by Owen Waters

To the physical mind, the world of dreams can seem to make no sense at all. In a dream, you can be in Location A, engaging in one activity and then, in a flash, be in Location B doing something completely different.

The big difference between dreaming and waking is that dreams use a different language than the physical mind. Nothing in a dream should be taken literally but when you treat everything as a symbol, they start to make sense. Then, the more you think about the symbols, the more you can actually discover and decode what is likely to be a message from your soul mind to your physical mind. Or, sometimes, it isn’t a profound message, it can be just your mind letting off steam by working through the stresses of the previous day.

Instant recall

Let’s say, for example, you awake from a dream that may contain a message from your soul mind. First rule of dream recall: When you awake, don’t move; don’t look at the clock, don’t even open your eyes. All of those things place you firmly back in your physical body where the memories of the night fade very rapidly.

Your physical brain is not the brain that had the dream. Sleep is an out-of-body experience where you travel in your spirit or astral body and use its etheric brain. Re-entry into the physical body draws the veil of sleep across the memory of your dream. So, to transfer the dream experience from your spirit brain to your physical brain, recall the whole dream from start to finish the moment you awake and before even moving a muscle.

Decoding dream symbols

Let’s say you had a dream where you were in a city on a gloomy day, hurrying toward an office building, then suddenly the scene switched to a walk in sunlit countryside next to a stream where you see birds take flight up into the blue sky.

The symbols in such a dream could be as follows: Pressure to perform your routine daytime job with the gloomy day reflecting how you feel about your work. The sudden shift to a pleasant scene symbolizes brighter possibilities ahead. The water in the stream symbolizes spirituality and the birds taking flight represent upliftment.

A translation of these symbols into physical thought could be that you should be prepared for an imminent opportunity to move into work that you find more inspiring. The message is sent from your soul mind in order to prepare you to be on special alert for thoughts and events that could open up new opportunities.

Dreams are real. They just use a different language than the brain with its physical world focus. Your soul sees the new possibilities that are about to arrive in your life and for good reason. Your soul creates those circumstances or, rather, co-creates them in cooperation with the other souls in your life.

Even after understanding that, dreams might still seem fictional because of the suddenly changing scenes and backgrounds. Actually, those are perfectly normal in the spirit world, which is where your dreams are carried out. New scenes and the objects contained therein are called thoughtforms.

Thoughtforms in the spirit world

When you dream, your spirit body is out of your physical body and you are located in the spirit realms. Your mind has the ability to create objects and even entire scenes out of the etheric energy in the air. These instant thoughtforms last only as long as you pay attention to them, so you can instantly replace them with yet another scene.

While we are on the subject, here are some little-known metaphysical principles relating to thoughtforms in the spirit world.

First, you create not just the scene, but the space which contains it. In the physical world, no one creates extra space. What you have in the physical world is a fixed amount of space but, in the spirit world, people create extra space all the time and then it dissolves when their attention turns away.

Second, another person might wander into the area in front of a dreaming person who has just created a whole scene in front of them, and never even see the dreaming person’s scene. That’s because the new arrival would need to be attuned to the dreamer’s mind to be able to perceive their creation. So, you could have a whole selection of scenes in created spaces, all quite happily occupying one common area of real space without conflicting with each other because each created scene has its own frequency signature that makes it exist in its own private space.

Third, commonly-shared thoughtforms gain power. This applies more to people who are living in the afterlife, not so much to dreaming night-trippers from the physical world. Let’s say that a man died in modern-day England in a country village. So, he goes through the usual afterlife re-orientation, maybe some healing, next is the necessary life review, and then he’s ready for life in the afterlife.

If he’s just a regular person with no special spiritual yearnings, he’ll be looking around for a familiar setting in which to settle and get over the trauma of being relocated to a strange new world where things are definitely not the same as they were. What better place to feel at home than the cozy pub he used to visit each evening to be with his friends?

Sure enough, in the spirit realms, vibrationally right above the village of the physical world is a re-creation of pretty much what he used to know, even down to the familiar pub where friendly conversation abounds and there’s a fireplace to keep you warm. What he doesn’t know is that the whole scene was created, not by bricks and timber and hard labor, but by the thought-form creations of the many people who have passed that way before him. People before him had wanted the familiar comfort of the old pub on the high street, created it, and then others followed, each one adding to the apparent solidity of the created thoughtform.

Each addition to the commonly-shared creation made the thoughtform more solid. It had transformed from a temporary creation of etheric energy into the more solid form of etheric matter. In the spirit world, etheric matter can last for years before it finally dissolves back to join the etheric energy that fills the atmosphere. It just needs the attention of people to maintain its existence because etheric energy and etheric matter respond to the creative pressure of mental energy. So, when you see a scene in a dream dissolve and another scene takes it place, it isn’t magic, it’s just the way things are in the more subtle realms of existence on this planet.

The cozy pub is just one possibility of a familiar place where a newcomer to the spirit realms can rest and adapt to their new life. Others may attend a church or move into a community of like-minded people. However, sooner or later, comfort turns into routine and then boredom as a person starts to seek more meaning in life. At this point, members of their soul family may help them into a higher sub-plane of the spirit realms to live with them and discover ways they can find purpose in helping the community.

In contrast, spiritual seekers in the afterlife tend to leave basic gatherings behind and venture up through the realms of the afterlife. They spend much time in the higher realms simply because the vibrations there make meditation so much deeper and productive in gaining enlightenment.

Soul messages

Your deepest sleep happens early in the night. This is when your consciousness rises into easy contact with your soul mind and life planning can take place in order to better follow your personal life purpose. What better time to decide what message may be appropriate to create and play out in a symbolic dream? The state where you remember dreams is close to the waking state, so the planned dream will then play out near the end of the night’s sleep.

Probe deeper into the symbols

Here in the physical world, for people who wake up with a clear memory of a dream that feels like it has a soul message, the trick is to focus deeply upon each symbol. If you work in an office building and it showed up in a dream, how did a gloomy scene under a darkened sky make you feel? How does being in that building make you feel?

Books of dream symbols describe what symbols can mean to most people but your dream is personal to you and can only be correctly interpreted in your personal context. For example, a slow-moving stream is generally seen as a placid symbol, one of calmness or quiet joy. Books about dreams would likely say that a raging river symbolizes turbulent emotions while raindrops can be an expression of tears of sadness. But those are just suggestions. The real meaning is always uniquely personal.

To better decode a dream that may contain guidance from your deeper soul consciousness, ask yourself what three words best describe what every scene, person and significant object mean to you.

Symbols are not literal, so seeing another person in a dream is not so much about them personally, but the three words that best describe their personality to you. What message lies within those three descriptors?

Once you see the personal significance, the meaning and the message can emerge.

*Owen Waters is the author of Spiritual Metaphysics: Answers to the Great Mysteries of Life.

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