Precognitive dreams

 

I also have occasional precognitive dreams. Nothing dramatic- just small events in my everyday life. For instance, I mostly see words during hypnopompia and I later come across them during my writing or research. For instances, I recently saw the word ‘Dadu’. At that time I did not know what it meant and later during my research on the saint poet Kabir, I came across a reference to the sect of Dadu Panthis who are followers of Kabir. On another occasion, I saw a bright pink saree during hypnogogia and later I came across a photo of one of my relatives wearing the same saree !! The photo was taken recently so the possibility of my having seen the photograph some time in the past and then dreaming about it is ruled out. Recently, I accidentally discovered that I could see a bright golden aura like globes around lighted candles in a dim room. I could not see this earlier. 

Notes:

  ”In unwittingly setting up waking consciousness as the sole arbiter of all his knowledge, Western man limits that knowledge unnecessarily. And in regarding other forms of consciousness as mere copies or aberrations of waking consciousness, or else denying their existence altogether, he bars himself from the supreme insight and the highest felicity open to him. Unless he brings the dream and the deep sleep states also into his reckoning, he will continue to be deceived by the Unreal and to mistake the shadow for the substance. Where a dream is really sensible and significant, this is because the consciousness has completely retreated into the heart-centre, has dispensed with the contribution of the brain, and is once again working in complete accord with the master world-image which it finds within the heart. Such a dream then has at least as much status as a definite experience as ordinary waking life but it is a different kind of experience. And its higher worth and significance will be intuitively felt after awakening.

There are rare dreams which are most important because they originate from an altogether loftier level of mind than the animal part of our being. The man who will not listen to the sublime whisper of his Overself during his waking hours will respond more easily during his dreaming ones, when the veil is thinner, partly because his egoistic will is more relaxed and partly because he is actually nearer the source of consciousness. It is dreams of this superior and spiritual character which bear good fruit after the man awakes.”

- Paul Brunton

 

 

Orgone or Human Aura ?

 

Gradually I also began to see luminescent dots of light darting about in the air. These were different from floaters. Floaters are supposed to be suspended particles in our eye fluid. Many people can see them drifting in front of their vision when they look towards the sky and defocus their eyes. I can see the luminescent darting dots more clearly when the sun is closer to the horizon and the sky is not too brightly lit. I can see them even when it is raining. There movement does not seem to be effected by the weather. However their visibility to the human eye seems to be effected by light conditions. There are various theories on the inter net about these luminescent dots. Some say it is orgone energy – the building blocks of life on earth. Some think that it is a kind of optical illusion that is related to migraine aura. But I can see them even when I am not having a headache.
I later came across the following account from the book ‘ The Human Aura’ by Swami Panchadasi on the Project Gutenberg website : ……‘Another peculiarity of the prana-aura is that it is filled with a multitude of extremely minute sparkling particles, resembling tiny electric sparks, which are in constant motion. These sparks, which are visible to persons of only slightly developed psychic power, impart a vibratory motion to the prana-aura which, under certain conditions is plainly visible to the average person. This vibratory movement is akin to the movement of heated air arising from a hot stove, or from the heated earth on a mid-summer day.’
This is exactly what I have been seeing.

Past life memories?

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“Both you and I have taken many births, I remember them all, O Arjun, but you do not remember.”
- Shri Krishna to Arjun in the Bhagavat Geeta

 

The phenomenon of visual hypnogogis gradually became less frequent and I begun to experience something else. Just before I fell asleep scenes, sometime with people in them, begun to ‘pop up’ randomly in my mind I use the word ‘pop up’ for a lack of a more appropriate word. The difference between this and hypnogogia, was that while hypnogogia seemed as if I was sensing something outside of me, these scenes seem to come to the surface from somewhere deep within me, like some long lost memories. However they were strange to me because I did not seem to have any conscious memory of having visited those locations or having met those people. It was almost as if somebody else’s memories had been put in my head !! On one occasion I saw a child climbing some dimly lit staircases. He seemed to be wearing modern western clothes. In another occasion I saw a young man riding a motorcycle across a field. He seemed to have western features. On another occasion I was a young boy sitting on a ramshackle bridge which overlooked some kind of a big dug out pit. On another occasion I was a small child with a woman who appeared to be my mother. We were sitting atop a dome shaped building, and some kind of a commotion seemed to be happening below us. When I recollect, from the look of the people around me, it was probably a time period of 18th century. On another occasion I was a young man (westerner) named Illad, there was a radio in the room, this model was in use during the period of the Second World War. Somebody seemed to be calling out my name and was backing against the wall in fear. There are numerous such instances and I have written them down in my diary in detail, sometimes with sketches. In a lot of these scenes I seem to be an outsider looking at the scene and in some, as in the above mentioned case, paradoxical as it may sound, I was both the character and the onlooker. So I was both Illad as well as someone who was looking at this scene from ‘outside’. As if my consciousness was at two places at the same time!! The question is are these past life memories?

 According to Paul Brunton:

“How absurd and superstitious … is the lore of the soothsayer which professes to provide a prophetic interpretation for all dreams! Nevertheless we know, if not from personal experience then from recorded statements which are too authentic to be disputed, that this lore is not without some valid basis in so far as it applies to a single class of dreams only. A dream may be an accurate perception of some event happening at a distance in space or time; that is to say, it may be a genuine clairvoyant vision in the better sense of this much-misused term. How is it then that some dreams can thus take shape as forecasts of future happenings?

Now because the same time-series which rules waking life does not rule dream life, and because bodily sense-experience is mental in essence, it is possible under certain conditions which are more easily provided for most people by dream than by waking, for the mind to perceive in advance of their physical occurrence events in which the body is involved, and to project itself sometimes into the future with fair accuracy. This is the rationale of most prophetic dreaming.

It may happen that we dream things and thoughts, persons and events, which cannot be ascribed to earlier waking perceptions by any stretch of theory. Such dreams leave extremely vivid after-images and their memory is hard to shake off, even after several years have passed. They may indeed exert an unsuspected yet profound influence in shaping some attitude of our wakeful life. The sense of familiarity with new places or persons may, on rare occasions, be due to this cause. These dreams arise out of our karma and are either actual transcripts or vague reminiscences of former happenings, their roots are deep down in earlier incarnations and they revive events which happened then.”

 

Hypnogogia and hypnopompia

I began to grow more sensitive to the world around and within me at the age of 44. This was also a period when I had begun to suffer from severe anemia and chronic fatigue. I do not know whether this was a mere coincidence or a trigger for the latent abilities to begun to develop in me. It was not all like the dramatic accounts of sudden development of clairvoyance among people, which we come across in books and other media. It was slow and gradual, and in bursts. During this period I was living alone in Delhi with my two sons. My husband was away on a foreign assignment. So apart from the health problem there were other stresses and tensions that I had to deal with. It started with very vivid visual hypnogogia and hypnopompia (please see the Appendix page for explanation of these terms). I would see outdoor locations, landscapes, inside of houses. One incident of hypnopompia that I can still visualize in detail was an old European- mansion like building. I seem to be looking at it from the top, as if my consciousness was floating above it and I could look at it from various angles. The image was crystal clear and life like. In fact it would not be an exaggeration to say that it appeared more real than real life!! I started seeing these images quite often – almost twice or thrice a week. There was no pattern to it. Nor was it under my control. Sometimes it would seem as if I was looking through or telescope/tunnel. Sometimes the images were in miniature. Some times strangely illuminated faces seem to materialize in front of my closed eyes just before I fell asleep.