Thread: Where is the Dream state?

Originally Posted by floatinghead

' I know reality is consciousness because I have seen it, as sure as you have seen your hands in front of you'

TRANQUIL TOAD - would you mind speaking some more of this?

I can try, but I doubt it will translate into words at all. Unless you have had such an experience it will sound insane.

I guess I can use an analogy. Imagine you once you lost one of your 5 senses, say hearing for example. And you went so long without it that you actually forgot what hearing was, or that you had ever had such a sense to begin with.

And then one day you could hear again, albeit briefly. It would be something startlingly new, since it had been so long, yet you would remember from some distant past that this is how you used to be. "Oh, OH OH! I remember this! This is a part of me."

There would be no question because it would be a remembrance, not something new and foreign.

We are born into this reality with complete amnesia of who we are and what the universe is. This is not your first existence, nor is it your natural state.

I just caught a glimpse I what I was like before this. I knew reality was consciousness because my consciousness was the same consciousness as the whole universe. The universe is one mind, and that mind is you and me. All of us. We're actually the same being. If you can remember this, it is like coming home. Because that state of unity is where you were for eternity before you came into this brief life, and where you will be for eternity afterwords.

I don't feel that way all the time, those experiences are brief for me. But at least on one level I know.

Of course there are other "hints" within this existence that it is all mind. Dreams are a big one. Wow, what a coincidence that our brain can create an experience that 100% resembles "real" life. I'm sure its just all brain chemicals though and nothing to ponder over...

Synchronicities, as unconvincing as they sound, become very convincing when they start happening to you all the time. Just watch your own thoughts and your environment. You can actually catch your mind spilling over into your surroundings. I'm thinking about a concept and someone walks by with that word written on their t-shirt. I am talking to someone about another individual, and that individual walks past right as we mention them. I am thinking about something and I come to my computer and someone has made a forum post about it, or there is a news article about the subject.

And it happens all the time. I don't have to reach and try to imagine it, I will have a thought and instantly there will be something in my environment related to it. I let out a huge yawn, think "I'm exhausted," while turning on my radio and the first thing I hear on the radio is "don't fall asleep at your desk."

There are other hints of course. OBEs, telepathy, shared dreams, quantum physics, NDEs. The logical argument of how consciousness could spring from dead matter in the first place.

But once you remember, and many people will start to remember during this life, it actually seems pretty funny when you look back at what you thought reality was before.

Originally Posted by Philosopher8659

To say " I know reality is consciousness because I have seen it" is just a rewording of "Man is the measure of all things." It is the same as saying the perceiver is the perceived. To me, and anyone else with a mind, that is pure psychological dysfunction. ONe only humors a mad man when they have to, and I don't.

As I said before, I am not saying all of reality is human consciousness, man's consciousness; that everything is me, my individual personality. If one's only experience of consciousness is that of their own mind, this would be what they infer from such a statement as "everything is consciousness."

You do realize we are both cliches?

The rigid rationalist who refuses to see past his own perspective, and the loose mystic unable to articulate what he sees in a way that is meaningful to anyone but himself.

Left / Right brain.

This has been going on for quite some time now.

Again, a discourse that really goes nowhere.

Try to explain smell to a man who has only used sight. It would be very frustrating because he would say: "well what shape, color and size is this smell you speak of?" And when you can't explain yourself within these terms he calls you insane, because to him there is nothing beyond them. Worst yet, by your inability to explain what you have smelled means you are somehow denying sight. "Look at this moron, his sight is so poor he comes up with ridiculous ideas, such as this smell he speaks of."

To the credit of the rationalist, often what the mystic has seen has been so fleeting that he knows not enough of it to really make sense of it. So can you blame those who ignore him?

However, I will point out, that the rationalist is always searching. Always attempting new avenues of logic in an attempt to find some truth. The mystic however is at rest. He just knows and there really isn't much that needs to be said.

Now that could mean that the mystic has fooled himself into a faulty set of beliefs that bring him comfort, or it could mean that while the rationalist is struggling to make his way from A to D, the mystic has just skipped to Z.

tranquil toad
Do you know if we can sustain a dream state past death? Or do we return to the infinite nothingness unity? Do we have a choice? or is dreaming only part of the experience of living in a body?
I had a salvia trip where I completely lost my identity of myself as an individual and completely lost contact with thoughts ideas concepts and physical reality. It seemed to last an infinite amount of time or maybe the concept of time didn't exist? Just nothingness. When I returned to my body it felt like all my memories were built into my body...

Well I'll add a disclaimer: beyond that everything is one consciousness, I don't really know for certain the details. I'm in the dark like everyone else. Part of the fun of being here I suppose.

That being said, this is what I am beginning to figure out. Call it a rough draft I suppose.

I don't think we return to infinite nothingness/total unity immediately upon death. This one mind can create itself to be individual beings/souls which furthers its knowledge of itself. These souls exist multidimensionaly and can move about through a variety of different dimensions, or levels of consciousness. Its not like a being is created and exists only for a while before re-merging with the source. Your soul is eternal unto itself, and encompasses much more than you can imagine from the perspective of this life.

So imagine a group of these beings got together and decided to create the idea of physical lives in a physical dimension. They could live out various lives as physical beings, and gain experience and insight from this game. This game would include much more than what you see with your 5 senses. There are other levels, dimensions, all intertwined with the idea of physicality. The dream plane is just one dimension "up" from physical existence. Sort of like an editing mode which is much more expanded and free compared to the heavy rules which have been placed upon complete physicality.

What has happened (again this is what I am beginning to understand, I'm no authority on reality here) is that we forgot we did this. Part of the game was forgetting who you really were so you could become very involved in your role as a human. So, in a sense, we kind of got trapped here. When you die you go up into the same dimension as the dream plane, perhaps a little higher, but you never fully remember who you are or what is happening. So your up there for a while unaware wtf is going on until you just cycle back down and incarnate again in physicality. And this cycle has been going on for thousands of years now. We are basically caught in a self created dream world which we have forgotten we created.

Some of us have become aware to an extent what is happening, enough that they can actually decide what they will experience when they come back to physicality. If you have a certain theme in your life that you just know you are here to do and experience, it is a good bet you decided upon it between lives.

We still have access to that unity, however. That nothingness you spoke of is what the one mind is like in its natural state before it creates itself to be individual souls. We all have access to that place, and various methods can take you there. I think that is actually where you go in deep, dreamless sleep. However once you come back from that you are still within this physical game.

You felt like all your memories were built into your body. The "you" who you think you are is tied to this specific body and incarnation. Your personality, memories, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, are all like an artificial avatar that you soul has created. Like a mask that hides you from the higher levels of who you really are. They are one with this physical dimension, and when you die, or when we all eventually leave this game, we won't be humans at all. Even when you are in a lucid dream, if you look at your own state of mind - even if you have complete clarity - it is very different from who you are when you wake up.

Because you are simply awareness. Any quality of awareness besides pure consciousness is temporary, not who you really are. You are nothing, like a blank screen which can project anything it wishes onto itself.

wtf everything you said here is exactly what I have been thinking about. I mean everything! Half way through reading this i was thinking about replying about how I thought dreamless sleep is that nothingness i described... and then you said it!

What I was thinking today:
when you silence your physical awareness you experience the mind
when you silence the mind you experience the nothingness

Dude you should put all these posts on this thread together and start a new thread.
This stuff is mind blowing. That interesting how you said when we die we are still not completely aware of who we are then we just come and live another life
I guess if you were in a lucid dream for an infinite amount of time you would have a very different identity for yourself than the strictly human indentity you hold in this limited material plane. Maybe you get bored of it eventually and thats why we come to this limited physical reality and forget who we are? After my salvia trip I was very convinced that I was not human at all. And kind of became frustrated with everyone else being so consumed belief of being human and the obsessive materialism. I was also didn't want sleep because I realized I have built up this ego my whole life and I'm subconciously programed into it.
How you said how can you know what its like to smell without experiencing it.
I was thinking maybe we come to this reality to use these experiences we have here as the basis for the infinite free experience of the dream world.
Like the paint to make the painting. And then the nothingness would be the the canvas that you paint it on.
You experience the colors and then you can create whatever you can imagine with them.

I agree, there seems to be an underlying truth here, an ultimate truth if you will. Allot of what you said rings true. It is something past logic; it is a feeling deep inside.

Many years ago through allot of anguish I started coming to the same conclusions, and it wasn't through logic that I came to these conclusions but a series of 'adventures' through my mind (it is the best was I can describe it). This was when I was in my early teens and I had read nothing about different belief systems/religions, and so through absolutely no outside influence I arrived at this outcome. It wasn't until years after that I started to come across people who had had very similar experiences and who had also arrived at the same conclusion. It does not seem to be something which is taught but something which is found within one's self. Something which is remembered. I'd like to think that we all have parts of the puzzle, and nobody is really wrong, because in one way or another the pieces all fit.

Here is a little of what I think, the way I like to look at it is this:

In the beginning there was one consciousness, for some reason (perhaps because it was lonely one day or because it needed a reason to be) it split, exploded into an infinite amount of pieces. This coincides with the big bang, everything starting from one point and then exploding outwards - expanding. Then one day, scientists hypothesize, the universe will contract, pulling everything together to be one again - and this will be when our 'oneness' with the universe will really start to comes together. (and perhaps we repeat this over and over, the universe expanding and contracting in nearly exactly the same way - which would help to explain why we get Deja Vu's - perhaps we will forever be repeating this cycle until everything is perfect - the 'Groundhog Day' film makes a good analogy of this.)

I think the dream world also goes both ways. We obviously take information back from this life, but often the dream world is used to plan out events and ideas that will be acted out when we incarnate.

The dream plane we experience in lucid and normal dreams is very closely tied to this physical realm. I don't think we were in an eternal lucid dream before we came here, with hills and valleys and other recognizable physical-like landscapes. It think that is a product of that dimension being so close to physicality. We are probably something else entirely that can't be imagined from where we are now.

That nothingness is the canvas as you said. The one mind in its natural state of unity doesn't know itself. When you go there, do you even have the recognition that you exist? It can only know itself by creating form, or a splash of paint to extend the metaphor. So all of existence is one mind's experience of itself.

A quote I like from Sri Aurobindo "Existence that multiplied itself for sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it might find itself innumerably"

Originally Posted by floatinghead

In the beginning there was one consciousness, for some reason (perhaps because it was lonely one day or because it needed a reason to be) it split, exploded into an infinite amount of pieces. This coincides with the big bang, everything starting from one point and then exploding outwards - expanding.

I'll give my take on this. I've tried to explain this before, and only some people can get it but here it goes.

This consciousness, before it does that split you spoke of, doesn't know itself. It contains infinity, but that infinity lies in potential yet to be experienced.

Complete unity is also a complete void. Think of a yin yang. Were there not two different colors, there would be no form to it. Experience is created by the contrast of two or more things.

When it is one awareness, I knows not that it is. So it dived into two; a black and a white, a dark and a light, an on and off. Each side could now see the other, and in seeing the other know that it itself exists. Out of this split into duality comes all experience. The black and the white mix, creating patterns of endless experience. And as it does this it creates an infinite journey. Because this mind is infinite, there will be no end to its exploration of itself.

You are this mind, and everything you look at is you. Infinite consciousness using itself as a mirror so it may know itself.

You have a really beautiful way of explaining things

I could never get my head around the why (to split) and this makes allot of sense. I love the mirror analogy!

Ya thats where the law of attraction comes in. Everything we think is shaping our physical reality, but because we are working with time and space it creates the illusion that things are happening to us us, not from us. As with deja va, intuition, and synchonocity I think maybe our dream self planned out a path before we came here.
A good way of explaining the experience I had is oneness. Unity kind of sounds misleading to me because it makes it sound like you are experiencing everything in the universe at once.
It was like time didn't exist because because there was no here to there. time is not measurable. There is no seperation, there is only oneness.
this thread I made kind of explains trying to say http://www.dreamviews.com/f19/layers-reality-105066/

Wow, TranquilToad. A lot of what you're saying (and I mean a LOT) sounds just like this book I've read part of, called "My Big TOE". TOE, being Theory of Everything. It's a really fascinating book, but a slow read, so I stopped reading it. But I'll have to get back into it at some point. The guy supposedly has scientific explanations for most of the things you've mentioned...

100% in our brains. The dream state is exactly that, a "state" of consciousness. Consciousness is derived from the brain. To me, there is no dream plane, people do not have dream bodies. Everything you perceive, waking and dreaming, occurs in your brain, sorry.

Of course, you are entitled to your opinion, just like Philosopher is. I'm not saying I know for sure either way, myself. I just find it interesting that there are even some scientists that aren't so sure about that anymore.

Originally Posted by Singularity125

Of course, you are entitled to your opinion, just like Philosopher is. I'm not saying I know for sure either way, myself. I just find it interesting that there are even some scientists that aren't so sure about that anymore.

Which scientists do you refer to?

Oh, well, "My Big TOE" was written by a physicist. Thomas Campbell. I'm not sure how well-known he is in the scientific community, but apparently he participated in experiments to try to legitimize OBEs in the scientific community, with Bob Munroe. There's another book I've read, "The Divine Matrix" by Gregg Braden. I don't think he's a scientist as such, but he references experiments in quantum mechanics and such.

At Tranquil Toad and Saltyseedog... were you perchance influenced by Buddhism in any way, or were these ideas purely from your own mind (whether that exists or not)? What you are saying about realizing your original form sounds quite similar to Buddhism, that you attain Oneness/Nirvana after understanding that there is more than the material world, and that you now understand you are part of something greater, the Universe/Parmatma/God/Whatever you may believe, and all that it may be.

Well I'm certainly not enlightened, but I saw/remembered that everything is consciousness independent of Buddhism, though I am familiar with it.

You can still begin to remember what reality is, and what you are, without being enlightened. It can happen in sudden spurts, or gradually over time. They key is that it will be very personal, and it won't come from one doctrine, religion or book. Your entire life is a dream, an orchestration of consciousness; and instead of looking to one component of the dream(IE a religion) the dream can gradually teach you over the span of your existence.

That probably makes little to no sense, so here's an example. As was mentioned before, the one consciousness which is everything "divided" itself up into duality so it can know itself. I saw this through the metaphor of binary code. With two things to contrast each other, 0 and 1, can come the foundation for all existence. Its like something came into my mind and arranged my thoughts to create a unique metaphor that made sense for me. I didn't read it anywhere, I had no notion of a concept until it just sort of erupted inside me. I read afterwords very similar ideas in Hinduism, which I found very quickly after having that thought. A synchronicity to drive the point home.

As floatinghead said, he went through adventures inside his mind. Now you can't prove this stuff to anyone, and they scoff at you when you say you know. But when it happens there is no doubt. Most people's views on reality are made up of stuff they have been told or have read. Second hand information that you have chosen to believe.

You know in school when you would have a teacher who would just get you to read the text book? He wouldn't engage you at all. You may remember enough to pass the test, but after a while all that information would just slip from your mind. It carried no weight. And then a different teacher would create field trips, projects or speak to you personally? You actually learned, because you weren't regurgitating information, you were learning in the moment, creatively. Those ideas stuck with you. Its sort of the same thing. I didn't have a teacher or anything, but the difference is knowing vs memorizing.

Ok here is something anyone can do. Is there something you would really like to know? Not something specific like lottery numbers or the contents of your girlfriends diary, but an idea or concept that really intrigues you? Ask the universe "please explain (concept) to me." At first nothing will happen. Its not like a voice will come inside your head instantly and tell you all. But just sort of keep it in mind. If you actually really want to know about it, see how much more you know in a couple months. Your reality and your mind can organize itself in a way so you will understand.

I know how my energy body works, and what the chakra points are. Granted I had read about these before, but I went into much more depth just by learning by myself. You can do this with anything that you really are interested in. Maybe you will run into a social situation that deals with the concept. Maybe you will find a book that gives you a little more understanding. Maybe you will have a flash of insight. The point is it won't come from one external source, it will be created within over time.

I don't know alot about buddhism so that would be a no.
Just quiet your mind and listen to your intuition. this is your truth, it is your spirit wispering to you.
The heart feeds you truth. The mind feeds you illusions.

Definitely interesting considering that it does sound shockingly like Buddhism. And to TT, I have had moments where everything made sense, just for a bit. I felt at peace. That's what I want to find again.

Ya those moments are rare. Part of what I'm learning is that your ego structure doesn't actually produce new ideas. So the "you" who you believe does the thinking actually is more of a conduit.

For instance have you ever been trying to figure something out, mulling it over in your mind, until you become mentally exhausted and give up, only to find that the answer comes suddenly in a flash once you have ceased mental effort?

Instilling a certain amount of passivity on yourself allows the mind to become a receiver of insight, as well as creating peace.

There are certain truths about reality that aren't measurable by science, so something like buddhism would have come across these and created its own metaphors and language to describe it. They aren't restricted to buddhism, but buddhism is one way of speaking of them.

I think it is very simple.

We can only give meaning to something by comparing it to something else.

There is one mind, One Mind
One Mind wanted to give more meaning to itself so it created different points of view / worlds / people / animals, etc. The more colorful the painting, the more meaning you can give to it by comparing everything inside of it.

So, dreaming feels like in the back of your head as some mentioned because you are not used to it. You are used to seeing through the glasses called the five physical senses.

To conclude, imagine the Universe (One Thought), you me i him and her, and all of them, as putting on different costumes and different glasses. It is all the same energy, just differently colored, be it the color of matter or w/e else it may be.

Drugs, sleep-deprivation demonstrate examples of looking through a different lens.
But so does being in love, being scared, etc.

-- I just noticed Tranquil Toad had the same thing I thought of - Complete unity is also a complete void. Think of a yin yang. Were there not two different colors, there would be no form to it. Experience is created by the contrast of two or more things.....

Which leads me to think... How fucking infinite are we!!?!?!!? )))
No wonder I feel no pressure by "time".. or at least in this life time

Originally Posted by maxihaus

Which leads me to think... How fucking infinite are we!!?!?!!? )))
No wonder I feel no pressure by "time".. or at least in this life time

Well there is only one definition of infinite

tranquil toad i think the exact same way as far as us being in our own trap. Something that we created just to do it and whiped our mem while doing it so we stuck.

sorry for the not smartness of this i understand big words i just can not use them.