Let’s Get High on Dreams
What are dreams?
Dreaming has always been an important part of my life. I have a very vivid and very active imagination that never seems to sleep. I daydream a lot, and every morning, I have at least some recollection of night dreaming to ponder. Yet, I’ve consistently wondered what exactly is the point of dreaming.
Purpose of Dreams
It seems to me that dreaming has two major purposes. On one level, dreaming is an exercise in exploring possibilities. And on another level, dreaming is a kind of temper tantrum that says I want the world like this particular possibility (and sometimes a temper tantrum that says I don’t want the world like this particular possibility).
It seems to me that dreaming is a kind of alternate learning tool to our waking state. There are lessons to learn from dreaming that are just as pertinent as lessons learned while awake. Dreaming is a window into what is usually kept unconscious and thus it is a way of bringing hidden things to the surface and dealing with them. I know from personal experience that there is a lot of stuff I’ve learned from dreams.
Analysis
There are techniques like Freudian dream analysis that are supposed to help people learn from their dreams, but I don’t buy a lot of the interpretations garnered through such methods. For instance, I have been killed three times in my dreams that I can recall. And each time I was killed by a woman. Two times I was stabbed to death and the other time I was at a gas station in the Arizona or Nevada desert and a woman shot me in the gut–my last words were, “dying hurts.” According to Freud, such dreams would be interpreted as some sort of issue with women, and it would be treated very personal and within materialist boundaries. However, perhaps those were flashbacks of past lives or premonitions—or nothing.
The way people are so easily convinced while dreaming that their dreams are real makes me seriously consider that what we call normal reality is just another layer of dreaming. And in fact, that is the model of reality I live my day to day life in. And when you hold a model like that, ideas like reincarnation and premonitions seem perfectly plausible. There is really no matter only a mind that dreamt it up.
Brain versus Mind
It seems to me that brain is but an insignificant spec in the field of mind. Brain is like your personal computer with its local storage of information. But mind is like the internet. The only reason we have our own local computers (brains) is because we maintain bad internet connections (like 14.4k), thus we need to store information locally so we can have fast access, and also so we can keep some information private and other information unconscious. When we try to interact with each other physically, we simply attempt to make a local connection, like trying to hook two computers together with a USB chord, instead of utilizing the internet, where in theory we could communicate telepathically.
The more we raise our consciousness, the more we increase the capacity of our internet connection and so we become more tuned in to the collective mind and are able to rely less on local communication. It seems to me that certain psychoactive substances, like psychedelic drugs, are like temporary internet connection boosts that allow better access to the collective mind. And dreaming too is a kind of internet connection boost. By turning off the external senses, a poor internet connection can be better utilized, and that seems to be what happens with dreaming—perhaps with meditation too. Ultimately, by becoming completely immersed in the collective mind (internet) a person no longer needs to exist physically and separately and so no brain or body is desired and so needed.
Sources
The content of my own dreams is often quite bizarre and I often can’t help but wonder where the content came from. I have lots of dreams of things and scenarios that seem very foreign to me in my waking state. For instance, I have a recurring dream theme of traveling down a tropical river. In the dream, I’m dark, trim, and muscular, alone in a canoe, wearing nothing but a loin cloth, and I’m surrounded by dense, tropical forest. It seems to me like I’m somewhere in South America. Perhaps it points to a past life as an Amazonian shaman or something. Perhaps I was drifting down that river while high on a psychedelic substance like Ayahuasca and my mental state at the time was so perturbed into higher levels that reflections of the moment transcended time and so pop up today in my current life.
Psychic Dreams
Transcending time in dreams is something I’ve directly experienced several times. And the way I directly experienced time transcendence is by having psychic dreams. All my psychic dreams have involved pre-living part of the upcoming day with all its idiosyncrasies intact. For example, one morning I had a dream about going to a certain college class and a certain girl I was interested in took the seat right next to me. In the dream, the girl started conversing with me and that conversation carried on after class, until I woke up and it was morning and time to get up and go to the class I was just dreaming about. I got up, went to that class, took the same seat I was sitting in in the dream, and amazingly, the exact same scenario from my dream unfolded.
It turns out that, although I thought the girl was very attractive and I was flattered that she was obviously interested in me, there was nonetheless a deal killer. The deal killer was how she kept mentioning how she was wanting to break up with her current boyfriend. Which is girl speak for, ask me out and I’ll break up with my current boyfriend. The problem with that is it involves bad karma and it shows she is the kind of girl that will stay with a guy and string him along even though she’s got her eye open for someone better. And if she did that to another guy, there is a fairly good chance she might eventually do the same to me. I personally respect women who aren’t afraid to be single and tell a guy how it really is. But that is another subject.
Only In Dreams
There is something powerful in the whole scenario revolving around the formation of romantic relationships that often boils up special mind feats and synchronicities. For instance, to me there is no such thing as love at first sight. There is like at first sight, but not love. However, there is such a thing as love at first dream. Consequently, dreams have always been very important for me in becoming interested in a woman. If I can’t dream about her, it is hard to build enthusiasm.
Dreaming Awake
There was a great quote about dreaming posted at IWillChangeYouLife.com :
“All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” - T. E. Lawrence
My new motto is “Dream to do.” I’ve done way too much idle dreaming and now it’s time to turn those many dreams into doing. Thus, I want to start dreaming awake. Dreaming to do isn’t the kind of mechanical doing upon which most of the world is occupied. Dreaming to do is instead an exercise in redefining what is reality; it takes a certain courage, conviction, and self-confidence.
Inspiration
Ultimately, our dreams are what can inspire us to take action and do. And the real purpose of taking action and doing is to learn how to come to terms with other people and ultimately the world.
So, let’s get high on dreams and get inspired to action. There is no time like now to get moving.
Don’t Overlook Positive Influences
A number of years ago, I read the book Power vs. Force by David Hawkins. In that book, Hawkins outlines an idea where, by using kinesiology, a person can calibrate how truthful or positive something is. In the presence of truthful, positive things, a person’s body has more strength. Thus, by measuring bodily strength under different influences, a person can measure how truthful and positive something is. It is an interesting idea and it is something I’d describe as true enough, but not really true. It is an illusion measuring and illusion.
The influences we let into our lives are not neutral because our thoughts about those things aren’t neutral. Influences can either energize us or drain us. When we give our attention to something, we essentially meditate upon that thing. Meditate upon negative things and you’ll most likely end up feeling negative. Meditate upon positive things and you’ll most likely end up feeling positive. People don’t have bad thoughts because they are depressed, they are depressed because they have bad thoughts.
We tend to be attracted to meditating upon things near our own level. A good example of that is music. You can often tell a lot about a person’s state of mind by the kind of music they like or are into at a given moment in time. And as people grow and change, their musical preferences often grow and change.
The most popular music is generally indicative of the median mental state of the general populace. I personally find most popular music either depressing, trite, or both. I listen to it only as much as is needed to stay up-to-date. While I’ve gone through many phases of music preference, the only music I’ve consistently liked throughout my life is upbeat pop-punk (example), which is in the same spirit as the other stuff I’ve consistently liked, like early Beatles (example). I also have consistently enjoyed composers like Vivaldi, Beethoven, and Mozart (example). And the only music I can’t stand at all is bass thumping techno house music—to me, that stuff is like torture.
So anyway, take a look at the influences you allow into your life. It should all for the most part be stuff that lifts you higher and energizes you with positivity. If you are energized with positivity, then when the unavoidable negative stuff intrudes on your life, you’ll be able to hold your own ground and deal with it and so it will have minimal impact.