unconscious, under anaesthesia,
clinically dead or traumatised. In cases of severe physical trauma, the OBE is also known
as a ‘near-death experience’ and may be accompanied by experiences of travelling
through tunnels towards a while light, or of reaching the white light and conversing with
other ‘body-less’ beings.
OBE reports range from a slight feeling of
physical detachment from your body, through to experiencing yourself as a totally
different ‘entity’ from the body which you can see lying on the bed, having
complete freedom to go wherever you wish at whatever speed, perhaps even instantaneously.
Somewhere between these two extremes is the ‘anxious OBE’ where you experience a
separate existence from your physical body while remaining connected to it by a cord and a
sense of time restriction (‘If I stay away too long, I might not be able to get back
in my body again.’)
Waking Life Freedoms
My OBE had a profound effect on me because I was fully conscious.
I have experienced the sensation of being out of my body in my dreams, but this
awake experience has allowed me to look at the OBE from a conscious, even rational,
perspective. I have to confess that mine was a restrained experience, since
I was so shocked that I frightened my physical body out of its deeply relaxed
state and shot right back into it for fear of not being able to come back. I
wasn’t ready to give up my life yet! (That was how I perceived the experience:
‘I might be dying, and I’ve got too much I want to do yet.’)
I had been lying on my bed one mid-summer afternoon, after
a half-hour meditation, and was just thinking about wriggling my toes and getting
my body moving so I could get up. I was fully awake and conscious, but still
had my eyes closed, and became aware of the sound of the blood rushing in my
ears while my heart rate seemed to slow. My head then lifted from the bed, followed
by my shoulders and then my chest. My head rose to about a foot off the bed
and I remember being particularly aware of the height of my heart, a little
closer to the bed but still outside my physical body. The half minute or so
of amazement was soon ended by the sound of my soaring, panicky heart rate as
I fell back quickly, instantly chiding myself for being so cowardly. I have
since had this experience a few times, and I am most definitely not in, or anywhere
near, a state of drowsiness or sleep. Neither is my body numbed so that my nerves
have lost a sense of where my body is and have made a ‘mistake’ in
calculating my position to be a foot above the bed.’
(Jane Anderson)
Did I achieve a mental freedom from my body
through detaching physical input and using the power of my thoughts to place the centre of
my mind outside my body? Hardly, in this instance, because I was not seeking to do so. I
had finished a meditation and was not consciously injecting any thoughts into dissociating
myself from my body.
The power of creative visualisation is indeed
strong, and I believe it is possible to achieve a mental detachment through sheer will.
This has been demonstrated many times through hypnosis where people have undergone
traumatic surgery (or just plain ‘painful’ dentistry) and felt no pain. The
power of the mind to achieve pre-set goals through techniques such as hypnosis, creative
visualisation and affirmations has become an acceptable part of life. All things are
possible when the mind is fully activated, but, personally, I have concluded that my
non-programmed conscious OBE was an experience of the soul: a part of myself which is
neither physical nor mental. Furthermore, my soul contains the ‘real’ me,
because, when the two were separate, I was 100% in the soul, sensing the body more as an
overcoat which I had taken off.
Dreaming Life Freedoms
I could measure the ‘realness’ of my
OBE (compared to my normal waking life) because I was awake and conscious. My waking life
is something that happens to me while all my conscious senses are switched on. The OBE was
a fully conscious experience, and my waking life is also a conscious experience, so I
could equate the two and say, ‘Yes, that OBE was real.’ In my dreams, unless I
am lucid, I have no way of comparing my dream experiences to my waking life, because, in
theory, my conscious ‘reality indicator’ is sleeping it off. I may wake up and
say, ‘That dream was so real!’ I may carry memories and sensations of a
‘real’ dream around with me all day, just as certain that I have visited a place
I once knew, hugged an old friend, or taken an instant overnight tour to Europe.
How bizarre. I have a conscious memory of a dream
and its ‘reality’, yet I was not conscious at the time (unless I was lucid). So
what is it that we bring back to waking memory? Are we more conscious than we realise
while we dream? Does our unconscious pass on a summary of the dream to the conscious self
shortly before waking? Does our conscious self have access to our unconscious dream
experience with an ability to scan and extract information that may get a bit garbled in
the translation between the dream experience and the language of the conscious self? How
can we bring back into consciousness so much of our dreams if these are ‘only’
unconscious experiences? Is the dream state a bridge between consciousness and the
unconscious – a way of accessing what is not conscious and bringing it into waking
reality? Are dreams merely our unconscious experiences bubbling up to the surface into
waking recognition, so that we can improve our lives through conscious understanding of
previously buried thoughts and memories? Or are our dreams a communication bridge between
our conscious selves and everything else that exists, physically, mentally and
spiritually?
Consider this sleeping OBE and the events that
followed for Joe in the days after the ‘dream’:
The most vivid experience I had was 26 years ago
while I was in hospital in Brisbane. I remember clearly floating through the corridors of
the hospital, moving out of the way of nurses coming towards me, visiting every ward,
looking down at the patients in all the wards. A few days later, after I was allowed out
of bed, I walked around and remembered everything I had seen and all the patients I
recognised. In two of the wards where there had been someone in a bed who was not there
now, I asked, giving descriptions. I was told that they had been discharged the day
before. This convinced me that it was not a dream. At the time I did not know what had
happened to me.
(Joe, catering attendant)
As Joe described, he was able to check his
‘dream’ OBE observations with his fully conscious, waking life observations and
find rational explanations for the differences. He had been out of his body and did not
class this experience as a dream. What kind of freedom had he experienced during his dream
time?
Freedom of the Mind or Freedom of the Soul?
In our dreams we appear to enjoy a freedom from
our normal bodily constraints. I remember receiving a phone call on one of our ABC
Brisbane dream talkback shows from a man who had been a paraplegic for a number of years
following an accident. He described how he always had full use of his body in his dreams,
an experience which was such a relief to express that his tears choked the end of his
story, but his impact on the listeners not to mention the ABC crew, was stunning. A friend
of mine has relied on crutches to get around for decades, but often has dreams where he
runs or walks without them. People who have become blind often still see in their dreams.
Is the brain still able to generate sensations
such as movement or sight to match the dream theme in the absence of the physical input of
moving muscles and limbs, or nerve impulses from the optic nerve, or are these sensory
experiences gained on another level? Able-bodied dreamers do it all the time – with
body unmoving and asleep – non-swimmers swim in their dreams and many of us fly,
float or ‘whoosh’ along. We can even close our eyes and ‘just be
there’. We are transported in an instant from the middle of a Sydney city street to
Amsterdam, or from December 1993 to May 1962, and it all appears perfectly normal. We may
dream of going through the process of having an OBE, of looking down and seeing our
separate body, or even of dying (a common dream) and then flying off to get on with
something else.
In short, whether we remember actually leaving
our physical body or not, our common dream experience is to get along fine without it, or
to have a new power to make it do things that we just can’t do in waking life. In
these cases, are we physically freed from our bodies, like a detached soul gone
walkabout (or flyabout), or are we mentally freed from our physical bodies, free
within our minds and our imaginings to roam at will? Are our dream wanderings of the soul
or wanderings of the mind?
Astral Travel in Dreams
According to our simple definition (see earlier
this chapter), astral travel is experiencing the soul as a separate part of our
being, unrestrained by the physical body, in place or in time, in or out of dreams. To
know whether we astral travel or not, we need to be able to distinguish between dreams
stemming from the mind and dreams resulting from the soul which becomes freed from the
body. Is this distinction possible?
John separates these two possibilities into
‘dreams’ (the mind) and ‘astral travel’ (the soul), and describes how
he distinguishes between them:
Astral travel, as I see and have experienced it,
is distinct from dreaming because the subject and detail that I see is as I see it
(usually) at some later stage in my life. The people I meet, their conversations and so on
are as I meet and talk to them at some later stage. It is a distinct feeling of being
‘out of the body’ as opposed to being ‘within the mind’ which is more
the location for a dream. I have travelled the astral with one of my old dogs, something
that may raise an eyebrow or two, but I have heard of other people who have had similar
journeys with other birds and animals.
(John, town planner)
Some relate ‘astral travel’ more to a
combination of time travel and geographical travel as in Jasmine’s experience:
Astral travel: I was in a walled city, dressed in
the clothes of the day, probably hundreds of years ago, a sort of Middle East type city.
We were all going about our business when I looked up to the turrets and saw soldiers
coming over the walls. I called the alarm and ran down a side street, as did everyone
else. As I passed a dark archway an arm stretched out, caught me and said, ‘Come, we
have been in this time long enough, we must move on.’ That arm was so strong and
comforting, although I did not see who it belonged to.
(Jasmine, teacher)
Others see astral travelling as the experience of
being able to gain another perspective (learning) on life, presumably from an astral
dimension (the astral plane) – the dimension of the soul:
My father died in 1965 and then in about 1972/3 I
had an extensive period of dreaming and astral travelling. On one occasion I was able to
meet up with the spirit of my father and look on as he was helping other people in his new
life. Later I came to realise that my physical body was in fact a vehicle in which other
souls were able to find shelter for various periods of time.
(John, town planner)
So far it seems we can only distinguish between
soul experiences and mind experiences on a personal level. Each dreamer may or may not
have his or her own sense of ‘knowing’.
Categories of Dreams?
If some of our dreams are soul experiences, while
others are mental or physical experiences, would it be helpful to categorise dreams into
different types? Many survey participants found it easier to deal with their own dream
experiences by forming them into categories. Take John’s dream experiences, for
example:
1. Relaxation. 2. Emotional. 3. Prophetic, either
symbolic or literal. 4. Review of Events 5. Astral travel. 6. As a helper.
(John, town planner)
We each have our personal experiences, and you
may wish to look back over your dreams to create a structure that makes sense to you.
Throughout this book I have loosely indicated ‘categories’ when I have referred,
for example, to ‘precognitive dreams’, ‘lucid dreams’, ‘symbolic
dreams’, ‘literal dreams’, ‘time travel dreams’ and so on. It has
been useful to utilise the English language in this way and to give some structure to aid
rational discussion. It has not been my serious intent to offer a strict categorisation of
types of dreams because I don’t believe this to be the overall reality. My
perspective, which will become clear in Part Three of this book, leans towards an
acceptance that dreams are experiences which tend to occur at three different levels: the
levels of the body (physical), the mind (psychological) and the soul (philosophical or
spiritual – the immortal connection with the true meaning of life).
Astral Travel or a Meeting of Minds?
Take a dream such as Margaret’s, and ask
yourself if this was a meeting of minds or a meeting of souls. Or did one mind ‘pick
up’ on the existence of the other, so that Margaret was ‘reading’ her
ex-husband’s mind? Or was it all coincidence? Or, or, or what? What is your opinion
of the evidence?
One night I dreamed about my ex-husband, that he
was really ill and had great difficulty breathing. He was trying to contact me in the
dream, and I could see how ill he looked.
I tried to dismiss it as just part of the break
up, but deep down I knew it was not an ordinary dream. It got too much for me in the days
that passed. In the end I wrote to him and said I’d had one of ‘my dreams’
and he’d know what I meant. I asked him if he could let me know if he was okay. He
turned up about ten days later and told me he’d been in an accident at work and had
been overcome by toxic fumes. He had been very ill and was still having chest problems. My
dream was on the night of the accident.
(Margaret, home maker)
Perhaps the feelings described in this next dream
begin to point towards a distinction between a meeting of minds and a meeting of souls.
Since the dream is also precognitive, it begs the question of which aspect is more capable
of looking ahead to the future: the mind or the soul?
In the middle of a long, complex and very real
dream, I sat down at a table in a restaurant and looked at the man sitting to my right. I
instantly recognised him as an uncle I hadn’t seen for about 30 years. I probably
hadn’t given him more than a passing thought for most of that time. This man had a
different physical effect on me than the other dream characters. I would normally have
been happy to see him, in or out of my dreams, but there was something unusual about this
meeting. It was as if I had broken through into another reality, but a reality that was
‘more real’ than my waking life. My body swayed, my heart rate rose and I felt
anxiety choke my throat. I tentatively checked it was him by using his name. He showed me
a magazine and told me he was selling advertising at $40 a page. I thought this was very
cheap, then the dream returned to its previous story-line.
A few weeks later I received a letter from my
mother, who lives in Britain, to say this uncle had just died (about four weeks after my
dream). I received her letter on the 40th day after my dream. On reflection I
felt that he had communicated this to me in my ‘dream’ but that I had confused
the original meaning and woke up with a symbolic ‘near fit’. Symbolically he had
‘advertised’ that I would read about (magazine) him in 40 days ($40). Since
then, I have had similar ‘swaying reality’ dreams which have been later
verified, and I feel these are ‘astral meetings’ rather than mentally tuning
in’, an experience which I know well. This new type of ‘dream’ is helping
me to distinguish personally between symbolism, meetings of the mind and meetings of the
soul.
(Jane Anderson)
Why Visit the Astral Plane?
For those who have personal experience of, or
have faith in, the existence of an immortal soul, it makes little sense to live waking
life without reference to what the soul is learning. If we accept that it is useful to
interpret our dreams on a psychological or physical level to give us insight into
improving our waking lives, then the same philosophy must surely be applied to the
spiritual aspects of our being. In this context, dreams can either be a way of
communicating more directly with your soul, or the souls of others, or they can be used as
a springboard to free the soul from the body to experience and learn more in astral
dimensions. This higher plane of learning, I believe, is open to whoever wishes to take
the journey. We may elevate our dream experiences to this level to discover more about
ourselves, or we may choose to interact with others, perhaps on a healing level.
To understand whether we can take these astral
experiences literally or whether we bring back a distorted picture and need to interpret
them as dreams, it is instructive to look at the astral experiences of some of the survey
dreamers.
Healing on the Astral Plane
Several of the survey dreamers feel that they
participate in healing while they are asleep and that some of their remembered dreams are
fragments of their healer-helper roles while asleep.
I see faces just before sleep and I have been
told these are people (in spirit and of this world), who are in need of help. I can’t
be positive but I feel that some of the people are shock deaths whom I have asked to be
allowed to assist in knowing they are dead. I feel they come back to let me know they are
okay – one friend in particular who was killed earlier this year.
(Regina, executive assistant)
Many dreamers have the experience of tuning in to
someone who needs help, but often they don’t realise this until future events reveal
the original cause of their dream:
My mother had dreams like mine. I remember as a
child her saying she dreamed the old Scots man who lived next door to her mother was
calling for her to come at 4 a.m. and he was distressed. In Grandma’s next letter,
she told how the old chap had died at 4 a.m. on the night of the dream. There were
320miles distance between us.
(Margaret, home maker)
I had an afternoon nap on this day, so I was
asleep between 1 p.m. and 1.38 p.m. In the dream the whole room was grey and empty.
Suddenly I felt weightless as if there were no gravity. On my left hand side I saw a
television set. There was no picture, only scratching sounds and ‘scratch marks’
appearing on the screen. I was frightened and called out, ‘Who’s there? Do you
come in peace?’
Suddenly, close to my right ear was a loud but
croaky whisper. A man’s voice said, ‘My name is Martin.’ By this time I was
aware of a deathly cold around my ear, like frostbite. I told him to speak up but he
replied, ‘I can’t because of my throat.’ I said, ‘I can’t hear
you very well and besides, you’re as cold as a corpse, a dead man.’ Instantly I
felt a ‘whooshing’ like being pulled backwards. I woke up and I recall my right
ear was almost ‘frozen’. I went to the bathroom to apply a warm towel when the
phone rang. It was my ex-boyfriend to tell me that a friend of his, Martin, was dying of
throat cancer. He died in hospital later that week.
(Eloise, unemployed receptionist)
It is possible that both of these dreamers have
responded to the call for help, and that the memory of doing this has been obliterated by
the waking light. If you have this kind of dream and are willing to be of spiritual
assistance to others, you may wish to consider doing so. It is wise to realise that if you
accept communication with other spiritual beings (alive or dead) is possible, that you
should perhaps also accept that among the well intentioned souls in need of direction and
help are those who carry negativity, or who are destructive to themselves and others.
Before dedicating yourself to being available as a helper on the astral plane, do whatever
feels right to you in consideration of your beliefs to protect yourself from taking on any
negativity from such souls. If you are completely blank on this, a good method is to
mentally draw a perfect (divine) white light down through the chakra at the top of your
head and let it fill your whole body. Let the white light spill out through your pores
until it forms a protective covering or ‘aura’ around you. Mentally seal the
outer layer against negativity, leaving gaps that allow only positivity to go through in
either direction. Ask this divine source for protection and for guidance to help in a way
that is for the highest good of all concerned. If you feel inadequately prepared for this,
or feel unsure, read other literature on this subject, but use only that which feels right
for you.
If all this seems totally way out to you, take a
wide berth, but keep an open mind. As your dream experiences accumulate, you may well find
yourself turning back to read this one day. It would be totally irresponsible of me, I
feel, to allow this chapter to be published, without including the above paragraph on
spiritual protection.
Sharing Astral Plane Experiences
I lived with my sister when we were going to art school together.
We often went astral travelling together and would write down our dreams the
next morning. We’d do things like go from Sydney to the Blue Mountains
where we were brought up. She would go and visit her friends and I would visit
my children, then we’d link up before coming back. Through that one year
of living together and dreaming together we became really close. We always know
what the other is going through.
(Robyn, sculptor)
Casebook: Astral Travelling or Housekeeping?
The following dreams are presented to challenge
you. Take each dream separately and ask yourself whether these are astral experiences (the
soul) or housekeeping experiences (clearing out the mind and body) … or somewhere
between the two.
Dream 1
Future Perspective
As the dream begins, I am looking out across a
barren landscape where everything is brown. There are no trees, shrubs or grass. Off to my
right is a rocky headland which juts out to sea. A huge man is set into the cliff. There
is a line across his head from which emanates a waterfall of tears. The river of tears
flows down upon the desolate earth, but it is too late. I realise the enormity of the
situation and look to the sea. Suddenly I am 40 feet under the water standing on the sandy
bottom, but I can still breathe. The colours in the water are intense and crystal clear.
Three grey shapes approach quickly and I am
afraid until I recognise them as dolphins. I am aware of their immense power and perfect
mastery of their domain. A loud singing ‘thought message’ comes from them.
‘Have faith, you will survive the age of destruction.’ They veer away, still in
formation and look right into my eyes. Such joy, wisdom and compassion. Immediately they
break the surface, the dream finishes.
The part that intrigues me the most is the cliff
man’s dress: gold buckled shoes, brown breeches, brown coat and ruffle instead of a
collar on his shirt. I also didn’t know whether the dolphins meant me personally, or
‘you’ as a race of people.
(Robyn, sculptor)
Dream 2
Learning on the Astral
Introduction:
Do you feel that sometimes dreams are a way for your subconscious
to cover up what people are doing in their sleep? I believe that some people
are very active while sleeping (e.g. learning in other dimensions, giving or
receiving healing, etc) and that dreams are a coded form of what we are actually
doing, hence the sometimes scrambled nature of dreams.
(Serena, administration officer)
Dream:
I seemed to be in a place on the Gold Coast where people were
learning some sort of tarot. A man came in and I was mystified about him. I
wanted to know all about him. He never said a word. Next thing I knew I was
in a hospital situation and this mystery man was in a bed. I wanted to know
more and they told me what was happening. He was having a vasectomy. Next thing
I am in a learning situation in a museum type place, looking at all the things
on the walls. Someone was with me all this time. The teachings on the wall were
like a family tree with the word ‘philosophy’ at the centre. I remember
asking the person with me if I were in a lift as I could feel us going down
slowly, just like being in a lift.
(Jayne A., home maker)
Dream 3
Cushioned on Air
If my dreams are ways of experiencing
qualities of the inner me then I can find parallel situations and personalities to
coincide with what I have imagined. Still, there are some other areas which I find hard to
explain. I had a most unusual dream the other night which has been on my mind since then.
After dreaming this particular dream I went on to dream various other things throughout
the night but when I got up it was this one particular aspect which I just couldn’t
help but feel had been real. I’m sure we all dream things which appear lifelike, but
this was so real that I would swear on a Bible it had actually occurred.
Basically I was overseas, projected into the
future and a friend of mine from England, with whom years ago I felt I was in love, was
there with me. We were looking at something and he began to hold me and show me varying
degrees of affection. It was not a sexual dream, more a sensual encounter that left me
feeling as though I had honestly felt his presence.
It is as if we were in strange surroundings. I
remember feeling very lightweight as if cushioned on air and it was definitely in the
future tense. Even now, days later, I can still feel the warmth of his clothed body
against mine. That’s how real it was to me.
(Rowyn, student)
Dream 4
Twilight Cat
I know I was asleep when a voice said,
‘Look above you’, and I saw my white cat on the bedside cabinet. My reply was,
‘I don’t care, as long as it doesn’t jump on my head.’ The cat came
onto the bed, walked down the side of me and passed to my husband’s side. I woke up
and went to the toilet and about half an hour later, while still awake, the above events
happened exactly.
(Jane, cook)
Dream 5
Reliving the Past
I am involved in family history research and
particularly during the last six months I have been producing a detailed book. Photos are
always greatly prized and sought. Then I had a ‘dream’:
I was sitting at the huge dining room table in my
paternal grandmother’s very old home. I was a child age about eight to ten years and
I was looking through an old photo album. I could smell the familiar odour of their much
loved old house. My aunt, in her mid-twenties, was coming and going through the room as
the bedroom was off this room. All the furnishings and so on were totally accurate and my
auntie’s hairstyle and dress were totally accurate of the time 1948-50. She was
telling me about the photos as she walked back and forth.
I do not have any impression at all that this was
a dream, but an accurate re-occurrence of an incident that I have no conscious
recollection of. I can only clearly remember one photo in the album.
A month later I rang an uncle, to whom I would
not have spoken for more years than I can calculate, to ask if he had any of the old
family photos that had all disappeared when my aunt and grandmother moved to a new home.
He didn’t have any or know where any were, but during the course of the conversation
he said my aunt had a lovely album with lots of photos a cousin had sent her from the
Middle east during World War II as well as family photos. I was very close to this
particular aunt who died when she was only 33. I used to sleep with her and go through her
things when we went to town.
On waking I had the emotional experience of
having been in the presence of the persons involved and I did not intellectually accept
that they were ‘dreams’.
(Dorothy, retired teacher)
Dream 6
Lucid on the Astral
I dreamed I was at a girlfriend’s house
(although it was different to her actual home) and we were chatting, when I suddenly
realised I had no recollection of getting there. I told June this and she laughed. I said,
‘The last thing I remember is reading in bed and dozing off.’ June thought I was
mad. I knew if I was there in spirit I would be able to fly. So I told them to watch me as
I walked down the end of the hall, rose up to the ceiling and flew back towards them. It
scared the wits out of them!
After everything had calmed down, June and I went
out to the back room for a cup of tea. I was touching June’s hand saying, ‘Look
my hand doesn’t go through your like it does in the movies.’ Also I could feel
my hand gripping the mug. More happened in this dream and then I found myself back in my
body in bed looking at my bedside table and the things on it. I wasn’t awake, this
was still part of the dream. I went on to another dream from this point.
(Chiron, astrologer)
Dream 7
Aliens
I’d like to mention a dream I had when I was
about ten years old., and it had so much impact that it has been stuck in my mind for all
these years and the memory keeps coming up. In it my younger brother and I were sitting on
the lounge room floor of the house we lived in at the time. We were playing a game of
jacks, or something similar, when we suddenly saw what looked like a spaceship of about
two feet in circumference, hovering just below the ceiling.
We looked at each other and froze as the
spaceship hovered for, what seemed like, a few minutes. Then it slowly flew down to about
a foot away from our heads and began letting of some kind of gas. I felt my consciousness
fade and then the next thing I remember is waking up in a sweat with my heart pounding
very fast.
Now, I’m not implying that we were captured
by a UFO and I realise that this could possibly be a typical ten year old’s dream,
especially with all the spaceship and science fiction stories so readily available through
books and television. But I mention this dream because it seemed so real and left me
feeling strange for a while.
(Tara, medical secretary)
Dream 8
The Lockerbie Air Disaster
I dreamed I was at a dance and I went out to the
back verandah and looked out of the window. A white circle appeared and my vision zoomed
into it. I saw a large object burning in the middle of a field. People were coming from
all directions: firefighters, police, etc. People were saying something about children and
Christmas presents. This dream occurred in the early hours and I awoke around 10 a.m. (I
had been out late at a Christmas party). I put the television on and then saw what I had
dreamed: the Lockerbie plane crash in Scotland.
(Chiron, astrologer)
Which Reality?
I have dreamed quite a lot of foreign cities and
places where I am convinced, during the dream, that I am actually there. The amazing thing
is that during the dream, I realise that it’s only a dream and that I really am not
in Paris or San Francisco and I am so disappointed that it’s only a dream. Soon after
this realisation I usually wake up feeling upset and disturbed.
(Kerry, student)
Does Kerry’s experience capture the point
where we discover that we have been deceived by our dreams? Or does she describe the
moment we cross over from an astral reality into a waking reality, a transition which our
waking mind finds hard to comprehend and, in the confusion, dismisses as irrational?
We are incredibly good at using rational thought
to argue ourselves out of situations we don’t understand:
In this dream I was speeding in my car and was
pulled over by the police. At that point I realised I was dreaming and told the police
they couldn’t book me as this was only a dream. They didn’t believe me, nor did
the person I was with and eventually I was convinced it wasn’t a dream and I paid the
fine.
(Leigh S., mother)
I have also had an experience, at night in sleep
hours, that I thought was real, but was so odd that I must have been dreaming: an alien
dream.
(Amanda, astrologer)
Can we really ever be sure which is more
‘real’: our waking life, or other realities which we may access through our
dreams?
The Ins and Outs of Dreaming
So we return to the original question: Are our
dreams the symbolic memory of our mind-body housekeeping, or are they remnants of a
greater experience in another dimension: the ‘astral plane’?
My assessment of the evidence is that we have
both housekeeping dreams and astral experiences.
The housekeeping dreams are largely concerned with tidying up aspects of the mind and body and can
be viewed as experiences that are focused within the physical body, brain and unconscious
mind. External physical effects such as light, thunder or a mosquito bite may have input
at this level, perhaps appearing at the ‘physical level’ of your dreams. These
dreams are largely symbolic. External ‘power of the mind’ effects such as
telepathy, tuning into the thoughts or dreams of others, and perhaps some aspects of time
travel may also come into this category.
The astral dreams are more concerned with the experiences of a detached soul and its
learning and interactions in dimensions outside those of waking reality. I believe much of
this experience is lost to waking memory, and that what we do bring back is often confused
in the translation, surviving only as fragmentary symbolic dreams.
Dream interpretation. In practical terms, I believe it is best to consider all dreams, no
matter whether you feel they are housekeeping dreams or astral experiences, as ‘best
fit’ memories which are best understood through the application of the dream
interpretation techniques you have learned in this book. I also believe that there is
great value in looking at other aspects of life from the point of view of our first
language: the language of dreams, but this idea is reserved until later in Part Three!
See Appendix B for an extract from The
Precognitive Dreamers’ Discussion on this subject.
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