The Dreaming Self

Imagine your waking self without the responsibility of looking after the physical body and all its needs. That’s your dreaming self. There’s no reason to fear or to ignore the dreaming self. It’s one source of learning and self-understanding, one way of connecting to the higher power, however we define it—God, Goddess, Allah, Brahma, Universal Love, the Life Force. I even knew a minister who called that power Skippy.

Dreaming may be considered not so much a psychic activity as a different framework for the mind. When we’re asleep, we suspend many of our mental blocks. Our inner critic sleeps, the one that pesters us with thoughts that we’ve been stupid or rude or incompetent. In dreams, our creative mind can come out to play.

The dreaming self acts as our gatekeeper to the wider universe. I believe that the knowledge and love of the Higher Power flows through the dreaming self to the waking self. The best attitude is not one of awe but of appreciation. Just as our physical body gets us around in the physical world, our dreaming self gets us around the imaginal realm.

The openness of the dreaming self allows many different types of experiences to happen besides precognition, problem solving, or personality analysis. Encounters with dead loved ones pepper the literature.

Hello from Heaven by Bill and Judy Guggenheim describes visits from the departed to grieving loved ones. The messages, often in dreams, contain words of comfort, such as “I’m okay, I’m in a beautiful place. Stop grieving and go on with your life. I love you.” These are sentiments we all need to hear from those we’ve lost.

Patricia Garfield has codified many encounters in The Dream Messenger. In her view, whether one can prove the actual visit from the other world or not, there’s no denying its impact. Dreamers remember details for a long time, and the experience often makes a profound difference in their beliefs. That definitely describes the dream I had about my grandmother and uncle.

On the other hand, many people experience frightening or sad dreams about their departed loved ones. Often the dead seem even sicker, suffer more, or die more horribly. It’s normal in the grieving process to initially have such dreams then get past them.

What can we do about nightmares or other troublesome dreams? Turn and face them, fearlessly and with humor. The mind creates nightmarish elements like hands strangling or tigers chasing. We can make the threatening images do whatever we want if we just stand up to them. That takes some work, but it’s certainly possible. Dream work becomes more effective if we develop lucidity, conscious awareness while maintaining the dream state.

Excerpted from Out of the Psychic Closet: The Quest to Trust My True Nature. The book is available in Kindle, e-book, and paperback at Amazon.com, bn.com, and the publisher, TwilightTimesBooks.com.

PURPOSEFUL PSYCHIC EXPERIENCES

"I visited your blogspot," wrote Hope King of Tempe."I understand well about psychic experiences. Dreaming about plane crashes and earthquakes prior to their happening nearly ten years ago was terribly frightening and led me to avoid the news at all costs for many years. Other than that horrible summer, I tend to find my psychic experiences comforting. When loved ones pass on I often get a visit within the next two weeks. I worried when my father did not come to me after his passing last May. Finally, I felt him, but his energy was filled with fear. I let him stay with me for maybe ten minutes, then surrounded his presence with white light, and called upon Jesus to take him to heaven. Several months later, I wondered what the outcome of all of that was. I shuddered to recall his fear and wondered if he was in a good place. Within two or three days, I came home one day to see my father - plain as day - sitting on my couch comfortably and with a smile on his face. It was only an instantaneous vision, but I know that he came to give me my answer. He is in a good place."

Hope is, in my opinion, a wise young woman who is coming to trust her psychic experiences to help support her life. One of her strengths is acknowledging her intention to receive a visit from a loved one who has passed on. If she believed such events would be impossible, she could have hampered her ability to see her father.

Sometimes we think that psychic experiences happen to us. Maybe we imagine they are visited on us by an unkind or even malevolent force. "The devil is behind it" style of thinking. Conversely sometimes people believe positive forces are behind psychic moments, often attributing them to angels or divine intervention.

For a long time I believed I had no control over psychic experiences. This is what happened to me: I spoke with the ghost of my dead friend then convinced myself it didn't happen. I had dreams that came true and decided not to continue to have those dreams. A guide or angel or some ineffable presence spoke into my mind, and I thought I was going crazy. Over the years, I've been my own worst enemy when it came to such matters by intentionally suppressing them. It has taken years of study and effort to come to trust these aspects of myself.

I believe intention is the most important element. By that I mean a conscious state of will. People can decide to have precognitive dreams or decide not to have any. They can decide to acknowledge their intuition or to ignore it. These experiences are far more under conscious control than many of us realize or admit. If this weren't so, how could people who consult psychics or mediums, including yours truly, ever trust the people we go to see? We pay them money to invoke their own psychic abilities. Why not invest in our own?

The websites listed below will help you wrap your mind around your own intention as a major player in psychic awareness. I realize that trusting science and scientists is an imperfect path to truth, but it's an important one, nevertheless.

An American born Swiss researcher, Dr. Arthur T. Funkhouser says intention can be employed to create precognitive dreams. If you'd like to participate in his research, you can do so at this URL: http://www.deja-experience-research.org/index.php/everydayde

Lynne McTaggart, a British author, sponsors a website and occasional scientific experiments on intention. http://theintentionexperiment.ning.com/

If you just want to play some games instead of doing research, try http://psiarcade.com/. The psi arcade is fun but it's sponsored by a serious research institution, The Institute of Noetic Sciences, http://ions.org/. Perhaps you read about them in Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol.

Whatever approach you take, know that it's all in your power. It's all in your intention!
Love and light,
Toby

Out of the Psychic Closet: The Quest to Trust My True Nature by Toby Fesler Heathcotte