memories of some dreams

Some memories of dreams I chose to make the title of this posting a bit boring sounding, precisely because this will touch on themes which could make some people a little too excited. There are many things I choose not to talk about most of the time, because people seem to go nuts even when we ask them to make small stretches, like from ordinary quantum electrodynamics to cavity quantum electrodynamics or from one way to get to work to another. When people hear that lightning might knock out electric power for a few hours, they can take the possibility seriously; however, when the National Academy of Sciences says that solar flares might cause events big enough to cost us $1-2 trillion, people tend to tune out and assume it cannot be so. People do admit that a guy named Mohammed had some interesting and important ideas… yet even those who believe those dreams were real tend to get scared (like the folks Greeley reports on in his paper “Are we a nation of mystics?”), and try to get rid of all the scary stuff by declaring “Mohammed was the LAST PROPHET,” and trying to outlaw (with death penalty) anyone who tries to follow the true spiritual path in the modern age. (Of course, many so-called Fundamentalist Christians are equally bad, while many Moslems, like Sufis, are much more enlightened.) As I get older, I feel I have a duty now to put some of this on paper, albeit on an obscure site, even though I know the folks I deal with mostly could not handle it. In any case, years ago, I became very curious about these things. I had an experience in spring of 1967, quoting a speech of Mao BEFORE it was given, which made me open-minded and curious about “paranormal” things. In late 1972 I had another decisive experience, which I may right about someday, similar in some ways to what Greeley talked about. In a TOTALLY conscious state, starting from a variation of kundalini yoga (the first time I ever tried it)… I met someone who pulled me up (in a clear but cloudy sort of way, no “astral body” of the traditional sort) across The Charles River, and… well, it was what we call veridical. Well, OK, I’ll say a little more about that one. A suitemate, Michael Lambert (Harvard PhD candidate in anthropology) loaned me a cheap popular paperback, called “How to Help Yourself with ESP,” which I would not have opened a few years before… but I notice d it had specific exercises/experiments to try, so why not? The first one worked for me, with some tweaking. So then I tried the kundalini yoga one, which culminated in sending energy up to a point a bit above the skull and sending a thought message there like: “Good morning, inner self. I am coming here to connect with you, to communicate with my highest inner self.” I was a bit startled when immediate feedback came, in a mixture of thought, English and feeling (strong reassuring loving feeling), and the message was “Sorry, Paul, I am not your inner self. You may address me as Father. Now, we do not have so much time right now, so let us get right to work…” After that, I decided to read – but not to trust – anything I could find written by people who might have had similar experiences. Within a year or two, I decided to join AMORC for a time (see my article in the open online journal Rose-Croix, 2012), primarily for the exercises/experiments to help me see for myself and form my own theories. But I did read things by Fox, by Monroe, by Steiger, and the book What Dreams May Come, by Besant, etc., which addressed the concept of out of body travel. It seemed as if true mastery of those skills would give me an experience base which would be extremely valuable in sorting out such things. And in essence, it did. I had to stop really active experimentation in December 1978, when I started work with the US government….. I guess I need to go over just a little background, before getting to the dream of the day. I have had hundreds of experiences which were “dreams but not dreams,” of various kinds. What is a “dream”? We call it a “dream” when a person blocks almost all awareness of immediate body surroundings, and is immersed in a different stream of inputs, which has a different video component and so on… One thing I learned is that there is actually a kind of continuum between what’s really 100% traditional dream, and what’s 100% out of body stuff… I also learned that many dreams and OOBE are “mine,” and that many are “vicarious”: I enter INTO someone else, or in resonance with someone else, in a tricky relation which some call “assumption.” Some dreams and OOBE’s go to ordinary life; others go to what some folks call “the astral plane,” a real-seeming complex built up by our souls just as corals build up coral reefs, within the “noosphere.” And I have also had a fair number, maybe a dozen or two, which go to … a part of the “astral plane”?... which I think of this morning as “the land of the dead.’ Since my experience is much more limited there, since it’s not such a big interest for me, I would be more careful about what I say about it. “Assumption”dreams and OOBEs are much more common for me, and they happen even without any conscious intent; sometimes, when I describe a dream to my wife, I use the words “the protagonist” instead of “I,” to avoid confusion. Just last night, I had a “dream” which took me to the classic “entry hall to the land of the dead,” for just the second time in my life. I did once visit a dead friend, Geoffrey Keppel, in “the land of the dead,” and I had a number of visits to my father (but I am not sure how many, in part because I am not sure there is much difference between his neighborhood and the general astral plane… most likely there is none). The first such “dream” was many years ago. More precisely, it was just a few weeks before the Challenger disaster in 1986. Over Christmas/New Years vacation, I had time to do some of the more explicit preparation activities (which I had done more in 1972-1978) . It was pretty much classic OOBE, with no assumption aspect. At the very beginning, I was in a very modern-looking anteroom, which I saw as similar in flavor to some normal well-lit rooms in Star Trek… not weird high tech, but .. whatever. That aspect was strongly emphasized as a kind of echo of the main group of other people I saw in this room, wearing US space uniforms – the Challenger astronauts. I did NOT think “this is the entry to the land of the dead,” or anything like that. It was just a room, more like a hotel or hospital waiting room (though much cleaner), and the only weird thing was how long it took before I caught on. We stood around waiting, with a few other people… until a kind of guide showed up , who said he would now sort us into groups, show us where to go, and give us some choice of the course we might take next. One of the two or three choices was “How to contact your dear departed friends on the Other Side.” (Hearing that on the list was the first signal to me that something odd was going on, but even then I thought he meant how people on the normal earth side could contact the dead.) That sounded like something different and new, so I opted for that one and followed that group… until, as we walked in the hallway, a guide turned around and looked at me: “Hey, YOU don’t belong here! What are YOU doing here?” He pointed at me, and I suddenly felt translated somehow and off in some kind of nowhere. But.. being somewhat energetic and willful, I did NOT want to just go off to Oblivion, and I did not want to miss this class. So I willed myself right back… only instead of projecting a human body, this time, I projected a kind of cloud, which I used as a “body,” as a vehicle.. slightly odd acoustic interface, but it worked, and it was more robust and less vulnerable to odd bolts of energy. And I guess it was less visible to the other folks. I kept on with the group down the hall, and entered in the classroom. As the class got going, it did strike me as odd. First, the guy showed by example how to “densify” your hand, so that when you hit the wall, it does not just go through, but interacts enough to call a kind of creaking or banging of the walls. (I was later reminded of Joel Whitton’s description of the odd audio spectrum they measured during their “Philip” experiments. I had also played with similar things back in graduate school, before any OOBE things.) And then, when you get used to densifying and undensifying, try it on a woman who accepts it, who was sitting in the middle of the room, a kind of volunteer… How to interact with a vocal tract, to make sounds come out, and practice to make them coherent… (perhaps interacting with HER mind? He did not say…) I found that last part very surprising….. and my emotional reaction was probably the reason why I returned at that moment. The veridical part was the Challenger astronauts in the hall of the dead, a couple of weeks before… I had long learned about the usual small time slippages like that which tended to accompany my experiments. (I do generally seem to have a kind of drift towards the future… which raises interesting questions well beyond the scope even of this posting.) So today (9/30/2012) I had my second “entryway to the hall of the dead” dream… Last night, I did not do any mystical preparation stuff (aside from a bit of energy stuff I often still do often, when it seems right). I watched a movie, All the King’s Men, with my wife. (I feel weird just calling her “my wife,” but she sure wouldn’t want me to talk about HER stuff here.) So it seems like I had a kind of assumption dream, not veridical, about a guy who was close to a future person in power… But not Willie Stark. Rather, a woman in power. A calm appearing and normal attractive woman… not movie star type, but clear and attractive enough. I guess normal brown hair; physically, like a cross between my Aunt Loretta and the Popular wife of Prince… William..? Very calm looking, and clear eyes, not so intense or shiny but looking at them you see more light than even those two nice people I just mentioned… In the first scene… she has developed a new foreign policy position for a nation which felt not unlike the way Iran does to us now. The whole world was so Grateful to her that she had solved that thorny crisis, and they all loved her lucid plan, which the whole world was acting on. Yet, like the narrator in All The King’s Men, I really doubted the plan. I did not make a fuss because, like that narrator in the early stages, I felt a loyalty to her, with a definite love aspect; the dream never got physical, explicitly or mentally, but the feelings were strong enough that she might even have been the wife of the protagonist. The protagonist saw giant ambiguities in what stuck normal people as a clear plan. (Here I do not say “I saw;” it is possible that my own analysis would have supported her, or not. I did see the details of the plan, but I do not remember enough now to say, except to say I do not know how viable the plan was.) Such a calm clear reassuring person… to the public. But one does not get to such a position by being an average wimp in all of life. In the next scene, we moved on to a place not unlike… Monaco… (though the world has a number of similar places… I was also reminded of the Black Sea coast; these are MY associations)… Lots of twisty switchback roads, and cliffs overlooking the sea. She and I had previously had a great vacation in a similar kind of place, using a rental SUV. Of course, she drove. This time, she was driving our bus… much bigger.. but powerful, to where we were proud of the strong engine. Somehow, the protagonist was looking at the progress of the bus from a higher point, like looking down from a local hill… even though he was quite conscious that his body was with her and the group in the bus. (By the way, I once had a very clear veridical experience of assumption into someone else’s “astral body” as THEY wandered out of body into my house, looking for me but wondering why they could not find me…) He was a bit nervous as she gunned the bus up a vey steep slope… and that’s when he frecalled the great things they said about that engine. But he was worried about whether this big bus could handle curves as sharp as that rental SUV could. And then came a stark scene… he looks from the hill and sees the bus project forward over a cliff… seeming to hang in the air for a split second… and the fast “Oh, shit” kind of feeling (without those words), the realization that “Oh well, I am in that bus, and it is not realistic to imagine anyone surviving from that high..” and remembering all those thoughts about “we all have to go anyway” and that a quick death would be better than what most people are lucky enough to have… And then the final scene, where I am still into him, in the entry hall of “the land of the dead.” This time, he/I pretty much knew what was going on, since we knew what happened a moment before. It looked like a kind of typical hotel meeting room, moderately large but not large enough for a big plenary. Not like a waiting room, but not set up with chairs and tables. At the front of the room, there was something like a twenty inch tablet computer or touch monitor, set up to look forwards slightly tilting up to the room. As I approached the tablet to explore, a couple of attendants popped up from the side… and UNLIKE me and the others, they were not so stuck on the usual crisp human body form. They morphed into something like a projection of friendly cartoon characters, which I/he viewed as a bit alien looking, but not at all scary. They said: “Do whatever you want here, but DO NOT touch the button here on the lower right hand corner of the computer. That would be very bad…” So I drifted back into the humans milling around. (I did not see her here, but was not actively looking for her here.) They were all wondering: “How did I get here? Where are we anyway? None of us seem to know. What happened?” He/I smiled and said “I have a theory. I think I know. But first I have a question for you all. Did any of you have a scary experience, just before we came here.. an experience so scary it seemed like you might even die?” They thought and started nodding their heads.. especially one guy (taller than my more or less ‘average’ height, though we almost all think of ourselves as average). Sat first it seemed he was wearing a suit.. and then more like a bathing suit or less… and he said.. ‘Yes… it really was scary.. and bad…” and bruises and bloody tracks suddenly started to appear along his legs and arms… And then I boomed out: “Yes folks, that confirms it. I know where we are.” They looked up to me… (and I think the other guy started looking more normal).. I thought the term “bardo” but of course would not use it with them, And I thought a moment and said.. “Welcome, folks! Welcome to heaven! It is real, and we are real, and we are completely ourselves…” (Not so dense as I was at times in that other scene, when I was “not all there.”) And that was all. For now. ================= Added the next day (Oct 1): 1. I did not mean to suggest any similarities between the politics of that woman (in yesterday's dream) with that of Wllie Stark. I strongly suspect that watching that movie was a factor in stimulating this other one... but there was no sign at all of the Willie Stark kind of politics. 2. Many science fiction authors use science fiction as an excuse to present their personal experience, altered to make it palatable to an audience. For example, Connie Willis has a book on the Titanic and several on time travel which reek of sensitivity and authenticity (if such can be called "reeking" -- sorry about the unintended negative connotation), with some relation to the above.