Thread: A lifelong personal study of dreams

Hello dreamers! I just stumbled onto this forum.

Through most of my 84 years, I have enjoyed and tried to understand my dreams. I have had hundreds of lucid dreams, and now when I rest and my mind tires of logical thinking, dreams interrupt my thinking or fantasies, and I can quietly watch the dream material unfold. If thoughts come, the dreams are interrupted.

Dreaming is still a mystery to my thinking mind. Here is an excerpt from a book I am writing about the mysterious experiences of my life, including lucid dreaming and paranormal events. I see a pattern in my experiences that prepared my mind for a profound awakening in 1978.

Dreams are a big mystery to me. None of the explanations I found in my reading, or in workshops, fit most of my dreams. The settings are always new to me, and not from my memories. It seems to me that it would be easier and more efficient for the “dream maker” to use my memory files, but that never happens. I often dream of being at work, but the studios, furniture, and buildings are never what I have known in waking life. I also dream of being in a house or car of mine, but they are always different from what I have known in waking life. Perhaps imagination is using imagery from other people's lives while my visual memories are not available. Dreams have always puzzled me. Dream experts said we dream five or six dreams each night. Once I set my mind to wake after each dream so I could record it, and found I was having ten to twelve dreams each night. I had to stop recording after a few, so I could get better sleep. During my reading of Freud, I had some definitely Freudian dreams, and while studying Jung, my dreams contained some of his archetypes. I tried to analyze my dreams, but was never sure that they really had much information of value. Since the metanoia, my dreams have been mostly fun and games types, and occasionally are dreams of designing cars and other products. Lately, I have had book-writing dreams, and while lying awake afterwards, much material for my book would come into my mind.

I frequently had lucid dreams, where I awoke in the dream, and studied the dream contents. I found that I could levitate above the ground, and in succeeding dreams, learned to go higher by exerting my will. In one dream, I flew to the top of a tree, and ran my hands through the leaves. I heard them rustle as they looked and felt just like leaves in waking life. One memorable time I was dreaming of being in a school classroom with black boards and windows on one side where I could see blue sky and a landscape glowing in the sun. I awoke and saw the schoolroom with sharp clarity. It was not a room I had seen before, in my waking life. I marveled at how real it seemed. I was sitting at a wooden desk with an enlarged arm. I stood up, and turned the desk over, studying it. There was a brass screw partly exposed, and I raked my arm across it, scratching it deeply, and feeling the pain. I decided that there was no way I could tell this was not waking reality, yet somehow I knew it wasn't. Then I awoke again, back in my bed.
Another time I was dreaming about preparing to take a rocket trip into space with Ruth. I remembered that I had left a suitcase behind, and ran into a large mansion nearby. Then I awoke in the dream, and looked at a large room. It was elaborately decorated and had many fine pieces of furniture, paintings, and carpets. It was not a scene I had ever seen before, and I wondered who or what had designed all the details in the room. I thought that if my mind had created this scene, it would take some time to imagine each detail. I decided to go quickly into the next room, and see if it would take time to design it. I jumped into the next room, and it was all there when I arrived, with great detail and different from the first room.
In another dream, I found myself awake in what looked to be a very large hall in a medieval castle. There were huge tapestries hanging high on the stone walls, and I decided to levitate up and examine one. I went up near the ceiling and looked closely at the fabric, and how it was made. I felt the wool, and could see that it was made by hand. Then down below, a youth entered the hall dressed in a medieval page's clothes. He walked the length of the hall without noticing me, and left by another door. That was all the action; no story, or plot, which is true of most of my dreams.


Man is two men; one is awake in darkness, the other is asleep in the light.
Khalil Gibran