Wind of the Soul » Dreams

Q & A: Out of Body Experiences & Dream Symbols

John Wolfe — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 02:36:02 +0000

Question: I have a question that I’d like to see featured on your blog about out of body experiences, even though I’ve never really been able to project. I was wondering what your thoughts are about why some people can do it while others can’t? And where do you think those that can project are going?
-Ryan M.

Answer: Those are some awesome questions. It’s interesting how astral projection can come so easily for some, while others may go their entire lives without ever experiencing it consciously. From my personal perspective, I feel that conscious, spontaneous OBEs were a huge launching platform for propelling me faster and farther down the path I’m currently on.

But I don’t view individuals that have experienced them as being “better” or more spiritually “evolved” than those that haven’t. I try not to get caught up in that sort of logic because it implies status and rank, along with the idea that certain people have arrived at some imaginary destination while others are still playing catch up.

I believe that each one of us experiences OBEs while we sleep, so it’s really a matter of who retains the memory (by becoming completely conscious during the experience) and who loses it during the sleep state. People like to take things like near death experiences and astral projection and turn them into something which is more spiritual than being focused on our physical bodies.

While I do believe NDEs and OBEs can have enormous impacts upon the recipients, sometimes changing the entire focus and course of their lives; I don’t feel they are above and beyond our experiences with the physical body. There’s not one human experience that can occur outside the realm of the spiritual. I stress this a lot, but I believe it’s true.

The out of body state exists as another location for focusing our consciousness. We focus our consciousness in a similar manner while existing on the physical plane. The only reason we choose to zero in on physical vehicles is because of the wide variety of experiences they can afford us, which may not be available at more subtle dimensional existences.

I believe we never really “go” anywhere while our energy is physically focused. The same is true when we transition into being non-physically focused as well, whether through out of body experiences or the death transition.

I believe the only form of actual out of body travel, we undergo, is deeper into ourselves. I’ve had astral encounters that have made it very clear to me that the astral plane resides inside my own awareness. As humans, we become accustomed to trying to mark out physical locations and pinpoint them geographically speaking. But OBEs help make it obvious that this entire physical environment, along with the astral plane, is literally all in our minds.

I like to compare life and the afterlife (and life after that and so on) to a virtual reality game. Our higher consciousness is the viewer or player of this VR game. It stays stationary in its consistent, always state of perpetual being while projecting its awareness into a multitude of virtual environments. These environments become backdrops for the characters that we identify with (as ourselves) to make their way through the settings and experiences that we call life. This is why nothing that occurs can happen outside of spirit, because it all stems from the same conscious spiritual origin.

Question: I love to research dreams and their meanings. A few nights ago I had a dream that was full of symbolism and when I woke up I was excited to look up its meaning in my reference books. It consisted of several elements that I’d rather not discuss, but the general consensus of my research pointed to a pretty negative interpretation of the symbols. Do you get into the symbolic meanings of dreams and can you recommend any good books on the subject?

Answer: The dream world fascinates me, but I’ve never invested a lot of time in researching any book’s interpretation of the people, objects and environments I encounter there. I don’t put a lot of stock in someone else’s viewpoints of what’s going on in my dreamscapes. I also don’t feel that anyone can accurately write a blanket statement saying that each dream symbol means exactly the same thing for everyone. While I do feel that the dream world could be considered an actual environment- not just fantasy- I understand that there are symbolic representations that we will encounter while in that realm.

I like to view books as beneficial guides (the dream meaning books are no exception) but not something that’s set in stone for interpreting our own unique individual life experience. It’s important to weigh out information as you read it. I’ve read many metaphysical and supernatural works that I would not recommend through my site because the information just didn’t make a connection with me.

I’ve mentioned before that I encourage my Wind of the Soul blog readers to only take away what truly resonates with them. It doesn’t hurt my feelings if people disagree with my viewpoints. In fact, I encourage them to do so if something I’m saying doesn’t feel valid. I’m sharing my ideas, beliefs, experiences and opinions about this subject matter from my own unique perspective, just as my readers are assimilating it and (hopefully) weighing it out from their own unique perspective.

If the dream guide interpretations primarily feel like they are on the money and they give you a sense of power over any fear that the dreams may be causing, then I think you should continue using them. However, if they feel like they are instilling a deeper sense of fear and insecurity about what they believe your subconscious may be trying to tell you, then I think you should let go of them for a while.

I believe we have our own built in powerhouse for interpreting dreams and we do it through our intuition. Feel for some clarity after each dream and see if you can recognize continuing patterns among the dream themes. I also think dream logs can be beneficial in helping to track trends and themes. I used to log my out of body experiences on a consist basis and it helped me to recognize certain trends. The main thing is to try and rely more upon your own senses, since your dreams are unique and stemming from within you and no one else.

And that does it for this second question and answer post of September. I’d like to thank everyone for taking the time to continue emailing me such great questions. If you have something you’d like to see addressed in the Wind of the Soul blog, then feel free to get in touch with me through my contact page. Your name will always be kept anonymous, unless you ask otherwise.

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Traversing the Dreamscape

John Wolfe — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 21:57:16 +0000

Our nightly slumber provides far more than just physical rest; it allows us to shift our attention away from our daily lives and enter into alternate landscapes and environments. The “rules” within these environments appear to be as strict or as lax as the dreamer chooses- limitations of the imagination serve as the only law of the land. While the stuff dreams are made of seems hazy and vague at best, it’s only our recall (after the fact) that presents us with the problems of remembering the bright, vivid details. While we are actually submersed in the dream, the experience appears as crystal clear as our waking lives.

For most, dreams seem to play out without much input; however lucid dreamers have full control and access over their nightly journeys. They can plan out, alter and mix up their dreams at will. While I’ve never been much of a lucid dreamer, I have had dreams whose vividness rivaled anything I’ve experienced in my physical world.

One dream, in particular, found me being pursued through the back streets of a city in Europe, where I was cornered and shot several times in the stomach. I woke, shaking and sweating with a knot in my stomach and a very real, lingering taste of blood in my mouth- pretty intense for something that’s supposedly a product of the brain. If my brain has the capability to fool me into tasting “dream blood” then imagine what it fools me into believing that I’m seeing, tasting, feeling and touching on a daily basis.

Of course, I believe dreams are far more than gobble-dee-gook our brains are regurgitating. But since dreams do require brain activity, I feel that the brain is a very integral part of the conduit between our spiritual selves and the physical body, whether we’re awake or asleep. It serves as the go-between for interpreting reality, which enables the link up of the big three: mind, body, and spirit.

So, if our consciousness is creating our reality and the brain is the piece that is interpreting it for our physical bodies, what’s to say this same process isn’t occurring when we sleep?

Maybe we are actually shifting into a different reality each time we have a dream. Our physical bodies lay sleeping in bed, while our consciousness is free to expand into other environments, all while our brains are running relay and storing the experiences for us to rationalize away as misty fantasies or wishful thinking the next morning. I believe the dream world illustrates how mysterious and enigmatic consciousness is, making it difficult to say where the ultimate perceiver is truly stationed, in any aspect of our lives.

Now, if we truly are experiencing other forms of reality when we sleep, then what happens to the awareness of our physical body while we’re resting?

In Exploring and Creating our Reality, I spoke about consciousness being defined as awareness. As long we are aware, then we are considered conscious, but how does this play out at nighttime, in the dreamscape? We are conscious during dreams, yet we are not aware of the physical self (and what’s occurring around it) that we usually identify with. What becomes of that identity?

Obviously we can say our body is sleeping on the bed, but what happens to our actual identity? What if the you (that you identify with as your identity) that’s reading this post, right now, ceases to exist when your conscious awareness shifts away during sleep?

I believe sleep is like mini-death. Each night, as we drift into it, our consciousness withdraws its focus from our physical bodies and resumes its other pursuits. Essentially, other realities take over once we make the shift into the dream world. We are then reborn into the awareness of this physical existence (which we most commonly associate with as our true selves) each morning, when we awaken.

So, if we are dreaming these other existences into being each night or reconnecting with them, then who’s to say there isn’t another perceiver outside of us, dreaming our daily waking lives into being, while it sleeps? In other words, when we think of ourselves as dreaming, our other “selves” are active and when they think of themselves as dreaming, we are the ones that are active in our daily lives.

Perhaps the dreamscape environments we encounter are actual locations, similar to environments on the astral plane. This would appear to be a function of continuous thought energy being directed toward the idea of the location’s existence. If enough individual aspects of consciousness focus on a specific location, then it becomes tangible, whether you’re in the dream world, on the astral plane, or even in the physical environment.

This brings us to a theory that I’ve encountered- that the dream world actually resides within the astral environment. I think this is plausible, since all dreams could be considered forms of unconscious out of body experiences.

I feel that dreams, out of body experiences, near death experiences and the actual death experience all share similar traits and characteristics. Each one is a journey further into consciousness, but to very different extents and “extremes.”

Of course the life experience itself is a journey of consciousness. I don’t want to sound like other spiritual or mystical experiences are special, while life is not. Each experience is unique and special, but to suggest that life is preferential to death or the dream state is better than waking life would be incorrect. There is not one state of being that consciousness ceases to benefit from.

As we continue to acknowledge that consciousness exists in everything and everything exists inside consciousness, it becomes easier to understand why every experience is truly spiritual, mystical and beneficial.

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