Dreamnotes

Both day-dreams and night-dreams are not directly comparable to speech, which is produced consciously and deliberately. Dreams are autonomous of our conscious will. They arise from some level of the Unconscious, either the 1) personal unconscious, 2) the Soulmind, or 3) the Coremind, Lovemind, or Spirit. The conscious mind experiences them like a tv show; but it does not create their content.

This "mind of its own" implies its autonomy, its freedom from conscious manipulation and control. It is very understandable that the ancients would see dreams as "separate entities," for they lived in an animistic environment in which the whole world was filled with "spirits" (devas), gods, etc. As per Thales, the world is full of "gods."

The ancients were onto something. For both modern psychologists and many varieties of mystics also believe that dreams are instructional and educational. In traditional and mystical (spiritual) psychology, dreams are thought to contain messages from-- usually about-- the Unconscious. So, they can be very valuable tools for intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and other forms of growth and development.

In parallel, dreams are considered spiritual, but not necessarily religious, experiences in spiritual psychology.

A dream is subjectively experienced as coming from inside the person's mind. Unlike the case with the analogous tv, we do not have to create an electronic mechanism, or turn a switch, to watch dreams. It is a part of that notorious "common sense" that dreams are "within." This is, by nature, how everyone experiences a dream.

The ancient Greeks saw dreams as having come from outside.

We can sense, with our sensory apparatus, the image of a dream forming within our minds. In fact, in some cases, we can even watch it form, moving from vague and nebulous image into clarified dream. Actually, in spiritual psychology, the tv-analogy represents only another part of your day-dream. When watching tv, you are dreaming up the images on that screen. So, it is an "artificial" reality within a larger artificial reality. But I suggest that dreams are qualitatively different from tv shows, which are clearly projected into the "outer" world.

You might not feel as if you are "losing" anything when awakened from a dream. But others might respond differently. Many times, I have felt as if I had truly "lost" something when I have awakened from a dream. In the course of my spiritual development, I have had to move from active dreaming into the state of "dreamless sleep," recognized by the Upanishads as a profound unconscious state of "Union with Brahman." did I feel that I had lost something? You bet I did, and only later did I come to understand this dream-loss as an aspect of mind-evolution.

Dreams are undeniably "modes" of Mind, for Mind must change Its configuration (structure) to accommodate their existence. And dreams, imho, are also "modes" of real Mindexpression. A thing can be both a part of you, and belong to you. This is, I believe, the case with dreams, with this difference: A dream is not necessarily the sole creation of any particular human dreamer. A dream about your home, office, or events/relationships of your life do aproach the definition of a "personal possession." So, some dreams are probably ninety-plus percent "personal possessions," and maybe others, one hundred percent. But those that float up from the deeper collective might be only from zero to twenty percent personal; they do not "belong" to "your self" at all.

In your pre-egoic self, in the womb, before you even had a sense of self, you arguably did not, could not, "own" anything. Your body was a "gift" of the cosmos; but even this implies a giver and a receiver. So, the physical body is a "personal" possession, with all its parts. It is also a part of mind. there is a famous saying in metaphysics, "The mind does not exist in the body, but the body in the mind."

It is not certain that extremely fine shades of meaning-- such as the difference between "yellow" and "yellow with a tint of orange"-- are relevant to the construction of mental and consensual reality. If you both were looking at a yellow truck, for example, and one of you saw it as a tree, that would indicate a much more powerful influence from the personal unconscious. As noted, the world is so filled with crosscommunications that no one lives in her personal reality. That is, in fact, what the entire idea of "collectivity" in psychological perception/sensation/interpretation is all about. We create consensus about the world. This is conscious, and occurs through word-structures and education. But, in time, it "sinks down" into the Unconscious until it reaches the collective level. This is the eros, interatomic force, or whatever you want to call it, that holds the cosmos together within an inviolable matrix of predictable laws.

A cabinet, created within consensual reality, is not precisely analogous to a dream. Besides, at a deeper level, cabinet and cabinet-maker are one and the same "thing": Both are the products of the One, the Mind. In the sense of the day-dream, the cabinet is indeed a "part" of the cabinet-maker.

Ultimately, everything in our everyday, ordinary world is dreamed into being by the higher Mind (soul) or the highest Mind (Spirit). But when either of these Mindlevels acts through a human being or other creature, it is permissable-- indeed, advisable-- to use the lower-case "m." The upper-case "M" is reserved for either the Soulmind or the Spiritmind.

Everything in your personally projected (created) reality is an aspect and part of your mind, and of Mind Itself. For reality is a vast concept; for convenience, we divide it into two parts: Experiential reality and theoretical reality. With a few exceptions, the six thousand million people on our planet are parts of "theoretical reality" for all, all of the time. For "experiential reality" is that which you can
prove, through sensory experience, to exist. Your "personal cosmos" contains everything that you see,hear, smell, taste, feel, and sense.
*******