In the last presentation, I gave a description of what was occurring during the process of dreaming and how this linked back to the rapid eye movements that are seen when dreaming is occurring. REM sleep is only one stage of the sleep cycle but an important one. This is the case for one major reason, we know it is occurring. Dreams themselves fall into four main categories and I have outlined these. Getting back to the point about remembering dreams, this is going to be the first topic I am going to cover in this presentation.
Remembering Dreams
It is interesting to note how we rank the experiences we have. Waking consciousness finds it easier to recall memories that were experienced, rather than witnessed or heard. In this statement, there is a profound reality. As a man, I can read about childbirth and I have witnessed it. I do however realise that to truly understand this event I have to experience it for myself. It is experience that confers wisdom. The other two methods of understanding just give me knowledge. It is a relief then to know that the act of experiencing something is the easiest method to really get to know and understand it.
Back to dreams and where they come from. Dreams are created by the meta-consciousness but they are viewed by the waking consciousness. So unless the impressions of the dream are very strong, they will be forgotten by the end of the next sleep cycle. What does it then take to remember a dream? We must know the pathway leading to where that dream is stored. Science would consider finding the pathway as a process of activating certain neural networks. We know, however, that the neural pathways found in the brain are just a mechanism to deliver the subjective experiences we are having in our subtle bodies. For us to be conscious of our dreams, they have to be brought into external focus. It is common to wake at the end of the REM sleep cycle. However, our body is relaxed and we usually just fall asleep again. We can circumvent the loss of a dream memory if we set the intention to remember our dreams. In such a case, it becomes possible to wake from the dream and remember it.
Time Distortion
It is feasible to have a dream which seems to last for days or even years yet, in reality, only minutes have passed. As I have already mentioned, REM sleep tends to last from 10 to 40 minutes in a cycle. So why this discrepancy? The reason is that we can not objectively measure time in our subjective dream world. Why do I call this world subjective, if during sleep many may be objectively conscious on the Emotional plane? The answer to this question lies in the fact that our dream when recalled in our waking conscious, is no longer an externally witnessed event, but just a subjective assembly of ideas, registered in our brains.
Let’s take an example. You can have a dream about someone being shot. This dream may be triggered by the loud closing of a door while you were asleep. Your meta-consciousness is aware of the door banging a fraction of a second before the waking consciousness is itself. In that fraction of a second difference, it is able to make up a whole dream to make sense of that loud noise.
The rapid return of our emotional and mental envelopes snapping around our physical-etheric body can result in our physical body jumping or jolting. Again, our meta-consciousness inventively makes up a dream relating to us falling to correspond to the timing of the return of our subtle bodies. This dream is concocted in the fraction of the second that separates the Consciousness Thread being connected and our subtle bodies returning.
Time Distortion
It is feasible to have a dream which seems to last for days or even years yet, in reality, only minutes have passed. As I have already mentioned, REM sleep tends to last from 10 to 40 minutes in a cycle. So why this discrepancy? The reason is that we can not objectively measure time in our subjective dream world. Why do I call this world subjective, if during sleep many may be objectively conscious on the Emotional plane? The answer to this question lies in the fact that our dream when recalled in our waking conscious, is no longer an externally witnessed event, but just a subjective assembly of ideas, registered in our brains.
Let’s take an example. You can have a dream about someone being shot. This dream may be triggered by the loud closing of a door while you were asleep. Your meta-consciousness is aware of the door banging a fraction of a second before the waking consciousness is itself. In that fraction of a second difference, it is able to make up a whole dream to make sense of that loud noise.
The rapid return of our emotional and mental envelopes snapping around our physical-etheric body can result in our physical body jumping or jolting. Again, our meta-consciousness inventively makes up a dream relating to us falling to correspond to the timing of the return of our subtle bodies. This dream is concocted in the fraction of the second that separates the Consciousness Thread being connected and our subtle bodies returning.
Sleep Paralysis
Our bodies are beings in their own right. I have mentioned this on many occasions. This body is controlled by the active focus of our monad in our physical-etheric brain. It is supported by the sense-making functions of our emotional and mental bodies. But what happens when all three of these units are absent? The body has to keep functioning or there would be nothing to come back to. Yet we know during REM sleep, the monad has taken up residence but not returned with its two higher subtle bodies. It is these two bodies that help the monad make sense of any environment it is focused on. The net result of this inability to make sense of images floating around in our brains is that we come up with some very weird dreams. If we then started to act out our dreams using our physical-etheric body, we could find ourselves in a lot of trouble.
The solution to this conundrum is to paralyses the body while we dream. Conventional science says this is a safety mechanism. As I have said, the monad relinquishes control of its physical-etheric body during deep sleep because it is simply not present. So who is in charge? Well, we know that the physical body is composed of tertiary matter and this matter has a memory. So all our internal organs know what they are supposed to do and they get on with it. Actually, it is a bit more complicated and sophisticated than that. Our bodies are run and operated by the class of evolution on this planet that I have called the devas. It is this parallel stream of evolution that keeps our boat afloat while we are on shore leave.
OK, so if Elvis and his trousers have left the building, it makes sense that the performance stops. But, surely it would start again when ‘Elvis’ returns? Unfortunately not. Elvis can not go back on stage and start his performance if his trouser are not back as well. He can just sit in his dressing room as listen to music. Consequently, there is no show as the stage is paralysed. What is this analogy getting at? To reiterate; the physical-etheric body can wilfully control the organic body only when the monad is absent. However, the monad can only control the physical-etheric body when the intermediary functions of the emotional and mental bodies are occurring. Therefore, in dream sleep, there is a stalemate and the physical body becomes paralyses. Strange to think that the all-mighty monad is powerless because a sack full of noisy elemental essences are missing. This just goes to show how these two other envelopes are not only vital for our effective operation on the planet but are beings in their own right, just like the physical-etheric body.
It is worth repeating what the monad can actually control when it is back in residence by itself. It can control the eyes. They are the only part of the physical-etheric body that the monad can control when the other subtle bodies are absent. Eye movement is controlled by the basal brain, via the etheric body, which is present of course. Major muscle groups in our body are controlled by the motor area of the cortex. The cortex is the part of the brain that is associated with thinking and the thinking part of our bodies, the mental body, is absent. If you decide to move your arm, the instructions must travel through the mental body, the emotional body, and the etheric body. Finally, the message reaches the physical brain and nerves, in that order, to reach the arm muscle. What a palaver, but that is how it works folks. It does not take a genius to work out that if any one of these components in the chain is missing, the show is cancelled.
Here is an interesting snippet of information. The link between your eyes and the etheric body is evident when your eyes feel heavy when you are low on energy. Why do you run out of energy? Because you have run out of prana. How do you recharge your batteries? By sleeping. What happens when you sleep? You close your eyes. Why do you close your eyes? Because they are tired and you feel you need to rest them. Ok, glad I got that sorted.
Temporary Waking Paralysis
It is good to know that our body is paralysed when we are asleep. It is a tad more alarming to wake up and also find your body paralysed. What is going in here? Science does not understand how or why. It also can not explain the hallucinations that often accompany this event of waking paralysis. So let’s look at this scenario from the standpoint of what we have already discussed. When we sleep, our monad, plus our emotional and mental bodies, leave our physical-etheric body. When we dream, our monad returns but remains internally focused. When we awake, our monad’s focus is external again. However what happens if we wake up and externally focus our attention but our emotional and mental bodies have not returned? As I have already mentioned, there is a defined chain of command that needs to be followed. It starts from our monad through all our lower envelopes into the organic brain. Finally, a signal can be sent to our muscles to do something. Miss one piece of that chain and your body remains paralysed. So clearly, if you wake up and you are paralysed, you now know why, but what could cause such a delay?
Let’s start by stating the most obvious. There was simply a delay between the monad awaking, which it can do as it controls the eyes and your absent subtle bodies returning. This state is temporary and short but many people have experienced it. There are, however, some more fanciful explanation and these have been outlined by Lee Bladon in his excellent book, The Science of Spirituality. I will outline some here.
Notice the terms used by different cultures and how they all seem to have a similar theme.
- The witch riding your back (USA)
- Dead climbing on top (Mexico)
- Witch pressing (Germany)
- Demon pressing (Hungary)
- Dark Pressure (Turkey)
- Ghost bed press (China)
- Pressed by spirit (Korea)
- Ghost silencing you (Laos)
So what can we conclude from this list? There seem to be many different explanations of the causes of waking paralysis but they all share a malevolent theme:
- A spirit of a ghost lying on top of, or pressing down on, the person (Vietnam)
- A ghost or spirit sitting or lying on top of the sleeping person (China)
- An encounter with a Jinn, which is a non-physical humanoid being described in Islamic culture.
- A Rakshasa (black magician) hindering people working towards enlightenment (India)
- Mara or Mare, a female demon who causes nightmares (Scandinavia)
- A witch or hag ‘riding’ a man as he sleeps (Medieval England)
- A Mohini (female demon) ‘riding’ a sleeping man (India)
So in these explanations, the return of the emotional and mental bodies is delayed by a malicious entity. In many cases, it is a female entity. Why? She is attempting to bring sleeping men to orgasm so that she can collect subtle energies to sustain her. It seems a bit unfair here that men seem to be having all the fun or is it just that women are keeping quiet about their nocturnal activities?
Are these just hallucinations as science seems to conclude? It does not seem to be the case, as there does seem to be a perception of a non-physical entity. The mechanism by which these events are occurring results from the malevolent entity temporarily disrupting the Etheric Web of the person. This is another good reason to keep your etheric web in tip-top condition.
Recap
Well, that brings me to the end of my presentations on Sleep and Dreaming. I wish now to have a quick recap of the whole series. We started with the concept of consciousness. This is because sleep is clearly linked to this state or lack of it. What we have learnt is that the monad is always conscious when incarnated. It is just your waking consciousness that may not be aware of where your monad has been during the hours of sleep. Science defines, our conscious state by the activity of brain waves that can be measured. We start with Beta waves and end up with Delta waves. What is useful for us to appreciate is that these cycles per second, know as Hertz, are all linked to activity in the organic lump we consider to be our brain. This is just a reflection of how receptive this material processing unit is to inputs, either from outside or subjectively from inside. The most surprising thing about these states of brain activity is that when we are dreaming, our brains can be as active as when we are awake. We now know this be because ‘Elvis’ is back in the building and sitting in his dressing room reading magazines. However, we also know that there can be no performance from the ‘King’. Why? Because his backing ‘vocals’ the emotional and mental ‘sisters’, are relaxing on a completely different plane of matter.
This brings me to the topic of why we need to sleep at all. It turns out that we don’t just need food to survive, we need prana as well. We may absorb this during the day but we can only use it effectively at night. This is when ‘Elvis’ is not hogging the limelight and demanding all the spotlights be turned on him. When he vacates the building with his backing vocals, the stagehands, our friendly devas, get to work cleaning and repairing the performance stage. Elvis may choose to lounge about nearby or he may decide to travel far and wide. If he chooses the latter, he may bump into another singer or even get some coaching lessons on how to wiggle his hips. The point is that sleep is not necessarily an idle time.
Several times in the sleep cycle, the monad comes back into the body and goes through the process of filing away the day’s activities. This filing process happens in two places. The mental body has experienced events and can transfer, via resonance, the lessons learnt that day, to the Lower Causal Body. Other lessons of a lower order are transferred to our permanent atoms (48:1 & 49:1) and molecule (47:4). These lessons are not able to make it into our causal memory banks. They remain as our traits and habits.
The monad, during REM sleep, finds itself back in residence in the brain. At this time it is focused in the 49:1 permanent atom. This isn’t exactly a lofty position to view anything as this atom is the home of our impulses and base physical needs. It nevertheless sits here and dreams and these dreams can be bizarre at times. This is because the day’s activities flit past it but the translator of these events is not present. What ends up being remembered by the brain can therefore seem very disjointed. However, not all dreams are Associated in nature, as these dreams are. Some are Symbolic and others are Prophetic. These dreams have their origin in the Emotional and Mental planes and are often presented to the monad as part of its educational process.
Understanding dreams only become truly possible when the monad gains Enlightenment (i3). Great play is made by some when it comes to dream interpretations. I hope you realise now that unless these people glow in the dark, take what they say with a pinch of monosodium glutamate.
So what next? The next topic up for discussion is Reincarnation. That should get the juices flowing. In the meantime, if you are interested in the script for this presentation or in fact the scrip for all my presentations, links to my website can be found in the link below this video.