Dreams often seem chaotic because our point of reference is too small to contain the added dimensions of actuality. Again, in a manner of speaking, events are far more circular in nature. In dreams we can experience the past or future. Physical events are actually formed now, in our terms, because of the interactions between past and future, which are not separate in actuality, but only in our perception.
A dream is like the snap of a rubber band, but it is not the rubber band. We read newspapers and keep in constant physical communication with others of our kind. The news affect “future” events. Individuals and governments take such communications into consideration when they made their decisions. The newspapers are not the events they discuss, though they are their own kind of events. The written news story is actually composed of a group of symbols. Through reading we learn how to interpret these. If we watch news on television we have a larger view of given news event. When we are viewing a war in a newscast, however, we are still not watching people die. We are watching symbols translated into images that are then visually perceived. The images stand for the people, but they are not the people. The symbols carry the message, but they are not the event the depict.
Some of our dreams are like newspaper stories, informing us of events that have happened in other portions of the psyche. Others are like the televised news picture, carrying perhaps more information about the event but still containing it.
Psychologically and physically, however, we send out dream bulletins all the while in a constant inner communication. On this level individual dreams help form mass reality, yet also to some extent arise from it in the same way that local weather conditions contribute to world weather conditions, while they are formed by them at the same time.
Our earth exists in the context of the physical universe. We exist in the context of our psyche. The events that we recognize as real are dependent upon all of the other events occurring within our psyche, even as the existence of the earth is dependent upon the other aspects of the physical universe.
Events as we understand them are only intrusions of multidimensional activities into space and time. Events are reflections of our dreams even a our dreams reflect the events we know; those we experienced, and those we anticipate in one way or another. In a manner of speaking, then, and without denying the great validity of our experience, events as we know them are but fragments of other happenings in which we are also intimately involved. The inner multidimensional shape of events occurs in a framework that we cannot structure, however, because as a rule we are not focused in that direction. We prefer to deal with activities that can be physically manipulated.
The physical manipulation of events is indeed a psychological knack of considerable merit, in which consciousness and attention are exuberantly and wholeheartedly focused, bringing vitality and meaning to one relatively small range of activity.
I don’t mean to deny the validity of that experience, but to point out its specialized nature. By its nature, however, that precise specialization and tuning of consciousness in to space and time largely precludes other less-specialized encounters with realities. Dreams often present us with what seems to be an ambiguity, an opaqueness, since they lack the immediate impact of psychological activity with space and time. From our viewpoint it seems often that dreams are not events, or that they happen but do not happen. The lack of normal time and space intersections means that we cannot share our dreams with others in the way that we can share waking events. Nor can we remember dream events — or so it seems — as we do our normal conscious experience. In actual fact we remember consciously only certain highlighted events of our lives, and ordinary details of our days vanish as dreams seem to.
We have a dream memory, of course, though we are not aware of it as a rule. There is a craft involved in the formation of events. We perform this craft well when dreaming. Events-making begins before our birth, and the dreams of unborn children and their mothers of merge. The dreams of those about to die often involve dream structures that already prepare them for future existence. In fact, towards death a great dream acceleration is involved as new probabilities are considered– a dream acceleration that provides psychic impetus for new birth.