Why Do We Dream?

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Previously we discussed the multidimensionality of dreams. We spoke about where we dream, but now, we are going to speak about why. In this lecture today we are going to elaborate on our psychological constitution, who we are fundamentally. By understanding our psychological makeup, we can understand the source and originator of dreams.
 
This is because we seek to awaken. We want to achieve religion, religare (Latin), reunion. That can only be accomplished with an awakened consciousness―no longer dreaming, no longer fantasizing. By understanding why we dream, we can cease dreaming and learn to awaken consciousness within the internal worlds.
 
This question is very profound. Science has not yet been able to explain why we dream. While different psychologists, scientists, have examined why we dream and offered particular insights from different perspectives, the truth is that none of them are complete in themselves. In this lecture, we are going to purvey some of those understandings in relation to Gnostic science. The Greek word γνῶσις gnosis means “knowledge from experience.” It is what we have verified within ourselves. 

​Why Do We Dream?

​It is useful to study previous insights into dreams. In this image we have Sigmund Freud on the left and Carl Jung on the right, eminent psychologists who provided some teachings that are valuable to provide context for today.
 
Swami Sivananda, a great meditator, dream yogi, gnostic master, explained in his book The Philosophy of Dreams a summary of the works of these two psychologists in relation to why we dream. Sivananda said the following:

According to Freud all dreams, without any exception, are wish fulfilment. The wishes are actually of an immoral nature. They are revolting to the moral self, which exercises a control on their appearance. ―Swami Sivananda, Philosophy of Dreams

​In Freudian psychology, he spoke about the id: instinctual animal desire, which seeks gratification through dreams. Those tendencies or impulses that are not satisfied within one’s daily waking state find their expression within the dream world.
 
Oftentimes, these desires are contrary to our moral sense of identity, the self, which Freud calls ego, a part of us that censors that which is unacceptable within society, or reprehensible.
 
He referred to the super ego as conscience, or ideals of a society that in turn help to regulate the self.
 
In dreams, he states that desires that are not satisfied find their expression. Oftentimes these dreams are very difficult to interpret due to the symbolic expression or nature of dreams.

Hence to evade this moral censor the wishes appear in disguised forms. The dream mechanism is very intricate. Very few dreams present the wishes as they really are. Dreams are partial gratification of the wishes. They relieve the mental tension, and thus enable us to enjoy repose. They are safety valves to strong impulsions. Dreams do not disturb sleep but rather protect it. The irrationality and the immorality of dreams make the morality and rationality of our waking life possible. ―Swami Sivananda, Philosophy of Dreams

​Freud stated this or taught this because he believed that our animal instincts and desires are a part of us. In Gnosis, we go a little bit deeper than that. The irrationality of dreams occurs in order to allow for our rational existence to be. This is stated because contrary to Gnosis, many think that desire is something that cannot be eliminated or transformed. They believe it is something that cannot be removed, but instead in Gnosis, it is something that we seek to transform.
 
Carl Jung was a bit different―actually―very different. His primary focus on dreams, why we dream, is to study the spirituality of those states. Freud was contrary. He thought all dreams were merely desire, and while these two paragons of knowledge offer valuable insight into the spectrum of dreams, in Gnosis we study both in order to understand the range that we spoke about previously, the spectrum of consciousness.
 
Swami Sivananda stated the following:

The above statement of Freud shows that we know our animal self in dream. But he does not say anything about the spiritual life being expressed in dream. This, it seems, has been done by Jung. ―Swami Sivananda, Philosophy of Dreams

Carl Jung was very well known for studying the symbols of dreams, the archetypical language of mystical consciousness. Those type of experiences in our studies we call visions. They are the direct apprehension of divine truth, communicated through the allegory, the symbolism of dreams.
 
However, this does not negate the fact that many of our dreams right now are of the animal nature, constituted by desire, which we are going to elaborate later on.
 
For Freud, he was very interested in why we dream from a biological perspective, but also to understand the causes. 

According to Jung, a dream is not causally determined as was supposed by Freud, but it is teleologically determined [relating to the explanation of phenomena in terms of purpose, end, or goal rather than the function of its cause]. ―Swami Sivananda, Philosophy of Dreams

For Freud, dreams are wish fulfillment. The cause is desire. For Jung, he looked at the consequences of dreams as a means of spiritual instruction, instruction from the divine, that teaches through that state. Teleology is more concerned with the impact of dreams, not their cause. This is why Sivananda explained:

The repressed wishes alone do not explain all our dreams. A dream presents a demand to our waking consciousness. If rightly interpreted, it shows the way to be at peace with ourselves. The dreams of the neurotics not only reveal the repressed contents but they also suggest remedies for the cure. ―Swami Sivananda, Philosophy of Dreams

​We can get messages in dreams that teach us how to be healed of a problem, of a sickness, of a state of suffering, of a situation.

A series of dreams sometimes occur to a patient, which reveal the way to cure. ―Swami Sivananda, Philosophy of Dreams

​We study both perspectives and offer a synthesis. Dreams are not only focused on desire, but can be spiritual. What it depends on is our psychological state, which has a range of expression, modalities of being.

​Why Study Our Dreams?

As you see in this image of an island, we have a direct representation of our psychology. We see only on the surface of things in our physical life, but if we happen to dream, we start to see inner realities, mostly of a disturbing nature. Oftentimes dreams are incoherent, wild, ecstatic, terrifying. They have a logic of their own, but when we wake, we realize their ephemerality and oftentimes we brush it aside.
 
These dreams show us something important in ourselves. These types of dreams show that we have no control of our real psychology, of the depths of why we behave in life.
 
The irrationality of dreams shows us that there are parts of us that we do not know, that we do not control, that we do not understand. The purpose of Gnosis is to understand why we dream, the cause, the origins. Dreams in themselves reflect who we are, and in reality, what we see on the surface of things has its roots in deep, psychological causes, oftentimes traumas, states of suffering.
 
The dreams we experience at night usually are a reflection of our daily life. We may have a conflict at work. Someone gets a promotion above us, the job we longed for, and even though we may not admit it to ourselves, we feel envy, jealousy, maybe even rage. We go to bed. We dream of that situation, except without any social inhibitions or mores. We curse. We commit violence. We express our rage in the dream.
 
These dreams really reflect what is going on in us, so we cannot dismiss them as something unreal, because they are real. They have a reality. They show us qualities of ourselves that we need to understand, because in Gnosis, we study our dreams because we want to understand these root causes of pain, to eliminate them so that we stop dreaming.
 
Instead, we should have happiness and altruism for our coworkers. We should give them praise for the work that they have put forward, and not only physically changing our behaviors, but when we dream, or better said, when we go to bed at night, we learn to see the reality of things without being hypnotized by our own delusions.
 
We think we are an island like in this image, but in reality, we are a shark, a dinosaur, a monster, because these negative emotions truly are not beneficial to humanity. These elements make us dream, keep us confused, keep us hypnotized. This is why Swami Sivananda wrote in The Philosophy of Dreams: 

The waking and dreaming states do not exist independently side by side as real units. Dreams are nothing but a reflection of our waking experience in a new form. ―Swami Sivananda, Philosophy of Dreams

It is by understanding this fact that we can learn to awaken. That small bandwidth that perceives the terrain of this island can learn to go into the depths, by learning and understanding and removing the obstacles of our consciousness, by ending dreams. By knowing why we dream, we awaken the full spectrum of who we are.
 
Right now in our current state, we have a statistic that is often very disturbing for people. We are 3% conscious and 97% unconscious. If you do not believe me, we can examine the last time we went to sleep at night. How much do we remember? What did we dream, if at all?
 
Perhaps earlier in our childhood, we had a vision in which we knew we were dreaming. We were awake. That is an expression of our potential, the possibilities of Being. We want to awaken consciousness, make that unconscious part of us conscious. This is why Samael Aun Weor stated in his book Hell, the Devil, and Karma: 

Any direct experience (such as a vision, an astral experience) is to be found associated with percentages of awakened consciousness. Normally people only possess 3% awakened consciousness and 97% subconsciousness or sleepy consciousness. Unquestionably, the first sparks of direct experience begin when one reaches 4 or 5% awakened consciousness. Now, let us distinguish between sparks and total plentitude, which are different. For example, someone who possesses 10% of awakened consciousness will have a greater percentage of lucidity than those who possess 4 or 5%. ―Samael Aun Weor, Hell, the Devil, and Karma

With the techniques in this course, the vibrancy of our dreaming state becomes augmented. We see more. We experience more. We see greater color, depth and lucidity than even physically being awake, but that can only come about when we transform ourselves. 

​What We Are

This is why in our studies we study our psychology.
 
In this image, we see an eye looking out at a person, a young woman. Beyond her is a mask. This image represents three qualities of what we are fundamentally: Essence, ego, personality.
 
The Essence is our consciousness. It is our innate reality. It is the ability to perceive like this eye.
 
That consciousness can be unconditioned and awake, unimpeded by any obscuring factors like hatred, fear, vanity, pride, lust, envy, or it can be conditioned by those things, by those states that I just mentioned― the self―ego.
 
The ego, the self, our identity, what we grasp at as an essential state of who we are, whether it be attachments, fears, preoccupations, anxieties, worries, despair, morbidity, passion, these all constitute a sense of self, an “I” as in me, myself, identity. In truth, these elements obscure our real vision. They do not allow us to see reality as it is, whether we are physically awake or whether we are dreaming, unconscious, asleep.
 
We also have personality, which we will dive into. It is a mask. It is the interface we use: our language, our face, our name, our race, our culture, our upbringing, our education, our inheritance, biologically and psychologically. These help us to interact with the world, but they are in turn an interface that we use to operate and live.
 
These are layers and layers of our psychology. Some of them are denser. Some of them are more rarified.
 
The consciousness is our real identity, but right now it is asleep.
 
This image, really, the eye should be closed, because we do not see internally. That is because we have too much attachment to the ego, the self, and also our personality, our terrestrial identity, which we are going to elaborate upon. 

​Essence: Consciousness, the Soul

The Essence is our intrinsic reality, our true nature. It is the consciousness, what religions have called soul. It is the beauty of an innocent child.
 
When we are young, we see life with innocence, intense awareness, clarity, radiance, happiness and love. When we look at a child, we see the bliss of Eden, paradise, untainted by any desire, any law of a societal nature, any fault, any defect.
 
This is why Jesus in the Gospels stated, become ye as little children if you wish to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18:3). A child symbolically represents the soul. If you dream about a child, what happens to that child, that is showing you yourself, your real nature.
 
The Essence, if you look at some of the dictionary definitions, refers to “the intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something, especially something abstract that determines its character.” We use the term Essence because it is that part of us that is indispensable. You cannot eliminate it. It is the fundamental core of your very existence. It allows you to live, perceive, to think, to understand, to feel and to sense, to experience.
 
However, this child has grown up due to the world, the tragedies of life, the sufferings of existence, and rather than see life with an alert, conscious attention, spontaneous awareness, intuition and joy, this consciousness has lost its course.
 
The Essence in itself, that which is indispensable to our true nature, had become clouded, obscured, conditioned. In its free state, it is what allows us to have astral projections, mystical experiences, visions, traveling through other dimensions. It allows us to see thought, to understand the inner causes of trauma or other people’s traumas, inner vision.
 
If you dream of butterfly wings or a butterfly, that relates to the birth of the soul that is becoming aware of itself, but as I said, that Essence that does not have any sense of identity of “me, my desires, what I want.” It is a spontaneous awareness that is not conditioned.
 
However, the Essence, as it develops within a child between the years of 1 and 7, starts to acclimate to the world, to parents through experiences, through education, through inheritance, and that Essence which was once free and joyful starts to express and be trapped within many elements, many faults. It loses its character, in the sense that water put into a dirty jug is contaminated.

​Ego: Selves, Defects, Vices, Errors

That is why we study the ego, those obscurations, those conditions, defects, faults, vices, errors, contaminants, afflictions, or precisely, our desires. The term “ego” in Latin means, “I,” even in Greek it has the same meaning. It is the self, that which thinks, feels, or acts.
 
In this image we see Saint Anthony surrounded, according to Christian dispensation, by demons, which in mythology represents his own selves. Each self is conglomerated within ego. In contemporary psychology, we like to think that we are one self. In reality, we are many. This is evidenced by our waking states, but also our dreams.
 
If you seriously examine your dreams in your daily life, you will find that there is no consistency within different activities. In one moment, we feel angry at our partner and the next we feel jealousy, fear, pride, attachment. We love someone one day, we hate them the next. We want to get something to eat, then we change our mind, or better said, our mind changes us, and we decide we want to get exercise.
 
Even within a single traumatic event, we reflect a multiplicity of factors, elements, contaminants: pride, fear, anger, lust, envy, jealousy, greed. If you want to use the seven deadly sins, or Buddhist terms to refer to the same things, this reflects what we are. It is the self that thinks, feels, or acts.
 
But why does the ego exist? This is the question. The ego exists because we created it. Our consciousness, the Essence, which had a choice to fulfill a superior law of divinity or to act selfishly, chose the opposite, and therefore the ego has a lot of power in us. This is the 97% consciousness that we have. It is conditioned self, ego, because when something bad happens to us, we just react. These things happen. We do not control, usually, our responses to life.
 
Often, we are very afflicted, mechanically. We do not really think about our choices or deliberate, whether to act on anger or not. In fact, our culture today feeds that sentiment. It is miseducated.
 
This ego is really egos, selves, but the only reason they have power is because they have bottled up our consciousness, in the same way that the genie of Aladdin's lamp is trapped. But if you break the bottle, you free the genie. This is where dream yoga becomes very interesting.
 
By liberating the consciousness that is trapped in these elements, by understanding ourselves, by understanding pride with its ambitions, its anger, its resentment or jealousy, whatever it may be, we learn to understand our dreams, to understand ourselves. The ego makes us dream. All those thoughts, daydreams, worries, anxieties, fears, preoccupations―those are projections of the ego, churning and lost in a reverie of thought. That is a state of dreaming. If you understand the source of those dreams, which comes from this sense of self, you can remove the ego and awaken the Essence. That is something we will talk about and have talked about in our courses.

​Personality: Cultural Interface 

It is also important to understand that we are not only Essence and ego, but we are also personality or have a personality. The personality is a mask, literally from the Latin persona, “mask, character.” It is our cultural interface. It is our face, our language, our race, our culture, our ideologies, our habits, our tastes.
 
This mask is a buffer between the internal and the external worlds.
 
This mask is time. It is born in time, and it dies in time. When we die, the personality goes to the grave as well, and it is the personality that allows the ego to integrate within a child.
 
When you look at a child between 1 and 4 years of age, they are innocent, but as they develop personality, learning to adopt language, their culture, they start to incorporate many elements which are egotistical, and therefore they become angry, temperamental, enraged. I am sure all parents are pretty familiar with that.
 
The personality in itself is something necessary. It is necessary to develop a personality between the ages of 1 and 7, and gradually through time, to get an education, a career, a vocation in order to subsist in this world.
 
But the question is, who is using the personality? The personality is an instrument we develop in each lifetime, whenever we incorporate into this world. Some people have called that reincarnation. We call it return because we do not choose to be here. If we remembered from experiences, then perhaps that is something different, but we tend to enter life after death repeatedly without any awareness or memory. We develop a new personality each time we return into a new existence. Therefore, this is why personality is time. It is appropriate to a given social context.
 
If you take a Roman soldier from the ancient era and put him in Chicago, his personality will not align with the world. No one would understand him, nor would he understand his environment. That is why personality is time. It is malleable. It is energetic. It relates to the context in which we develop language, understanding, identity, culture.
 
Each mask we wear in each lifetime is like an instrument that can play music. Every personality is a different instrument. Perhaps in one era it is like a guitar. In another lifetime we develop another personality like a piano. You can play the same notes, the same music, the same psychological content, ego or Essence, but it gets expressed in a different way every time we return to a new life. This is why the word persona can relate to personality, “to sound through,” from the Ancient Greek πρόσωπον prósōpon, a “face, appearance, mask, used in ancient theater to denote a character or generally a social role.”
 
The personality determines how we express what we are, but our psychological contents remain the same. The ego returns and reincorporates again and again, and it is the ego which dreams. It makes us asleep. It makes the Essence unconscious, but the personality, people worship it in this era, identify about it, dream about it, that “this is my race, my language, my culture,” ignoring that in other lifetimes we were in other races and times and religions. We do not tend to remember that, but many people build a dream world about their race and their language and their culture. These things are necessary and beautiful in life, but they are not the totality of what we are.
 
Shakespeare related some truths about this in his play As You Like It, talking about the personality.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts…
―Jaques, As You Like It (Act 2, Scene 7)

We play many parts within time. Every time we return, we put on a new mask. We play the same dramas. The mask in ancient Greek culture was a representation of personality, the interface, the code by which we express what we are, and unfortunately for many people, this is what we are attached to. If we are attached to our personality or the ego, we dream.

​Identification, Fascination, Sleep

​What is a dream? We will explain some examples. Driving your car, you are thinking of something else. You are washing the dishes reminiscing about a problem you had, or a trauma. We are taking the bus, we are remembering a struggle or conflict we had at work, and we miss our stop. We are preoccupied with our thoughts, our emotions, and our impulses to act, not really questioning their source. We therefore become identified.
 
We feel identification whenever we attach our consciousness to a sense of self, in response to whatever impressions come into us in life. When we feel a sense of identity, it may be pride, resentment, anger, jealousy, we give our energy to that self. We become stuck in that quality. 

​The type of work we are talking about in these studies is to awaken the consciousness, to observe this process in us. We call it self-observation, like in this image we see a woman looking at a mirror. Behind her you do not see anybody, but in the image of the mirror, she sees a man. We chose this image because it represents self-observation very well. It is a psychological sense. It is not like you are literally going to physically see your desires or your mind. It is a psychological sense.
 
We all know that we feel, think, have impulses, emotions. Can you pinpoint it? Do you know where it is? Where is it coming from? What provoked your reactions? We say we experience thought in our brain. It does not mean that the brain originates thought. It is a vehicle that allows our soul to act, ego to act. Likewise, when we feel a strong emotion, we point towards our heart, but emotion is not originated in the heart. It is psychological. It is from a different dimension.
 
We are multidimensional beings. Thoughts, feelings, and impulses―the latter being related to the body, the drive to act―do not originate from the physical body. When you drive a car, you do not say, “This car is me,” although this is exactly what everybody does. “I have a Volvo,” or “you have a Mercedes. Let us get into an argument.” Judgments, right? It is funny, but it is really sad. People put too much exclusive attention into their bodies. They identify even with the body. They think, “This is what I am.” Personality. They have many dreams about it, many ideas, many philosophies. All of it is like a ghost. It is ephemeral. It does not last.
 
Or emotions―they come and go―but we invest so much energy into it. Likewise, our thoughts, which wander from thing to thing―flighty.
 
They have a reality in us. In fact, we tend to think of them as more real than our physical existence. You do not sense that with the physical senses. It is psychological. It is from other planes of being, worlds of being. In order to know this process, we have to observe ourselves. We have to look in the mirror, observe ourselves psychologically, moment by moment. People have called this mindfulness, which means to observe your psychology in every instant, all day, so that you do that at night. Instead of dreaming, going with the flow of existence, you awaken consciousness.
 
The problem becomes rather than looking at the mirror, reflecting on our own states, we tend to give our energy and time, our emotions―or better said, our consciousness―to the ego. We become fascinated with life. 

We see a woman whose eye is covered by a moon. The eye is the consciousness, symbolically speaking. It is the ability to perceive, to see it in the mirror clearly, reflecting on who we are. But the Moon is a symbol in religions and even in the dream world about our ego, our desires. The Moon is a symbol of desire and ego because the Moon is mechanical. It does not have a life of its own. In fact, it is like a vampire. This satellite rotates around the earth. It affects many mechanical processes in nature, whether it be menstruation, reproduction, the tides of the earth, even crime rates. It is because the influence of the Moon has a direct impact on life on earth. That is a symbol of our ego.
 
Our ego and our desires just happen to us. They are mechanical. We go through a problem at work. Someone insults us. We feel anger. We do not choose to be angry. It just happens, and then you are in the situation, whether to give your thoughts and desires what they want, express them, give them your energy, or to observe them and not act on those impulses. Those thoughts and worries and daydreams and plans are all dreams. This is why we dream.

Something happens, we identify with it. We have a sense of self that comes up. We become fascinated with the problem, fascinated with our own psychological reactions. We get sucked into the Moon. We become lunar―lunatics. Really, it is absurd to give energy to anger and lust and pride when all it does is create suffering. This is what we do all the time, and if we give energy to our selves, our ego, our egos, we fall asleep. We are not even aware of what is happening.
 
Have you ever watched a crowd become violent? Ever watch a lynching or some kind of violent experience? Genocide? Crime? Many things. People enter a crowd, they become a mob. They are fascinated. They lose their identity. They just go along with the flow.

​People who have never done anything unethical become unethical in an instant because we are asleep. We are unconscious.

We need to observe ourselves. Reflect on what is going on inside of us, so that we do not do things we regret, and therefore we no longer dream.

​Mind, Perception, and Imagination

​When we study dreams, we also study the nature of the astral dimension. The astral world is a world of imagination. It is a world of perception, with a lot of images, clarity, color, dynamism, range, depths.
 
The capacity that allows us to perceive dreams with greater intensity or experience has to do with the quality of our consciousness. The consciousness can either be free or conditioned, awakened as Essence or conditioned within ego. When we enter the astral dimension, depending on our state of being, that dimension reflects back to us what is inside. It is like a lake that reflects either the heavens above or the chaos and churning of a storm, which is our own mind.
 
This quality of perception, the ability to perceive non-physical imagery―whether in meditation or in dreams―is known as imagination. Imagination is a natural faculty of the consciousness. We all have it. If I tell you to imagine an elephant, you can see it, right? It just comes to you. Or do you remember what you had for breakfast this morning? It is not a physical image, but it is there. That is imagination.
 
That very same faculty, when it is trained and developed intentionally, allows us to open the door to the superior worlds. It allows us to see what is actually there. But unfortunately for most of us, because throughout the day we identify too much with negative emotion, the water is churning and chaotic and disorganized. Therefore, you can not reflect anything profoundly, but when you reach equanimity through meditation, serenity of mind, acting ethically, and self-observing throughout the day, the waters of the mind calm and you can start to perceive images. Dreams are like that.
 
When you are at perfect peace and calm you see things. That is imagination. We have exercises that help to develop imagination and we will talk about them in this course.
 
The difference between inferior perceptions and superior perceptions has to do with our quality of mind. We call the mind, in our studies, the ego. That is predominantly what we are, what we think, feel, and act. Our mind right now tends to be very active, agitated, running around, thinking many things, feeling many things. When the mind does that within the dream state, it projects images because the mind is active. Therefore, usually when we dream, and why we dream, is because we are seeing the contents of our own mind playing out. 

​It does not have a real, objective existence, in the same way that you look at a projector screen with images being presented on it. The screen is the screen. That is the astral dimension. Because we are projecting images from our own mind, it manifests as a negative type of imagination into our experience, and that is typically what we see.
 
If you awaken your consciousness in the astral world and see people walking around the streets doing whatever, you see that they are hypnotized by their own mind. They are dreaming. They are like in a mirage. They are delusional. It is like being a crazy person, hallucinating. You do not see the reality. You do not see what is there.
 
The projector needs to be turned off. The mind can not be active. Instead, it must become receptive. When the mind is receptive, the lake calms, then the images from the superior worlds emerge, whether we are meditating or entering the dream state willingly, consciously.
 
The consciousness needs to be active. When the consciousness is active, the mind is calm, the personality is at rest. The mind is still. Then reality comes.
 
This is why Samael Aun Weor in his book Sexology: The Basis of Endocrinology and Criminology stated:

For the wise, to imagine is to see. ―Samael Aun Weor, Sexology: The Basis of Endocrinology and Criminology

​Imagination is the capacity to directly perceive our inner reality, and the astral dimension is what allows us to see through the world of images, our own desires or divine archetypes, divine experiences.
 
Swami Sivananda explained in The Philosophy of Dreams how psychoanalytic theory is deficient, primarily because it ignores what the astral dimension is like, its even mere existence:

[Psychoanalysts] say that desires stimulate or help the dream creation. But they do not know what supplies the material out of which they are made and what turns the desires into actual expression, enabling the dreamer to see his own suppressed desires materialised and appearing to him as real. ―Swami Sivananda, Philosophy of Dreams

​It is because the astral world is the mirror. It is the imaginary world. We see what we are there.

​Positive and Negative Imagination

We have touched on this, but I would like to lay out for you the difference between positive and negative imagination.
 
Positive imagination is related to the Essence, the soul. It is the qualities of our consciousness, the powers of the consciousness.
 
Negative imagination is desire. It is the perceptions of an ego.
 
To understand why we dream and how to cease dreaming, we examine the different ways in which we perceive existence. In the beginning we perceive through a lens darkly, says St. Paul (1 Corinthians 13:12). When you are afflicted through anger, you see through anger. We do not rationalize or deliberate. We just see the situation in accordance with that condition, and then we fantasize or daydream. “That person should not have said that to me. I deserve better!” We respond. We react judgmentally. That is a negative quality of imagination. It is not positive. It is called fantasy.
 
The consciousness can have insight into problems. It does not wander off into thought or get distracted, fantasize about who we are, what we should have received. Or going back to an example I gave about seeing a coworker become promoted, “He should never have deserved that promotion…” or whatever. These are fantasies. Those are illusions. They waste energy. In those moments, we are dreaming through the ego.
 
Also, we study how the consciousness works. How does the consciousness perceive? The Essence needs to learn to examine the ego. We need to activate through self-observation what is going on inside of us. That is vipashyana in Buddhist meditation philosophy. It is “special insight.” It is when you see ego in action, and you do not give it what it wants. You understand where it comes from, why it thinks the way it does, where it was created, how it came to be, what it feeds on. We know the root of a problem. Therefore, the mind is calm―perfect serenity―stillness.
 
The opposite of vipashyana, of special insight, is spacing out, which we all know. Perhaps we experienced a lot of that at our job. The mind wanders. We are in the meeting, not thinking about what is going on. We just want to get to our next activity, or think that the meeting was a waste of time. Some people think that meditation is like that―just letting the mind do whatever it wants, but that is negative. That is negative imagination.
 
Some people have called this type of perspective, of perception, clairvoyance. It is a French term meaning “clear vision.” It originally was given by a group of French esotericists who wanted to create a technical flavor to their studies, so that people would leave them alone, or think that this faculty is only something given to the special. It is not. Clear vision, clairvoyance, is imagination. We all have it. It is a natural part of who we are, but unfortunately it is not developed.
 
When you really develop clear vision in yourself, you see your egos. You can even see the egos of other people, the way thoughts travel. We awaken consciousness within the superior worlds, but unfortunately for us, we tend to daydream. The mind wanders, losing a state of awareness, which again is another faculty of imagination, where you have a spatial perception of the things around you and how you relate to them, of yourself, and of the impressions of life.
 
Unconscious dreaming we all know of. Dreams happen. We have no control. We go through the experience without even remembering who we are or what we are doing. We wake up and realize it was a dream.
 
Spiritual visions are positive imagination. It relates to the translucence of the soul, to see clearly. These type of visions and experiences are very divine, and they can not be limited or interpreted with any sense of self.
 
Some people get confused about consciousness. How is it our true identity, and yet it has no self, no “I”? The truth is that you can only understand that through experience, to perceive without the mind interpreting, labeling, interpreting.
 
Visualization is a positive quality of imagination, the ability to take an image, project it within your mind, to see it for what it is with a lot of clarity and depth. That is something that helps us to experience dreams consciously.
 
The opposite is hallucinations, nightmares, even hypnosis. Hallucinations, for people who might suffer from a mental illness, they are seeing things. We say they are not real, but in fact, they have a reality within the mind of the person. That is negative imagination.
 
Nightmares we have all had, probably where we are being chased by a monster or beast. We have no control of what we are doing. Those are negative.
 
Lastly, hypnosis, some people have attempted treatment to understand trauma within themselves, but we do not emphasize or recommend it, primarily because hypnosis puts you to sleep psychologically. The consciousness is asleep and inactive, and for the person, the hypnotist controls the mind of the person, maybe even implants some thoughts into the person. That is negative, because we want to awaken the consciousness, so that we can understand for ourselves perhaps our own traumas and experiences.

​Superior and Inferior Perceptions: The Tree of Life

​We have talked previously about the Tree of Life. It is a map of consciousness from the superior to the inferior. These spheres represent qualities of being, from the most divine above to the most material and dense below. Some religions have called it heavens, and beneath the physicality of our body, the Earth, our material plane, we have the hell realms, which is our ego.
 
In the positive spectrum of perception, we have supraconscious, divine states, and also conscious perceptions, which we are going to elaborate upon.
 
The negative states belong to the subconsciousness, the unconsciousness, and the infraconsciousness.
 
Visions belong to the positive states of imagination, but dreams are found within the negative, the inferior worlds.
 
Let us talk about these in detail to understand why we dream.

​Subconsciousness

Subconsciousness relates to our memories, past experiences, and mental formations in the personality.
 
Perhaps growing up as a child, we were bitten by a dog. We may not even remember the experience because we were too young, but whenever we encounter a dog in our life, we feel panic, terrified, even if it is an innocent dog or a cute one. We feel terror because there is something in our subconsciousness which has traumatized us. It is a fear and an impression in our psyche that has not been understood or transformed, because the intensity of the impression of that experience is so deep, and because the consciousness was not active, that impression became a fear and a trauma, a condition or a bottle that traps the soul within a state of suffering.
 
There are many other types of subconscious desires, subconscious states. They all have to do usually with memory, things that we may not even remember on the surface, but have an existence, which is just beneath the range of our perception. Sub means “beneath, below” the surface of the waters, so to speak, if you think back to the image of the island in the previous slides. The subconsciousness is like being in a cave. You are in the dark, and oftentimes our subconscious perceptions relate to our personality.
 
These are things that often are developed within our lifetime that relate to personality, usually the initial stages of our development. With our personality, what is important to understand is that personality relates to our inheritance, whether biologically or psychologically. People who grew up in a house of alcoholics tend to do so because they have an ego of alcoholism in them that attracted them to that situation. It is a form of cause and effect we call karma, and growing up in such a house, one may have pain and suffering, a lot of trauma, a lot of difficulties. They repeat behaviors throughout life that coincide with those faults.
 
Not only do we have our inheritance, but we also have our education, how we are raised, that affects our personality and how we dream. The way that we are raised shapes in the first seven years of life the trajectory of everything. Therefore for parents, it is very important to learn to cultivate beautiful values for the soul of their child, so that they can have a strong ethical discipline and a personality that will allow them to function effectively in life.
 
Then, circumstances―what happens all throughout the progression of their experience. It could be any event in life after the personality has already been formed, but is as I said, it is malleable. It is affected and adapts to different situations. The personality is not a stable, static entity.
 
In fact, if you get a new job, you examine the culture of your coworkers. You see that there is a culture there, and therefore you learn to adapt with your personality to fit in. It relates to imitation, especially. We dream a lot because we imitate or try to imitate others to fit in. We worry, “I need to be like my boss, or my coworkers or the people I work for, or the clients I serve.” It is related to the subconsciousness―subconscious tendencies that we do not really question. We just go along with it.

​Unconsciousness

​We also have the unconsciousness, unconscious perceptions, unconscious imagination.
 
This is formed through frustrated desire, strong emotions that are not transformed, usually of anger and lust. Unconsciousness or unconscious behaviors relate to desires that are not satisfied, and therefore they become enraged or violent.
 
Perhaps we may even think of an example, whether in oneself or someone we know. Perhaps their partner was talking with someone else, and we feel jealousy. We feel anger. We perceive the situation as something of adultery, even though the partner is innocent. Later that night, we go to dream. We see a scene of our partner committing adultery. That is unconscious imagination, a desire of anger and jealousy that are so intense that it felt betrayed and projected its own illusions onto the screen of the astral world.
 
There are many people who take their dreams at face value. They think that such dreams are objective because they are seeing it, and that it wrong. It is dangerous. There are a lot of people who have had these types of experiences and could not discern or discriminate what it was, and therefore have committed crimes.
 
The mentality of criminals is also unconscious. A hundred percent of homicides are unconscious behaviors. The desire in life that, “I deserve what others have because the world has not given it to me. Therefore, I am going to take what I want.” That is anger. It is frustrated sentiment, or lust. Lust dreams all the time for the perfect partner. This partner is going to be in a certain way, a certain appearance, a certain personality. Then, people are getting into multiple relationships again and again, and always leaving those relationships because the lust is never satisfied. The person does not meet the ideal, does not fit in with the fantasy, and never will. That is unconscious imagination. It is dreaming.

Infraconsciousness

​There are also even more hidden depths. The infraconsciousness is the most intense of the three inferior kinds of imagination. Infra, meaning “inferior,” relates to inferno, the hell realms. These are nightmares. Anybody who has had night terrors, experiences of falling asleep and being attacked by monsters, by demons, by black magicians, this is infraconscious imagination. These are hidden animal desires, perversity, traumas, negative qualities of the lowest psyche.
 
These nightmares in themselves are really the reflection of the lowest aspect of ourselves. Those monsters and beasts are really our own mind. They have a reality because they dwell within the infernal regions of experience. Our ego belongs to the subconsciousness, the unconsciousness, and the infraconsciousness, and we dream because those elements surge to the surface and find expression within us when we are asleep and usually off our guard.

​Nightmares are not illusory. They are showing us a reality in ourselves, and this is why every mythology or religion always depicted the heroes going down into the abyss to fight the great monster, the dragon, the minotaur, the medusa, the gorgons. This is a symbol of how we go into our own subconscious, unconscious, and infraconscious depths to pinpoint the source of why we dream, why we are so hypnotized in life, and by confronting it with an awakened consciousness, we slay the dragon. We free Andromeda like in the opening slide of this presentation.
 
I do not know if it is Perseus or Theseus who saves Andromeda from a monster, from the Kraken. That is a symbol of the same process, going into the depths, slaying the ego, so that we can no longer dream, and therefore we develop conscious imagination.

​Consciousness

​This is the perception of things as they are. When there is no “I” present, no ego, no self, when you are awake as an Essence and seeing without an interpreter, without a condition, you are experiencing conscious imagination. Seeing an ego in yourself is precisely conscious imagination, where you do not have to think or presuppose, theorize or debate. You see it directly as a clear, sharp observation of the facts.
 
By awakening consciousness within the physical world, we awaken it internally. Samael Aun Weor in his book on Sexology stated:

Only those who have achieved awakening in the superior worlds possess conscious clairvoyance (or imagination). ―Samael Aun Weor, Sexology: The Basis of Endocrinology and Criminology

​Conscious imagination or clairvoyance is really developed when you are learning to enter the dream state willingly, consciously. You see what is actually there. You do not have to theorize about it. You just know it, because you are living it like you are here physically.
 
But the consciousness can be transcended too. There are states of perception which are truly divine, and in this, we do not dream at all.
 
The consciousness fluctuates in its work, depending on the consistency and intensity of the student, whether to really stay awake and work moment by moment, to be attentive, but oftentimes falling into sleep, losing attention, losing the thread of something, even in a lecture or dialogue perhaps, being asleep. Consciousness fluctuates.

​Supraconsciousness 

​Supraconsciousness is of divinity. It is the perception of a god. It is the perception of a being like Jesus, Moses, Buddha, Krishna, Muhammad, masters who could see every dimension of existence, here and now, without confusion.
 
We talked in our previous lecture [Where Do We Dream?] about how all the different spheres of the Tree of Life are here and now. They interrelate with our physical life. In fact, our dreams relate to how we live physically. Therefore, everything is interconnected.
 
A being like Jesus coming into a room can see the thoughts of a person, the emotions of a person, the egos, how much karma they have, know what their past lives were, who their Being is, their inner divinity. He is omniscient―no fault there―no imperfection. It is the perception of reality, its causes and relations, within multiple dimensions.
 
In the beginning, we can get a taste of that. Anybody can achieve that if they learn meditation, where you have an experience out of the body. You leave the body willingly and you experience the Tree of Life. You communicate directly with your inner Being, your inner God, and the He or She teaches you what you need to know. Or if you are really blessed, you go higher up this tree and even unite with your Being, in which there is no self. There is only the soul united with that ecstasy, with that omniscience, with that joy.
 
But usually that is temporary. It is not permanent. Some people have that experience. They come back to the physical world, and they say, “I am a god,” and it is wrong. That is a temporary vacation. It is not a permanent residency. In the meantime, we are working on our internship, and that is a process in relation to the Secret Path of Initiation, fully developing and perfecting ourselves.
 
Supraconsiousness and conscious imagination have to do with visions, seeing reality, but why we dream depends on states of our ego: subconsciousness, unconsciousness, infraconsciousness.

Conclusion

In synthesis, in order to experience the higher worlds, we have to understand why we dream. We dream because of fantasy, the perceptions of our desires. Samael Aun Weor states in The Revolution of the Dialectic:

When the doors of fantasy are closed, the organ of intuition awakens. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Revolution of the Dialectic

​Intuition is the capacity to know without having to think―no if, ands, or buts. It is direct knowledge. Intuition is knowing in the heart something is real, especially when those visions and dreams coincide with physical facts. Therefore, you develop a lot of intuition, a lot of factual accuracy when interpreting dreams and experiences.

​Exercises

​We always conclude with a series of exercises.
 
Every day, develop your self-observation from moment to moment.
 
At the end of each day, adopt a meditation attitude. As if watching a movie, review everything you observed inside of you and outside of you. Do not change the facts of what happened. Simply remember the facts of everything you can.
 
This is a type of meditation which you imagine all the scenes of your day, and even before when you were dreaming the morning of or at night. You visualize what happened. Just recall them in the same way that you recall any fact of what happened in your day. Do not change the facts. The mind will attempt to skew things, to interpret. All that you need to do is imagine it with as much clarity as you can.
 
You can start retrospectively from the moment you sat down to meditate to the moment you woke up in the morning, or you can do it from the beginning to the end of your day. Follow your intuition. Either way works. The mind will fantasize and try to argue about, “This is what happened.” Do not think about it. Do not stew in emotion. Just observe it. Imagine it.
 
Lastly, write the facts of the day in your spiritual diary.
 
At this time, we are going to open up the floor to questions.

​Questions and Answers

​Question: Does finishing a fantasy conclude the karma of the dream?
 
Instructor: No. The first step is to stop dreaming. That has to do with awakening your consciousness here and now. When you recognize that you are dreaming, that is a beautiful step. It is the first. When you see that your mind has been wandering, is distracted, is preoccupied, and even in the dream state you find that you are dreaming, you realize that you are awake, it does not eliminate the karma. The defect that produced the dream in itself still exists.
 
Only when you have understood and comprehended the ego in its depth, by meditating on it and eliminating it through the prayer of your Divine Mother, then the karma is absolved. Even then some egos are paid with pain in their disintegration. Some egos can only be eliminated once the karma associated with that fault is removed. Once that is paid through a certain situation in life, and even though we have comprehended the ego, finally the Divine Mother says, “Ok, we are going to eliminate this,” and then the ego can be destroyed. But simply knowing that you are dreaming and ending a fantasy in the moment does not mean that the projector is just not there anymore. It just means you have turned off the light for it, but comprehending the ego is another thing.
 
Question: Is intuition related to being awake in your dreams?
 
Instructor: Yes. It is related in the sense that when you have an astral projection, you can immediately know what you need to do without having read anything or thought anything. Intuition is simply the ability to know. It is a faculty of the heart―conscience. You know what is right from wrong in a situation.
 
Intuition can play out in our dreams and relates to our dreams when we are awake in that state, and we know in the moment what we need to do. Or perhaps we receive a vision, a spiritual experience, and then we immediately know the meaning without having to think about it.
 
Intuition is simply the ability to know the truth. It is not an intellectual process. Therefore, it is very intimately related with dreams because dream experiences have already discarded one element, in a sense of our intellectual, terrestrial personality. Intuition can be more accessible in dreams for this reason.
 
Question: I feel that probably like a year ago, I actually projected in my dreams and then something happened, and I just got scared and I woke up and for a few seconds I could just not move my body in reality. What is that?
 
Instructor: It is known as sleep paralysis. Sometimes when you are traveling in the astral world and you come back, it is like trying to start your car and the engine will not turn on. Even though you are in your car, you want to get back in your body again, you want to start moving, but the transition has not fully come about 100%. It is a phenomenon that happens to many people―nothing to be worried about.
 
Question: Would this be a positive or negative experience? I do not know.
 
Instructor: It could be neutral in the sense that it is just something that happens once in awhile. Sometimes we transition from the internal worlds to our physical world slowly. We are aware that we are back in our body, but we can not move. Some people have had experiences they deem as negative, in that during sleep paralysis, they have seen images of entities trying to harass the person.
 
Comment: I did see something, but I thought it was something more spiritual. I was not scared of it or anything.
 
Instructor: Sure, and that is a good thing you know. There is nothing to be afraid about in terms of the process, though the student was mentioning that she was not afraid about what happened in terms of seeing an entity or person. Sometimes that happens in sleep paralysis. It is nothing to be concerned about. Even so in our practices and our studies, we have techniques to help protect us against negative influences.
 
Question: This is a related question. Are dreams or sleep paralysis used as a way to attack people? Is sleep paralysis a demon possession?
 
Instructor: Primarily my experience has been, such experiences are the mind of the student. Most attacks that people experience is often from their own ego. As you start to enter this path and start changing, the mind does not like it. It fights back, like in the myth of Perseus and the Medusa, fighting the monster. The monster knows that its life is threatened. Therefore, we have to protect ourselves against our own mind. That is the majority of cases for people.
 
Yes, there are entities known as black magicians or demons whom we learn to conjure or protect ourselves from. If you want to learn how to defend yourself, study our course on our website. It is called Spiritual Defense. There are a few lectures already on there about that topic.
 
Comment: This is a follow up. I met the same negative entity in sleep paralysis as a child many, many times.
 
Instructor: The thing is, do not worry about it. It is good that you have the data, but in order to do a full assessment of what that entity is, it is important to meditate. Ask internally, “What is going on here?” and your Being can give you a dream or experience of how to interpret the situation.
 
Question: Is there a relationship between the astral or dream world and paranormal activities?
 
Instructor: Yes. Oftentimes the symbolic narratives of different stories and myths and great works of literature have demonstrated the type of magical works one can perform when in the dream world. Sometimes people talk about seeing auras or ghosts and other entities. That is because those people tend to be more sensitive. They have the imagination more active. Primarily they might have developed that sense in a previous life, but having returned, they have forgotten about it.
 
So, some people can have perceptions not only of the physical world, but the internal worlds. Some people see those types of phenomena. There are a lot of stories in myth and literature talking about heroes doing great feats of work in magic. That is a symbol of the interior work that we perform. Those paranormal activities do relate to that.
 
Question: I can on occasions astral project or become aware that I am in a dream. However, at this stage, I do not seem able to investigate the superior worlds, that is, I try and invoke a master, but nothing happens. Is this blockage due to the ego?
 
Instructor: The master appears when the student is prepared. The question is about invoking a divine being like an angel or a master. That is something that happens as a result of the will of divinity and when we are prepared. I know for some people it can get frustrating where in the initial stage of astral projection, they start to awaken in that state and are asking if a certain master they want to get help from, and thinking if they are not being helped.
 
I advise in your situation to meditate on any of the dreams that you have, so you may be asking internally for a master to come to you. But the truth is that if you look at the context of any of the experiences that you have, you have to reflect on how they relate to your physical life, but also understand that we get help from the initiates without even seeing it.
 
Personally, I have gotten help from certain masters that, rather than giving me what I wanted in my petitions, they gave me what I needed often without me even seeing them internally, but their presence is very real.
 
Experiences where you are face to face with a master of the White Lodge is something that can happen when it is the right time, when they have decided that it is going to benefit you spiritually and not your desires.
 
Question: I was thinking that as a dream is a mental process with practice, if the dream is remembered and recorded, it should be possible to later consciously reenter the dream and expand upon it.
 
Instructor: Yes. The dream experience is not mental or intellectual. This is why people from other countries or people who are not necessarily literate like in our Western culture often have greater access to the astral dimension than their Western counterparts, primarily because astral projection is an emotional quality. Many people who develop the intellect often do it at the expense of the heart. Many of us in the West have a head the size of a library, but a heart that is very deficient. If you want to learn astral projection and to remember your dreams, it does not require stuffing the head with too much information. Instead, it has to do with being practical.
 
When you have those experiences, it is a result of saving those energies in the heart and developing the heart, so that when you wake up, it becomes easier to remember.
 
We will have a lecture in the future of this course all about remembering dreams and visions. We will talk about that eventually [see also How to Consciously Enter Dreams to learn how to intentionally return to astral experiences]
 
Question: Do we have to have imagination fully developed in order to comprehend an ego and most importantly eliminate it?
 
Instructor: No. Whatever level you are at, the 3% usually in most beginners, that is something that can strengthen where it is at. You have to remember that in the myth of David and Goliath, David was a child in the Hebrew Testament, the Hebrew scriptures. That is a symbol of the Essence who, with a stone and a sling and faith in God, killed the monster. You do not have to be like Heracles in order to really go to battle at yourself, but you can start where you are at, and little by little we develop and mature spiritually.
 
Question: Also, what does it mean to have recurring element of water in one’s dreams every night?
 
Instructor: Recurring dreams or visions, something we will talk about in the future too (How to Consciously Enter Dreams), signifies that there is a deep message that you need to understand about your spiritual work. When visions repeat again and again, it is because it relates to what is known as the Initiator Element of dreams. A recurring dream has to do with a vision that happens again and again, and whenever that dream happens, you automatically know you are dreaming.
 
The practical import of that is first, it is a symbol that is going to help you wake up, but symbolically speaking, waters in a dream relate to our energy, primarily of a sexual nature. The state of the waters determines the state of the energy in our body and our psychology as well.
 
If you want to know more about the symbology of water, study The Perfect Matrimony, which has to do with the nature of working with our sexual creative energy, because the waters relate to that principle or force.
 
Another Instructor: Sometimes when we see a certain element like water, fire, earth, or air recurring again and again in the same time period in our dreams, it could mean we are facing an emotional ordeal related with that element, so an ordeal of water might mean that you are struggling to adapt to radically changing social circumstances in your life right now, and it could show up in your dreams as the ordeal of water repeating.
 
Question: You say that hypnosis is bad because it puts us to sleep, but can self-hypnosis be used as a way to connect with the Innermost or subconscious? Is the Innermost the same as the subconscious?
 
Instructor: We are self-hypnotized all the time. Whenever we identify with the ego, we are asleep. That cannot take us to divinity, being distracted or in fantasy. If I understand a little bit of the nuance of your question, I believe you are referring to the fact that by entering a state of sleep physically, drowsiness combined with meditation, that opens the doorway to experience of our inner Being. In that sense, we do not use the term hypnosis, putting ourselves to sleep, because we want to activate the consciousness. Put the body to sleep. Still the emotions. Calm the mind but activate the consciousness. When you put those three factors to rest, and your consciousness is active, then you can investigate the superior dimensions.
 
The Being is not the subconscious. I know Jung used the term the Unconscious to refer to the collective mind of humanity, that can access all the spiritual and divine archetypes of religion. We are a little bit more specific in that unconsciousness is an ego, that state of sleep. The Being is something else. It is beyond. It is supraconscious, not limited to even the mind or the consciousness itself. It is something beyond. It has to be accessed by developing the consciousness.
 
Question: If I read a bunch of mythology, will that be helpful to interpret dreams?
 
Instructor: It will be useful if you meditate on it too. You may have experiences that relate to things you read, and that can give you a lot of faith when you realize that your experiences are not just something limited to a book or yourself, but it is something universal, because every mythology and religion and teaching coincide with the experience and that is what is factual, repeatable, scientific, conclusive. [See also How to Interpret Dreams].
 
Question: I have practiced SOL: Subject, Object, Location, and have had the experience of waking up in a dream, but that I was quickly suspended and floating in complete darkness. I have had the same experience leaving my body in my room only to be sucked up and suspended in complete darkness. Is this due to a lack of energy, or karma related?
 
Instructor: It is probably a symbol. Every time you wake up, you start to have consciousness of your reality, and then you are in darkness again or you are levitating in the sense you are up in the air with things. Going back to the other instructor’s comment about recurring dreams, being suspended in the air can relate to ordeals of air, relating to the need to adapt and be mobile, to be secure and courageous in the face of adversities. Being in darkness is a symbol of the darkness of our own mind. So, it is a blessing that you have been receiving these experiences, because they are showing you something about yourself.
 
Oftentimes we are also unconscious because we lack energy. Look in your life, in your daily experiences, to what behaviors in you are wasting energy of an emotional type and of a mental type as well, even physically and sexually especially. We will talk about how to save energy and use it for our spiritual development in the next lecture: How Do We Dream?
 
Instructor: Any other final questions or comments?
 
Question: One more. I feel like I am out of the loop without lucid dreaming. What do I do?
 
Instructor: The question is, what do you mean by being “out of the loop”?
 
Comment: Not conscious.
 
Instructor: Awaken in your daily life. If you are not having any dreams, you are not perceiving anything internally, look at the way you act in life. What are your thoughts? What are your feelings? What are your impulses? What are your behaviors in your daily waking experiences? If you observe the sources of your distractions in yourself through self-observation, by being mindful throughout the day and also of your environment, that practice will help you to awaken within the dream state. The fact that you are not seeing anything when you go to bed at night refers to the state of your consciousness in your waking life. Learn to observe yourself. Study the book Treatise of Revolutionary Psychology. It will teach you all about how to self-observe the ego. That is how you develop light.
 
Question: Is it fine to use lucid dreaming subliminals and stuff, or is that not good?
 
Instructor: Sure. It is a good question. We spoke in the first lecture called Fact and Fiction about binaural beats, and mechanical means to awaken consciousness within dreams. We do not recommend them, primarily because synthetic sounds or even drugs, especially, are mechanical influences. They activate the ego rather than the Essence, because they are conditioning factors that impose themselves within our psyche. A drug will awaken consciousness, but trapped in the desires, and will have negative experiences within the astral world―not positive. It is actually seeing within the hell realms, so to speak―subconsciousness, unconsciousness, infraconsciousness.
 
We have other methods that we use that are natural, because the consciousness is the natural capacity to perceive. By learning to develop our own intrinsic nature, you do not have to rely on anything external.
 
Question: Is the moment when we fall asleep significant? I often wake up right after falling asleep. I feel startled. My heart is beating fast, and I feel as if I am fighting to stay alive.
 
Instructor: I know some people have related feeling terrified of falling asleep. I do not know if there is any medical term for that type of phenomenon, but the moments in which you are falling asleep are crucial. If you enter the dream state with lucidity and intentionality, with control, you can learn to astral project willingly, because we do it every night we fall asleep. We are just not aware of it.
 
Also too, the more you learn to transition consciously, the more familiar and safer it feels, because I know some people get terrified of astral projection. “What is going to happen to me when I go out of my body?” I personally had that growing up when I was a teenager. I was dabbling in astral projection at the time, and I had an experience where I came out of my body and felt the fear and terror of, “Oh my God, this is actually happening!” Then my fear took me out. But with practice and time and familiarity, it is something now that is very welcome, so when I start to sense the transition elements of entering the astral dimension, it is nothing to fear anymore. My heart does not race. No panic. It is natural.
 
Why be afraid of your natural functions, like drinking water or breathing, or your heart beating? The same thing with astral projection. It is a normal thing. We do it all the time. We are just not aware of it, so there is no danger to becoming aware of what is natural [learn more in How and Why Do We Astral Project?].
 
Question: When I have fairly intense or vivid dreams, I find it harder to focus or be present during the day. Do you have any advice on this?
 
Instructor: Do not identify with your dreams. It is normal in the beginning to feel anticipation or anxiety, perhaps the fear of the unknown, especially after having very vivid and intense dreams. It is important not to be attached to or fearful of what one experiences.
 
Personally, I have had that issue too, where I have a vivid dream or experience like a vision that was foretelling something negative to happen in the day. I could get very identified as well. It is important not to get identified even with spiritual things. There is a saying among the Buddhists, I believe, of “getting drunk on Nirvana.” It is dangerous. Do not identify with any experience, whether it is internal or physical. I know in our beginning studies, we get very enthusiastic about our astral experiences or visions, but the important thing is not to be limited by them, in the sense that our mind interprets it a certain way or we feel fear about it. We worry about it. We identify with it. Those are egos. Instead, learn to take the message with gratitude and let the day unfold as it is. Be attentive.
 
Comment: It is more like a feeling of being “spaced out.”
 
Instructor: Okay. Spacing out has to do more with the quality of our consciousness being dispersed. We are not aware of what is going on around us. It is normal in the beginning to fluctuate between states. Sometimes we may have more awakened consciousness that come and go, because we are developing, and the more consistent we are, the deeper our practice and the more effective it is. If you find your mind is spacing out at times, do not identify or worry about it. Observe it. When you identify your weaknesses, it is actually a cause for great triumph, because when you see in yourself why you are dreaming in the day, you can learn to rectify it.
 
Okay. If there are no more questions or comments, we will conclude. Thank you all for coming!