The "Reading Guide" and "Key Points" for this chapter were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not things Mike said during the lecture. The main text comes from Mike's commentary, and the blockquotes are Seth's original words (the portions Mike read aloud).
Introduction
This chapter uses the "dream camera" as a metaphor to explain that dreams are not bound by linear time and can record both manifested and unmanifested probable events. Thoughts, emotions, and feelings in dreams are projected as conscious, colored phantoms or shadows, and they influence the dream landscape. Seth points out that in the dream world, objects have no shadows while thoughts and feelings do; recognize the source of a phantom and tell it to leave, and the phantom will disappear. Emotions not faced in waking life may form dark scenes or fearful dreams in the dream state. The dream world is directly created by thoughts and feelings and changes at every moment.
Key Points of This Chapter
- The "photographs" in dreams are not restricted by the sequential order of everyday time and space, and can record both manifested and unmanifested probable events.
- Thoughts, emotions, and feelings are projected in the dream world as conscious, colored phantoms or shadows, and they have their own activity.
- In the dream world, objects have no shadows; only thoughts and feelings have shadows. If you recognize a phantom and command it to leave, it will disappear.
- Fears not faced or suppressed while awake may be projected in dreams as gloomy scenery or as dreams of the death of someone close to you.
- The dream world is created directly by thoughts and feelings and changes at any moment, whereas the physical world is limited by time, materials, and conditions.
Main Text
Discovering the History of Your Psyche
Today I'm sharing with everyone Session 720 of Volume 2 of The "Unknown" Reality. The title of this session is "Discovering the History of Your Psyche, Exploring the Dream World Yourself, Fear of a Stormy Dream Landscape." This session began on Wednesday, November 13, 1974, at 9:55 p.m.
Seth began by saying that if you carried a real camera with you today, then when you were doing your daily work, taking a walk, or talking with friends, you could take some photographs, and you would preserve some scenes of that day's activities. But your film would only take today's photographs today, and yesterday's or tomorrow's scenes would not appear in today's photographs.
The photographer in the dream world, however, would discover an entirely different situation. For there, consciousness can capture scenes from entirely different times as easily as the waking photographer can take pictures of different places. Unless you understand this, certain dream albums will make no sense to you.
In the dream state, time is not limited; it is not restricted by our everyday space and time. So if you cannot understand that the photographs in dreams do not have the temporal sequence of our three-dimensional world, then you cannot understand what they actually mean. When you are awake, certain events you experience are real, and generally speaking these can be captured by an ordinary photographer. When the photographer takes this picture during your daytime, you consider it real.
But in the dream world, a far larger range of events is presented. Many events later manifest as concrete events, while other equally valid events do not manifest. So the dream camera will also capture those probable events. Anything you do in the three-dimensional world can be photographed by a photographer and kept as a memento, but the photographs you take in dreams are not necessarily the same — many things photographed in dreams are probable events that will not manifest in your three-dimensional world.
When you wake up with a dream photograph in your mind, it may seem meaningless, because it does not seem to relate to the official order of activities you recognize, and it has no connection to your daily life. You may make a particular decision in physical, waking consciousness, and that decision may bring about certain events. With practice using your dream camera, you can discover the history of your own psyche, and discover the many probable decisions experienced in dreams.
During the daytime you may make many decisions. Some manifest in your three-dimensional world, while others are only probabilities that you did not act upon. But when you take these photographs in dreams, it is equivalent to recording all of those decisions — both the probable ones and the ones that have already manifested. You will find that the history of every decision your psyche has made is in there. For one matter you made three decisions, and you chose one of them, while those not chosen are all preserved in the dream state. In dreams you can experience those things you did not go and do in real life, and these are used as a basis from which you make your physical decisions — those probable events that were not chosen, once experienced in dreams, can serve as a basis, a foundation, for the decisions you make in reality.
As you learn to interpret the individual photographs in your dream album, you will need certain skills. This should be easy to understand. For if you tried to understand physical life by taking a group of photographs only of different places and different times, then it would be very difficult for you to form a clear concept of the nature of the physical world.
In real life, if you take one picture here and one picture there, one in this place and one in that place, one last year and one the year before, and you put all these photographs together and ask someone else to analyze your physical life, the trajectory of your life, that person would not be able to figure out what was going on with you, because time and space would all be jumbled.
The same is true in your dream state. The dreams you recall are indeed like snapshots taken under various different conditions. If you randomly pull out one of them and ask what this photograph means, what life was like at that time, a person who has not experienced that life would not understand. You might say, that's not right — I experienced it, so how could I not understand? These photographs are very likely of probable lives or probable events that you did not experience. They were only a probability for you, so you do not recognize them either. If photographs from your life were shuffled and then given to you to identify, you would still be able to recognize them; but if those probable photographs were mixed in as well, then you would not be able to recognize them. For example, in a dream photograph, you are together with a strange man, and you may not even know what this means — in that probable reality, that may be your husband in that world, but because you did not experience that experience, you have no impression of it at all.
No single photograph tells the whole story.
Because it was taken at different times and places. So you should write down your description of each dream photograph. This is why recording dreams is so important. After you bring back the photographs from dreams, you must quickly write them down. Because unlike photographs in our three-dimensional world, which can be stored in a phone or a computer, those dream photographs have no place to be stored. The only way to store them is to describe them and write them down, and keep a continuous record. Because each one provides more knowledge about the nature of your own psyche, and about the unknown reality in which it exists. It provides more background knowledge about the nature of your psyche and the unknown reality in which it exists.
Shadows and Phantoms in Dreams
He says when you take a real photograph, you have to know how to use your camera. You have to learn how to focus it, how to emphasize the particular features you want to record, and how to reduce distracting influences. For example, you know the difference between shadows and solid objects. You know which are shadows and which are real. If you want to photograph a tree, you cannot photograph only the tree's shadow. Of course you can include its shadow, but you cannot say you only photographed the shadow. Sometimes, however, shadows themselves can be fascinating subjects for photographic study—some people specialize in photographing shadows, arranging a few dead branches with their shadows to create a composition of light and shadow; this is a discipline within photography. You may use them in the background, but as a photographer, you would not confuse shadows with solid objects. No one would deny that shadows are real, and any person in the three-dimensional world, not just photographers, would not confuse shadows with objects.
But now take this as an analogy—take the relationship between objects and shadows in this three-dimensional world as an analogy. He says your thoughts and feelings also cast shadows, which we will call phantoms here. But they do exist, and the role they play in dream reality is the same as the role shadows play in the physical world.
What produces these shadows? They are produced by your thoughts, emotions, and feelings. The role they play in your dream world is just as important as the role shadows play in the three-dimensional world. Without shadows, things look strange. Those of us who have done game design know that in the video options there is always a setting for whether to enable shadows, and how much shadow detail you want. When you enable shadows, and the higher the shadow detail, the more realistic the game's visuals become; when you turn shadows off, the characters in the game look very strange—they are not realistic enough. So although shadows themselves are not as real as objects, without their existence, objects also lose their sense of reality. Those of us who have studied drawing know that the main task is drawing shadows. If you are asked to draw a ball, an egg, or the outline of a figure, the important thing is drawing the shadows. Without shadows, a person is just a line outline, with no sense of three-dimensionality and no sense of texture. So photography and camera technique are a technique of light and shadow—always remember that photography is about light, how to use light, and then how to use the shadows formed by light.
Why do we say your emotions, your thoughts, and your feelings are shadows? Let us imagine an example. Suppose your inner self, your source—that most authentic thing within you—imagine it as a luminous light source, with no obstruction at all. But when the light source itself shines outward, for example if there is only one light in a room, you cannot see the light—if light itself has no shadow, you cannot see it. By "cannot see it" I do not mean you cannot see its brightness; I mean it has no external variation at all—it is just a field of light.
Suppose your innermost, purest state—the state we most want to attain through spiritual practice—is a light. And your thoughts, your beliefs, your emotions, your mental currents are the lampshade outside the light, a hollowed-out pattern. This lampshade is your thoughts, your beliefs, your emotions, constantly changing, and your inner self is that light. The light shining through that lampshade casts patterns of light and shadow onto the wall. And the shadows you see on the wall—most people take those shadows to be reality. In fact, you do not realize that they are projected outward by your inner light through that hollowed-out lampshade outside.
Teacher Xiyu, from the very beginning of the exercises, has always had you practice the lantern exercise—a light in the middle, with many hollowed-out patterns on the outside. What does that practice train? It trains exactly this—giving you an awareness, an awareness that your true nature is that light, and those external phantoms, those things that constantly shift and change, are your thoughts, your beliefs, your emotions, moving around outside the lamp, circling around, rising and falling, and thus manifesting as shadows outside.
This is not so clearly visible in our physical world. Because the manifestation of anything, from your belief to the shadow taking form, requires time, requires a process, and there are many branches and detours along the way, so in the end you cannot truly see that it was originally your beliefs, your emotions, that formed the external objects. Everything in our three-dimensional world is formed by these shadows. What are these shadows? They are your beliefs. We say beliefs create reality—like the shadows in a shadow puppet play, they are projected outward and become real. Your emotions are the same; they also project outward. In the three-dimensional world it works this way, though it is not so obvious to you, but Seth has always told you that this is how it operates. When you reach the dream state, all of this operates instantaneously—any thought in your mind, any idea, can instantly become the actual scenery in the dream, giving you a direct, intuitive experience.
He continues. The psyche originally has no shadows; add your thoughts and mental currents, and it has shadows. Why do all those spiritual practitioners tell you to train until you have no thoughts, no mental currents? It is so you do not get entangled with those shadows—once those shadows appear, there is restlessness, there is agitation, because you will be drawn along by those shadows.
They are beautiful in themselves, these shadows are beautiful, and they enhance the whole picture. The shadow of a tree cools the land and affects the environment.
A big tree, of course, provides good shade. Therefore phantoms alter the environment, but in a different way, and on another level of reality. In the dream world, your thoughts, your ideas, your notions are like the shadows of the psyche, and they also affect the environment of that world. Seth calls these projections of beliefs and thoughts in the dream world or in unknown reality "phantoms."
In the dream world, phantoms are like conscious shadows.
Here is a distinction—they are conscious shadows. In our three-dimensional world, shadows are not conscious; they do not move on their own; they are passive. In the dream world they are not passive, and their shapes do not depend on their source. They have their own abilities—these phantoms have their own phantom abilities. This is very interesting, and it is different from our three-dimensional world.
In our physical reality, an oak tree can cast a deep, dark shadow beneath it, and this shadow will move, faithfully reflecting the slightest swaying of the smallest leaf. But its movement is entirely governed by the swaying of the oak tree; no leaf's shadow moves on its own unless the leaf itself moves—this is common sense. Continuing with this analogy, in the dream world, once the oak tree's shadow is cast, it is free to pursue its own direction—the shadow comes alive, it is conscious. And that is not all. It also has a creative interactive zone with the oak tree from which it was born—it still has a connection with that oak tree itself.
Just like the shadows projected by our psyche—these shadows are created by our beliefs and thoughts, so thoughts and beliefs are the source of these shadows. But the phantom projected by this source of thoughts and beliefs, once projected in the dream world, gains self-consciousness and develops in its own way. And not only does it develop according to its own self-consciousness, it also interacts with the thoughts, emotions, and beliefs that produced it—they influence each other. This is the most interesting part. The principle is the same in our physical life—the objects projected in physical reality, when we interact with our objects, do they not also influence us? But in physical reality what is projected is real objects; in the dream state what is projected is a kind of phantom.
However, anyone sufficiently accustomed to inner reality will have no difficulty distinguishing the tree from the lively shadow.
He says a person with some experience of inner reality will not be unable to distinguish which are thoughts and emotions and which are the phantoms projected by thoughts and emotions—he can tell them apart. The premise is that this applies to those already accustomed to exploring inner reality. But those who are just beginning this practice often cannot tell the difference; they think those phantoms are things that truly exist in inner reality.
Just as a waking photographer has no difficulty distinguishing a physical oak tree from the shadow on the grass. Of course, but when you are a dream tourist, wandering through the inner landscape with your psychic camera, it may take you some time to tell the difference between dream events and their shadows and phantoms.
For someone visiting the dream world for the first time or just beginning to travel there—a person carrying a psychic camera and taking pictures everywhere—at first you really cannot clearly distinguish which are the real events of the dream world and which are the phantoms and shadows within that dream world. So you may photograph the shadow instead of the tree, and as a result, you get a truly beautiful work—it is beautifully photographed—but it will give you a somewhat distorted version of inner reality. You were supposed to photograph the tree, but you did not capture the tree; you photographed the tree's shadow, and then you came back and studied that shadow for a long time—it is a distortion, because you did not photograph the tree itself. So you must learn how to aim your dream camera and focus on the dream event itself, rather than photographing the shadows or phantoms of those dream events. If you photograph a bunch of shadows and phantoms and bring them back, it becomes even more distorted—it is already difficult to understand as it is, and this way it becomes even harder to understand.
How to Distinguish Realities in Dreams
In your everyday world, objects have shadows, while thoughts and feelings do not. In our physical world, our things have shadows, and this is normal, because the light source is outside; when a light source shines on things from outside, they are bound to have shadows. But thoughts themselves have no shadows, because thoughts are inside, and you cannot see them.
So in your dream travels, Seth has given you a very good method. You only need to remember that in the dream world, objects have no shadows, while those thoughts and your emotions and your feelings, they actually have shadows. He says you only need to remember this one point.
How should we understand this statement? It does not mean telling you to crouch down and look at whether something on the ground has a shadow; it is not that in a dream you see a castle and check whether it has a shadow; that is not the meaning. It is simply using such a thing to explain the concept of shadows to you. Actually, in ancient times we had a folk saying: you look at whether a ghost has a shadow — one with a shadow is a person, one without a shadow is a ghost. You still remember that old saying, right?
Since these are far more vital than ordinary shadows, and certainly richly colored, at first it is difficult to tell them apart.
In our reality, no matter what color the object itself is, its shadow is generally black. Unless you use a piece of colored glass or colored plastic, otherwise the shadows of all other solid physical objects are black, and you can easily tell them apart. But in dreams, the shadows are rich and varied, they are colored. When a shadow is colored, it is very hard for you to tell whether it is a shadow or an object. You can imagine: suppose the shadow of a flower in the three-dimensional world were also colored, then you could not tell whether it was the flower or the shadow. In dreams, that is how it is.
You must remember that you are wandering within a mental or psychic landscape. In waking reality, in the afternoon you can stand in front of a friend's shadow, and no matter how many times you snap your fingers at your friend's shadow, it will not move in the slightest. You kick it, you stomp on it, and your friend will not move at all. Because in the physical world, when you act upon his shadow, he obviously will not leave just because you tell it to disappear, or because you snap at it or push it.
But in the dream world, any apparitions will vanish immediately, as soon as you recognize them as apparitions and tell them to go away, they will vanish at once.
Why? Because when you recognize it, what is it that you recognize? You recognize that it is an apparition; do you not also recognize its source — oh, you say this is a projection of my fear, this is a kind of fear within my heart. When you recognize that source, and then you have no fear, you say, ah, this is only fear, what is there for me to be afraid of? Although it is projected as terrifying as a demon, it is only a projection of a fear within my heart, it is not real. At that moment, the moment this thought arises in your mind, your fearful thought is also gone, the source of the projection is gone, and the apparition is gone as well.
Although the apparition itself bares its fangs and claws, although it has autonomous consciousness, as if it were alive, it still depends on its source. Never forget this — the source of the apparition comes from the emotions, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs within your heart; it is composed of them. The moment you change that thing, the apparition automatically disappears. This is absolutely true. When everyone is exploring the unknown reality, you must remember this point.
You might think, well, I have remembered it now, but will I remember it when I am dreaming? You can remember it; try it if you do not believe it. When you are in a dream, you will suddenly remember that Seth said this point, and that you need not worry or be afraid. Why do we study these materials? It is precisely to give you some basic common sense, to let you know what the things you see might possibly be. So initially it is projected out from your own thoughts or feelings, and when you withdraw the source of those thoughts and feelings, then the shadow automatically disappears. This is very interesting, so when you explore, you have one more tool — no matter how terrifying it is, if you find its source, it will vanish immediately.
The actual shadow of a stone will faithfully reflect its shape, and in that regard, it allows for no creativity.
A stone in reality, depending on the position of the light source, will cast a shadow that is bound to be a certain way; this shadow has no creativity. But when a thought or feeling in the dream world casts its larger shadow upon the landscape of the mind, there is far greater room. You can treat your mental feelings as a kind of screen, a big screen, and treat this shadow as a projection cast upon it. It has far greater autonomy and variability — the same mood and emotion may not project the same thing. Here it tells you: unlike in reality, where the shadow cast by a shadow puppet in a shadow play is bound to be fixed, it is not so.
When you are dreaming, you are the same as when you are awake; your emotions obviously exist. You have emotions in dreams too; have you forgotten waking up crying from a dream? And many people wake up laughing from a dream. Of course you have emotions in dreams.
Actually the day may have been brilliantly sunny, but if you were in a gloomy mood, you might automatically shut yourself off from the natural light of the day, and not notice it, or even use that natural beauty as a contrast that made you feel more depressed. Then you might look out through your mood at the brilliant sky, and regard its beauty as a meaningless, or even cruel, outwardness.
He gives an example from real life. Suppose this afternoon the sky is cloudless, but you have just gone through a breakup, and everything you see looks gray and dim. At this time you sit in the shade; actually on a sunny day sitting in the shade is a very pleasant thing, but your mood is very depressed, and nothing looks right to you. There are two situations: in the first, you look at the brilliant sunshine and it does not seem brilliant either; in the second, the brilliant sunshine becomes a tremendous irony and contrast, making you feel even more depressed — outside the sun is shining, while inside my heart it is raining; that feeling is even more unbearable, and it would almost be better if it were raining both inside and out. So at this time a kind of contrast forms. You see, Seth is always using examples from our reality to explain to us, which makes it very easy for us to understand.
This, he says, applies equally to the dream state. But there, the shadows of your thoughts may be projected outward as the darkest desert landscape.
In a dream, this depressed, melancholic emotion of yours is not like in the daytime, where you only see the clear sky outside — when you are dreaming, this emotion of heartbreak may directly project a desert landscape, a stretch of desolation, like a bleak and chilly wind with no daylight at all, that kind of feeling.
In the physical world, you are surrounded by the sense data of the group, each individual helping to form that exterior environment. And on any sunny day, no matter how dark your mood, your individual thoughts will not turn the blue sky gray.
No matter how heartbroken you are, you cannot affect the emotions of others; others may be in the middle of falling in love, and their emotions will have long canceled yours out. So the sky is clear and the sun shines brightly, and it will not turn gray because of your individual depression, because this is a group event decided collectively, and your individual belief alone does not have that much power. But in dreams it is different — the biggest difference between dreams and reality is that in dreams it is entirely personal to you; there, your depressed emotion immediately forms a desert scene.
Some dream landscapes, on the one hand, are apparitions, cast by your thoughts or feelings upon the inner world, and on the other hand, they effectively represent the inner climate of yourself at the time of dreaming.
It represents your inner emotional state at that time, not your outer emotional state. Some people appear very cheerful outwardly, but they have what is called smiling depression; inwardly they are very depressed. But at such times, dreams cannot deceive anyone; in dreams they cannot fool anyone — no matter how sunny and smiling they appear in the daytime, in dreams they immediately reveal their true form. So sometimes dreams are more accurate than daytime reactions. From this angle, we can record dreams; if a person records dreams truthfully, we can detect early on a person's depressive emotions or depressive state, and by intervening early we can treat them well. Some people have depression without knowing it themselves; some have that kind of cheerful depression, where others cannot tell they are depressed, and they themselves do not know either, but in the dream state it shows up.
If you recognize their source, then such scenery can be changed within the dream itself.
When you know that this desert scene is caused by the influence of your inner emotions, then if your inner emotions change, the scene will change immediately. Conversely, you can also choose to learn from such apparitions — you say, I do not want to change it either; then you can learn a great deal from this apparition, and let it continue, while understanding that they are indeed a shadow projected out from within yourself. There are two ways to deal with it: one way is that if you want to change it, you change it; the second is that you can learn through it — the appearance of this scene means there may be some emotion in my inner world.
Facing Fear
If you are faithful to your own thoughts and feelings, then you will express them in your waking life, and they will not project disturbing shadows into your dreams.
If in your real life you are a person who expresses emotions, feelings, and sentiments directly, then you will not carry these things into your dreams and turn them into an unsettling shadow. So in our real lives, we should express our own emotions and our own thoughts as much as possible. Do not suppress them, do not hold them in. If you hold them in, they will still be released in your dreams. They will definitely be released.
You may be afraid that a beloved child or your spouse will suddenly die, but you may never want to admit such a fear. Yet that feeling itself may arise because of your doubts about yourself.
He does not think this is a fear; some people admit it. This inner fear of the death of one's closest loved one definitely has a cause -- it arises because of your doubts about yourself. You may be overly dependent on such another person; you depend on him, and then you doubt that you can live without him. That is a kind of doubt. The fundamental cause is doubting yourself, and what is projected outward, what is expressed, is the fear that another person will leave or die. And what is the root of your over-dependence on him? It is that you doubt that you can live well without him.
You try to live your own life secondhand, through another person's life.
What does it mean to live your life secondhand? It means you prove the meaning of your own existence through other people's lives. Your attention is no longer on yourself; you focus it on your child. Chinese parents, especially mothers, mostly have this problem -- once she has a child, she no longer sleeps with her husband; she goes off to sleep with the child instead, putting all her attention and energy onto the child. The child becomes her very lifeblood, and later this extends to tutoring the child's studies, helping with homework, the child's growth, and so on and so forth. So in China there are many mama's boys and mama's girls, and the problem is not with the children but with the parents. You live your life through your child's life, and the child's life becomes your life. Your own life no longer matters; everything becomes centered on the child. Some people are centered on their husband, some on their wife, some on their parents, some on their children. We are all living our own lives through other people's lives; this is called a secondhand life. You have not lived your own true life; you are proving the value and meaning of your own existence through others.
Once your own fear is acknowledged, it will lead you to other feelings behind it, and place a greater demand upon yourself.
When you recognize this point, the root of these things lies in a doubt you have about yourself. In Teacher Xiyu's interpretation, he will bring up a vivid case study -- a case of a young mother he recently treated during the pandemic. Once you read that case, you will understand what Seth means in this passage.
But if waking life is not faced, then the fear may cast its dim shadow, so that you dream of the death of your child or of another person close to you. The dream experience will then be focused within the dream's landscape and faced there.
When you do not dare to face this fear, when you do not dare to confront it directly, that fear will cast its dim shadow, and you will dream that your child has died, or that another person close to you has died. In Teacher Xiyu's case, that young mother dreamed of her child -- she kept dreaming of her child dying in a pool of blood. If you remember such a dream, you may think it is precognitive -- that it foretells some possible misfortune for the child, and that the event will come true. That mother thought exactly that. In fact, it is just the opposite: the entire omen of that dream event is an educational omen. It is not an omen that the child is in danger; it is an education for the dreamer herself.
It brings your fear into clear focus.
The thing you fear most -- you let it happen. Your most beloved child, you let it die; the person you love most, you let them die. It brings you into a situation where the fear is brought into its clearest focus. In such a situation, you should recognize that tragic dream situation as a shadow, and search within your heart for its source. Seth is teaching you step by step here. How to explore within dreams, how to interpret dreams, how to analyze dreams -- that is, after you go into the dream and bring back a photograph, how to analyze it. To analyze it is to find its source. You should treat it as an illusion, as a shadow, and find where your inner belief lies.
For this mother, the belief lies in her doubt about herself -- her doubt that she cannot live well on her own. Many mothers are bound to their children every day, not because the child needs her, but because she needs the child. Without the child, she does not even know where the value of her own existence lies. Some are lonely, and some are desolate.
Shadows Can Also Be Joyful
Shadows, you see, can be delightful and comforting.
Shadows are not only melancholy, not only sorrowful; they can also be joyful and comfortable. For example, on a hot summer day, isn't the shade of a big tree cool and comfortable, not melancholy at all? So some dream phantoms are also beautiful, comforting, and refreshing -- not all shadows are terrifying demons; some shadows are very comfortable and refreshing.
They can bring great tranquility and are sought after.
If you believe that God is a kindly father figure, perhaps you may personify him as Christ or Buddha, and then in your dreams you may encounter such figures.
Many people encounter these in their dreams, and they are quite substantial, especially real, but they are also phantoms projected by your own thoughts and feelings. They are phantoms too. For that matter, dreams of heaven and hell likewise fall into this category and are a kind of phantom. Some people have beautiful dreams every day, and those are also phantoms.
The shadow of a tree proves the existence of a tree, even if you only see the shadow.
For example, in our daily life, suppose behind the house, beyond your line of sight, you cannot see the tree, but you can see the tree's shadow -- don't you also know that the tree exists? Drivers especially have this experience -- many times, sometimes you can only sense the presence of a shadow, but you know that the thing must be there. So the phantom that appears in your dream also testifies to its source. Just as in the three-dimensional world of daily life a shadow proves the existence of an object, so in the dream state the existence of a phantom proves the existence of a belief or thought of yours.
It proves the existence of a valid objective dream object, which in that reality is as real as a tree is in your world.
The source of that objectively existing phantom in the dream world is like a dream object, just as real as a big tree is in your world.
The Creation of the Physical World and the Dream World
In the physical world, there is a period of time between the conception of a concept and its materialization.
When you have an idea and it manifests, there is a period of time involved. Beyond that, the operation of other conditions can slow down the concrete realization of a concept — when something manifests, it is not that the moment you think of it, it appears; there is a period of time, and it is also subject to the restrictions and support of other conditions, which can even completely block it. If it is not concretely expressed, that idea will be realized in another reality.
For example, before a concept can be transformed into a recognizable event, it must possess certain characteristics that agree with physical assumptions; it must appear within your space-time framework.
When a concept manifests in our physical world, it must satisfy certain basic conditions of the physical world — that is, the physical world must agree to it. You cannot create something that does not exist in this physical world. You say, "I want to first imagine a kind of metal that is lighter than air" — there is no such thing. And it must appear within our time framework. You say, "I want a flying saucer right now, capable of traveling through space and time; I want a time machine right now" — these are all things that do not exist; they are not within our time framework. Perhaps they will exist in the future.
But in the dream world, every feeling or concept can be immediately expressed or experienced.
In real life, time and conditions are needed, but in the dream world it is expressed immediately, realized in an instant.
In the physical world, there are buildings that you have constructed; they do not naturally jump out of the land.
In our physical world, we have built all kinds of tall buildings; they do not just pop out of the earth directly. They are the result of our beliefs creating — the belief designer's blueprint drawings, plus the construction workers' labor, plus building materials: steel, cement, glass, sand, all of these. Without these things, the building could not be built. You may have the idea alone, but in the three-dimensional world you cannot build it.
So in the same way, your thoughts become the products created in the dream world; they are a part of that environment.
In the dream world, the objects you build in your dream world are actually all created by your thoughts; thought creates them directly. Everything you see in the dream world is created by thought. In real life, things have both the part created by your thoughts and the part created by the physical world, right? They complement each other — without the workers' labor and without building materials, the house could never be built no matter what. But in dreams it is not like that; everything in dreams is created by thought.
Although they often change shape and form, whereas physically manufactured objects do not.
The things in the dream world constantly change shape and form, because they are all created by your thoughts, so they can change at any time, instantly changing their correlations. Things in dreams are all especially strange — suddenly here, suddenly there. But the things you make in the physical world will not be like that; they will not keep changing back and forth.
The earth has its own natural, given materials.
When we create in the physical world, there are natural, given materials of nature — there are earth, fire, water, wind, the so-called four great elements, and also metal, wood, water, fire, earth, and in chemistry we speak of more than 100 chemical elements, more than 100 kinds of atoms on the periodic table1. These make up all the things in the natural world of our physical reality. You must use these materials to form all your products, whether a cell phone or a house; they all need to be built from these physical things.
The dream world also possesses its own natural environment. You form your dreams from this natural environment and materials of the dream world, and use its natural products to create dream images. However, very few people have ever seen this natural inner environment.
At this point you understand: what is this natural inner environment that creates the dreamscape in dreams? It is your thoughts, your ideas, including your feelings, experiences, emotions, and mental processes — all of these. In other words, there you are creating entirely by your imagination. If something is not in your imagination, you cannot use it to create — if you cannot even conceive of it, it will not exist in the dream either.
So we should understand that the more we expand our experiences, the more we experience and create — this is where its significance lies. You can improve, you can elevate, you can create, but there is a foundational premise: you must have your imagination, your thoughts, your beliefs; all of these must be present in your thinking. If you want to create, you must also enrich the materials of your own creation, enrich the source of your own creation. The source of your creation is your thought — if your thinking is very impoverished, very one-dimensional, very narrow, or very restricted, then your dreams will also be extremely monotonous and not very interesting.
注释与核实
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Mike's explanatory aside in class. ↩