I have to disagree witj Rani Oberoi. As far as I'm concerned your imagination and your dreams are maybe even more real then physical reality. Why do I think that? Because I believe that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, not the other way around.

Supposebly in the moment of dying you enter into a domain in which your physical experience, your physical life seems pretty much as a dream. You can remember it but vaguely and soon you are in touch with your true nature, as a being vast as the cosmos.

Dreams are real because their are the way of our Higher Self to communicate with our physical Mind. Their's a lot of symbolisim in your dreams becauser that's the way Higher Mind can communicate. Otherwise physical mind can not comprehend the realizations made by our Higher Self.

So are dreams real? I believe they are but everybody has to make their own distinctions. I have had lucid dreaming in the past and the feeling of exiliration and freedom when you know you can do anything you want without social pressure is undiscrebable. But is this real? After I woke up I always had the feeling of peace and harmony with me, so the emotion was real. Does anything else count?

In regard to your question I personally don't see the distinction significant. I feel we can split uor perception into to poralities: The known and the unknown. The known is everything you have a name for, everything that has been ever said, felt, experienced etc. Unknown is everything else. Right now as a species we are tapping into the unknown, but more important than give them labels I feel that what we experience is much more real and much more undisturbed this way. Just like I'm just not able to put into words the times when I was lucid dreaming, smoked salvia, had multiple orgasm or 4 hand massage. They were all experiences one of a kind and words just distort what I got out of them. But I'm also a book-worm which means I want to understand too, but for hundred hours of reading one hour of doing is that much more valuable :-)

Dreams are not real manifestations. You cannot create anything physically in your dreams. Everything is terms of manifestation happens when you are awake.

Dreams are just a manifestation of what you have been thinking during your awake state. However, once you are awake and think and talk about your dreams, these thoughts do affect your reality.

In answer to your question, you are not astral travelling in your dreams as dreams are not physical manifestations.

I actively astral-traveled in my sleep as a young child- it was very different than dreaming...they are two very different states. I have written before about this elsewhere on this site. I remember very clearly the morning the angels told me that I was no longer allowed to "leave" my body any more...It made me very sad, as the feeling was wonderful.

This is, or could be, a very philosophical question. The Buddhists ask, "Which is reality? Life, or the Dream? Or Life, and Death (The Void)? Which is real?"

But some people, like Wade, actively lucid dream...which I envy. He controls his dreams at will- I have had only a very few lucid dreams...I believe that this can be learned, but I also believe that these dreams are a special type of dream which (my own theory) combines the dream state with the astral plane in some new way. It would be very interesting to do an EEG of Wade while he is lucid dreaming- just to see if he is in an Alpha state, or Delta, or whatever...

The two planes are similar, and connected, but not the same at all. Dreaming is very different than being out-of-body on the astral plane.

Blessings,

Jai