Dream Labs / Blog

What are dreams?

We can now scientifically prove: we can be conscious in our dreams. Lucid dreaming, also called conscious dreaming, is the ability to be aware in our dreams. Crazy, right? Well it pretty much is. Imagine being in a dream when all of the sudden it dawns on you, “Wait! This is a dream!” With this knowledge it’s possible to do pretty much anything in a dream, and do so with complete awareness. Imagine then this: the ability to enter directly into a dream with complete awareness. Yes, you heard right, going straight into a lucid dream from the waking world without any lapse in consciousness. These are all possible and the basis of what you’ll learn in our book Oneironautics. But lets take a step back and ask an even broader question.

What exactly are dreams?

This has been a question that has fascinated humanity since the beginning of time. In ancient cultures we believed that our soul was traveling to another realm in dreams; a realm where we could communicate with higher spirits, other dreamers, and even the dead. It was a place they called Dreamtime. And it was a realm that offered insights, healing, and most importantly guidance- both practically and spiritually. Fast forwarding, Freud then flipped it on its head at the turn of the 20th century and made dreaming something strictly internal, a personal experience of our repressed desires, and famously calling them ‘the royal road to the unconscious’. Even today, with all of our modern understanding, scientists and philosophers alike have come to the same conclusion when it comes to answering the question, “what are dreams?”.

“Ummm…” cricket cricket… “we don’t know.”

Here’s Jared’s Take on It …tune in tomorrow for another perspective.

Dreams are the visual representation of our subconsciousness. (Lucid dreams being the visual representation of our subconsciousness and our consciousness balancing out.) Of course, this opens the question to what is consciousness? As far as I’m concerned, in this current state of existence, the universe is like a book: consciousness being the words, while matter is the ink and paper. As human beings, we are only an individual letter, but that letter is part of something far larger. Most of the time we’re consumed with being that letter, but when we step back and look at the whole, we realize that we’re part of a book, a story. As much as we craft the book, the book has crafted us. We would have never come into existence without the book and the book couldn’t exist without us. Like poetry, we exist as pieces to a work of art where the sum is greater than the whole of its parts. The meaning of the book is not spelled out in the individual words or sentences, but is found when you’ve moved beyond the book.

To find the meaning, you must first know the meaning. That’s where dreaming comes in.

Dreams stem from the what’s enclosed in the fabric of those words and letters. Dreams let you read what’s between the lines. When we explore our dreams we are venturing into the nature of the universe. Dreams are the ether that connects the dimensions of reality. When we dream, we travel to a realm where consciousness is the construct of what we are experiencing.

We are essentially reading the book that we are made of.

by Jared Zeizel