Since time immemorial people have been intrigued by their dreams. The Egyptian civilization had dream interpreters who were called ‘Masters of the Secret Things’ and even had temples with dream beds for dream incubation to occur. Augustus, the successor of Julius Cesar, believed so strongly in the prophetic nature of dreams that he created a law requiring every citizen who had a dream about the empire, to talk about it, in the market, in their town. In ancient Rome, the dreams were subject to debate in the senate and were used as guides to govern the state. The Greeks shared a belief that the god of dreams, Morpheus sent warning and prophesies through dreams. Native Americans would hang a dream catcher near the bed to ‘catch’ bad dreams and let the good dreams slip through!
How did that happen? What are dreams? Where do they come from? Do they have any bearing to reality…let’s find out!
Modern psychologists talk of three states of mind – conscious, unconscious and subconscious. Our ancients knew of four… jagrat (conscious), swapna (subconscious), sushupti (unconscious) and turaiya (superconscious). What we call as dreams are to do with the subconscious at the level of normal beings, and also with the superconscious… forthe practitioners and patrons of science of energy…
An ordinary person, visits many a places, meets lots of people, watches movies and shows, reads, hears and also thinks of countless things during the day. All this information gets imprinted on his subconscious mind. When at night, the conscious mind is put to rest, the subconscious starts playing out the recorded events and things from the day and even from forgotten parts of the memory, which we call as a dream. Usually, these dreams work as a mechanism to play out our desires and longings, things which we suppress or which weigh on our minds, our fears and anxieties…often juxtaposed in a strange sequence or animated manner.
For a yogi, dreams act as a platform to communicate with dimensions and energies beyond the Bhuloka. This is to do, with the activation of higher centres of the brain, wherein a being is able to attain the superconscious state of mind, that is, his consciousness expands and travels across galaxies and lokas and is not limited to what happens in the immediate surroundings. Patanjali refers to this state of mind when he says ‘swapnanidragyanalambanamva’, that is, for a yogi, sleep and dreams are also a source of gyan. Through dreams, beings from different dimensions communicate with them, often certain secrets or past or future happenings are revealed and at times, warnings and messages are also delivered…
This is not a hearsay or a myth…but the finest understanding of human mind and psychology, from which the modern scientists are still learning and upgrading their research. I have personally witnessed some amazing dream instances after having started the practice of Sanatan Kriya at Dhyan Ashram. A fellow practitioner, for example, reported having seen his engineering final exam question paper in his dream, the night before the exam. Yogiji teaches how to control the mind and during sleep, how to focus on specific energies and communicate with them…through dreams.
