There is no such thing as chaos. The universe, by what ever name and in whatever manifestation, attains its reality through ordered sequences of significances.
These are kept separate in various systems of actuality, while still combining in an overall fashion. We understand the cause-and-effect kind of order, but this is built upon the non-causal aspect of significances. In a way the dream that you recall are like numbered paintings, tailored to fit our own intents and purposes, fitting the contours of our mind so perfectly that we forget the larger experiences from which they were drawn.
Physically and psychically the dream itself is the result of the most precise kind of calculation and activity, in which complicated dramas and interactions occur, often highly charged and intense, and yet cut off from the body’s full participation. These significances, then, involve from our end certain biological cues that regulate the intersection of psychological events with physical activity in time and space. Only when all conditions match our own highly specific requirements are the necessary cues activated to give us physical experience. To the extent in dreams we are “on hold,” involved with a range of action too wide to fit the contours of practical earth experience.
These significances set up their own codes, then, so that physical events must be coded in a certain fashion, and dreams in another. There is, then, what can be called a pre-dream state, or a state of experience from which the dream will be formed. Such experience will carry a different kind of code, further divorcing it from that acceptable intersection with bodily activity, space, and time.
Our physical events happen to us as us. In dreams we may experience an event seemingly as someone else, or we may find oneself in the past or future instead of the present. In waking life we have the family that we recognize, or group of friends, or profession, or what have you. In dreams we may find oneself married to someone else, or living an entirely different kind of life. In a way dreams are like variations of the theme of our life, though in reality our life is the theme we have chosen from those possible versions.
To some extent, however, dream events are like physical ones a good deal of the time. Our dream perceptions seem physical — we walk, run, eat, and perform other physical functions. There are actually many other conditions of existence, but for now we will speak of a pre-dream state, which is actually composed of several conditions of actuality. Here the physical aspects of events largely vanish, comparatively speaking, the farther away we go from the dream state into inner reality. It would seem to us that experience becomes broader but less specific, but such is not the case. Experience does become broader, but it changes in quality so that, for example, one moment in our terms of such experience would provide the working material for five years of dreams.
This is simply an analogy because we are steeped in that other reality constantly; but its illuminations and nature are transmitted to the self that we know through the formation of dreams, and in our terms, “it takes time to dream.” This larger experience, from which our dreams are finally formed, involves us in a kind of journey. Using another analogy, it is as if we joyfully leave the normal paraphernalia of usual life behind, and ride aboard or own greater psyche into vaster seas of experience.
We leave behind the physical nature of events and go into those areas in which events are formed. In ways most difficult to describe, we encounter the universe in a more direct fashion, using inner senses that are far more ranging. Using our own indestructible validity as “bait,” we go forth to draw from the universe the raw material of experience. We are ourselves, yet at that level we are also a part of the universe from which that self springs, and its power and vitality are our own, to be uniquely focused. In our terms, we literally look backward and forward in time at our individual self and our civilization, seeing where they merge, and feeling the infinite connections, so that each event we choose as our own will also be chosen as a world event — participated in to whatever extent by others, and adding to the available experience of the species from which others can also draw.
A direct cognition is involved in which each consciousness knows what each other one is doing, its “position,” and the implications of its experience. The entire fabric and framework of time and reality at each point is ascertained, and the probabilities probed and understood.
All of this sounds very complicated. Yet in a different way that same processes occur at other levels, as in its way cellular consciousness perceives all of the probabilities concerned with physical survival in its most far-reaching complications. At this moment the cells within our body know the life conditions of any place on the planet, and compute these, ascertaining the ways in which they require action on the body’s part. Our cells are aware of the motion of the planets and of all circumstances regarding the body’s equilibrium, stability, and survival. The body is then formed constantly as the result of these computations.
In larger terms, in the pre-dream states we are aware of all of the activities of own greater psyche as it participates in — and contributes to — the infinite existence of psychic consciousness as we understand it, and becomes aware of the psychological realities that form the framework of its own stability.
Events do not become physical, then, unless requirements are met, and certain codes activated.
Experiences at pre-dream levels occur at their own intensities. The knowledge is translated into information that is broken down in the dream state into more specific data, highly symbolized, suiting individual requirements and “run through the body” in a kind of ghostly trail fashion.
It is then further processed into individual significances, drives, or intents, which convert it into the required codes that will then determine the nature of actualized waking events. Data must be of particular kinds of intensity before they register as physical matter, or are experience as physical events. Part of this processing occurs in the dream state, and creativity plays a large part into the preliminary process.