It’s normal to experience moments where you suddenly remember the dreams you had last night. Your previously-forgotten dreams may suddenly pop up in your mind unexpectedly and generate a deep sense of familiarity or even nostalgia. While it’s common to suddenly remember your dreams from last night, it’s also possible to suddenly recall dreams from months or even years ago. It’s difficult to determine what causes this spontaneous recall. Very vivid or lucid dreams are hard to forget, but we often forget many of our mild and non-lucid dreams. Usually, when we experience spontaneous dream recall, we are remembering a dream that we forgot about up until that moment.
In this post series about how to work with your dreams, so far I have focused on dreams you already have had. Now let’s take it to the next level, and learn how to ask for the dream you want to have. Known as dream incubation, this ancient method for asking for guidance from the dreamworld is scarily effective.
The ability to have control and consciousness in the dream
state, also known as lucid dreaming. According to Hereward
Carrington (in his book Higher Psychical Development, 1924)
dreamers can keep conscious control up to the moment of falling
asleep. He advises:
‘‘When you have learned to do that, then construct before
yourself, mentally, a definite scene, which you must hold firmly
in mind. Then, as you are falling to sleep hold this scene before
you, and at the very last moment, before you fall asleep, consciously
transfer yourself into the scene—in other words, step
into the picture; and if you have developed yourself to the requisite
point, you will be enabled to carry over an unbroken consciousness
into the dream state; and in this way you have a perfect
continuity of thought; there is no break in the
consciousness; you step into the dream picture and go on
dreaming consciously. That is the process of dreaming true,
and after this dream is fully enacted, then you should remember
perfectly all that has transpired during the sleep period.’’ In the book The Projection of the Astral Body by Sylvan J. Muldoon
and Carrington (1929), Muldoon remarks that these instructions
are in harmony with the method of dream control
used to induce the astral body to move out into space. An article
in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (vol. 26,
July 1913) records van Eeden’s experiments in dreaming true.
The British psychical researcher J. Arthur Hill vouches for the
truthfulness of
the experiences in The Dreams of Orlow (1916),
by A. M. Irvine.
J. Gordon Melton, ed., “Dreaming True,” in Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, vol 1. (Farmington Hills: Gale Group Inc., 2001), 449.
There’s a world that lies on the border between wakefulness and sleep, in the realm of the subconscious. Between the conscious and unconscious, sounds and images auto-generate rapidly in a seemingly random succession, much like they do in the dream world. This world is witnessed only while you fall asleep, in transit. Whether you are inducing a lucid dream consciously or falling asleep in a normal fashion, you will pass through this in-between realm, which is similar to a lucid dream, yet noticeably different. It’s a blendbetween the physical world and the dream world… a crossroads of some sort. Thoughts take on a new quality here… they become vaguer and occur more automatically, with less intention and effort. Events, people, places, things, and sounds all appear underneath your eyelids while you still vaguely sense your physical surroundings. This is the place from which you cross into the realm of the unconscious mind (the dream world).
Dreams can be a compass when you’re doing workings which fall outside of reason or logic.
For the past little while I’ve been in the midst of magical operations which work on very subtle aspects of my self.. The goal is essentially to discover the true nature of myself, my true will you could call it. To align my conscious self with my unconscious.
The great difficulty with this is that anything you can consciously think of is filtered through both the true will and the false will. The “me” who is deep inside is always present but by the time anything reaches my conscious mind it is muddled with all the imprints and conditioning that I have accumulated in life.
In a situation like this you can’t trust a single thought that comes into your mind. Any one of those thoughts could be a traitor in the mix, even the ones which seem like brilliant ideas. In fact, the ones that seem like brilliant ideas turn out to be traitors quite often.
How do, then? How do? Luckily we have an avenue in which the true self gets more control than our conscious self. Dreams. As Crowley has stated in Liber Aleph the places, characters, and objects in our dreams are often results of our conscious experiences. Yet the feeling of the dream, the events, and arrangements of symbols are all aspects which the unconscious takes control of.
Ecstatic dreams signal that we are coming closer to our true will in the area of the topic that the dream was based on. Terrifying, sad, or violent dreams are signals that we are moving far from our true will.
As an example if you have a dream about your love life in which you are filled with anxiety, and the events of the dream are violent, then your approach to love is coming from a position of false will. If, on the contrary, you have a beautiful and enjoyable dream about love then your perspective on love is in alignment with your True Self (or unconscious self).
This allows us to tiptoe around the traitors Reason and Logic. It allows us to receive messages, more or less directly, from our unconscious.
The transmission may be partially delayed, but that is a small price to pay for a tool which allows you to avoid all the wretched confusion the thinking mind creates. Personally I’d rather make slow progress towards the right destination instead of taking leaps in random directions and hoping I end up at the right place.
“yet, none i know asks the mythic question; none tries to suggest a theory, and a praxis with it, derived from an archetypal approach to the whole business of dreams. others have seen myths in dreams and have used myths for amplifying dream motifs. it is, however, another vision altogether to look at dreams as phenomena that emerge from a specific archetypal ‘place’ and that correspond with a distinct mythic geography and then, further, to reflect this underworld in psychological theory.”
“Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamic of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions sown are directly valid for all mankind.”
“We all dream; it is a mystery in which all humankind participates. I realize this is an assumption, but it is one that I have no qualms in asserting as fact: the dream is an experiential universal for humanity.”
Occult Aspects 