The ego skims the topmost surface of reality and awareness. This is not the result of any inherent egotistical quality. It is true that the ego’s responsibility is with the relationship between the self and the physical environment. It must necessarily focus within the confines of physical reality. Nevertheless, it is fully capable of perceiving far more than Western man and woman allows it to perceive. Fear, ignorance, and superstition limit its potentials and, therefore, limit even its effectiveness within the physical universe.
The ego itself cannot directly experience certain intuitions and psychological experiences, but it can experience them insofar as it can become aware of them on an intellectual basis. When training forces the ego to become too rigid and to limit its perceptions of other realities, then the intuitions will not be accepted by the ego because intuitional experience will not fit into the framework of reality that it accepts as valid.
The ego in that case will therefore fight against what it then considers an unknown threat to survival. Struggles are initiated then that are entirely unnecessary. We want to bring intuitional comprehension to a point where the ego will accept it. In our dream experiments, this is one of the purposes we hope to achieve. The ego is not equipped to delve directly into nonphysical realities, but if it is trained to be flexible, it will accept such knowledge from other wider horizons of the self.
And the ego must have its feet upon solid earth. It is naked and out of its element outside of the normal environment of physical existence. To some extent, its distrust of the dream experience is necessary for the overall balance of the personality. Physical reality is, after all, a rock to which the ego must cling; from it, the ego achieves its prestige and reason for existence. This provides necessary balance and control, and results in the sturdy anchorage of the personality in the environment in which is must survive. We have here one of the main reasons why we must request the subconscious to enable us to recall dreams. The ego would see no reason for such a memory and on general principles attempts to repress them.
Again, however, this excellent balance and these fine controls exist. The ego will accept knowledge derived from the dream state as a man and woman might accept a message from a distant land in which he or she does not care to dwell and whose environment would both mystify and astonish him or her.
In our dream experiments, then, we will allow you to bring such messages to the ego. We will attempt to map this exotic country in such a way that the ego can understand what is there in terms of resources that can be used for its own benefit.
“What’s the purpose of the whole study exactly?” You might ask.
We will be involved with a study of the characteristics of the dream world in general and attempt to isolate it as a separate reality for the purposes of examination. Then we shall regard it in its relation to physical reality, using comparisons and dissimilarities.
This will then allow us to proceed into the relationship between the waking and sleeping personality and discover the many ways in which the personality’s aims and goals are not only reflected but sometimes achieved in and through the dream condition.
Usually the dream state is considered from a negative standpoint and compared unfavorably with the waking condition. Emphasis is laid upon those conditions present in the waking state but absent from the dreaming experience. We shall consider those aspects of consciousness which are present in the dream environment and absent in the physical one. No study of human personality can pretend to be thorough that does not take the importance of dream reality into consideration.
In some discussions we will state the ways in which conscious goals can be achieved with the help of the dreaming self. All of this material will be reinforced with experiments that, I hope, you will conduct yourselves.
It is amazing how man and woman regrets the hours spent in sleep. He and she does not realize how hard he or she works when the ego is unaware. We hope to make this clear. We hope to let you catch yourselves in the act of doing so. You will realize how productive dream experiences are and the ways in which they are woven into the tapestry of your entire experience.
As mentioned previously, we will also deal with the nature of space, time and distance, as they appear in the dream environment. Some of our experiments along these lines will be most illuminating. Here the ego cannot go, but it can benefit from the information, and perhaps in time, even a shadow of the ego may pass through that strange land and feel in some small way at home.
Some methods, to be given in later blogs, allow you to come awake while dreaming, to take our conscious selves into the dream state, manipulate it and have deliberate out-of-body experiences while sleeping. Learning to manipulate in two levels of reality at once, to be aware both in waking and dream states. Giving us the general nature of dream reality and our place in it.