What Are Dreams

A lot of trash mixed with other things that make you go hmmm.

Mmmm . . . . .well, while we are sleeping our bodies may be resting but our mind is quite busy. Alot of dreams happen to be about our obstacles that we have come across in life and those dreams can also help us find solutions to our own problem should we choose to think over our dreams and try to interperate them.

I do also think that once in awhile people will get dreams that are divinely inspired and may even tell you what could happen in the future.

One theory is that the mind is bombarded with many things it cannot immediately make sense of during the day. It throws them into the background for processing, and while you're sleeping, it starts playing around with them -- trying to make sense out of them.

Or what happened in the past.

That theory seems to only apply partially. The rest makes you wonder.

Consciousness is a mystery in itself. To what extent are spiritual experiences a result of quantum nonlocality in the brain? If the structure of the brain ultilizes quantum nonlocality does that mean mind is immaterial? Maybe not. Quantum theory is very strange but it still has a material basis.

"In terms of dreamtime, we begin to realize that we are all sharing a mutual dream in which we are all, literally, dreaming up our shared universe moment by moment. Every moment is recognized to be the unmediated manifestation or expression of the deeper dreaming process which is unfolding. We could even say that the recognition that this is actually happening is the key to receiving the blessing from our situation."
Paul Levy
[link to www.awakeninthedream.com]

When a person gets hypnotized they can go back in time and that really has me wondering is it proof of reincarnation? To tie this in with dreams, the spirit does live on after death just like the mind does too. So mind, dreams and spirit are connected.

Something is known about these subjects but it's kept away from public scrutiny, IMHO. Why isn't that research data public? Maybe because the information is being used against us politically, militarily, economically, or maybe the reality doesn't jibe with popular religious notions and is thus considered destabilizing to the social order.

I do think reincarnation is a possibility. In the bible it says we are given one life, but maybe it means our spirit. After all, when our bodies die our spirits are still alive. So we never technically die, we just change. . . .

. . . . just a thought.

Exactly, death is just losing the body but the ghost or spirit moves onward which means it is still experiencing existence. You say its heaven or hell then that also proves it is existing still. Of course nobody knows what heaven really is, every religion has its own ideas of it. To the American Indians they go to a happy hunting ground, etc. Coming back again until you get it right explains why evil is always with us, the scumbags keep returning. Dreams I do believe are means to teach us where we went wrong.

Why isn't there more correlation between religious cultures built around experience of quantum nonlocality; why doesn't Judaism corroborate reincarnation for example?

The notion that dreams and everyday experience are similar in nature is best understood by Westerners by examining the concept of "idealism". The philosophy of idealism says that all experience is delivered to the individual via the brain and nervous system, and is therefore a product of the mind. Idealism (better termed "ideaism") characterizes all sensation as indirect mental representations or "ideas" rather than direct experience of an external or objective world. Without the brain and nervous system, such experience would not exist. All experience, both ideas and sensations are therefore mental phenomena. In this way, everyday material experience is very much like dream experience..
[link to www.spiritualtravel.org]
[link to www.nydzogchen.com]
Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light
dreams as preparation to see through the illusions of our material world

Many religions pick and choose what they want to keep in their holy books. They also choose how they want to translate these holy books.
I'm not quite sure why reincarnation can't fit in. Maybe they're afraid that if they believe in reincarnation then Jesus may not be real, and if he's not real then they're not as special.
I'm not sure actually. I'm just posing some theories and grasping at straws.

actually the bible is speaking of eternal life - this is no contradiction to reincarnation

early christian believed in reincarnation

actually, they believed even in trans -species reincarnation, same as pitagoreans did before them

but later, the christian dogma stiffened

Ah! Yeah eternal life is what I meant. It makes sense. Never really knew early christians believed in reincarnation. ^.^

[link to www.near-death.com]
Metempsychosis literally means "transference of souls," and is related to the process of reincarnation. It is often asked, why was reincarnation unknown in Europe until recently? Why does not Christianity teach it?

Actually, the idea is found in the oldest traditions of Western civilization, as well as being taught throughout the ancient Near East and Orient. And there is solid evidence that during its first centuries, Christianity did indeed impart what it had learned about the pre-existence of souls and their reimbodiment.

Josephus, the Jewish historian who lived during most of the first century AD,
records in his Jewish War (3, 8, 5) and in his Antiquities of the Jews (18, 1, 3) that reincarnation was taught widely in his day, while his contemporary in Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, in various of his writings, also refers to reimbodiment in one or another form. Moreover, there are passages of the New Testament that can be understood only if seen against the background of pre-existence of souls as a generally held belief. For instance, Matthew (16:13-14) records that when Jesus asked his disciples "Whom do men say that I am?" they replied that some people said he was John the Baptist (who had been executed only a few years before the question was asked). Others thought he was Elijah, or Jeremiah, or another of the prophets. Later in Matthew (17:13), far from rejecting the concept of rebirth Jesus tells his disciples that John the Baptist was Elijah.

John (9:2-4) reports that the disciples asked Jesus whether a blindman had sinned or his parents that he had been born blind. Jesus replied that it was in order that the works of God may be made manifest in the blind man, that is, that the law of cause and effect might be fulfilled. Or, as St. Paul phrased the thought: we reap what we sow. The blind man could not have sown the seeds of his blindness in his present body, but must have done so in a previous lifetime.

The earliest Christians, especially those who were members of one or other of the Gnostic sects, such as the Valentinians, Ophites and Ebionites, included reimbodiment among their important teachings. For them it enabled fulfillment of the law -- karma -- as well as providing the means for the soul to purify itself from the muddy qualities resulting from its immersion in matter and the egoism we have developed in the first stages of our journey through earth life.

After the original generations of Christians, we find the early Church Fathers, such as Justin Martyr (AD 100-l65), St. Clement of Alexandria ( AD 150-220), and Origen ( AD 185-254) teaching the pre-existence of souls, taking up reincarnation or one or another aspect of reimbodiment. Examples are scattered through Origen's works, especially Contra Celsum (1, xxxii), where he asks: "Is it not rational that souls should be introduced into bodies, in accordance with their merits and previous deeds . . . ?" And in De Principiis he says that "the soul has neither beginning nor end." St. Jerome (AD 340-420), translator of the Latin version of the Bible known as the Vulgate, in his Letter to Demetrias (a Roman matron), states that some Christian sects in his day taught a form of reincarnation as an esoteric doctrine, imparting it to a few "as a traditional truth which was not to be divulged."

Synesius (AD 370-480), Bishop of Ptolemais, also taught the concept, and in a prayer that has survived, he says: "Father, grant that my soul may merge into the light, and be no more thrust back into the illusion of earth." Others of his Hymns, such as number III, contain lines clearly stating his views, and also pleas that he may be so purified that rebirth on earth will no longer be necessary. In a thesis on dreams, Synesius writes: "It is possible by labor and time, and a transition into other lives, for the imaginative soul to emerge from this dark abode." This passage reminds us of verses in the Revelation of John (3:12), with its symbolic, initiatory language leading into: "Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out."

We need at this point to recall what happened after Constantine declared Christianity to be the state religion of the Roman empire. The church forgot the injunction about rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's only, and allowed itself to become entwined with the administration of Caesar's realm -- the political arena. Its destiny became linked to the fate of the empire itself and its rulers.
[link to www.theosophy-nw.org]

My dreams are all movies that run as though scripted. They might not make sense, but they have an intrinsic logic. I have never dreamed of myself in another country or time, but I frequently dream of people I've never met and places I have never been. I had a recurring dream about an old mansion with a secret, very modern pool that you approached from the third storey.

[link to www.godlikeproductions.com]

"I have never dreamed of myself in another country or time"

I like those. The little things, like the doors and how they latch, give them away as not from my current known thoughts. Do we really want to know? because It may not be pretty. I don't recall any good. Just more questions, like WTF?

Why can't scientists come up with a way to record our dreams?

Or what happened in the past.......

No. They have a word for that: "MEMORY" (not "dream").

Duh.

They have. Its called pencil and paper.

maybe because scientists cant even agree on what dreams actually are

scientists like to look important and claim they just need a little more time to explain everything,
but in reality, they are only walking in the dark, touching some fog

As I remember it, one of the major current neurophysiological explanations goes something like this. The brain is flooded with acetylcholine (a neurotransmitter related to recollection) during dreams. As far as we can tell, REM sleep is the brain's way of compiling, sorting, and storing the memories you've accumulated over the course of the day - which is why if you've been doing or thinking about the same thing all day, it often shows up in your dreams. It also serves as a kind of cleanup process for getting rid of memories you don't really need anymore, which is why you might often dream about old stuff you haven't even thought of in years, and why dreams are hard to remember - for the most part they're not really supposed to be remembered.

An interesting thing about this is that if you deprive rats (or humans) of REM sleep, but let them sleep normally otherwise, they'll have a much harder time with complicated memory tasks that span more than one day. Pretty cool stuff.

Spoken like a true conspiratard!

Hint: The dream is real, you're not.

"They have a word for that: "MEMORY" (not "dream").

Duh."


In that case, how many here are in some real serious trouble?
A show of hands please?

Ok, I'll bite, how many here dream about their own real past?

Dreams in an oversimplified explanation are the equivalent to a hard drive defraging.

Nice, but that is a "what they do" statement not a "what they are" statement.