How I used dreams?
I am fond of dreams. In fact, previously I have written about dreams of my childhood and Philosophy of dreams. However, with time We get better in understanding of them. If you ask me who use dreams, I will say everyone conscious and will explain how. But first let's go back to childhood to learn How I used dreams.
Maybe I was seven or eight at that time. I had trouble sleeping. Often, I would go to bed and just turn this way and that way without sleeping. I am not sure what I was thinking, maybe I wasn't sleepy when I go to bed. And that Is hard when you want to sleep but sleep doesn't come. Then I used this dream trick for a better sleep. I would start a deliberate dream.
I would start a dream with conscious awareness. With selected characters blended with imaginary ones, like a little story. I would make them do what I would like them to do. I would make a dog in my mind and paddle a cycle with it in a race. Or I will make the river flood drowning everything one foot deep and make its fish swim everywhere in the town. And deeper I went in this imaginary dream, I forgot it's a deliberate dream. And I would never know when it became a real dream! Often Wake up following morning. I'm not saying this is the sleeping pill for everyone with a poor sleep. Just to illustrate How I used dreams.
Fundamentals of a dream.
Some fundamental things about dreams that often we get mixed up is the location of a dream. We locate a dream and put it within the timeframe of the sleep. Yet if you look at the above example and within yourself, we really do not know what happened during the sleep. Unless you wake up in the middle of a dream and realize you have imagining things or dreaming. So, if we really should locate the dream we should locate it at the time of awareness of it. And this is often the time you are fully or partially awake of your surroundings. So, dreams happen when we are awake when we are aware. What happens during sleep we do not know.
Who else dreams?
If we look at above as a fact, that dreams happen when we are awake what is a good definition of a dream. When I combine this with the fact that I can create my own dreams just at this moment, we can say dreams are projections of mind about the future which happens now. They do not have to be following physical laws or social norms as they are just bounded only by our past information and dimensions of our imagination.
Fundamentally everyone dreams every day.
Mind Castles on empty lands.
Mind Castle is a memory method used by some genius to memorizes things. I am not a big fan of the method. But the technique is interesting. You imagine a place, completely it's up to you and in mind you visit this place so often. And you fill this castle with things. Some mental objects. Once the castle and its objects are in place, when you have a list of items to memorize you peg each item with something in your memory castle. In that way when you retrieve information you just have to go through items in your castle and the list will be there in order.
I'm sure you have used dreams not to that extent like a memory castle, or a mental experiment of Einstein.
Remind yourself last time you travelled. Imagine you saw an empty land by the road. I am sure when you see empty land like this naturally, we build a castle. For a construction worker it is a skyscraper. For a CEO it is an office building. For a man without a house, he would dream about a house with a garden. For a cowboy it would be a nice place for a stable. If there are twenty people in the bus, they would dream twenty things about the land. And some would go further than the others. But the bottom line is this happens every time when something comes to our conscious awareness, and it is essential we do that.
Why dreams are essential to happiness?
Dreams are essential component if you want to savor something. Imagine a young man see a beautiful girl walking passed him. And he would dream about a future with her, and this is the savoring part of the experience. If he just saw the girl and there were no additional thoughts about a future dream, there would be no enjoyment in this.
Importance of dreams in mindfulness practice.
As you can understand everything, we observe has a future component in it. You can call it a dream or any other name. But important message is this part is essential to enjoy. And it is not real. Just the imagination. Just like the past, which never is there. Mindfulness lets us understand the nature of our experience. When you see future projections are your own creation, mind will further identify essential nature of reality which is called now. Like a swan who can separate milk from water, sharp mindfulness tries to separate experience from imagination. And will come into conclusions on its own. Until then let's try and focus on what is real instead of the dreams.
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