The Nature of Dreaming: A Doorway Into Multiple Realities by Julie Redstone

There are different kinds of dreams that we dream, and each has a value in its own right and must be taken seriously as a representative of an aspect of our consciousness.

Some dreams seem peripheral to everyday life. They have fantastic characters, absurd plots, and linger in our minds for a very brief period of time because they seem to make no sense at all to our conscious waking experience.

Other dreams have a strong emotional message that can be felt in the body, even if the actual content of the dream is not entirely understood. Often, the emotional component of a dream message is the central aspect of the teaching, and so it is often not necessary to understand the content further, no matter how much it might add to our knowledge.

Finally, there are dreams whose emotional content and meaning is very clear and very relevant to our conscious waking state. These dreams also fall into several distinct categories: There are those that have to do with everyday life – with relationships, past or present, with longings or fears that we are aware of, with repetitive themes in our mental or emotional experience. These dreams seem to offer a commentary, directly or indirectly, on the life we lead.

There are other dreams, however, which seem to catapult us into a different life and often into a different reality altogether, where space and time feel different, where we experience ourselves on a deep inner level as different from our normal self-perception, and where a message from the beyond may come through to our consciousness that is as real and as potent as anything that we might feel or think that is more familiar to us.

These messages from the beyond are not all fashioned out of words. Some come in the form of visual displays of things that have no correlates on the human level. Some come in the shape of sounds that affect our consciousness with a meaning that only our deepest self can translate. Some come with words that arrive as a thought or as a voice that conveys a purposefulness and a direction that we are being asked to follow. These dreams can be premonitions. They can be glimpses of our soul’s essential nature. They can be visions that we have carried into the present lifetime which have lain dormant beneath the threshold of awareness. These awaken during sleep when the ego and mental processes are less in charge.

The dreams that are visionary or that bring us into a different reality are not always dreams. Some, are the visual translation of messages that were seeded into our consciousness prior to incarnating into a human body, containing things that we were supposed to remember at a particular time. Others are wake up calls that are sent from helpers and teachers with whom an association exists, whether or not it is known to the more conscious self. Still others are actual events that are taking place primarily on a different dimensional level – events which are being translated into our semi-awake mind, even while we sleep. These other-dimensional events may be happening to our physical self or they may not. We may be taken somewhere or carried somewhere in what seems to be an energy body that is very close to our physical body. Or we may exist in a dream as pure awareness, simply in touch with a knowing that could never have occurred in a waking state.

The ‘akashic chronicle’ of the world’s life and the akashic chronicle of our own individual life are often made known during dreaming, especially when one has embarked upon a spiritual path and is pursuing a deepening knowledge of the sacred. These chronicles contain the history of our actions and consciousness and of the world’s actions and consciousness. Both chronicles reveal the moral and spiritual weight of events that have been, are, and will be. Both convey to the self that is aware, a possible or probable future, or an actual or alternate reality of the past. When we sleep, the absence of mental vigilance can lead us to experience our own akashic chronicle that contains our soul’s memory existing outside of time. This ledger extends both to the past and to the future. It brings to us experiences that have already happened at another level that have yet to happen at this one.

All that we know of dreaming cannot fathom the mystery of intertwining multiple realities which dreaming can provide a doorway into. Far from being just a commentary by the psyche on the psychological aspects of our inner life, dreams can create a world of their own and a life of their own which in many ways may seem more real to us than our everyday life. They can engage us with a larger reality hat we are already living, though our conscious waking self may not be aware of it. The experience of other-dimensional realities in which we also seem to be living and that we feel touched by is increasing now, as the distance between planes is simultaneously decreasing, and as the physical plane is being drawn closer to the higher realms. Because of this increased proximity, there is a ‘bleed through’ that can happen more easily now from one plane to another, both during waking hours and while we sleep.

When we become able through time, effort, and the illumination of our total being to experience our multi-dimensional self in a waking state as well, it is then that our dream life can become just another layer of our being – one that can easily be incorporated into the ongoing sense of self that lives within time, and one whose other-worldly experiences can be accepted as having equal validity to those we experience during our more awake states. To accept the experiences of dreaming as an extension of our ordinary self into the multidimensional self that we already are, is to recognize the great complexity and expansiveness of the human psyche which, while fully present on the earth, has yet one foot in worlds that are far away which dreaming brings closer.