Chapter 7: An Introduction to Dreaming

...subsection menu...   A Few Facts About Dreams and Dreaming   Why We Dream   Higher Consciousness and Lucidity   OOBE and Transpersonal Consciousness

o aspect of sleep is more mysterious than dreaming. It is a place our science has not been able to penetrate to any great depth, and I believe it is because our science simply hasn't had the tools to do it. Dreams have always been the area of sleep research reserved for "space cadets" and "flakes", and the amount of hard data on dreaming is small because dreams are not hard experiences. Dreams may be our most personal, most intimate, and most free experiences.

Dreaming occurs in the realm of the subconscious, and often the conscious as well, and the lack of logic associated with dreams seems to point to how foolish it is to apply logical techniques to their study. Freud and Jung both made a big deal out of dreams, but Freud's work was confined to seeking out logical connections between dreams and waking reality. Jung's work is more widely accepted today, perhaps because he accepted dreams on their own terms, broke with traditional logic and allowed dreams to reveal their meanings to him as much as he assigned meaning to them.

This non-logical analysis appears to be the only way we will truly come to grips with this mystery, and we now have scientific data which indicates that this is precisely how dreams need to be approached. Quantum physics, a favorite subject of mine, has caused a large number of hard scientists to question their methods because of the strange phenomena they are discovering at the level of quantum particles. They are finding that quantum particles, ultra-tiny particle, some of which compare in size to electrons the way our moon might compare to the size of the sun, show every sign of being real.

But some of them can't even be proven to exist using our old scientific tools, because at the time we measure them, they could be either matter or energy. They do not sit still for us to take their picture but instead change in nature between a solid state of matter and a non-solid state of energy. And even more confusing for traditional researchers, they offer the additional impudence of behaving differently depending upon who does the measurements, as though they respond to our expectations or measuring instruments and cannot be taken as completely separate from us.

Dreams display the same characteristics. Objects in dreams have every characteristic of being real and solid, yet they disappear when we open our eyes. Dreams are like life but not like life. They respond to us as observers, as those who can achieve consciousness in their dreams will testify. And they can't be proven scientifically to exist, because there's always a chance that everyone who ever said they had a dream either lied or imagined it. No one has been able to film or send an independent observation team into someone's dream to prove it actually exists.

As we improve our technology in regard to understanding quantum particles and their behavior, this knowledge is bound to translate into an explosion of new technology for coming to grips with previously unexplainable phenomena such as dreams.