“Such is your luck, such are you called to see, and let it come rough or smooth, you must surely bear it.”
— Nat Turner
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Having Semi-Lucid Conversations
In a dream, I am driving a car but having difficulty finding the steering wheel. Though it is right in front of me it is at an odd, low position, and only consists of a small arc of a circle. Cresting a hill, the road drops precipitously cutting across the mountainside, descending into a valley, though an urban area densely built-up on the slope. Seeing a road branching off uphill and right, I turn onto it and slow to a crawl, looking for a place to park.
I turn left, crossing a small bridge over a canal that runs along the hillside. Again pointing downhill, I turn the car around and park, pointing uphill. I go off in search of something.
I find myself at a clinic for people with neurological damage. The ground is not so steep here, but I’m still in the same area. I watch as a client is being coached in learning to walk with coordination. I notice I seem to be having some trouble coordinating my knees.
On my return to the car, I discover I cannot find it. I think I’m at the location where I parked but the car is not there. Everything looks the same but I’m unsure, so I decide to look around and maybe ask for directions.
Nearby, I enter a complicated building, maybe a residence or establishment. I find myself confronted by turns and passages, doors, windows, stairs, cabinets. Nothing is at right angles, all at different heights. I cannot get a sense of where things lead or what’s going on.
A door opens and an Asian man exits from a cabinet and goes past. I try to enter the cabinet and the passageway to which it opens. I can see daylight through the opening, but it’s only 2-inches wide and impossible to enter.
I’m with my young teenage son who, in the dream, is now 10. That’s the age at which I had traveled with his older brother. We enter a cafe or pub somewhere inside the building. It’s unclear how we got in or how we might get out. The room is full of people and, at first, I look for an exit.
I find two doors that look promising, one leads to a patio at the same level and the other down some steps and perhaps to the street. I’m considering which exit to take when a woman seated at a table tells me she’d be happy to show me around the neighborhood. She is a middle aged woman with dark hair and a somewhat dowdy appearance.
I tell her that I’d love to accept, but I first want to find my car. If I can, then I’ll come back and join her. We exchange a few more warm words and I assure her that I’m not making an excuse. I greatly appreciate her offer, and I will try to come back.
I call to my son, who seems to have gone off. He does not respond and I worry that he is or will become lost, as I am. I decide to take the lower exit from the cafe. I descend, exit through a car-sized opening, and find myself on a street that also crosses the canal. I feel that while this isn’t where I parked the car, it’s probably close.
My son is there playing with someone he’s found in the neighborhood. I follow them down a precarious hillside that leads off the road and works downhill following a low wall. The friend he’s found appears to be an attractive, short-haired girl. She looks at me radiantly and my son says, “She heard you speak and was impressed that you knew so many languages!”
Her face is adorned with face paint, sparkles, or tattoos in a kind of starburst pattern of many colors. As I look directly at her, I notice her features are somewhat distorted. Her face is thin and long.
The abstract starburst patterns are not painted on but are some sort of skin pigmentation. I say to her, “Where did you hear me speak? I don’t really know many languages. I once spoke other languages but now I only speak English.”
She looks at me blankly, her face going slack and losing the sparkle. She seems disappointed or uncomfortable. I quickly add, “Oh, you must mean I speak with a knowledge of other systems and attitudes.”
She recovers her engagement and enthusiasm. Her face sparkles again and the dream ends.
Having Conversations with People Who Are Not Yourself
The above dream was unusual in its length and continuity. Everything happened in the same vicinity and everything was consistent, at least to the extent that I could understand it. The dream repeated the same themes and the two conversations addressed issues of both my real and dream realities.
Once you become adept at remembering dreams, you start to have dreams in which you go to places you’ve never been, meet conversants you’ve never before encountered, and receive messages that are unexpected and perhaps beyond understanding. The longer the dream you remember, the more coherent it becomes.
As a person trained in the hard sciences, I have no trouble accepting things that are completely strange and make no sense. You might think people who are practiced in the hard sciences are rigid in the realities they’ll accept, but that’s only true of people who are less able and open minded.
A good scientist accepts everything at face value, and then tries to make something of it. In fact, a great scientist lives in a world where the most important things make no sense.
I completely understand why some people believe in ghosts, aliens, and supernatural entities. The inner world is full of them and, as we know from our dreams, the reality of the inner world can be entirely convincing. So, the scientific thing to say is, “Fine, let it be another reality. What can I learn from it?”
The conversations I have with dream characters usually shake my reality. These are dialogs in which I’m semi-consciously involved, not situations where I’m simply a witness or bystander. I am convinced I’m speaking with someone who is not myself, who may inhabit a world that’s foreign to me, and who may know things that I don’t.
I do not mean there is a real, physical world in some parallel universe, a realm of the spirits, or wormhole to another dimension. These other worlds are immaterial because, in truth, the world of my mind is immaterial. I have yet to meet a spirit or entity in my dreams who is inconvenienced by the needs of a physical body. They do not misplace their keys, wash the dishes, or need to use the restroom.
If you’d like to work with your dreams to understand yourself…
Constructed Realities
Few people understand realities. Most think there is only one, but our one reality is just a construct. There are as many realities as there are separate realms of persistent things. These realities may depend on each other, like we depend on the molecular reality, but they conceive of each other in their own terms.
For example, we interact with our chemistry, but we do it through sensation and not through atomic physics. Both sensation and atomic physics are real, but they are different realities. You will never “sense” atomic physics, only consequences of it. Similarly, there is no term in the equations for atomic physics that measures your sensations, but there might be terms for hormonal concentrations connected to sensations.
The worlds of sensations and atomic physics are constructed realities. We construct them in order to interact with them. These worlds exist whether or not we conceptualize them, but it is our conceptualizing of them that gives them reality to us. Within these realities we create different concepts to explain them.
We will never know the extent to which these realms are physically real. The key is the word “know,” not “real.” Real is just what is; knowing is what we make of it. The world does not depend on our knowing anything. Knowledge is something we construct and believe in. We believe in our knowledge because it helps us survive. Knowing is separate from reality.
You should have no trouble believing in the existence of other realities just as long as you don’t mistake them for being corporeal. That error will get you inexorably entangled. If these energetic beings were “real,” then where are they? And if they’re not real, how can they exist independently from us?
The answer is simple: none of us are “real,” we just think we are. Like the wave and the tornado, these things arise when the system is energized, and they disappear when energy is taken away.
For the most part, these structures exist on different scales. The wave does not exist for the molecules, and the role the molecules play is not evident in the wave. My mistake was, and the typical reductionist mistake is, that the smaller scales explain the larger ones. Chemistry does not explain the mind, and engineering does not explain art, but both exist and depend on each other.
What’s Most Real is What’s Most Important
Reality, it turns out, is limited to the keys, the dishes, and the restroom. These are the mechanisms of the world. They might even have consciousness of their own, but I doubt it. If they do, I don’t think they’d have much to tell me.
On the other hand, I’m not entirely sure. In an effort to keep an open mind, I speak encouragingly to things in my environment, like the rain, the trees, and my car. It is said that experimenters kept Wolfgang Pauli out of their laboratories because whenever he entered, their machines would break.
If you don’t fully understand things—and I assure you that you don’t—then it pays to keep an open mind. A very open mind. Unlike Pauli, I try to be a positive influence.
If you meet an entity in your dreams and you insist, “You don’t exist!” they’ll probably disappear, and what a shame! The Buddhists say, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” I don’t believe this. Instead, I believe that when the teacher appears, the student should be ready, and there are teachers all around us. Some would say that my role as a therapist makes me a teacher.
However, I don’t believe in teachers as they generally know nothing of importance. It’s mentors who know what’s important because they have some ineffable or “extra natural” connection to you. Where teachers read instruction manuals, mentors share an aspect of your spirit. I make it clear to my clients that while I’m experienced, I only know what they tell me.
The nonphysical entities you meet in your dreams are mentors. They have something to offer of personal importance. These energies are connected to you, which is why what they bring is of importance. Think of them as vortices in the bathtub drain of life. If you’d prefer to ascend, then think of them as tornados.
You’re no better or more real than they are. In fact, they’re less encumbered and you should aspire to appreciate things at their level. Recognize that what’s most important to you does not exist in the real, material world, but in the realm of meaning, spirit, and purpose.
Your Mental Health is Most Important
This is the world we construct. It is not material, but it feels real, which is why dreams feel real. Dreams are real, but they’re not material. So are the entities we meet in our dreams. They are as real as your sanity, which is an energetic structuring of your mind.
Next time you meet in your dreams someone or something you can talk to—and because you are reading this, you soon will—recognize that they are more in touch with the reality of your spirit and sanity than you are. That is their entire existence. Unlike you, they are unencumbered.
You have much to learn from these energies, and the respect with which you approach them reflects the respect you have for your own intangible world. That’s where your spiritual growth starts: with respect for your incorporeal self.
Some might call this self-love or self respect but it’s more basic than that. It’s a recognition that you are too ignorant of the incorporeal world to know the full meaning of love and respect. The best you can do is to suspend judgement, be humble, respectful of all energies, and committed to learning.
In our complicated world of specialties, experts, and circumscribed behaviors we are taught to believe in certain truths. We are expected to internalize these laws of thought and behavior, and rooting those ideas in us is what teachers do. That is why I don’t like teachers and why I am not one. I am a catalyst or energy provider. I provide the sky; you make the tornado.
The problem I encounter in my clients is their faith in the illusions they’ve been taught. In the most problematic clients, these rules have been incorporated into their ego identity. They are good mothers, citizens, artists, scientists, or congregationalists. They are who they are supposed to be, and there they remain imprisoned. You are nothing more than what you pretend to be, and you can change that.
Once you believe your moral compass is absolute, you are absolved of behaving badly. This might entail injuring others or yourself. Real self respect does not depend on being accepted by others. You will make mistakes and in a changing landscape that’s not only expected but required. Being adaptive requires making and enduring mistakes.
It is in this context that the sins of avarice, greed, and betrayal have their true hellish implications. It’s bad to be indifferent to your exploitation of others, but you can redeem yourself through service and engagement. But when you are indifferent to how you exploit yourself and cannot imagine your mistakes, then you have no way out of your nightmare.
Immaterial reality cannot be scientifically measured, but its consequences can be. Immaterial reality actually explains things while scientific reality only predicts them. Believe in the immaterial reality of the spirits who you meet in your dreams. This is an essential step in believing in yourself.
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