A portion of you, therefore, is aware of each and every dream encounter and experience. Dreams are no more hallucinatory than your physical life is. Your waking physical self is the dreamer, as far as your dreaming self is concerned: You are the dreamer it sends on its way. Your daily experiences are the dreams that it dreams, so when you look at your dreaming self or consider it, you do so with a highly prejudiced eye, taking it for granted that your “reality” is real, and its reality is illusion.

To some extent this is natural. You are focused in a daily life for a reason. You have adopted it as a challenge. But within its framework you are also meant to grow and develop, and to extend the limits of your consciousness. It is very difficult to admit that you are in many ways more effective and creative in the sleep state than the waking state, and somewhat shattering to admit that the dream body can indeed fly, defying both time and space. It is much easier to pretend that all such experiences are symbolic and not literal, to evolve complicated psychological theories, for example, to explain flying dreams.

The simple fact is that when you dream you are flying, you often are. In the dream state you operate under the same conditions, more or less, that are native to a consciousness not focused in physical reality. Many of your experiences, therefore, are precisely those you may meet after death. You may speak with dead friends or relatives, revisit the past, greet old classmates, walk down streets that existed fifty years earlier in physical time, travel through space without taking any physical time to do so, be met by guides, be instructed, teach others, perform meaningful work, solve problems, hallucinate.

In physical life there is a lag between the conception of an idea and its physical construction. In dream reality, this is not so. Therefore, the best way to become acquainted with after-death reality ahead of time, so to speak, is to explore and understand the nature of your own dreaming self. Not very many people want to take the time or energy.

[...] Most dreams are like animated postcards brought back from a journey that you have returned from and largely forgotten. Your consciousness is already oriented again to physical reality; the dream, an attempt to translate the deeper experience into recognizable forms. The images within the dream are also highly coded, and are signals for underlying events that are basically not decipherable.

The Speakers help you in the formation of dreams which are indeed multidimensional artistic productions of a kind — dreams existing in more than one reality, with effects that dissect various stages of consciousness that are real, in your terms, to both the living and the dead and in which both the living and the dead may participate. It is for this reason that inspirations and revelations are so often a part of the dream condition.

[...] As mentioned, these experiences are translated into dreams later, necessitating a return to areas of consciousness more familiar with physical data. Here a great creative synthesis and a great creative diversification takes place, in which any given dream image has meaning to various layers of the self — on one level representing a truth you have lived and on other levels representing this truth as it is more specifically applied to various areas of experience or problems. There will be a metamorphosis, therefore, of one symbol turning into many, and the conscious mind may only perceive a chaos of various dream images, because the inner organization and unity is partially hidden in the other areas of consciousness through which the reasoning mind cannot follow.

[...] If you have particular conscious goals and if you are reasonably certain that they are beneficial ones, then you can suggest dreams in which they occur, for the dreams themselves will hasten their physical reality.

[...] If you let yourself drift off into sleep here, you would most probably manufacture two or three dreams that symbolized the fear, dreams in which you consider and try out possible solutions within the dream context. The job situation might never appear as such within any of the dreams, of course.

[...] This more liberated self sees the situation much more clearly, suggests a given line of action (but does not order it), and informs the dreaming self. The dreaming self then manufactures a group of dreams in which the solution is stated within a symbolic dream situation.

[...] In the most important dream work, done in the deep protected sleep periods, the symbols are powerful enough and yet condensed enough so that they can be broken down, used in a series of seemingly unrelated dreams as connectives, retain their original strength and still appear in different guises, becoming in each succeeding dream layer more and more specific.

(Pause at 10:20.) There is a great unity between your daytime symbols and your dreaming ones. [...] Personal association, therefore, is highly involved with your personal bank of symbols, and it operates in the dream states precisely as in waking life — but with greater freedom, and drawing from the future, in your terms, as well as from the past.

This of course is obvious, but the same sort of symbol changing may occur within dreams. The dog’s accident may be a dream experience, for that matter, that then changes your conscious symbolic feeling toward dogs in the waking state. One person may symbolize fear as a demon, as an unfriendly animal, or even as some perfectly simple ordinarily harmless object; but if you know what your own symbols mean, then you can use the knowledge not only to interpret your dreams but also as signposts to the state of consciousness in which they usually occur.

Seemingly nonstable mental objects appear in the dream environment at certain levels. [...] As mentioned earlier, again, the dream universe is as “objective” as the corporeal one. The objects and symbols within it are as faithful representations of dream life as physical objects are of waking life.

[...] In normal dreaming within the context of an ordinary dream drama, the objects seem permanent enough to you. [...] You project upon dream images the symbolism of your waking hours.

[...] I wanted to be sure that the material given on the Speakers, so far, adequately dealt with the methods by which they were able to contact others in both the waking and dream states. I wanted to know more about the Speakers’ training, by whom it was conducted, and their intuitions and dream experiences.

[...] Much of the most pertinent information, in fact, was memorized by trainees during the dream condition, and passed on in the same manner. These unwritten manuscripts therefore were also illustrated, so to speak, by dream journeys or field trips into other kinds of reality. [...] Some Speakers confine their abilities to the dream state; and, waking, are largely unconscious of their own abilities or experience.

[...] They are highly creative on an unconscious level, constantly forming psychic frameworks beneath normal consciousness that can be used both by themselves and others in dream and trance states. They often appear to others in the dream condition, and they help dreamers in the manipulation of inner reality. [...]

(Pause at 9:40.) Now it is meaningless to call such dreams or dream places hallucinations, for they are representations of definite “objective” realities that you cannot perceive as yet in their own guise. [...]

[...] Outside of your own framework, houses as such or dwellings as such are not needed, and yet in trance encounters or dream encounters with other realities, such structures are frequently seen. [...]

[...] Often, however, the suggestion involved in a dream brings about the event, so it seems when the dream becomes real that you have looked into a future that already existed. [...]

[...] Whether or not you remember your dreams, for example, a certain portion of you, under hypnosis, could remember every dream that you ever had in your life. [...]

[...] Now, I tell you to remember your dreams. In your context I will tell you again not only to remember your dreams, but to learn to come awake in the middle of them and realize that you can manipulate within them. [...]

[...] In one context what you call physical reality is a dream, but in a larger context it is a dream that you have created. [...]

[...] Now you do this to some extent in the dream state, but even then in many dreams you still tend to translate experience into hallucinatory physical terms. Most of the dreams that you recall are of this nature.

[...] You do not remember them as dreams. Dreams, however, may later the same evening be formed from the information gained during what I will call the “depth experience.” These will not be exact or near translations of the experience, but rather of the nature of dream parables — an entirely different thing, you see.

[...] During it, energy is generated that makes the dream state itself possible. It is true that dreams allow the physically oriented self to digest current experience, but it is also true that the experience is then returned to its initial components. [...]

[...] When you are ill, in the dream state you often have experiences in which you seem to be someone else with an entirely healthy body. Often such a dream is therapeutic. [...]

REINCARNATION, DREAMS, AND THE HIDDEN
MALE AND FEMALE WITHIN THE SELF

Now: Our next chapter will be called: “Reincarnation, Dreams, and the Hidden Male and Female Within the Self.”

The male will often dream of himself, therefore, as a female. [...]

SLEEP, DREAMS, AND CONSCIOUSNESS

[...] The conscious self would recall more of its dream adventures as a matter of course, and gradually these would be added to the totality of experience as the ego thinks of it.

You have trained your consciousness to follow certain patterns that are not necessarily natural for it, and these patterns increase the sense of alienation between the waking and dreaming self. [...]

[...] For other reasons having to do with the chemical reactions during the dream state, bodily health would be improved; and this particular schedule would also be of help in schizophrenia, and generally aid persons with problems of depression, or those with mental instability.

[...] In the dream state you are much more aware of them, although there is a final process of dreaming that often masks intense psychological and psychic experience, and unfortunately what you usually recall is this final dream version.

[...] All dreams are not of this nature. Some dreams themselves do take place in psychic or mental areas connected with your daily activities, in which case no dressing-up process is necessary. But in the very deep reaches of sleep experience — those, incidentally, not yet touched upon by scientists in so-called dream laboratories — you are in communication with other portions of your own identity, and with the other realities in which they exist.

[...] If you do not want to remember a particular dream, you yourself censor the memory on levels quite close to consciousness. Often you can even catch yourself in the act of purposely dropping the memory of a dream. [...]

Now, many of these freedoms are quite natural to you in the dream state, and you form dream environments often to exercise such potentials. [...]

You can learn to change your physical environment, therefore, by learning to change and manipulate your dream environment. You can also suggest specific dreams in which a desired change is seen, and under certain conditions these will then appear in your physical reality. [...]

[...] In childhood and in the dream state, each personality is aware to some extent of the true freedom that belongs to its own inner consciousness. [...]

[...] Only through the use of the intuitions and in sleep and dream states, as a rule, can you perceive the joyfully changing nature of your own, and any, consciousness.

[...] Its power and strength then returned to the dream universe. [...] In private dreams, men then related to the main figures in the drama, and in the dream state they recognized its true import.

[...] These dramas are also privately worked out in the dream state. The God-personified figures first were introduced to man in the dream state, and the way then prepared.

[...] Multidimensional awareness is available to you in your dreams, however, in some trance states, and often even beneath ordinary consciousness as you go about your day.

(I did have a couple of questions pertaining to Jane and her dreams. [...]

[...] In some dream states you may visit a particular location and then perceive the location as it was, say, three centuries ago and five years hence, and never understand what the dream meant. [...]

[...] As one dream is like a stone thrown into the pool of dream consciousness, so any act appears in this pool also in its own guise. [...]

[...] On such occasions your attention is focused elsewhere, in what you might call mini-dreams or hallucinations, or associative and intuitive processes of thought that go quite beyond normal focus.

Inner portions of your personality also have memory of all of your dreams. [...]

[...] This is usually the level that is visited by the living in projections from the dream state.

[...] It is from this area that some disturbed personalities have those dreams of returning to the physical environment.

[...] In your dreams you have been here.

In their dreams they were in contact. Consciously Paul remembered many of these dreams, until he felt pursued by Christ. It was because of a series of recurring dreams that Paul persecuted the Christians. [...]

[...] Were their dreams and other psychic experiences — other than the recorded instances — outstanding on a regular basis as they lived out their lives day by day?

On an unconscious level, however, he knew the meaning of the dreams, and his “conversion,” of course, was only a physical event following an inner experience.

John the Baptist, Christ, and Paul were all connected in the dream state, and John was well aware of Christ’s existence before Christ was born.

[...] A dream about it, for instance, may so frighten you that you avoid the event and do not experience it. If so, such a dream is a message from a probable self who did experience the event.

[...] By this I mean energy that appears simultaneously both to you and probable selves in other realities; psychic connections having to do with a uniting, sympathetic, emotional reaction and a connection that shows up very strongly in the dream state.

[...] In dreams you may have glimpses of probable roads that you might have taken. [...]

(10:30.) So can a child then in a dream receive such communications from a probable future self, of such a nature that its life is completely changed. [...]

[...] I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I even remembered reading at various times that when projecting one knows the difference between that state and a dreaming one. [...]

[...] As I lay dozing I gave myself suggestions that I would recall my dreams in the morning and write them down. [...]

[...] On a different occasion I had a rather small out-of-body that trailed behind it, for almost two weeks, a series of incomplete projections or dream experiences containing distorted elements of such phenomena. [...]

[...] They are recalled when there is some reason to do so, some merit or obvious achievement involved, as in societies where it is considered highly advantageous to use dreams and projections.

[...] Some periods of dream activity do indeed supersede those of some waking states. [...]

[...] The ego feels threatened by the extended “leave of absence” it must take, becomes wary of sleep, and sets up barriers against the dream state. [...]

[...] The symbolism in dreams would appear with greater clarity, not, for example, be lost through the many hours you now give to sleep.

[...] Valid information gained in the dream state was memorized in the morning. One Speaker heard another’s lesson in the dream state. On the other hand, pertinent physical data was also communicated one to another in the dream state, and both states were utilized to a high degree. [...]

[...] These can take place in either the waking or dream state, and they serve to open up the reservoirs of knowledge and make past training available.

[...] Both of you are being trained by other Speakers who are themselves between lives, this occurring in your dream states. [...]

[...] Much of her training, as Jane, took place in the dream state. [...]

[...] Now, often in your dreams you are able to perceive such other situations, but you often wind them into dream paraphernalia of your own, in which case upon awakening you have little clear memory.

[...] The personality itself seems to be having a nightmare, or a series of recurring dreams, during which it returns to the physical environment. [...]