Whether alive or dead. It involves conditions in which direct knowing primarily operates.

It is our natural state of being. In its larger aspects, then, nature involves states that include both life and death in far more expansive frameworks of reference.

This characterized perhaps most of all by more perceptive psychological organizations. In the pre-dream state we participate in such organizations, although we bring back home to our physical self — in the form of dreams — only data that can be recognized and used in physical terms. It is highly important to remember that our experience and knowledge grow at those other levels of actuality. Even during our physical lifetime our experience is not confined to conventional physical events alone. Those usual events arise from the creative impetus that occurs at these other levels.

I am not saying here that we have no conscious control over events, for they are formed by us in accordance with our feelings, beliefs, purposes, and intents.

The inner material that “makes events real” comes from these other sources, however. Most of us are not aware of this basic, mysterious nature of events, because it does not occur to us to study the inner fabric. The past and future of any given event provides a kind of thickness, a kind of depth-in-time. The probabilities of an event escape us in practical terms.

In the pre-dream state we directly encounter a reality in which those probabilities exist all at once to our perception. In a dazzling display we are aware of such events from infinite perspectives. Consciously we could not grasp such information, much less act upon it, nor could we maintain our particular, unique, psychological stance. We still take advantage of that level of being, however, using that immeasurable data as a basis to form the reality that we know.

To some extent our dreaming state is a connective between the kind of life we recognize and this far vaster dimension that is its source. Dreaming involves a far greater input of information than is realized, then — that is, we take in far more data when we are dreaming than when we are awake, although the data are of a different kind. We form our dreams in part from that information. The dreams themselves are further processed so that they become a fabric for recognizable waking events.

Dream dramas are highly complicated, artistic productions. On the one hand they represent other events of the pre-dream state, events beyond our comprehension in their “natural condition.” Such events are not lost, however, but translated into dreams as our own consciousness returns closer to its “home base.” Each aspect of a dream stands in coded form as a symbol for greater, undecipherable events.

The symbol are so precisely and accurately produced that they simultaneously serve as aspects relating to our intimate daily life as well. Since everyday events are formed in part as a result of such dream information, then each event of our physical life is also a symbol for another otherwise undecipherable event that occurs in those levels of the psyche in which our own being is immersed.

This in no way denies the validity of events as we think of them, for all of our physical activity immediately alters all other relationships at all levels of being. Most of us are familiar with inspiration on one form or another. People who are not writers or artists, or poets or musicians, often suddenly find themselves almost transformed for a brief period of time — suddenly struck by a poem or a song or a snatch of music, or by a sketch — that seems to come from nowhere, that seems to emerge outside of the context of usual thought patterns, and that brings with it an understanding, a joy, a compassion, or an artistic bent that seemingly did not exist a moment earlier. Where did the song or poem or music come from? Such individuals feel that they suddenly “know” in a direct manner. They experience knowledge that comes from within rather than information that comes from without.

The dream comes in the same fashion. We do not have to wonder about how to form a dream before we go to bed at night. We do not have to know any of the mechanisms involved, so dreaming often seems to “just happen” in the same way that an inspiration seems to just come.

Books have been written about the nature of dreams. Here are classic accounts of precognitive dreams, or prophetic dream involving saints and honored personages in the Bible. Yet each ream alters the physical world to some extent. A creative idea might lead to a book — certainly a physical-enough production. Dreams involve us with the most intimate mechanics by which physical events are formed. There are hormonal and chemical changes occurring in the body — often at minute but important levels — in direct response to dream experience. Our dreams then are tied into our biological makeup. There are also coded biological connections within dream images themselves that relate to cellular activity — not generally, but specifically.

Each dream object is chosen with the highest discrimination so that it serves as a symbol at many levels, and also sends pertinent messages to the individual cells and organs of our body as well.