Spirituality for Living

A deep seated sense that something just should be so, just shouldn’t be present or shouldn’t occur. The majority of dream related emotion is actually negative. While you sleep, your dreaming mind works out all the subtle little discomforts and confusions we condition ourselves to ignore while we are awake.

The things that scare us all relate to release, and there is a scary side to everything we experience. Anything that suggests shadow or void, emptiness of confusion, fills the realm of nightmares. You don’t have a choice about what is present in your nightmares. They have a reality all their own which actually should be comforting because it means they aren’t evidence of your insanity or some deep seated character flaw. Just like physical presences, they just exist, and like physical presences what that means to you is decided by you.

“Welcome to my nightmare. I think you’re going to like it. There’ll be some more when you come down.” Alice Cooper

“You are also caught with the fact that man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage.” Morris West

What is a Nightmare?

Let’s start with a question which is very often a good start. What is a nightmare? A bad dream. Frightening imagination. Any fearful situation. All true. In fact, how do we tell when we are dreaming? Sometimes the boundaries of dream and awake are not easy to see. Interesting and true. The defined boundaries are not as solid as people convince themselves they are. Something about it isn’t consistent with our daily pattern. Isn’t that also what makes a waking world event a “nightmare”? Something is seriously inconsistent with our expectations? This is also the definition of horror more or less,… Seek More

Blurred Boundaries

Dream experience seems to defy physics, but how did the dreaming mind come to be able to make up such seemingly illogical events as occur in our dreams? Memories of before this existence? It comes from another plane that doesn’t have the same restrictions? Basically yes to both statements. There is a grammar the mind uses innately, a structure or logic that is inherent to consciousness itself. It structures our perception in ways that our brain can digest, so to speak. We don’t invent it and no one actually learns it. It’s more something we instinctively recognize, like recognizing that… Seek More

Nightmare Characters

Notice how time works in your dreams? Almost non existent. Because it’s non-existent, as we define it, even while we are awake. We think we have a dream at the end of the day while we sleep, but even viewed in waking world terms, that part of your brain that dreams still dreams while we walk around during the day. They call it the default mode network, and we revert to it whenever we aren’t “consciously” trying to do something. One dream stands out and you don’t realise you’ve also had dozens more. True. Sort of like we don’t remember… Seek More

World of Experience

Neuroscience has discovered some very interesting things. We structure our memory like it was physical spaces. This is why when you walk through a door, you often forget why you were entering that room. Your memory is your house. But what is the difference between sensation and memory? How can you tell the difference? Sensation is sharper, more immediate. Sort of like the sight of a visually impaired person, or the hearing of the partially deaf? Yes. So all we have to go on is that sense of displacement? How often do we experience that even when we aren’t thinking at… Seek More

Include the Whole Picture

Our world has three faces. A dreamy heaven where wishes are fulfilled. A nightmarish hell where guilt is punished and fear is rewarded with its expectations, and the bright and potentially blinding “real world.” Can you have the real world as we know it without the other two? What would happen if humans had no dreams? We’d go insane? We would just go extinct. We couldn’t survive long enough to go insane. Schizophrenic? Actually, the problem with schizophrenics is they have poor control over their focus. They have impaired ability to shift, sift and filter through these various facets of the world,… Seek More

Things that Scare Us

We have one world with three faces of experience or consciousness. We have one world, but one which can be said to exist at three different levels of awareness, and even if you understand everything and delude yourself about nothing, none of the levels will disappear. The reason being, just as our brain assembles what we see by continuously and subtlety moving our eyes across the visual landscape before us, our minds eye scans the reality in front of us. And just as we know our left from our right, we know growth and energy from death and entropy. Our… Seek More

Nightmare Awareness

Just as your body is an ecosystem, so is your mind, and besides impressions made on you by other organisms, you actually have semi-independent intelligences showing up in your dreaming experience as well. We aren’t as holistic as people convince themselves they are. Various regions of your own nervous system still center themselves and organize themselves sort of like your familiar brain does, and these other centers of consciousness filter that same set of worlds or domains of experience differently. I won’t be going into a breakdown of the chakras, but I can tell you which center of your body… Seek More

Nightmares

Nightmares. I think we’ve all been having intense dreams recently. Perhaps due to the environmental balance as of late, the increased energy brought about from an early spring, and the more radical changes going on in our world. The beings that can enter our dreams, there must be some interesting ones. The oneiroi? They stalk dreams? They live dreams. They are dreams. They are the living embodiment of that stratum of reality that makes up a large part of waking life. We don’t make up dreams, and neither are we the first or last to dream. We just move with the… Seek More