{"id":5554,"date":"2013-11-23T11:15:11","date_gmt":"2013-11-23T16:15:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/dreamgates\/?p=5554"},"modified":"2013-11-23T12:24:41","modified_gmt":"2013-11-23T17:24:41","slug":"three-broad-bands-of-dreaming-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2013\/11\/three-broad-bands-of-dreaming-2.html","title":{"rendered":"Three broad bands of dreaming"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Longwood labyrinth (c) Robert Moss<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In our contemporary society, when analysts and dream “experts” take dreams seriously, they usually approach them from just one perspective, as sets of symbols to be decoded.<\/p>\n

Certainly our dream life is rich in symbols. Etymologically, a symbol is something that “brings things together” (what is “diabolical”, by contrast, is what divides and separates). Symbols help bring together our workaday mind and the workings of a deeper multidimensional reality. We need symbols to take us beyond the little we know, or think we know, to a richer and deeper understanding of everything.<\/div>\n
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\u00a0So we dream in symbols. But we also experience dreams that need to be taken literally rather than symbolically, because they give us a clear perception of events that are unfolding or will unfold in physical reality or in another order of reality that is no less “real”. They are experiences that take place within two further broad bands of dreaming that should not be confused with symbolic dreaming.<\/div>\n
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One of those broad bands involves the ESP that works naturally during dreaming, and is part of our human survival kit. In dreams, our intuitive radar sometimes functions better than it does amid the clutter of waking life; we scout across time and space and glimpse events at a distance. To borrow language from the East, these are “clear” dreams or “dreams of clarity” (although on waking, we may struggle to retain clear and complete information from them). In the Hawaiian language, they are called “straight-up” dreams. They don’t need to be translated according to some symbolic system. Their information about what is happening or will happen in the external world needs to be recognized and acted upon.<\/div>\n
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The third broad band of dreaming involves experiences of a separate reality. For active dreamers, this is the richest treasury of dreaming. We travel, consciously or not, to the realm that a great Sufi philosopher (Ibn ‘Arabi) called “the isthmus [barzakh<\/em>] of imagination”, which lies between the realm of the senses and the realm of the eternal. We have adventures in many other locales in the mutiverse, including parallel worlds, bardo zones, far-flung galaxies, and places where gods, demons and faeries are at home.<\/div>\n
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So, when you ponder a dream, ask what what band you were dreaming on: symbolic, literal or separate reality. Then remember that dreams may have many layers, so it’s not necessarily a case of either\/or. The dream may operate on all three levels. You dream a future event, for example, and then what happens in ordinary reality turns out to be richly symbolic. You have a dream in which you are moving among people in a parallel reality. They are clearly transpersonal figures, and yet they can also be viewed as aspects of yourself. There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in any approach that tries to box in the plenitude of experience in the multiverse.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  In our contemporary society, when analysts and dream “experts” take dreams seriously, they usually approach them from just one perspective, as sets of symbols to be decoded. Certainly our dream life is rich in symbols. Etymologically, a symbol is something that “brings things together” (what is “diabolical”, by contrast, is what divides and separates).…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":224,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,10,24,13,5,7,12,31],"tags":[1613,1324,1616,1615,1612,1614],"class_list":["post-5554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-active-dreaming","category-conscious-dreaming","category-dream-interpretation","category-dream-symbols","category-dreams","category-lucid-dreaming","category-meaning-of-dreams","category-multiverse","tag-dreams-of-clarity","tag-esp","tag-ibn-arabi","tag-isthmus-of-imagination","tag-parallel-realities","tag-straight-up-dreams"],"yoast_head":"\nThree broad bands of dreaming - Dream Gates<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2013\/11\/three-broad-bands-of-dreaming-2.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Three broad bands of dreaming - Dream Gates\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"  In our contemporary society, when analysts and dream “experts” take dreams seriously, they usually approach them from just one perspective, as sets of symbols to be decoded. Certainly our dream life is rich in symbols. 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He is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences in childhood. He leads popular seminars all over the world, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a best-selling novelist, journalist and independent scholar. His nine books on dreaming, shamanism and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, The Three \"\"Only\"\" Things, The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreamgates, Active Dreaming and Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole. His most recent book is The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse. Over the past 20 years, he has led seminars at the Esalen Institute, Kripalu, the Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, Bastyr University, John F. Kennedy University, Meriter Hospital, and many other centers and institutions. He has taught depth workshops in Active Dreaming in the UK, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Brazil and Austria and leads a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. He hosts the \"\"Way of the Dreamer\"\" radio show at www.healthylife.net. He has appeared on many TV and radio shows, ranging from Charlie Rose and the Today show to Coast to Coast and the Diane Rehm show on NPR. His articles on dreaming have been published in media ranging from Parade to Shaman's Drum.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.mossdreams.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/author\/rmoss"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/224"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5554"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5775,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5554\/revisions\/5775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}