The Beach
The mist rolls in from the ocean current
The sand lightly dances on the beach
Carried by the wind of change
My children’s laughter over near the Cliffside rocks
Why aren’t they standing next to me? I wonder
I look to the sky; it is hushed
A button appears
I push it without thinking of the consequences
The atmosphere collapses; blackness appears in the sky
I’m sorry; I did it
It is dark now; the world is still
Life has ended by my hand
This poem is from a dream I had in 1998, a dream that has haunted me for many years. Aristotle says we cannot “lightly either dismiss” dreams or give them “implicit confidence.” But what do you do when a dream fills you with dread? In my dream, I caused the end of the world through my own carelessness while my children played, trusting, unsuspecting of what was to happen. My last thought in the dream was that I would never hold them again. What a terrifying image for a mother, where trepidation churns in your stomach, ripping it apart until you shudder at every choice you make fearful its conscious intent will lead to this event.
What happens during sleep is still a mystery to many, yet it is not improbable to discover many explanations to our questions during this resting state. Depending on your knowledge, understanding, and personal beliefs, you could assign a myriad of resemblances to interpret my dream. One could say that to dream of the world ending is a sign that the individual is under tremendous stress or has a deep-rooted fear that their world is about to change dramatically. And when we talk about “the world,” aren’t we are generally referring to everything “around us,” so much so that if feels as if the entire world would cease to exist if we did?
In prophetic dreams, the end of the world has been characterized as being followed by a death of someone close to the person who dreamed it or in extremely rare cases, to the dreamer themselves. As with most people, events in our dreams can be so small compared to the magnitude of our movements when we’re awake, that they often times become either heightened or dismissed due to their specificity. Imagine your alarm clock buzzing in the morning and because you’re still dreaming, you imagine that you’re in the middle of a thunderstorm. You wake slightly startled, then relieved at the notion that it was only the alarm sounding. Now, it is easy to see the link between the alarm clock sounding and your brain responding by imagining you’re stuck in a thunderstorm. However, one could also say that the thunderstorm signifies a violent eruption of anger or aggression or even that an important life lesson is about to happen and that you need to pay close attention, as you would to something as loud as thunder.
For centuries, prophetic dreaming has been written about in many cultures and religious teachings. In the Bible, in the book of Daniel, King Nebuchandnezzar is troubled by his dreams, “I have dreamed a dream, and my spirit is troubled to know the dream.” When the Chaldeans told the king they would interpret his dream, he then answered, “The thing is gone from me: if you don’t make known to me the dream and the interpretation of it, you shall be cut in pieces, and your houses shall be made a dunghill. But if you show the dream and the interpretation of it, you shall receive of me gifts and rewards and great honor: therefore show me the dream and the interpretation of it.”
The Chaldeans answered a second time, “Let the king tell his servants the dream, and we conscious intent show the interpretation.” The king again was not pleased with their answer, believing that their knowing the dream would allow them to lie to him and corrupt their words. He believed that they must first know what he dreamed, and then interpret it, if they were telling the truth. Otherwise, they deserved to die for their deceit. The Chaldeans, in exasperation, told the king, “There is not a man on the earth who can show the king’s matter, because no king, lord, or ruler, has asked such a thing of any magician, or enchanter, or Chaldean. It is a rare thing that the king requires, and there is no other who can show it before the king, except the gods, whose dwelling is not with flesh.”
The king became angry and commanded his captain to destroy all the wise men of Babylon until Daniel asked the king for more time. The bible says that the secret to the dream was revealed to Daniel in a vision of the night. Daniel brilliantly related the kingdom of King Nebuchandnezzar to the kingdom of heaven, explaining how the king’s kingdom would be divided and lesser kingdoms would appear after his death, while the kingdom of heaven, the only true kingdom would remain unchanged. He explained that King Nebuchandnezzar’s kingdom on earth was his because God had chosen him to reign over the land, people and animals. This symbolized to the king that he was chosen by God, something he responded to favorably, and that it would only fall apart when he died, which eased his fears that it would happen during his lifetime.
Was a it prophetic dream that the king had, the future of his kingdom being destroyed or changed in a way that looked like the end of the world as he understood it or was it merely a dream that symbolized his fears or concerns that his kingdom was changing and that he was getting older and could not reign forever?
The king’s dream can be interpreted in a number of ways. Daniel’s answer was indeed wise, however, what about Daniel’s dream? Was his dream prophetic or was his brain, fearful of death for he and his family, dreaming creatively as a mere response to the pressure to give the king an answer that would appease him? Either way, Daniel benefited from his wisdom and sage advice and was greatly rewarded.
A poem by Harriet Monroe called The Blue Ridge relates mountains with sage wisdom revealed by dreams. She compares mountains to human consciousness, residing at the edge of the world, almost out of reach of our conscious thoughts, but still there. Her line that all can be revealed in silent sleep is another example of how many people throughout history, artists, kings, poets, writers, sages, and prophets believed in the prophetic power of dreaming.
STILL and calm,
In purple robes of kings,
The low-lying mountains sleep at the edge of the world.
The forests cover them like mantles;
Day and night
Rise and fall over them like the wash of waves.
Asleep, they reign.
Silent, they say all.
Hush me, O slumbering mountains –
Send me dreams.
The Bible, as well as many other books of great historical relevance, shows traces of a general and sometimes substantial belief in dreams. Plato, Goethe, and Shakespeare assigned prophetic value to certain dreams. The famine of Egypt was revealed by a vision of lean cattle. Joseph and Mary were warned of the cruel edict of Herod, and fled with Jesus into Egypt.
The writers of Greek and Latin classics relate many instances of dream experiences. Homer accorded divine origin to some dreams. During the third and fourth centuries, the supernatural origin of dreams was so generally accepted that the founding fathers of the Christian Church, relying upon the classics and the Bible as authority, made this belief a doctrine.
Joan of Arc predicted her death. Of course, her journey was dangerous and treacherous for a young woman in that time period, so one could consider it a fearful, or even prudent dream representing her conscious understanding of the dangers she was facing.
Jocasta, the queen of Thebes, was married to King Laius and bore him a son, Oedipus, who was destined to kill his father and marry his mother, so said the oracle. Laius sent his son away to be left to die, but his servant gave the child away, to be raised unknowledgeable of his true birthright. Laius was later killed in a dispute along the road. While Jocasta, following the death of her husband, spoke of “empty nonsense,” of prophecies never fulfilled, she did not know that the “robbers” who she thought killed her husband, did not exist, that it was actually an incident between her son, now new husband, who did not know it was his father in that fatal dispute. While both Jocasta and Laius tried to circumvent fate, both fell victim to it.
As in medieval and ancient times, people are still experiencing prophetic dreams. Of course, it may be wise to forget what we consider prophetic dreams as quickly as possible, as by remembering them through the conscious mind we could impress them in the immediate subconscious and make them manifest. To think about a negative prophetic dream may be the beginning of its creation. However, being incredulous about dreams could lead someone to the same fate as Julius Caesar, who might have benefited had he listened to the warning that Calpurnia, his wife, received in a dream.
Perhaps prophetic dreams offer us an opportunity of mitigating the severity of a coming shock, and in some cases maybe a means of avoiding the threatened crash. Much of this may depend on the nature of the crisis, be it simple avoidance of an ill-fated voyage or a larger-scale premonitory vision, such as a correction in orientation or direction of the planetary forces. When dreams involve the conscious intent of the individual, perhaps a critical moment is revealed to avert a disaster. If, however, the dreams are events destined to pass through a period of special tribulation, regarded as an opportunity for the correction of a specific orientation of mankind, must we stand impotent against them? If our fate is indeed revealed by dreams, we may be given the greatest gift that humanity could receive, an opportunity to choose, to meet the future in a spirit of rebellion, resignation, or with conscious intending acceptance. This would imply that by responding to our dreams in the objective state, we possess the power to interact with additional vibratory frequencies to shape and create our own destiny.
In sleep, human volition or conscious intent is suspended, leaving the mind often a prey to its own fancy, whereby a knock on the door may be magnified into the sound of a gunshot. Yet, a supersensitive perception is awakened. Not only is the sleeping mind sensitive to sound and light, responding to these sensations via standard brain activity and reasoning, it is also supersensitive to other cosmological vibrations, thoughts, and events, meaning capable of seeing hours and days ahead of the waking mind. While this, conceptually,
may appear against the laws of nature, it is present in nature, seen through animals or insects like ants, who away from atmospheric changes, still know of the approach of the harvest and react accordingly.
People respond to the same types of invisible signs or influences during sleep that animals respond to during their waking hours. Animals may not respond with the same type of indeterministic causality humans do (be it a personal attitude or mental or physical motion that effects its environment) but they do effect and interact by a form of causality, meaning there is a relationship between them and their environment. However, unlike animals, people reason these influences out by cause and effect when they are awake. The nature of consciousness while we are awake carries with it the element of human conscious intent. Yet, while we are asleep, conscious intent is no longer present, no longer interfering with nature’s laws and vibration’s. As in quantum physics, it is the observer that effects changes the phenomenon being observed. Therefore, perhaps human conscious intent is also an unseen force emitting vibrating atomic units that interact with the laws of nature. Without exercising human conscious intent, would the laws of nature, as
seen in the dream world, manifest similar perceptions and foresight? If humans can suppress their conscious intent, could we not see and interact with these vibrations or influences in a way that allowed us to create our own destinies?
Rene Descartes believed that human conscious intent could be suppressed, and in the 1600s said:
“There is freedom in our conscious intent, and that we have power in many cases to give and withhold our asset at free will, is so evident that it must be counted among the first and most common notions that are innate in us.”
The Philosophical Writings, vol. 1.
Ludwig Wittgenstein more closely stated in Tractatus:
“The freedom of the free will consists in the possibility of knowing actions that still lie in the future.”
Did Wittgenstein share the notion that letting go of human conscious intent was a key to interacting with the unseen vibrations of nature?
Scientists may discredit dreams as being nothing more than wave patterns or essential functions that sustain life, such as breathing and body temperature, but how do we explain the differences in frequency band or cycles per second? The Theta wave band is present at 4-7 cycles/second and has been documented as being associated with “dreamy, creative, intuitive states.” Manfred Davidmann, How the Human Brain Developed and How the Human Mind Works. While this may explain how or what is physically happening in
the body during these experiences, there are no answers as to why some of these dreams are inspiring, intuitive, or prophetic in nature.
As the nature of a wave would suggest, movement predominates. Therefore, the brain experiences a multitude of wave bands or cycles per second during REM sleep. Generally considered the strongest, Delta wave bands, which occur at 1-2 cycles per second in frequency, occur when a person is in a deep, dreamless sleep. The Alpha wave band, which occurs at 8-10 cycles per second in frequency, is associated with a calm and relaxed state when the person is not thinking. And finally, the Beta wave band, at 15-30 cycles per
second in frequency, is associated with being alert, with normal thinking, with processing information.
While the physiological and biological aspects of dreaming are understood in terms of maintaining the health of the human body, the ability to dream something beyond sensory illusions or hallucinated dreams of imagined feelings or awareness is not understood. Why would an individual dream of future events or of loved ones dying before or at the moment of their death if the body merely needed to secrete hormones into the bloodstream to maintain proper brain health and bodily function?
With the advent of a computer and Internet connection, a multitude of texts, doctrines, and essays are readily available to anyone seeking more information on the subject of quantum physics, brain development and function, and philosophical and spiritual works relating to the importance of suppressing the human conscious intent.
What I would like to know is whether or not the energy or quantum waves sent out or pulled in by human beings during the act of expressing human volition or conscious intent affects the vibrations of invisible energy fields here in the material world and whether or not by suppressing human conscious intent we can perceive vibrations that until now have been invisible to the naked eye or not perceived by our senses. After all, the human eye only perceives light and color within a certain frequency range.