Many people argue why they should bother working with their dreams. For most humans dreams have been for eons merely "the thing that happens to us when we go to sleep". Life continued day after day, year after year, and sometimes to significant levels of success. So why change all that now? What's good in it?
About the photo: Luke Abiol
There are many reasons as to the importance of our dreams in our lives. Just to name a few - dreams connect us with our true self, dreams rejuvenate our physical body, dreams carry energy that allows us to change our physical reality and dreams can be really fun.
But for the novice, those who have just begun their spiritual journey, dreams fulfill a different purpose.
Shifting realities in the dream state
During our journeys in the dreams world, we maneuver between different states of awareness. The basics are three:
- The regular dream state in which we remember short glimpses of dream events;
- The lucid dream state where we realize that we are dreaming;
- The OB (out of the body) state of awareness, where we become aware of the fact that we are outside of our physical body and dreaming.
The experience of the last state, the OB, changes one's life completely. It resembles the NDE (near death experience) where people reported that they found themselves hovering above their physical body, watching paramedics or other medical teams working on "it" (their body), trying to bring them back to life. All along, they look at the situation from a distant, trying to understand where they are and who they are.
Out of body experience
OB is much the same only you don’t need to go through a life-threatening accident to experience it. With some training and self-discipline, you can amend your awareness to become aware even in your sleep time. Then you can experience yourself detached from the physical body. Whether you experience the process itself, which is the detachment from the physical body usually accompanied by internal shakings and noises or bypass that and merely find yourself out all of a sudden, you are sure to be amazed.
The realization that you are not just your physical body is startling. I have found that very few experiences in life can top that. This OB state is much more than a regular dream. You are still you, retaining your regular awareness with your known thoughts and feelings, only now you are out "there" (i.e., is the world of dreams, a multilevel dimension, subjective and objective, that has been waiting for your arrival). Upon awakening, soon after you return to your physical body in bed, you begin asking the major questions in life – who am I? What am I doing here? What is life? What is death?
When I had my first OB experience, as a kid, I wasn't ready for it and for many years afterward the fear prevented me from replicating another OB. However, that first innovative experience allowed me to get rid of one of the biggest fears that a human can have – the fear of dying.
About the photo: Romane Granger
Fearing Death vs. Freeing death
That realization led to many years of inner exploration and outside adventures that culminated in the mindboggling thought – I will always exist. No matter what will happen, here or in other worlds, nothing can destroy who I am. Naturally, many new questions arise from this realization (which I will not get into now) but one of the most important messages is the fulfillment of the ancient prophecy about the Resurrection.
True resurrection is not about dead physical bodies that rise from the soil, assemble their crumbling bones and organs, and form the same old humans with their same old known personalities. Nature cannot work that way (we already experience the population explosion).
True resurrection is Us becoming aware of the many dimensions that surround us in which we operate and where, inter alia, we can communicate with those who have died.
Once you psychically defy death life is never the same. Think about it – if you are not afraid of dying you are free to follow your inner passions. You are not bothered by mere survival because you know that the worst thing that could happen to you is not bad at all. You may die, yes, but death will be just a new beginning. And therefore, you look for your own purpose, the personal vocation that you have chosen for yourself in this lifetime. You harness your mind to cooperate with your soul-self. Your thoughts are no longer impede your progress but add to it. You are driven by your feelings, your passion, your heart, and not by social norms or conventions that oftentimes were conceived many years before you came to this plane of existence.
