The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of…

Once we break out of the limitations set by Western psychologists, such as Freud, in our attempt to understand the nature of dreams, we can explore the much wider and more nuanced potential causes, triggers, images and significances of dreams.

We find it hard to appreciate that there are independent mental or vital planes, or subtle physical worlds that exist outside of the human frame of reference. We also have a hard time recognising that forces and beings from these other planes or worlds can, and do, impact our lives here. Yet the premise is quite simple. There is a vibrational spectrum and we accept that we are only able to directly perceive a specific range of that spectrum. We also accept that vibrations from outside that range can be experienced by other beings in the world, and that they also can impact us even when we cannot directly perceive them. It is thus no extraordinary leap to understand that these forces and beings influence our behaviour; nor that they are most effective in that influence when our conscious waking guard is down during periods of sleep and dream.

It is also true that even impulses, vibrations and forces that are known to be active in our world can influence us, particularly when they act on the subconscious levels where we are less able to monitor and control them on a consistent basis. Thus, energies we encounter in our lives can raise up reactions and responses that come out in the dream state.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “All dreams of this kind are very obviously formations such as one often meets on the vital, more rarely on the mental plane. Sometimes they are the formations of your own mind or vital; sometimes they are the formations of other minds with an exact or modified transcription in yours; sometimes formations come that are made by the non-human forces or beings of these other planes. These things are not true and need not become true in the physical world, but they may still have effects on the physical if they are framed with that purpose or that tendency and, if they are allowed, they may realise their events or their meaning — for they are most often symbolical or schematic — in the inner or the outer life. The proper course with them is simply to observe and understand and, if they are from a hostile source, reject or destroy them.”

“There are other dreams that have not the same character but are a representation or transciption of things that actually happen on other planes, in other worlds, under other conditions than ours. There are, again, some dreams that are purely symbolic and some that indicate existing movements and propensities in us, whether familiar or undetected by the waking mind, or exploit old memories or else raise up things either passively stored or still active in the subconscient, a mass of various stuff which has to be changed or got rid of as one risees into a higher consciousness. If one learns how to interpret, one can get from dreams much knowledge of the secrets of our nature and of other-nature.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 5, Physical Consciousness — Subconscient — Sleep and Dream — Illness, pp. 100-101