I’ve been focusing a lot in meditation these last few days on asking for guidance in how I can best us my life and my time here.
Concurrently, over the last few days, I’ve been having what I call circular dreams; dreams that repeat and repeat to the point of being annoying. In this case, though, I had the feeling that there was something I was being offered in these dreams; some thing I was suppose to ‘get’. I mentioned this to Sharon yesterday.
Yesterday’s meditation was again partially focused on asking for guidance and being open to it. Last night, my dreams became a bit clearer.
Lucid dreaming is the act of controlling how your dream unfolds because you’ve realized, in the dream, that you can be an active participant rather than just a passive observer.
I think my circular dreams were offering me an opportunity to do this. They repeated enough times that I began to separate myself from them and become an active participant.
As is usual with many dreams, I’ve lost much of what these dreams were about, upon awaking, but they seem to have been about my trip to New Zealand and about moving between cultures.
The lucid part had to do with how I experienced one of the sequences. I was able to consciously choose to alter my reaction to the sequence. Later, as I was dreaming, I was able to create an entirely new portion of the dream by willing it. All of this, the long sequences and my alterations of them, repeated several times before I drifted into waking.
When I sensed that I was coming into the waking state, I tried to ‘fix’ what was happening in my memory so that I would be able to recall it and describe it later. I was, as you can tell, only partially successful at this.
So, was there a connection between the focus of my meditations and the fact that I had this experience? Impossible to know, but I believe so even though I can’t say what the connection/purpose was.
One final comment which is pretty remote from the main point of this post and it has to do with why we forget dreams.
I think we are capable of thinking/experiencing thoughts in dreams which have no correspondence here in physical reality. As an example, to make this idea clearer, imagine that our physical world exists in black and white and always has and yet can we experience a world of color when we close our eyes and dream. While we’re in the dream, the colors are real but when we open our eyes, they vanish, even from our memories, because they have no counterparts here.
Like everyone else, I’ve often awoke from intense dreaming only to forget everything. And, in addition, I’ve often sat in meditation and drifted into a long line of musing thought only to realize, after I’ve been following this train of thought for some time, that my intention for the meditation was to exist in wordless awareness and that I’ve forgotten what I was doing. Once I ‘remember’ myself and snap out of the chain of thought, it usually vanishes completely. So, here I’ve been sitting up, conscious, aware and following some chain of thought through my mind and a second later, I can remember nothing of what I was thinking even though I was completely lost in the experience of it the moment before.