Dreams both can be meaningless body related mind images, and expereinces of another world. Of course the latter requires quite a lot of explanation, as the formulation might mislead us. To correct that, let me use the words of Christ Jesus: the kingdom of heaven is within you. That was said with the intention to turn an extroverted intellectual culture/people to the reality of inner life. Truth is that the kingdom of heaven is neither outside and nor inside, it just IS/EXISTS. The human condition of today is that we have full consciousness in our sensorial mind. We have grown accustomed to the physical vehicle, what actually is the bases of our daytime consciousness and feeling of individuality/self/ego. It is hard to talk about these things as concepts and ideas because all of these has been used, learnt in and used in many situations without most of us making the right connections. This is not criticism, but statement, and it is not boasting as I just share what I have recieved.
To put it simply, while sleeping, we actually enter another world, the so called astral world, some ethimology would explain the name but let just leave that now.
Than why don’t we know that, how come we lose our consciousness ?
The answer is that we simply lack the soul qualities/organs what would provide us with a base for our self consciousness, while we are in this level of the “kingdom of heaven”, rupa, loka, or spiritual world.
These qualities/organs are organs of our astral body, manomaya kosha, also called wheels or the more popular “chakras/lotuses”. For the spiritual seer (one who has aquired the ability/bases to maintain consciousness in the astral world) the astral body of the uninitiated is undeveloped, dark, chaotic and without structure. Only through spiritual discipline and training are these structures ordered, and created - to say activated is just partly true as only half of the existing “petals of the lotuses” is given. This might create confusion as our materialistic mind often sees chakras as rigid structures. But they are not so, the astral world is much more flexible, and the limitations of spacial causality do not apply here.
Enough to say, milestones of spiritual development are the abilities to maintain/aquire self consciousness in various states of sleeping. This needs not to discourage us - remember that humanity has a normal course of evolution, and what we talk about here, normally will be aquired in later ages for most. There is no rush. But what is important to retain, is that all moral practices, yamas, niyamas, the eightfold path of Buddha, commandments, they all work towards this direction.
What Pandara’s teacher says is true. The astral world is more real than the seemingly objective “outer” one. That is the only obejective reality for us because this is where our clear self consciousness manifests itself. So far, I was just sharing and explaining. But let me use the maya, veil, concept of eastern wisdom you are familiar with. It is also a true formulation - because it is just the veil of a world of higher reality, the one we were talking about.
For our present daytime consciousness, the outer world of the senses is more real and objective because we all have similarly developed tools to expereince it: our senses. The reality of the astral, mental world for most is theoretical, because compared to the steadiness of this world of the senses where we can always return, the astral/mental world seems fleeting and arbitrary. But when we develop the senses for it, not physical senses but spiritual “eyes” and “ears”, what are nothing else but the soul structures called chakras/lotuses, than we realize that it not just has the same reality as that what we experince with our ordinary senses, but we also realize that the latter is the result, the manifestated effect of the former, and as such it is of a higher order of causality.
Just a few thoughts, to implement this interesting question about dreams into our everyday yoga practice.
