Dream Yoga
Meditationtime Forum Post
Date: Posted 6 years before Sep 22, 2018
MiBeloved 6 years ago
Email correspondence:
Had an interesting experience over the weekend. I thought I had lost my wallet and started to cancel my credit cards, etc. While sleeping, I dreamt that I was looking for it in the closet where I keep the laundry sack. Anyway, I looked in the laundry sack when I got up but did not find it. But my mind kept telling me that the dream was trying to tell me something, so I pulled the entire laundry sack out of the closet and there was the wallet under the laundry sack! I don’t usually keep my handbag in the closet, but threw it in there to get it away from my mischievous grandson.
MiBeloved’s Response
Dream Yoga is a Tibetan term. It is used in an introspective study which is a part of spiritual progression. By a carefully study of the shifts in consciousness from wakefulness to dream, dream to dream, dream to wakefulness and the slow motion of those shifts, a yogi can get much insight into the operations of consciousness.
The missing handbag and laundry sack incidence above seem too trivial and mundane to be not worth anything in terms of self realization but let us take a second look.
First of all if the dream was symbolic then what was the related symbolism? I usually tell people not to regard dreams as being symbolic but to see dreams as mere occurrences in the subtle world, real occurrences, even though some dreams are simply mental creations or constructions. Even when dreams are mere mental construction that does not mean that they have no significance.
How about the man who mentally constructed a scene where he murdered the neighbor whom he did not like. How about the fact that a week later the neighbor was found dead? Does that still mean that because the idea was just a mental image it had no significance? Let us be real and realize that even if something is imagined it can have real impact and maybe it should not be dismissed.
However how about the incidence where the neighbor had a dream that the man in question was in the process of breaking into his house to murder him. But he dismissed the dream as being merely some stupid imagination in his mind. Then it actually happened physically that the man did break in and caught him off guard and murdered him.
So I am asking all of you to take a second look at these mental things and not to dismiss them as mere illusion.
In the incidence with the lost credit cards, what happened was that this person lost contact with the memory chamber in which her action of hiding the wallet was logged. There is more than one memory chamber. Any of these, if they are out of reach of the person, would cause the person to forget as we say it. What we really mean by forget is loose access to that particular stored incidence.
The other day I could not find a file in my computer, so should I say that I forgot it? Of course not, I will simply say that I lost the file or that it was deleted by the computer or stored with as a strange file type in some hidden part of the registry of the computer.
In waking consciousness the person with the wallet could not access that memory but it was accessed during a dream. Based on that the person, perhaps because she is superstitious, took the dream seriously and went back to the closet to find the wallet. She searched but did not find it.
Still she felt compelled to keep searching in that place, eventually as fate would have it, not common sense, she pulled out the laundry sack and found it but interesting she not only found the wallet but also found the memory impression which showed her when she placed it there and for which reason.
So what is this? Well in a computer, say on the desktop, there might be a short cut icon which is not the actual file but which can lead to the file. So in this person’s regular memory there was such a short cut icon but it was triggered by the actual discovery of the wallet, which means that the memory was in the subconscious and she could not access it directly without the short cut reference.
This is all part of the study of kriya yoga while otherwise this has no value as a separate study and observation. How did the mind go about isolating that memory from this person, even though this person lives in the same psyche as the memory? How was this person so powerless to access that memory, even though its storage in her psyche was logical (digital)?
These are some of the challenges for student yogis.
MiBeloved 6 years ago
2nd email:
Interesting! However, the wallet lost was originally in the bag that was stored in the closet. I did not forget that the bag was stored in the closet, but when I put the bag in the closet, I failed to close the bag and thus causing the said wallet to fall out of the bag to a place where I would never really think of looking for it.
MiBeloved's Response:
Still what I explained is valid. Some part of your consciousness knew for sure that the wallet was in the closet but that part was inaccessible to your rational mind. Rational intelligence often fails in areas where emotional intelligence or instinct is versatile.
Again why did the rational self fail to close the bag or acted carelessly when the bag was placed in the closet. Some other part of the consciousness noted that carelessness and that part functioned later as the strong intuition to keep searching the closet.
No matter how you look at it, the important thing is to dissect consciousness and to make a note of the components of awareness. Are you doing this? The answer is that usually we are not concerned with this. Our birth attitude is that this should just work for our convenience but in yoga you are asked to abandon that attitude and to pay attention to the movements of and movements within consciousness.
Did you stop to think this through and make a decision to be more observant of shifts of consciousness? That is the issue. In another experience at another time, there will be different variables but the same components of consciousness will operate the shifts and then will you be in a position to sort this?
