When you sleep do you have another life?

[luke wilson]

This cant be answered definitively but nonetheless, thoughts are welcome.

With the whole thing that has been mentioned in some channeled material about living more than one life simultaneously, is there any possibility that somehow when you sleep, you could be engaging in another different life? Not here like om Planet Earth but like ethereal or something like that?

I'm asking because some dreams seem strange, not that I think its true but that if someone one day turned and said, oh yeah btw...., I wouldn't entirely disbelieve them simply because some dreams seem rather strange. I woke up this morning with the thought in my head. The dream just prior, I was resting out on a sofa, in a house with 2 other guys I'm the living room, and they were talking, completely independent of me. I remember looking at my watch and getting stressed, like I had to go... I looked at it repeatedly and the hour was approaching closer and closer and its that feeling when you know as soon as it hits, you have to go somewhere. The time hit and my alarm went off waking me up.

I got up and was thinking... Could the above be remotely possible?

 

[davey72]

I remember whaen i was very young wondering if this life we live is a dream and when we awaken we know all the answers. Seems i was closer than i ever imagined.

 

[kalibex]

Do you mean as in the perception that there may be an 'ongoing narrative' feeling to some dreams?

 

[luke wilson]

Do you mean as in the perception that there may be an 'ongoing narrative' feeling to some dreams?

Not really. Like a different life. As real as this life...

Doesn't make sense though, how would the mechanics even work!

 

[Yupo]

I don't know the answer. My gut tells me yes, it is possible.
I feel like I have a parallel life sometimes. Scenes of it open for me sometimes.
I came to a fork in my road about 10 years ago. It is like I am living down both paths, 2 different lives. Still me, still same characters, just playing different roles in each others' lives.
Maybe they are just daydreams. They feel surprising and real, full sensory.
Anyway, it is a happy experience whenever I see what might have been.

 

[trendsetter37]

Funny thing is I've actually thought about this before. Dreams sometimes have intense details and the people in them feel very familiar. More so than oh they were another random person.

Conversely, I have also had specific and detailed dreams, two that I can remeber, of events that took place in my waking life after the fact. But as you say I don't know how you could prove something like going to a parrallel life while you dream.

But, maybe if we consider that our minds are not our brains then it could be that it taps into other or parrallel lives when the focus Is not solely in our current body.

IIRC "Through the mist", or "an experiment with time" touches on these topics.

 

[ec1968]

The Everittian interpretation of quantum mechanics posits an infinite number of parallel universes. I believe that human consciousness is a quantum phenomenon too, and that when we sleep our consciousness 'leaks' into one or other of these parallel universes. So our dreams are actually images of what is happening in these other places.

Is that the type of thing you are thinking of Luke?

 

[luke wilson]

The Everittian interpretation of quantum mechanics posits an infinite number of parallel universes. I believe that human consciousness is a quantum phenomenon too, and that when we sleep our consciousness 'leaks' into one or other of these parallel universes. So our dreams are actually images of what is happening in these other places.

Is that the type of thing you are thinking of Luke?

I don't know lol

Uhmm, well I don't want to put to much emphasis on dreams as it's quite easy to get lost there but I do think they must have some non-negligible purpose. Why else would they plague us all our lives? And I've asked people what it is they dream and it seems different people have different types of dreams - from little to no dreams (or remembrance) all the way to other end. Some have nightmares for example, something I don't suffer from personally. The form they take seems not to be the same for different people. Why? What determines all this? I've just always been curious about them but have had no way of finding out more about them. Is science looking into this by any chance? Who are on the cutting edge of this research out there and what do they have to say?

Regarding other lives whilst you dream, well, it's my recent dream that made me think of that. I've had a spate of them that make no sense, in terms of symbolism or any sort of communication. Usually they would take some symbolic form, appear like some sort of inner working that is linked to me personally. But, for example, I don't know why I would look at my watch and worry about an approaching time, then my alarm goes off. It's almost like I knew in the dream. In the dream I kept saying, "Darn, I have to go to work soon". Got up thinking, is waking life work or is it that my alarm will go off indicating to me I have to go to work? Plus those 2 people in the room, mumbling away... I was looking at photos of one of them, of his travels.

The other night I had one which was a true first.... I saw faces, well and proper, like, can't be any more real... but they were not faces I recognized at all. I was having conversations and talking with these faces, like we weren't strangers. I swear, I was walking on the streets looking at people expecting to pick out one of these faces like maybe they'll pop up somewhere in real life. But, nope! Still, I don't get it. Usually faces you recognize would appear or your dream would create a face but attach an identity that you recognize to that face.

Then I've been having a spate where I've been in certain places and I would take a picture of the landscape or some building and I would look at the digital photo on the camera and it's no different to real life, like how you would expect. You'd hold the camera up to the scene and try and get the right shot.

It's all quite strange really. Got me thinking, beyond all the usual symbolic, processing of emotions, sorting out psychic hygiene, could there also be another thing going on. I know for sure channelled material has talked about this but who the hell knows!

One part of me is like, absolute waste of time but another is like, how can they be well, useless if they are always there!

 

[kalibex]

Well... I've had some dreams where I wake recalling my interpretations during said dream state, but upon waking and recording said dreams, I say to myself, "No, you misinterpreted that at the time... upon reflection I think it was actually this happening..." Almost as if my initial perceptions were the result of me doing the best I could at the time to understand, but that back in a more 'normal' state (so to speak), I see it a different way. One example: I had a dream that I interpreted as a 'James Bond Adventure Scenario' while in it...and upon waking, decided that I'd actually been attending a May Day celebration (and it was indeed May 2nd when I awoke and recorded the dream), but had been too 'confuzzled' while 'there' to realize it. Thus, I interpreted certain events one way while in the dream, then saw them differently (to the point of feeling sheepish) upon waking. An over-active imagination creating multiple interpretations, one while in it, another after waking? Maybe. But there have seemed to be some ongoing themes in dreams of this type (including the idea of being subtly 'looked after', as if not quite in 'compos mentis' while in the situations I find myself in, during such dreams.

Does make one wonder.

 

[striveforselflessness]

You kind of scared me with the notion that the dream I had last night might have physically occurred in another reality! It wasn't a frightful dream, only disappointing (upon waking) in terms of how I reacted emotionally to certain things people said.

I don't know if it's worth noting, but I might propose that we may (or may not) get fleeting glimpses, an emotion or a thought, from another life, but whenever it does happen we interpret it with the mind we have, in the ways we have become accustomed to thinking and feeling, that is relevant to the present life we live. This may or may not obfuscate the information we would be getting, or on the other hand it may accommodate the emotions to have practical use for us now. To get continuous input from other realities, and to know for sure that it is happening, might be rarer, and a good question.

It is funny when different authors appear to be saying things along the same line as those like Gurdjieff, but coming from a different direction. There is a quote I read from An Experiment with Time, p. 108:

[quote author=J.W. Dunne]
...we are driven to the interesting conception of a higher-order thinker who is learning to interpret what is presented to his notice...
This, admittedly, is a complete reversal of the old-time animist's conception of the 'higher' observer as an individual of superlative intelligence producing the best effect he can with the aid of clumsy material equipment. But it seems to me there is no getting away from the plain evidence afforded by the character of our dream thinking. Whatever capacities for eventually superior intelligence may be latent in the higher-order observer, they are capacities which await development. At the outset the brain is the teacher and the mind the pupil. Mind begins its struggle towards structure and individuality by moulding itself upon the brain.
...it now appears that, apart from its self-sustaining and self-developing activities, the brain serves as a machine for teaching the embryonic soul to think.[/quote]

I could easily be misinterpreting. I guess Dunne is not quite going in the direction of a two-way process of informing, but the bottom-up way is more often forgotten and his findings stress this way. It could be more a reference to how 'dumb' and emotionally overwrought we might seem in dreams sometimes - but another way of interpreting that could be that we present such emotions to our conscious minds to possibly integrate them or understand them.

 

[taratai]

I the only person that can really tell whether it's a glimpse from an alternate reality or not, is you. The key is to recognize patterns in your dreams. The problem is, even with understanding them, you might never get a definite answer...

But other than alternate realities, you might have simply seen a glimpse (or, what i think better describes it, an "echo" :P ) of future events. Whether that's the case here or not, you're unlikely to know until you find yourself in the situation that happened in the dream (you might even not recognize it immediately).

To add to confusion, sometimes such dreams might mix up with symbolic dreams, dreams about your problems, about your wishes, about stuff that is happening around you (or to you) at the time you're dreaming them, and even about things that happened already. So it wouldn't surprise me if a glimpse of an alternate reality would slip in there too. After all, consciousness doesn't know any barriers, and sometimes it might wander off into weird places. :P

 

[luke wilson]

I went digging around and came across the below

Basically, some psychologist called Joe Griffin developed a theory about why we dream called

"Expectation fulfilment theory of dreaming"

Joe Griffin discovered, from years of research on his own dreams and those of others, that dreams are metaphorical enactments of emotional arousals that were not expressed or acted out during the day. This is nature’s evolutionary solution to animals’ need to inhibit arousals, such as anger, urge to eat or urge to mate, whenever such instincts are inappropriate or dangerous to act on at the time; the arousals are safely deactivated later in dreams. In civilised societies, of course, people are commonly in circumstances where strong feelings are aroused but it is inappropriate to act on them. Arguments do not feature in dreams, as the emotion is expressed; private worries, fears, urges not given into (such as for a forbidden food or activity) do. Griffin has theorised that by enabling arousals to be safely discharged in dreams, once they have been activated, REM sleep serves to keep our instincts and drives intact. (If continually activated but not acted upon in any form, they would gradually become extinct.) The PGO spike activity prior to and during dreaming signals that there is material to be acted out and discharged. Once the instinct patterns have been deactivated, the data processing potential of the neocortex is released, ready to deal with the emotionally arousing contingencies of the following day. Far from dreams being the cesspit of the unconscious, as Freud proclaimed, Griffin says that they are the equivalent of the flushed toilet.

Metaphor is the language of the REM state. French scientist Michel Jouvet suggested that REM sleep is concerned with programming the central nervous system to carry out instinctive behaviours.[6][7] William Dement and colleagues discovered that the amount of REM sleep a foetus or newborn has depends on how mature an animal is at birth. Animals born relatively mature have little REM sleep as foetuses and after birth, while animals born immature have a considerable amount.[8] During REM sleep, foetuses and newborns are programmed with the instincts that they must seek to complete in the environment. As the sense organs start to receive inputs from the environment, the brain ‘pattern matches’ to the instinctive templates programmed in during REM sleep. According to the theory, just as programming instincts involves creating a pattern or template for which an analogue can be found in the environment (twig-like materials, a friendly human face, etc.), so it makes sense that deactivation also uses sensory analogues or metaphors, enabling the brain to draw on images which represent the unexpressed emotional arousals of the day.

Griffin has posited another, more important reason for why dreaming is in metaphor. Using an analogous experience as a means of completing an arousal enables the arousal associated with the instinctive urge to be discharged but, importantly, the instinctive urge itself in the context it was experienced can be remembered. This prevents memory stores from becoming either corrupt or incomplete. It also explains why it is important to forget dreams most of the time.

In his site, he goes through the most prevalent theories of dreaming which are:

- The activation synthesis theory of dreaming
- Wish fulfilment
- We dream to forget
- The memory consolidation theory of dreaming

Writing in Behavioural and Brain Sciences, in a special issue devoted to the most widely promoted dream theories, Professor Domhoff of the University of California, recognised as one of the leading researchers in this field, commented on the evidence presented, concluding, "If the methodologically most sound descriptive empirical findings [ie the findings that are most solidly established to explain dreaming] were to be used as a starting point for future dream theorising, the picture would look like this:

1. Dreaming is a cognitive achievement that develops throughout childhood

2. There is a forebrain network for dream generation that is most often triggered by brainstem activation [the PGO spikes]

3. Much of dream content is coherent, consistent over time and continuous with past or present emotional concerns."[11]

So any theory of dreaming would have to account for those three most solidly established findings.

In addition to the above, he also seems to be involved in some sort of movement called the "Human Givens"

Human givens theory proposes the following. Evolution has endowed all humans, regardless of race or culture, with a common set of innate physical and emotional needs along with a set of innate physical, emotional and psychological resources. Like all organisms, humans deploy their 'given' resources in order to meet their 'given' needs in the environment in the course of their daily lives. When all the innate needs are met in a balanced way people will flourish but when this does not happens distress and eventually illness results. The basic human givens proposition is, then, that all emotional distress and mental illness are caused by a failure to get innate needs, particularly emotional needs, met in balance. This may go hand in hand with problems relating to missing, misused or damaged innate resources. The focus of human givens therapy is, therefore, the discovery and rectification/removal of any impediments to these needs being met in an individual's life.

The human givens movement believes that human lives can be made happier, and our future (together with that of the other species with whom we share this planet) can be made more sustainable if societies, organisations, communities, professions, families and individuals are more aware of and sensitive to our innate needs, resources and tendencies.

The human givens approach grew out of a psychotherapeutic method - an integrative, bio-psycho-social model of therapy. Within the framework of needs and resources it uses some interventions from known effective therapeutic methods. The organising ideas[4] are new, along with some of the detailed theory (most notably on the function of dreaming), whilst other areas (such as how addictions are created and maintained[5] and the cycle of depression[6]) represents new formulations of existing scientific knowledge.

The human givens approach is not considered by its proponents to be just another model of psychotherapy but rather the beginnings of a unified science of human well-being with ramifications well beyond mental illness.

Whatever movement this is, they appear to be non-negligible. The topic on addiction on one of their websites caught my eye:

Addiction can be beaten by many people without necessarily becoming dependent on a recovery group and without having to consider yourself as an 'addict' for the rest of your life.

To get away from addictive behaviour it is necessary to understand two things: the way these reward mechanisms work, and the way life should be constructed in order to receive the natural rewards that make addictive activities less attractive.

A human givens therapist will work with people who have compulsive behaviours to help them get their real emotional needs met and acquire the strategies and understanding that will enable them to walk away from danger and embrace a whole life.

 

[luke wilson]

In addition to the above, I did some further checking about, to see if some of the claims being made about the science of dreaming were true and I have to say I learnt something new

_http://www.howsleepworks.com/dreams_how.html

During REM sleep, the limbic system of the brain, including the hippocampus and amygdala (which are involved in processing emotions and motivation, among other things) is very active, while some areas of the prefrontal cortex (which are involved in working memory and attention, but also logical reasoning and self-control) are notably inactive. This is consistent with some of the bizarre, illogical and disorganized imagery in dreams, as well as the absence of logic and self-criticism which often characterizes them. During dreams, then, the brain allows its most recently-evolved, more controlling side (the prefrontal cortex) to give way to a more primitive, less rational way of thinking (under the influence of the amygdala and the limbic system).

Although the primary visual cortex is almost completely inactive during REM sleep (as might be expected when there are no external visual signals coming in), the extrastriate visual areas of the cortex (which are involved with analyzing complex visual scenes) are highly active, which is consistent with the elaborate internal visual images in dreams.

Griffin mentioned some of the above

Hobson and McCarley's theory (activation synthesis theory) was that these PGO spikes were sending a random barrage of stimulation through the brain every so often, activating the whole cortex as a result; the higher brain had to try and make some sense of this random barrage, and dreams were the result. Dreams, therefore, were an epiphenomenon: they had no intrinsic meaning. They were just the brain's efforts to synthesise some sense from random signals.

Evidence has accumulated over the last 30 years to disprove this theory. The first piece of evidence that disproved it emerged once PET scanning of the brain was developed. According to Hobson and McCarley's original theory, a barrage of random stimulation coming up periodically from the brainstem was synthesised by the prefrontal cortex into dreams. But scans of the brain in the REM state showed that the cortex was very selectively activated. The emotional brain (the limbic system) and the visual brain were highly activated but the prefrontal cortex was excluded from this stimulation (the very part supposed to be doing the synthesising).[2] Indeed, Hobson himself, over the last few years, has been so drastically redrafting the theory that it is just a pale shadow of its original presentation.[3] Even he now agrees with the evidence that, instead of global forebrain activation being responsible for dream synthesis, it is the emotional brain that is responsible for dream plot formation.

 

[Yupo]

All this reminds me of something Philip K Dick said about him believing his alternate reality was actually real. It is interesting to me that his fiction works often describe a very consistent world; a highly surveilled police state/dystopia.
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[duyunne]

Alo Luke

I've had dreams where:
- I've known I was dreaming but couldn't manipulate the circumstances any better than I could with waking life.
- I knew I was dreaming and people or entities in the dream forced me awake against my will.
- I was someone else entirely, I still resembled myself, but I had a different life, or age, hair color, friends, job, family, etc (I'd also return there at random.)
- I was someone/something else entirely that I could some how feel was being grafted or projected onto me, a screen.
- Clear and concise communication with others (that I know) that we knew we were dreaming.
- I wasn't there/visible/tangible, only able to observe the events of the world.
- Witnessed events that eventually occurred in waking life. (Though not exactly as the dream had shown but the circumstances match.)
- I didn't know I'm dreaming and was enthralled by the circumstances in the dream.
-I remembered specifically forgetting the dream prior to waking and feeling deprived immediately as I woke. The only thing I can remember when this happens is that I did not want to remember it. That I wasn't supposed to. It's a frustrating experience to say the least.
- They would span weeks or months in one night.

It's always entirely random to me. I do not want to control the process either (lucid dream/astral project, if that's possible, I wouldn't know.) Half of the time I can be aware that I'm dreaming. When this happens, it usually ruins that world where it's as if I can't go back to it, that I'm not meant to be conscious of my waking life when I'm having this other experience. I think this may have to do with why I force myself to forget certain dreams. IT's hard to say.

Then I won't remember them after I wake up too. OR Sometimes they'll come to me later.

I Hope this helps with your research.