Dreams are a truly fascinating topic to me.

There is a debate whether dreams are simply created by brain activity during sleep or if they have a deeper meaning. I believe both can be true. To some extent dreams probably help us filter the experiences of the day and get everything in order in our heads. As we grow spiritually though we also experience more and more meaningful dreams.

For example one of my spiritual teachers talks about meeting recently deceased friends in a dream and helping them. There are a lot of stories about people getting inspiration or guidance from higher forces in their dreams.

A while ago I was very actively practicing lucid dreaming (becoming conscious in your dreams). My experiences during that period led me to believe that dreams are not just "images" created by the brain. In a lucid dream you can touch, feel and sometimes even smell and taste things and they do not appear any less real then in waking reality, even though they are more easily influenced and changed by pure thought. My intuitive feeling therefore is that dreams happen on another plane of existence, which is very real, just not as solid as our everyday world.

Hello flowingwater ... thought, mind and consciousness go beyond the limits of our material earth and into the world of dreams where time and space are abolished.

Here is a story of how the first native american dreamcatcher was conceived;

Long ago in the days of the ancestors some of the children of the people were having strange frightening dreams. As the children talked to other children, the troubling dreams spread among them like a plague and the parents of the children were concerned, they wanted their children to be happy but they did not know what to do so they went to talk to the shaman.

The shaman listened patiently as the parents told him about their distress, then he told the parents that he could help, but he would need to spend some time in councel with the spirits before he would have a solution, he would have to enter into the dream world before he could find the answer.

Upon entering the dream world the shaman was approached by the four elements: air, earth, water and fire. Air had already heard of the parents concern and had carried the message on the wind to the other elements. All the spirits in the dream world loved the children and wanted to help return the children to their state of peaceful sleep. The elements and the shaman dreamed together for a long while and they finally came to understand that;

Air could carry the children's dreams

Earth could hold the dreams within her hoop

Water could wash and separate dreams, the wanted from the unwanted

Fire could use the morning sun to burn up the unwanted dreams that are caught in the web

Now all they needed was something to capture the dreams as they were carried by the air, but try as they might the shaman and the elements could not think of a way to catch the dreams.

Grandmother spider had been listening! she said "beautiful loving elements, i can help you as you help me every day", she continued "i can weave a special web that only wanted dreams can escape down to the dreamer", and so she did and the first dream catcher was made.

The shaman brought the dream catcher with him when he made his journey back from the dream world. All of the families of the people made dream catchers and they hung them above where the children slept, in a place that was seen by the sun. No longer were the children troubled by unwanted dreams. Instead they had happy dreams and peaceful sleep.

ref; http://www.motherbird.com/indexfndr.htm

Since the 1950's a very similar dream catcher has come into being, it was conceived by felix and william servranx and although their explications of how it works uses a different language it is nevertheless just as poetic. Here is a graphic representation

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it measures 18cm in diameter and has 32 points on the circumference, thus in perfect mathematical harmonic resonance with the original shaman web which has just 16 fixation points. It works on the principle of the radio telescope constantly listening to the smallest message from the cosmos and receives a series of information in the form of waves that accustom you to stay constantly listening to that which makes us humans.

After a while, trained to strengthen your sensitivity and your listening powers, you become more and more clairvoyant with all that entails in advantages. Little by little you will come to interpret quickly, you may feel, predict, imagine correctly a great variety of situations, from the most commonplace to the most important.

This tool presents itself as a graph, all the 32 points symmetrically disposed on the periphery of a solar disk are joined to each other by straight lines to form a beautiful fine web that serves to capture cosmic waves. The cosmic waves, or rather informations, are immediately conducted to the center of the webbed solar disk which then transmits them to the earth's magnetic field which is necessarily in contact with you.

When the information travels from the solar disk to the earth's magnetic field, it intermingles and is colored by your own individual energies. That's why it's important to be conscious of your state of being and make sure that your thoughts are clear and pure.

The graph enters into action as soon as you place your photo on the center of the disk and it's possible to improve the effects by placing under the photo a color filter, a beneficial number or simply a piece of paper on which you have written what you wish to achieve. If you have a pendulum you can easily, naturally and certainly more exactly, make your choice by using radiesthesia. Use of this disk should be limited to twice a week, each time 3 hours.

There is a second way of using it, instead of placing your photo on the graph, place an electret that the graph will fully charge in 3 hours. An electret is a 5.5cm square aluminium envelop containing a sheet of 18 carat gold and a mixture of waxes, heated and cooled very slowly in a high voltage, polarized, electric field. It condenses and stores subtle energy, dream energy if you prefer and can be charged by various means; visualisation, laying on of hands, radionic, or any other magnetic procedure.

As soon as you carry the electret around with you, it acts on your aura and will continually diffuse whatever it has been charged with during three days. This method much gentler than the first method has the advantage of being a constant reminder to remain in a state of awareness. Recharge the electret every 78 hours.

Here is the reference for the graph and electret;

http://www.servranx.com/Recherche.aspx?searchtext=graphiques&searchMode=AnyWord

The electret requires specialist knowledge and equipment to make, however i enjoy drawing the graphs myself, this gives the advantage of not only automatically embedding your own energy within it whilst you trace the lines, but also the action of drawing it gives deeper understanding of how it works, remember the saying " what i hear i forget, what i see i remember, what i do i understand"

have fun :)

I sure agree with John. And in keeping a log, what may seem non-nonsensical at the time, may later make perfect sense to you weeks later, or even warn you of something. I started a log a few years ago and was very surprised. Besides, it's fun!

I have had dreams of word for word conversations with people that I didn't know at the time of dreaming, but then I met them and I had the most odd sensations when I heard them say something that I had dreamed and my reply, all word for word. This happened in my teens and at later periods in my life too and the people were usually significant in my life for a while.

I also had one very vivid dream as a child that kept recurring for some years that I didn't understand fully. I was flying down a tunnel and there was a 30 mph speed limit, and I thought, "But that can't apply to me, that's for other people in cars and I'm flying". Strangely I remembered it the other day, after thinking about limiting beliefs, and it suddenly made a lot of sense in relation to handing over our power to other peoples' ideas and beliefs as to how we create our lives and what we are expected to do to conform to societies' definition of what 'normal' people do. I got one of those 'aha' moments that, even way back then, something was trying to explain something to me. At some level I took it on board then as I have never felt like I fitted in with people's ideas about how to live my life and I have gone my own way. I have done many things back in my original home country in the UK including being a published live music photographer, a qualified garden designer, an artist, an antique dealer, and now an art gallery owner in the USA. As one woman who has been in the same job all her life said to me once, "What, you just decide you're going to do something and then you go and do it?" It was incomprehensible to me that I shouldn't, just as it was incomprehensible to her that I should!

I think our dreams guide us, as well as act as filters.

I found this excerpt from the teachings of Abraham through Ester & Jerry Hicks to be very informative... Abraham Speaks To Us About Dreams

the prophetic dream i think is guidance.the dreams with beloved dead is contact. there are dreams that are metaphysic expirience

I seriously believe dreams are a teaching tool, it is a smaller scale teaching tool than death teaches us, but still I believe they are to progress us to greater awakening on many levels. We can learn from our fears and failures as well as our victories. As a matter of fact we learn more from our fears and failures because we are not trying to learn to be victorious, we are learning to have consideration, and compassion for those that suffer from defeat,failure or feel not worthy. In other words we enter a race not to win but to feel we lost and how to feel about that, to feel others maybe teasing us for losing calling us a loser, maybe to win and feel the jealousy of others against us. The point isn't winning or losing, the point is spiritual progression.

Instead of winning or losing think of it as experiencing.

So when you dream, no matter if it is a nightmare even! Write down, what can I learn from this that is a benifit to me. Write it in a journal of awakening.