I wonder sometimes, what’s the use in messages from heaven (dreams), if they flee? Or if you hear them, think about them while in bed, then lose them when you get up. Was it a communication that did its job even if the conscious mind is not involved, or cannot hold it? I started this paragraph talking to myself, but it occurs to me, guys, what say you?
Your intuition is correct: Not all dreams require retention (much less interpretation) by the conscious mind. When you think about the fact that most people don’t recall most of their dreams, you surely conclude that it must be so. Why would nature provide a function that mostly didn’t function?
So if dreams aren’t intended primarily for the conscious mind, who are they intended for?
Think of them as lightning strikes. That is, they provide balance. Just as serious electrical imbalance creates the conditions needed for lightning in the skies, imbalance – lack of communication, call it – within the mind creates the need for dreams to rebalance.
Our conscious awareness of it not needed.
Not needed and usually not available.
So what extremes are being rebalanced?
This is a bigger subject than first appears, because it involves not so much the brain as the mind, a much wider subject.
We have encouraged you to invert your society’s conventional view of the mind, and see consciousness as surrounded by subconscious knowledge, and that in turn surrounded by the vast universe of which it is mostly unconscious. That is, your individual consciousness is a bubble of disconnection from the universal intelligence, not a bubble of superior focus rising out of a sea of ignorance or in fact non-consciousness.
Thinking that way, it will be easier for you to see that much more goes on around your consciousness than goes on within the small circumference it is aware of.
And dreams are a part of that whatever-it-is that goes on around us?
Sometimes a dream might be best considered to be leakage. That is, it isn’t primarily intended for your consciousness, but you become aware of it nonetheless. What you make of it varies according to your mental state at the moment.
Psychiatrists regard dreams as valuable messages from the unconscious mind that may need interpretation.
They don’t quite say that dreams are intended for the conscious mind, though, do they? And some would say they are little more than automatic processes, or are the aftereffects of conscious activity, or are, in effect, garbage through which one may profitably root, seeing pearls of wisdom. We don’t say this is how they would but it, but that is sometimes what their attitude would amount to.
Freudians and Jungians and Adlerians would define dreams and the mental environment quite differently.
Of course. And which school of psychiatry or psychology one is drawn to serves as a rough measure of one’s own mental state. But notice that our scheme differs from theirs – less so from Jung’s, but still from that too – in inverting the structure. Where they regard the individual conscious mind as primary, we are considering it as only a local phenomenon.
Understood.
Well, consider. Think how many layers of mind coexist, and consider (as you have never done) how necessary it is for them to be continually adjusting to each other, to be rebalancing, one might say. Dreams are a sort of lightning flash in the sky, an occasional glimpse of powerful forces continually functioning. There is:
- Your conscious mind, which includes what you think of, experience, and consciously react to.
- Your subconscious mind, comprising so much more that doesn’t come up to the threshold of consciousness, or that is repressed for whatever reason, or that is not conscious mostly because the conscious mind has no receptors (has no mental structures) capable of representing it.
- Then – but here’s where things get intricate, and interesting – there is all the communications between your present 3D life and other 3D lives of yours, each of which are no less complicated and self-focused.
- In addition, there is all the communication between your present 3D focus with its non-3D aspect.
- And each of your other 3D lives comes with similar links.
- All this even before considering mental links between your own 3D life and the 3D lives of others with whom you are in resonance.
Huh! That is somewhat more than we usually consider together.
Well, if it were not continually rebalancing, readjusting – communicating, in short – how could you live?
Say some more about that?
You (that is, 3D minds) tend to forget overhead. Maintenance. You forget that your life depends upon the functioning of so many things unsuspected by you. You are creatures of your environment, and if the environment were to fail, you could not live.
That you forget, or never think about it in the first place, is natural. You are created as the center of your mental world. That is how you function and how you are designed to function. Being responsible for one tiny part of the universe, you are meant to focus your efforts on your particular responsibility. At the same time, though, it is important that you learn that this is so for everyone, for the same reason, and therefore it cannot be true in any one sense, but only relatively.
You live your lives as if the world was created for you, and centers on you, but ideally you remember that this is only one point of view, useful but contradicted from every other point of view.
Now, when your view of who you are expands sufficiently, you see that there is a sense in which it is no contradiction. You are the center of your world, and you are a spider whose web is far wider, grander, than you ever suspected. You interweave (so to speak) with all these other webs, until no one can see any one spider’s domain as central, yet each one is essential to the whole.
We may not appreciate being called spiders, but I imagine few will object to being told that their absence would leave a hole in the universe.
Well, the spider is analogy, but the hole in the universe is true.
So, dreams. Like most things in life, they have different attributes and uses, different advantages and disadvantages, depending upon how they are considered. They are not meant primarily as messages from the other layers of mind to your conscious mind. Nonetheless, they may function in that way, and your conscious intent may increase the probability of your receiving dreams that serve your purpose. Still, you will notice that you cannot command your dreams. Like the spirit, they go where they want, as they want.
Well, how about lucid dreams?
You will remember, we told you long ago (in a different context, amid a different model of psychic life) that dreams, lucid dreams, and out-of-body experiences were the same phenomenon, separable by the amount of mental energy you put into them.
In our current model we would say that lucid dreams are in effect your conscious mind’s extension into the surrounding subconscious mind and thereby retaining awareness while participating in processes that usually go on without such conscious awareness. And OBE’s may be looked at as your retaining conscious awareness while extending farther.