Thread: Dream plane existance

Everything takes place in our mind, APs (I'd rather call them with the non-esoteric term OBEs) are just a different kind of lucid dreams.
Auto-suggestion is extremely powerful and that's why most experiences described here are similar.
If anything, it's those who believe in the "dream plane" that need to prove their existence or at least explain why.
I asked multiple times in different threads and never had a decent answer though, so... yeah.

Originally Posted by Whiskee

Everything takes place in our mind, APs (I'd rather call them with the non-esoteric term OBEs) are just a different kind of lucid dreams.
Auto-suggestion is extremely powerful and that's why most experiences described here are similar.
If anything, it's those who believe in the "dream plane" that need to prove their existence or at least explain why.
I asked multiple times in different threads and never had a decent answer though, so... yeah.

He is asking for proof. Not for a discussion on who's beliefs are more vallid. Absolute proof of something is imposible. With something like the dream plane you just sort of have to prove it to yourself.

Originally Posted by MadMonkey

He is asking for proof. Not for a discussion on who's beliefs are more vallid. Absolute proof of something is imposible. With something like the dream plane you just sort of have to prove it to yourself.

He asked for proof of the non-existence, which doesn't make any sense.
We know how OBEs work, there's nothing to prove or believe in, we can explain them well enough starting from lucid dreams.
On the opposite, if you strongly believe in the existence the dream and astral "plane" then let me just ask why, what in your experience triggered this idea.
If there was something unexplainable as a lucid dreaming experience than you have a good point (I'm genuinely curious, I asked this around multiple times).
Otherwise we are just talking about a new religion, self inducing dream hallucinations is extremely easy when you have "faith".

Originally Posted by Whiskee

He asked for proof of the non-existence, which doesn't make any sense.
We know how OBEs work, there's nothing to prove or believe in, we can explain them well enough starting from lucid dreams.
On the opposite, if you strongly believe in the existence the dream and astral "plane" then let me just ask why, what in your experience triggered this idea.
If there was something unexplainable as a lucid dreaming experience than you have a good point (I'm genuinely curious, I asked this around multiple times).
Otherwise we are just talking about a new religion, self inducing dream hallucinations is extremely easy when you have "faith".

I am very skeptical of the dream plane theories but I have had one interesting experience. Even though I am skeptical I still like to study the posibilities of shared dreaming ect. I had been trying to share dreams with someone and one day I had a dream were I fought a vampire with a black cape and a giant iron sword. He was also acompanied by this giant ogre looking monster. When I showed him the dream he remembered a dream he had 6 months earlier were he had fought someone that fit the vampires discription perfectly and there was also an ogre monster with him. I read the dream journal from his dream and it was uncany how similar my vampire and ogre monter were. Even the sword seemed exactly the same. I had not read his dream before either because it was posted in a section of the forum I didn't have access at the time.

Originally Posted by MadMonkey

I am very skeptical of the dream plane theories but I have had one interesting experience. Even though I am skeptical I still like to study the posibilities of shared dreaming ect. I had been trying to share dreams with someone and one day I had a dream were I fought a vampire with a black cape and a giant iron sword. He was also acompanied by this giant ogre looking monster. When I showed him the dream he remembered a dream he had 6 months earlier were he had fought someone that fit the vampires discription perfectly and there was also an ogre monster with him. I read the dream journal from his dream and it was uncany how similar my vampire and ogre monter were. Even the sword seemed exactly the same. I had not read his dream before either because it was posted in a section of the forum I didn't have access at the time.

Awe shit a dream jumping vampire.....sounds like fun

Come on , where are those who believe in the dream plane astral plane and other ? Dont they have any proof of these ?

Originally Posted by wana

Come on , where are those who believe in the dream plane astral plane and other ? Dont they have any proof of these ?

I believe in a dream plane, though I don't have proof myself. I believe one human can connect to another through love and other intense feelings....why can't we expand that to strangers as well?

Originally Posted by hprib012

I believe in a dream plane, though I don't have proof myself. I believe one human can connect to another through love and other intense feelings....why can't we expand that to strangers as well?

"Why not" isn't really a valid argument though

Originally Posted by Whiskee

"Why not" isn't really a valid argument though

True. Like I said I don't have proof myself. I've always been a believe in the beyond and supernatural. Isn't there a law that states that if a theory cannot be disproved more than it can be proven that the theory itself will remain a theory....or be neither....idk.

Originally Posted by wana

Come on , where are those who believe in the dream plane astral plane and other ? Dont they have any proof of these ?

It depends on why you want to know. If you're just trolling, the people who have the most compelling evidence are also among the least likely to want to waste their time arguing with someone who's mind is already made up. Also, if your mentality is to use what you do know to gain advantage over others, then there's no reason for anyone to want to give you more.

Trolling? Please don't pull the "oh you don't want to understand" card, this is a serious yet very simple question.
What exactly did in anyone's experience lead him/her to believe in the astral plane?
I know and have experienced lucid dreaming and OBEs (which are basically the same thing except for the "entrance point" and overall feeling).
I can explain them with a scientific mind, I can't see the reason to bring in new religions. Please enlighten me?

If I strongly believed in worms and bad entities, or accepted anything here on Beyond Dreaming really, I would certainly see and feel them in my dreams.
But this would be pure, powerful auto-suggestion in the unstable world that is completely ruled by it.
You know you are very "vulnerable" to your own thoughts while you are dreaming, right? Most people here seem to forget that.

Originally Posted by MadMonkey

I am very skeptical of the dream plane theories but I have had one interesting experience. Even though I am skeptical I still like to study the posibilities of shared dreaming ect. I had been trying to share dreams with someone and one day I had a dream were I fought a vampire with a black cape and a giant iron sword. He was also acompanied by this giant ogre looking monster. When I showed him the dream he remembered a dream he had 6 months earlier were he had fought someone that fit the vampires discription perfectly and there was also an ogre monster with him. I read the dream journal from his dream and it was uncany how similar my vampire and ogre monter were. Even the sword seemed exactly the same. I had not read his dream before either because it was posted in a section of the forum I didn't have access at the time.

Well... this isn't even shared dreaming, you just happened to dream about the same thing and with a significant delay
I once had a nightmare about a perfectly detailed dark figure chasing me, the image stuck in my mind for months.
I then saw it again in one of my old comic books... I completely forgot about it, and that was shocking.
Don't underestimate your subconscious, it keeps track of everything around you. What if your DCs were from one of those B movies?

Originally Posted by Whiskee

Well... this isn't even shared dreaming, you just happened to dream about the same thing and with a significant delay
I once had a nightmare about a perfectly detailed dark figure chasing me, the image stuck in my mind for months.
I then saw it again in one of my old comic books... I completely forgot about it, and that was shocking.
Don't underestimate your subconscious, it keeps track of everything around you. What if your DCs were from one of those B movies?

Well the dream plane theory aplies to more than just shared dreaming. It also deals with the posibilities of non-human entities showing up in our dreams. I don't know why we dreamed about fighting basicly the exact same dude. There are 3 main explinations. 1) coincidence (not likely because of how astoundingly similar they were)
2) We had something influence the dream. For example I could have somehow found out about his dream before hand without realizing it or we both saw the same vampire in a movie or something and forgot about it, like you said.
3) The dream plane exists and we both ran into some kind of dream plane entitee.

Or it could be a combination of the 3 or something different all together. Trust me I don't underestimate my subconcious. I'm just throwing out an experience I had.

I personally believe in the existence of the dream plane, but of course i don't have proof. Like someone above me said, definitive proof for something like this is next to impossible to get. I don't mean to stray of topic but, scientists believe that the universe started with a big bang. Is there any difinitive proof that the big bang actually happened? No... well not any proof i know of

Originally Posted by Whiskee

Trolling? Please don't pull the "oh you don't want to understand" card, this is a serious yet very simple question.
What exactly did in anyone's experience lead him/her to believe in the astral plane?

OK. For myself, I had a long string of accurate premonitions in dreams over a couple of years, almost nightly at the peak of this. Most often these would preceed the actual event by a few hours. A couple of the most notable ones I wrote down and e-mailed to other people before the event, to prove that I wasn't somehow changing my memory retroactively. Some of the events also decisively eliminated the possibility that I was making the predictions by extrapolating from subtle physical cues, or that I was predicting things that I could cause to happen or which were likely to happen if I looked for them. The same sense that enabled the premonitions was subtly present in my waking life also. To cap it off, I had several experiences with discontinuous jumps in waking reality, where something changed as if it had always been some other way, yet other facts remained consistent with it being the first way. In other words, the causal flow of events that we regard as our world or 'universe' doesn't have to be a unified whole, it can branch and rejoin in ways that produce apparent contradictions. This is neither predicted nor prohibited by modern physics theory, though it goes against both our usual assumptions and our usual experience, fortunately. I chose to accept those events at face value rather than doubting them and being faced with an escalating series of more decisive examples, as happened with the dream premonitions.

None of that tells me anything about an 'astral plane' of course, it just tells me that there's more to reality than current scientific models and explanations can even begin to account for. Since I did not experience anything like an 'astral plane', I questioned the existence of such, and to some extent continue to question it. Conventionally, physical events are supposedly manifest from the 'astral', and you can see them there before they happened. Astral matter is supposedly 'finer' matter which interacts only very subtly with the matter that our senses commonly work in. But it seemed possible to me that this 'astral' matter is invented to explain things like premonitions, and that actually everything can be explained in terms of 'physical' worlds, and some currently unknown interactions between those worlds. The current trend among scientists is to assume that there are other worlds infinitesmally similar to ours, even though there is no known interaction between those worlds. It seemed more plausible to me that I was sensing other worlds similar to ours, in a state a few hours more advanced, than I was sensing 'astrally' or our 'future'.

Now for a variety of reasons I'm coming around a little more now to the idea that there is something like 'astral' matter, even though that metaphor is no doubt flawed. One reason is experiences I've had with astral projection, which I had previously dismissed as unreal based on an absence of other kinds of objective evidence. My experiences did not seem to be merely a particularly vivid type of lucid dream, there was a quality to them that was quite different. I experienced something that was different, which for lack of a better term I'll call my astral body. I'll call it something else if someone provides a better description. This astral body is not what people call the 'dream body' - I agree with people who make a distinction between the two. The dream body sort of floats in ones imagination. The astral body is meshed closely with the physical body, and separating them is to me a very strange experience. I don't have even the beginning of an explanation of what either of these are, I just have the experience. But the "its all in your mind and unreal in other regards" explanations are for me completely implausible now, because of my other experiences which such explanations fail for.

I have not had experiences with shared dreams, but I have had convincing experiences where I have had part of a thought or dream and someone else has had another part of it, that fit together in a very specific way like lock and key. And these experiences occurred in situations that ruled out other possible explanations, such as both dreams being triggered by related prior events. This proves to me at least that our minds are in some sense shared. Beyond that I don't see the point in shared dreaming though, since we already have a shared world which works pretty well if we make the most of it.

So I've typed this big long post, taking up lots of time, and of course I've left out a ton of information to even to make it this short. Does anybody reading it really care that much? This is not the first time I've gone down this path, and not the first time on this site. Sometimes the other person ridicules what I said, as if for some reason another person can't experience something that's different from what they have experienced. More often they just blow it off and go on to argue with a weaker target who's opinions are more book-based, less developed logically, or less scientifically informed. So if you think that the "oh you don't want to understand" card is BS, that's fair enough. Prove it by engaging it in a serious and sincere way.

I understand of course that it would be unreasonable for you to believe that something is real based on what I say, if you haven't experienced it yourself, given that so many other people just make stuff up. But you don't have to make a judgment like that, you can just accept that another person has said something about an experience which you can at present neither confirm or deny, and leave it at that. Of course that's not the same as blowing off that data point as if it doesn't exist.

There's another angle to this also, which I alluded to in my previous post. As an example to illustrate, on another thread recently a couple of people were talking about doing neurofeedback on themselves. I suggested they might want to be cautious, since I have some knowledge in that field, and it can be dangerous if you aren't careful about what you're doing. They mocked me for suggesting that it was any more risky than reading or any other sensory input. OK, whatever - most likely they'll just lose interest and move on to something else, or if they don't they'll either learn quickly or hurt themselves. Its natural selection in action. But that kind of dismissive arrogance has a price, and I see a lot of it on this site. Its the same attitude that has lead a lot of young, smart people I've known to fry themselves with drugs so that they're impaired for the rest of their lives. Why do I want to try to convince people that 'astral matter' is real? What are they going to do with that knowledge if I convince them? Astral stuff can get a little bit dangerous if you're not conscientious about it, just like driving a car, eating unknown plants that you come across in the woods, or most any other activity. And the "why do you want to know?" question does significantly qualify the kinds of experiences you have.

" No 1 can tell you what the matrix is you have to see it for your self" What i do is listen and read stories about the astral planes then try to verify them through the lucid dream vehicle. Dont take anybodies word for it try to verify things through your own personal experience. namaste

Originally Posted by SergSG

I personally believe in the existence of the dream plane, but of course i don't have proof. Like someone above me said, definitive proof for something like this is next to impossible to get. I don't mean to stray of topic but, scientists believe that the universe started with a big bang. Is there any difinitive proof that the big bang actually happened? No... well not any proof i know of

Uh, what? Yes there is.
I assume we all know how lucid dreams work here and we can explain the OBE phenomenon starting from them.
If people claim there's something more, and populate whole subforums about that, they should expect the question: "ok, but why?"


@dreamcatcher81: "I heard stories about it and felt the same" sounds exactly like religious faith.
If you are new to the whole experience and read that you see a lot of unicorns while you AP, then you will see unicorns.
If someone tells you that it's dangerous, then you will feel bad entities and constant fear on your attempts.
This doesn't make them true, just easily reproducible.

@shadowofwind: Thank you for the answer . Premonitions like what, can you be more specific?
I happen to know a tiny bit of quantum mechanics, that's why I define myself (very) "open minded" about time and events.
Yet, the concept of "astral body" doesn't sound right to me. I've experienced it myself multiple times and it felt very different and unexplainable to others, but I also know well that both my waking life and dreams are ruled by my inner perception of things and our mind is in fact able to create pretty much any feeling we imagine. Again (this is proven) we tend to adjust to the experiences of others because that's what our human nature is about, think of when you see someone yawning and immediately yawn yourself for no reason... and I suspect shared dreaming comes from some kind of brain synchronization we haven't explained yet.

Does anybody reading it really care that much? This is not the first time I've gone down this path, and not the first time on this site. Sometimes the other person ridicules what I said, as if for some reason another person can't experience something that's different from what they have experienced.

Yes, that's a big deal and I really care about it.
This is a public forum, every beginner ends up here after they have their first LDs. Do we really need to fuck up with their incredible OBE experiences spreading fears about bad entities, which is exactly what you get in every other topic? Don't get me wrong, it's been a fun reading, but threads like http://www.dreamviews.com/f19/secret...-plane-102986/ sound more like science fiction. I personally know (both in real life and on the web) a fair amount of pragmatic dreamers who reject anything supernatural from their lucids and OBEs -- and thus never experienced anything out of ordinary except for a beautiful secret world. Here, no offense, I could write walls of text about gods and wormholes and someone would go "OMG I'VE JUST SEEN THAT TOO!!!11" in a matter of days if you see what I mean

dude.... one day when i was a kid, in the morning i started to tell my sister about a dream i had in the night. when i was at the half of the dream she stopped me and continued. every single word, detail, person was EXACTLY the same! we were like O__o.... also she had many many premonitions... for me that dream was the ultimate proof of shared dreaming

Read above about the possibility that our brains can somehow synchronize after we see, read, or think about the same topic.
Incidentally, this seems to happen more often between brothers and sisters, who share ~50% of the DNA and had the same education/experiences.
If there really was a dream/astral plane, "pro" LDreamers (and there's plenty around) would have created a special place to meet at by now.
Why isn't this happening, except for suggestible people who write huge walls of texts about the weirdest things?

Oh snap ! I sound septical but where are those who defend the dream plane theory ? Or are they just a bunch of lders who believe in an illusion ?

What is your intent here?? are you trying to convince people that their personal experiences out side of physicality is just an illusion. gd luck with that. Even those that believe lucid dreaming is just subconscious projections of the brain enjoy the lucid experience. Any one who ld's know that its about the enjoyment of the experience not its scientific validity. What are your experiences with lucid dreaming which is a phenomenon
i think we can all agree on. I would hope you have your own experiences with LD's to come to the conclusions you have.

Originally Posted by wana

Oh snap ! I sound septical but where are those who defend the dream plane theory ? Or are they just a bunch of lders who believe in an illusion ?

It is hard to prove that something is NOT true or NOT real. It should be assumed the dream plane is exactly what it seems, unless remarkable proof is presented to show it is otherwise. It is definitely not as real as the real world. The fact that there is no consistency or persistence of experience is the main proof that it is not "real" the way our waking world is. Our actions have no lasting consequences on the dream world, and the dream world has no lasting material influence on us. The only way we interact is mental. The only thing that carries over between dream experiences is our memory. Therefore, it is logical to assume that the dream world only exists in the mental realm, the realm of memories and experiences.

There's nothing mystic about induced lucid dreams, it's a partially unexplored state of mind which already has solid scientific evidence.
OBEs can be explained in the same way, different entrance points and mindsets just provide very different experiences and feelings.
There are hundreds of threads scattered around Beyond Dreaming with the most weird theories about gods, worms, entities willing to hurt you...
yet, every single author goes with the "hey this is true for me, I don't really need to prove it to you" argument until someone else agrees.

My intent? Well this is not about what you believe anymore, because as I've said, this subforum is influencing every new lucid dreamer on DV.
People should approach and enjoy the subject from their own perspective, not be lured by "oh yeah I think I got that too!" hallucinations.
I just don't get it, what does separate this astral plane from any religion in the world without evidence if you can't at least explain... why you believe in it?
95% of the userbase here think different planes are real just because someone told them they are

Originally Posted by Whiskee

Premonitions like what, can you be more specific?

I'll give an example which I have previously described elsewhere. All of my dreams are in close metaphor, cobbled together using images generated from waking memories. If I don't have any recent memories that fit adequately, the dream will use some combination of whatever looks and feels the most similar. The dreams are focused more on motives and emotions connected to events than on a visual representation of events, and some of the dreams don't even have a visual our audial component.

I'm in a long, thin, low building, near an animal somewhat between a bobcat and a polecat. There is a lot of water on the floor, and I am arguing about in what sense the cat creature is the cause of it. The scene shifts outside, to a small, boxlike building near the long thin one. This building is a couple of meters across, has an opening in the side, and contains a metallic contraption. A blob of something about the size of a shotput smacks the side of the building and bounces off, missing the opening. That happens a couple of times, and it occurs to me that it would make a cool sound smacking against a skull. I pick up the blob and toss it through the opening. The metal contraption starts vibrating as if rung like a bell, and flies apart. There is a deeper gong, as if heralding a disaster, and I hurry to the long thin building, for the purpose of rescuing children who are inside. Then that image ends, and is followed by a hymn of praise to the cat-like creature, "leo, leo, leo", which incorporate tones from the Ted Nugent song Stranglehold.

This dream was during a nap a couple of hours before a jet landed on the Hudson river following a bird strike. The point of the dream is how predatory aggression, as represented by the cat and my attitude about ringing skulls, is closely related to courage, such as was exhibited by the pilot. Its a positive vision of what can be done with that part of ourselves. I picked this example in part because its one that I recorded and shared with someone else prior to the corresponding event. Other disturbing examples include two lethal train wrecks, a child falling to his death, a murder, a missile strike on a bus. Other notable examples are highly personal and involve other people, but I'm willing to describe them in private messages. Other examples relate to living, relationship, and employment changes. Hundreds of smaller examples just relate to every day experiences of things, for example seeing a flotilla of balloons in the sky. Almost all of the dreams preceed the corresponding events by just a couple of hours, but a few of the most significant ones lead by up to 30 years. One or two I could blow of as coincidences or explain away in some other manner, but eventually that gets obviously ridiculous. Trying to explain them in terms of known physics principles also gets kind of silly. One reason is it doesn't work, quantum mechanics isn't close to adequate as an explanation. People try to use quantum mechanics to describe all sorts of marginally mystical things, like consciousness for example, but I think that the better a person understands quantum mechanics, the more obvious it is that those explanations don't make any sense. Furthermore it is ridiculously conceited to expect everything to be describable in terms of present models. All existing scientific models describe things which are rigorously determined by previous events, so that experiments can be performed on them in a lab, or predictions can be made which can be confirmed by observation. To the extent that any degree of uncertainty is allowed, that 'randomness' also has to follow a clearly defined distribution. Anything that can't be described in this way is, according to this way of thinking, not real, and therefore not worthy of further investigation. The dream premonitions are not that kind of thing, where I can describe an experiment that someone else can conduct which will guarantee the same results. So its unreasonable to expect theories which were developed to model those other kinds of things to be able to account for them.

I'll write more later, but need to work for a while now. I do think that ideas involving 'astral planes' or 'vibrations' are at best half truths, and I am interested in finding new and better ways of understanding these things, even though I think its hopeless to try to use existing scientific models for that.