The Greek god Hypnos, or sleep, is the twin brother of Thanatos, the Greek god of death. The Greek gods represent archetypal patterns or blueprints for the human condition. What this particular aspect or pattern suggests is that being human means to be in a material body, and being in a material body means being conscious of one's material finitude. Another aspect of being in a body is the body sleeps--consciousness leaves the material body behind every single night of its life. The irony is that this aspect of the human condition, sleeping, also suggests that we practice dying every single night of our lives. While sleeping, or practicing how to die, we dream. We enter a different world, a very personal world, where we have adventures and then return to our material bodies. When the material body awakens, we reconstruct ourselves for the material world with ordinary, everyday rituals: we effectively weave ourselves back into our lived world.
To dream and more specifically to contemplate the nature of dreaming and the meaning of one's own dreams is challenging, partly because of the nature of dreaming. First, dreaming is in many ways quite a different reality. To dream is to hold onto our conscious awareness and to take that level of clarity that our access to Light offers us into the darkness of an unknown realm that lies beyond time and space. To dream is lose control of the radio dial and tune into different frequencies and dimensions, or access different radio stations. There are maps and principles that have been formulated by those who have walked the path to self-knowledge in the past. Since the first harmonic convergence in the late 1970's, however, a manifestation of which is the explosion of technological possibilities, the portals for human consciousness have opened wider and wider, and the old maps and principles no longer cover the range of frequencies to which human beings have access.
A second difference between wakened and dreamed existence concerns how we experience the body. In dreaming one has a perception of one's body, rather than a body per se. It is a body without material limitations. One can breath under water, fly through the air, defy gravity, and translocate in time and space. One can sometimes observe one's body and even experience being in a body, but the body that one is experiencing in the dream is not made of matter. To dream is to experience oneself as a Light body and to die to the world that is organized with and shared by others. We then return and are reborn into a world we share with others and which has continuity--in most instances--we awaken to the same world in which we fell asleep; we do that without exception. It is possible to return to the same dreamscape we left the night before when we awoke and even to find ourselves further along in the process, but this appears to be a rarer phenomenon.
Each time one recalls one's dreams, one becomes more informed about the Spirit-Soul process and the obstacles, blockages, and expansions to that process. To focus upon and contemplate one's dreams is to look into the mirror of one's Soul and witness its emergence, its possibilities, and its experiment and allow Soul to inform and even guide worldly choices, for choose we must, even if our choice is to leave it up to someone else, fate, or the gods. Ironically, the only choice there is the one we make in the moment: in life we do not have the luxury of retaking the scene, and if we keep repeating the pattern, there is something we have not learned yet. To choose for Soul means to recognized free-will and the responsibilities that accompany the exercise of free-will. That takes courage.
Prior to the harmonic convergence, holding one's center or Self sans the body was more difficult and the secrets were closely guarded. As the harmonic convergence intensified, the possibility for ascension arose. Ascension means holding one's center, one's Self, one's identity in Soul with the body suspended or absent. Through dreaming we take a journey, a journey in which we learn to hold the Light of consciousness that is our Self without the body and the shared world as our reference point.
To dream is to explore different possibilities for being human. An untrained consciousness is like a radio dial that cannot hold a particular frequency on the grid of Light and sound that holds the universe, our world, and ourselves together. To explore and contemplate dreaming is to contemplate what is unknown and to do so from one's own center. To know our center and stand with it means looking inward, and looking inward takes courage. We cannot know the Truth until we are prepared to walk through our fears.
Through the systematic and methodical contemplation of dreams--and make no mistake, spiritual development takes discipline--we become more conscious about the choices we make and begin to become more conscious in our dreams. In both wakened and dreamed landscapes, we begin to make decisions with greater discernment, we begin to differentiate aspects of ourselves and integrate various possibilities from which we imagined we were previously separated, and we make new choices from a perspective that is informed by a sense of responsibility toward that which we value. We respond to and with what we value. We nourish it. At times we may find ourselves playing on the Astral, and in so doing, we begin to learn how to function from a center that is not located in the body. We learn to move beyond the body, and in that sense, we engage in the process of Ascension.
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