How many dreams do you dream during your life? Most dreams are forgotten upon waking, but if you could remember them all the total number would be in excess of 100,000. Imagine if each of your night-time dreams were a complete life, an incarnation lasting around 70 years, that of a human life. Perhaps this is the nature of rebirth.
Since the dawn of the species, if we had all lived around 100,000 to 200,000 lives and if these lives were on average 25 to 50 years in length, the timeline would take us back five million years to Australopithecus, our earliest ancestors.
The phenomenon of dreaming reflects the phenomenon of rebirth. This fractal style reflection of the macrocosmic in the microcosmic permeates the whole of reality. For example, on a superficial level, the solar system resembles an atom. If this is so, then understanding our relationship to our night-time dreams will help us understand our relationship to past lives and rebirth.
Each night time dream resembles an incarnation, as during the dream it is completely real to us and nothing other than the dream exists. We accept what happens to us during the dream, no matter how bizarre and they often end unexpectedly. The process of ‘dream death’ is what we call waking up, and most times we completely forget the dream before we even get out of bed. This does not mean that the dream has completely vanished, just it is not conscious. If we do dream-work- such as keeping a dream journal and trying to remember our dreams, we can often master considerable clarity of recall. This is analogous to past life recall work, on a conscious level we do not ‘remember anything’, but if we use shamanic techniques, we can recall our past lives.
There appears to be a hierarchy of dream recall, and there is a similar one for past life recall. The most difficult things to remember are specific facts, abstract thoughts and knowledge. You may not remember names, or what you were thinking, or the address of the house you were in. Next come imagery, scenes from our dreams, snippets at first, sounds, images, smells etc. Beyond that is the emotional reaction to the dream or past life, these are general feelings and leave general residues of feelings. The déjà vu phenomenon is an emotional reaction, a feeling of having been somewhere before and breaks through into consciousness ahead of imagery. Sometimes we wake up elated or deflated, but do not understand why, as emotional memories from our dreams carry into our waking consciousness. Finally there are the subconscious patterns, things we repeat in our daily life without any awareness of doing so. These include irrational fears and reactions to certain stimuli, usually we have no idea why we behave in a particular way, but it may be from our dreams or past lives.
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| Reincarnation |
The memory residue from our past lives informs our current lives. It provides what we think of as our essence, the innate ‘me-ness’, beyond our current physical reality. As we can see from dream recall, this is going to consist mainly of behaviour patterns, we call them innate traits. There will be to a lesser degree a general emotional background, collected from all our past lives, we may be optimistic, pessimistic, depressive, rational, etc. To a greatly diminishing degree will be imagery, what we call past life memories, which we will only glimpse unless we deliberately work to remember them. Finally, abstract knowledge is lost to all but the most capable shaman, names, dates, places, knowledge about particular subjects, the ability to perform learned motor skill tasks like driving or playing an instrument. As a parting though, perhaps those shaman who undertake dream-work and manage to achieve lucidity in the dreaming state, can also achieve lucidity in the incarnated state and perform seemingly magical and supernatural feats?
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