When you are sleeping, you are non-resistant and all those experiences are joyful.

However, the dream doesn't occur during those times. The dream occurs in the few moments before awakening when those experiences are filtered through your physical self. Even a dream that seems to last several hours still occurs in the few moments before waking up...time is an illusion of the physical plane only.

It is that interpretation (through the physical self) of those joyful experiences that you perceive as the dream, not the actuality of the non-resistant sleep experience itself.

Because your (physical) vibration stays where you last left it, the vibration you had as you fell asleep is the one through which the re-interpretation happens when you re-awaken.

To try to make this concrete and understandable, imagine going to a movie theater...

The "You" in the following example is just meant to be a general person, not specifically You :)

As you go into the theater, you might be miserable thinking about all the major problems and worries in your life.

But as you settle down in your comfortable seat in the darkness, the film starts to roll, and the giant colorful on-screen images in front of you dominate your attention, you may find that your mood quickly changes and you soon forget about your problems.

Now let's say that the movie that you are watching was created to feel joyful and uplifting to the audience (representative of your actual connection to Source).

During the actual watching of the movie, if it is well made, you might now genuinely begin feeling joyful and uplifted. The experiences that the movie takes you through might make you smile, laugh, and just generally leave you in an extremely good-feeling place.

You are truly in another (joyful) reality during a movie like that.

But now, as the movie ends and the lights come back up, you remember again that it was just a movie. You watch the credits start to roll, feel a slight tinge of disappointment that the experience is over, and get up out of your seat and leave the theater.

As you head back out into the "real world", you suddenly feel the "shock" of remembering all your major problems and worries again and it's not long before you are back to feeling miserable again.

You realize that the magic of the movie experience is now gone.

To an outsider looking at your behavior, you were miserable before entering the theater and, soon after emerging from the theater, you were miserable again. So their natural conclusion would probably be that the movie was a miserable one :)

But the truth is that it was simply your perceptual filter that caused (and causes) your misery, not the joyful uplifting movie itself.

No analogy is perfect and this one isn't either. There are movies that we can watch that can genuinely change our outlook on our lives and leave us (for a long time, at least) in an uplifted and joyful state.

But in the world of dreams, this cannot happen...your joyful, uplifting, non-resistant experiences cannot override your physical vibration. So the non-resistant experiences that happened during the sleep state are immediately forgotten on waking up again, and the "filter" of our physical self dominates.

For more information, see If dreams are downloaded to our "consciousness" the moment we awake, why do we wake up from bad dreams? and the links within those related answers.

Some of my most powerful and greatest enlightenments came from nightmares. It is because of these nightmares that I find strength to fight and overtake the nightmare! I end up the victor, I figured it out what to do. But here is the great thing I use that in life, knowing that I can win, that winning is an option. I can figure things out to win, to accomplish and know that I need not fear because I can beat what ever it may be.

I have awoken from nightmares where my solution was to face my fear and stare it down. Where my solution was to change the dream (change my thinking), these different times I have awoken and realized this works as well in life too!

I have done amazing things in these nightmares that boggle the mind simply because i needed to at the time. I did not stop to think this is impossible, I just said this will work and did it! In other words I had faith that what I did would work and it did!

So yes you can get great enlightenments from nightmares.

My nightmares have given me some of the best windows into my soul that I ever could experience. Some of them are people chasing me- that is anxiety. Some of them are convoluted deep-buried memories of my satanic abuse, and prove to me that I am not crazy. Some of them tell me of the future. (I began dreaming that I kept losing track of my Dad in a store six months before he died.)

Pay attention to your nightmares. They can be a valuable tool into your subconscious. After all, dreams are our brains way of dealing with the problems and events of our lives. We process when we dream.

Look into your soul, and see what you are trying to grasp- trying to handle, trying to process. It will tell you what moves you need to make in your daily life. God also tries to reach us through our dreams sometimes. This happened in the Bible. So it does not seem unusual to me at all that a nightmare might be God's way of telling you that you have work to do!

Love,

Jai ♥