August 2015
Barbara Stevens Barnum, RN, PhD, FAAN
It’s a girl. I’m only 2 months pregnant, but she came to me in a dream. She was about 6 years old, and she said everything would be fine. She has dark brown hair like mine and seems to have an even temper like my boyfriend. She has a beautiful smile. She said that she got to pick us for parents.
I told my boyfriend, but he thinks a dream doesn’t count. And he doesn’t want to know the sex until she’s born. He says, “What you dreamed was just in your mind.” But it wasn’t just a dream.
The speaker was a small excited young woman from one of my dream interpretation classes. She sat back in her chair almost daring members of the group to challenge her. That didn’t happen. Several members nodded. One started to speak: “Let me tell you what my son said when he came to me before his birth . . .”
Dream interpretation is fascinating and valuable whether done in psychotherapy or simply for group members learning the process of interpreting their own dreams. Unfortunately the information available on the altered states of consciousness associated with dreams, especially for dreams like the one above, is limited. And these are the dreams that experiencers insist are important, different from regular dreams. Here we’ll call them visions. While the one above focused on giving information, here’s another vision with a different sort of intensity. It also appeared as a dream:
I was in a room—just an ordinary room, not surprising since I was looking for a new apartment in my waking hours. But I looked up at the molding at the top of the high ceiling, and I could see it with such detail—a slight crack over one of the curlicues, a small lightening of the dark wood at another spot.
I looked elsewhere in the room and found my vision equally enhanced. I had just begun studying Reiki in my waking life, and I wondered if this enhanced vision related to that. This was a lucid dream because I knew I was dreaming. I was able to analyze the dream even while it was happening.
The white walls were rough and I could see every detail—spots where the roughing was deeper, spots where it was thin. There were inadvertent patterns that had been created by the painter’s brush. It was as if I didn’t want to miss seeing a single stroke.
The vision was a delight. The room was ordinary, but I was enthralled by my visual abilities. I had never seen with such clarity.
When a dream has such intensity, or brings a message that strikes the experiencer with such conviction, I label it as a vision. Visions enhance one or more senses for the experiencer. The sense that is expanded may be one of our normal senses—like sight, sensation or smell. Or it may delve into the psychic—such as offering precognitive messages. Technically, I doubt that these so-called dreams share much with regular dreams. I doubt that they are initiated in the same part of the brain. Nor do I think—if one were to measure them—that they would ride on the same sort of brain waves.
Yet such visions inevitably are offered by people in my dream analysis groups. This is not surprising; where else are the experiencers to go when seeking explanations? With our present language, the only way to talk about visions is to label them as dreams. But is this adequate for exploring these unusual experiences? Perhaps the issue is not that of exploring them but of honoring them, of respecting the depths from which they arise.
The term, dream, seems to be the only available label. No one has ever said to me, “I must have been in a different state of conscious.” No, they’ll say, “ I had this weird dream.”
Even in this article I’ll use the term dreaming to indicate both so-called regular dreams and visions. It’s the term people use today.
Here, we’ll examines those dreams that seem to the experiencer to escape a normal dream definition. And one of the invariable characteristics of these visions is the intensity or the impact on the dreamer.
A related theory was popularized by Charles T. Tart (ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS). He noted that we are not really clear about what we mean by dreaming:
Close questioning of people about the formal nature (as opposed to the particular content) of their dreams will reveal many differences between one person’s dreams and another’s (p. 205).
. . . there may in fact be several psychologically and experientially distinct phenomena that have been indiscriminately lumped together under the term “dream” (p. 205).
Tart noted that our language has yet to recognize these different states of consciousness. Indeed, when you examine his assertions, there may be no such thing as a typical dream. My interest here is in making a pragmatic, perceptual cut between other dreams and visions. Visions are the dreams for which experiencers quickly claim: “This was so real.” Or, “I can’t believe it was a dream.”
It’s difficult to collect physiologic data on such irregular dreams because their appearance can’t be predicted. Hence they are seldom captured when an experiencer is wired up in a dream lab. But I think that Tart’s right: some so-called dreams arise from different states of consciousness—possibly several different states. This is not to say that regular dreams are all of one kind. But here I aim to separate visions from all sorts of other dreams.
It’s not surprising that the altered states of consciousness that are visions occur in conjunction with dreams. Dreams, themselves, are altered states—altered from our normal waking beta brain waves. Dreams may serve as a portal to many other altered states of consciousness, providing access to deeper levels of the subconscious.
Dreams aren’t alone is providing this access. Meditation seems to be another altered state of consciousness with the ability to open doors. And some people fall into a different state of consciousness while doing a routine task, like driving on a long unchanging highway. The dream state, however, has a natural advantage: not all of us meditate, but all of us dream.
This article, by necessity, looks at reported personal experiences. Brain research has yet to give us enough physiological data to isolate these experiences. I’ve drawn my examples from dream groups instead of psychotherapy clients to avoid experiencers with overt psychological problems.
Additionally, dream groups are a more fruitful source because one reported experience inevitably leads other group members to contribute similar experiences. In dream groups, I find that about one-third of the examples offered by the group deal with visions that escape the ordinary dream label. Many participants reported old visions—some remembered from early childhood. No one reports an ordinary dream from when they were six years old. Visions have endurance.
WHEN VISIONS APPEAR
Visions appear at many times: 1) at the beginning of the hypnagogic state, 2) at the end of the hypnopompic state and 3) within a dream. They can also appear during a waking trance not associated with dreaming. In this format, a vision inserts itself into one’s waking consciousness.
Hypnagogic States
Hypnagogic events occur just as one is falling asleep, in that fine border country between waking and sleeping. The hypnagogic state is a unique altered state of consciousness, a very light state of trance.
At first the dreamer may not realize than an altered state of consciousness has occurred. These visions may be perceived as occurring when one is awake. Usually the dreamer has already bedded down or perhaps relaxed on a couch.
Hypnagogic events tend to have many somatic effects (tingling in the body probably being the most common). In addition, the hypnagogic event is often marked by a temporary paralysis. Experiencers for whom this event is new are often terrified, especially as the paralysis extends to not just the body but also the voice. The person may try to alert a sleeping spouse only to discover that he can neither move nor speak. Normally, the paralysis stage passes quickly, although it may seem very long to the person undergoing it. Take, for example, the following account:
I did not perceive myself as asleep yet. Suddenly I felt as if my body had come alive with energy. In my mind, I saw the energy as a flow of colors. The sight was beautiful, but I felt like I had touched a live wire and was being electrocuted. Yet it felt good, like a sexual experience. I tried to move and felt myself to be paralyzed. Then I became scared. What was happening to me?
My husband was inches away, but I couldn’t move or speak to him. I felt imprisoned in my body until the paralysis passed. Then I quickly came fully awake, driven by my enormous fear.
In addition to somatic events, hypnagogic states may have plot lines. Usually hypnagogic states are very beautiful.
Hypnopompic States
Hypnopompic events , in contrast, take place just as one is awakening, when one has not yet returned to a normal state of consciousness. Some characteristics of the hypnopompic state were particularly disturbing to experiencers in my classes. The first characteristic was one of bilocation: being both awake in one's bed and still in the vision one was experiencing before waking, that is, still being in the vision and simultaneously being awake.
In my dream groups, one experiencer felt this bilocation with awe, while another feared that she was losing her mind. Neither had ever heard of bilocation before they experienced it. In other cases, the experience may feel, except for its content, like it is a regular dream.
Hypnopompic experiences can be fascinating in their intensity and their strangeness. For example one woman reported:
I found myself in a hawk’s body. The shock brought me awake, but I was still in the hawk’s body as well. It was so amazing. I could feel the power of my wings. They felt like they covered the earth when I spread them. I could feel the wind against them, but I could bank to make the wind my tool, not my enemy. I could soar on the currents, and I know this was exactly the way a hawk felt. My vision was unbelievable: I could see clearly for what seemed like miles. I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to leave this exhilarating experience.
And then I dive-bombed down to the earth. In seconds I had a squirming mouse in my mouth. I felt myself crunch its bones. Then I had a thought: “Get me out of here! I don’t want to eat a mouse!” I made one more crunch before I could make myself leave the hawk’s body.
As soon as I was totally back in my human body, I ran to the bathroom to wash out my mouth. Yuck!
When one experiences a deep hypnopompic state like this, there is no way to call the vision just a dream. Dreamers who experience deep hypnopompic states also report taking in information from a source other than our natural cognitive learning (left brain) processes. Such information is often reported as being received all at once. Monroe (ULTIMATE JOURNEY) labels these compact bundles of information as rotes. Group members for whom this form of direct knowing was new tended to say things like, “I just knew it, but I can’t tell you how.” Or “I just knew it was true.”
Within-Dream Events
Visions don’t have to occur when falling asleep or waking up. They can occur entirely within a dream cycle. Then they are remembered just as one would remember any other dream when awakening. But they still have that feel of being extra real.
Waking Trances
Not all visions are so closely associated with dreams and sleep. Dream group members often segue into event occurring in waking trances. I suspect that’s because these states mimic trance states they have experienced in dream visions.
Waking trances occur when one’s state of consciousness shifts while one is awake—awake in an unusual fashion one might say. Waking trances are very similar to the hypnagogic state. An experiencer can perceive himself to be slightly dulled over or totally awake. In this case, the experience is much like a lucid vision (when one recognizes he is dreaming). Alternately, it's possible that one isn’t even aware of the shift in brain activity.
Here's an example offered by one man who seldom dreamed. This took place when he perceived himself to be awake:
I was walking in the park where a concert was going on. I could feel the vibrations of the music, particularly of the drums. I sat down on a bench that seemed to be midway between the two sets of broadcasting speakers. For moments I just listened to the music.
Then I looked up at the trees. It was as if each leaf was clearly defined from every other leaf. It was weird—as if I could see each leaf blow in the wind separately. My sight is not this good, but this effect lasted for several minutes. And then it faded.
It’s likely that the drum beat in the music lulled the man into a different brain state—just like a hypnagogic event before sleep. Indeed, indigenous shamans have used this technique for centuries. Modern medicine labels this brain entraining acoustic driving.
COMMON VISION EVENTS
The subject matters of impact visions are diverse, but some common ones have been reported for centuries. Indeed, all of the common ones discussed here were brought up by dreamers from my classes: visits with the deceased, with future children, with demonic entities and abductions.
Contact with the Deceased
Visits from deceased loved ones are perhaps the most common sort of vision. The deceased person may have something to say, or the visit may itself be a symbolic message that life doesn’t cease with death. For many people, this is the only sort of vision they ever experience.
I’ve never had a dream group in which someone didn’t bring up a dream featuring a deceased friend or relative. These dreams often feel quite different from a normal dream, and many dreamers conjecture that they represent real visits by the deceased.
Whether real or simply psychological (both can occur), there are differences in perception by experiencers. Visits from the deceased feel like actual visits, and others are merely dreams about the deceased. I always find people who are adamant about some such visits not simply being dreams.
In one of my dream classes, a participant captured this difference in an interesting way. She reported that her very pragmatic husband, a person unlikely to admit to after-death encounters, talked of visits with deceased persons in the following way. ”Last night I dreamed about Uncle Bob. . . “ Yet strangely, every time he addressed a dream about his deceased Aunt Mildred, he said, “Aunt Mildred visited me again last evening.” The woman suspected that the latter wording indicated a different type of dream, namely a real vision by the deceased as opposed to dreaming about the deceased person.
Not all dream visions with the deceased concern the fact of their death. Sometimes the visits have different purposes. Take for example, this illustration:
Around the time of my 70th birthday, I received a series of dream visits from my long-deceased father. In these dreams he told me that he had always hated me. My older sister was like a buddy to him, but I was independent from the start. He hadn’t wanted me; he had wanted a son. He even hated the fact that I was prettier than my preferred sister.
This message was delivered with much invective and offered with no saving grace. It didn’t resemble his real life personality which was reserved and distant but neutral. But in these dream visits, he was the worst bully one could imagine. The tirade was truly a nightmare each time—but I had no doubt that my father was actually there and that these were his true feelings.
The woman felt the presence of the father in these visions. Although cold and indifferent, he had never before expressed such malice. After discussion with the group, the woman admitted that what the father said, cruel as it was, confirmed what she had believed all her life. When alive, the father would not admit to these feelings. Even though the messages in these visions were harsh, at least they validated her own childhood perceptions. It gave her back a sense of faith in her own instincts.
This is a good example of visions that could be explained away on psychological grounds. But the intensity of the visits marked them as different than regular dreams.
Pre-birth Contact with Future Children
It’s not uncommon for a pregnant woman to report being approached in a dream by an older version of the child she is carrying or perhaps a child she will conceive in the future. Usually the child presents as 5 to 10 years of age. Dreamers who experience pre-birth visits should be reassured that the phenomenon is not unusual.
In these visions, the child-to-be communicates its coming arrival or something about its own talents or limitations. Sometimes that mother only remembers the visit years later when she happens to look at her then older child whose appearance suddenly reminds her of the vision. Nor is the dreamer always the mother-to-be, although that is the most common pattern. Recall that this article began with a pre-birth report from a class member. The following is my own report:
At one stage I was working as a therapist with pregnant women, and one of them was expecting twins. After a sonogram she was told that the infants were both male. But I had a dream in which I saw her twins in utero. One was much larger than the other, who was almost hiding behind the larger one. The tiny one smiled at me, and moved outward just enough that I could see that it was wrapped in a pink blanket. Indeed, the smaller baby proved to be female at birth.
Demon Dreams
A surprising number of visions dealt with demons or devils. I came to understand that these were often the incidents that brought people to the dream groups in the first place. Not infrequently, these dreams extended back into childhood. One Catholic woman in her 60’s reported a repeating vision that she first experienced at about the age of six:
My mother was very religious, so I was exposed to many religious beliefs early in my life. They bordered on ‘fire and brimstone.’ Then I had the following dream. It happened again and again, making my life a nightmare for many years.
In the dream I’m walking along a creek that borders on our property. The creek bed is almost dry. There is perhaps a foot or two of water still running through it. I decide to wade in it. I take off my shoes and enjoy feeling the water flowing between my toes.
Suddenly the devil appears. He is exactly the picture I had learned to fear: horned, with a tail and pitchfork, his face terrifying. I stop in fear.
The devil tells me that he will hold me down in the water with his foot on my neck, and I will drown. The foot or so of water will be enough to do it. But if I give my soul to him, he won’t kill me.
Each time this dream recurs I have to make this decision all over again, and nothing has ever felt more real that this devil’s threat. I’m terrified, but each time I decide that drowning would be better than letting the devil have my soul. He leaves in a horrible rage, and I wake up, still in terror but relieved that he did not drown me.
These dreams continued until I was about 10 years old. Even today, I wonder what would have happened if I had ever made the alternate choice to save myself by offering up my soul.
Various group members offered their own versions of this tempted-by-the-devil dream. Most of them were people whose families were very religious and/or used the threat of religion to control the person as a child. Only one member, instead reported such dreams occurring only in adulthood.
This type of devil dream seemed very real. Like all visions, they were remembered in great detail. Whether or not these dreams were incited by a religious fear, they were reported as terrifying and very real experiences.
I have yet to find a dreamer who says that he/she yielded to the devil’s temptations (often the focus of these dreams). Whatever the dream circumstances, the plot is always the same: threat, temptation, rejection, terror and a sudden awaking.
Abduction Dreams
It was more unusual to have group members report abductions by aliens, but it did happen. Most commonly these reports described aliens with thin gray bodies and large eyes. Sometimes these were dreams of escape where the dreamers only remembered seeing thin gray arms trying to grab them. Other times the dreamers reported medical experients. A most unusual alien abduction tale was the following vision:
I saw the aliens gathering, and I wanted to get away before they spotted me. I hid behind a large tree that was the only spot available in the rather large field. They did not seem to notice me, but I was still fearful. Then the dream became lucid and I knew that this was not the first time that they had taken me. That made it even more fearful.
Then I realized that I was totally aware of what they would do to a captive. But I didn’t remember their instruments having been in my body. With a sudden knowledge, I remembered that I knew about them, not because I had been a captive, but because I had been one of them in a prior life. But now I was reincarnated in a human body. It was the shock of this memory of having been one of the aliens that awakened me.
This was the only case in which someone remembered being an alien. I was surprised by the high number of abduction dreams, but in many cases, such visions were what brought members to the class in the first place. Of course I had a skewed set of participants with a higher-than-normal representation of all sorts of visions—including abduction phenomena.
PARANORMAL DREAMS
Many visions are paranormal/psychic. Group members reported visions of telepathy, clairvoyance, and/or precognition.
Telepathy
Telepathy involves getting information from another person’s head: mind reading, if you will. Telepathy usually conveys thoughts (e.g., the money is hidden in the basement), but it can also be communication on a visceral level. Many mothers in my group reported receiving telepathic visions from their children (almost always crisis states were involved).
Sometimes the telepathic message occurred in the dream state, sometimes in a waking trance. The following is typical of these accounts:
My son appeared in my dream; he was frantic and calling out for me. I didn’t exactly see him in his car, but I felt the car there—it’s deep red color, the steering wheel at an odd angle. I knew he was hurt. My panic woke me up.
It was the middle of the night, but I called his cell phone anyway. I got no answer. His college roommate didn’t pick up his cell either. I was frantic and wondering if I should start the long trip to the college. I kept calling but was getting no response.
It was about an hour later that I got the call. It was from the hospital. They said he had been in an auto accident and suffered a concussion. They would keep him overnight, but he should be okay. The dream had taken place at about the time of the accident.
In this sort of crisis dream, the mother-child bond dominated. Fewer such dreams were had by family members or friends.
Clairvoyance
Clairvoyance means having knowledge of something when one has no access to the information from any valid source. (Predicting from environmental clues doesn’t count.) Members most often saw upcoming tragedies or traumas—like earthquakes or floods. Perhaps the experiencer might see a mudslide in a part of the country where he knows no one.
Precognition
Precognition is the next common paranormal dream. Like clairvoyance, the dreamer has no advance information. But in this case, the knowledge about the event precedes it in time.
Some precognitive dreams are more like premonitions or warnings. These may be perceived as giving the dreamer a choice. There are, for example, numerous accounts of people who refused to board a given plane after such a dream. And sometimes that plane subsequently goes down. Of course, one can argue that such a dream warning is only remembered when the precognition is fulfilled. In my groups more premonitions involved plane boardings than any other subject matter.
This type of premonition, then, deals with precognitions that may or may not come to pass, warnings to be heeded (or ignored). Unless the dreamer has been thorough about recording such events before they occur, they are difficult to validate.
BODY EXPERIENCES
Often bodily experiences are the signal of a vision. Earlier accounts in this article exemplified visual enhancements, e.g., the man seeing each leaf standing out or the woman examining curlicues on the ceiling moldings. But there are other equally interesting body events.
Levitation
Levitation occurs in visions when a person feels that he is rising up off the bed. Rarely, a person feels himself rising from another position, even, for example, when standing. Although most commonly associated with hypnagogic encounters, levitation can occur in other states as well.
If one looks at the perception of levitation, one must first ask, what levitates? Moss (DREAMGATES) differentiates between the physical body, the energy double, the astral body and the mental body. He presents these as finer and finer levels of the human being’s essence. His model is only one of many that define different psychic levels within the human being. In essence, if one accepts the idea that these different bodies exist, one would have to ask which level of the person was levitating. (Many eastern religions or philosophies paint similar theories.)
One dream class member, for example, reported this hypnagogic event.
I was just lying down to sleep. My cat had arranged itself on my belly as it did every night. Then I felt myself begin to rise off the bed. I couldn’t imagine how this could be happening. For a few moments it was merely interesting. But as I neared the ceiling I started to get fearful. Then suddenly, I was back in my body and fully awake.
When the group questioned the experiencer further, she realized that throughout the levitation, she felt her cat still curled up on her stomach. This made her rethink the validity of her physical body actually leaving the bed. She couldn’t imagine her cat having stayed in place were that true. But this hadn’t occurred to her during the experience.
Out-of-Body Experiences
Out-of-body experiences (OOBEs) are another type of vision that at least initially focuses on the body. Sometimes dreamers simply realized they were out of the body; more commonly, they felt the process of slipping out. Some dreamers report these experiences as fearsome; some simply enjoy them. Groups included members with a one-time experience and those for whom OOBEs were frequent.
As in the case of levitation, we need to ask what part of a person actually leaves the body. The reports of dreamers leaving their bodies were not unlike those I had heard from patients suffering near death experiences (NDEs) in my work as a nurse. Many of these NDErs described finding themselves at ceiling height looking down at their bodies.
People visited different places once free of the body. Some NDErs were happy to be out of their pain-ridden bodies. Some dreamers enjoyed being able to go anywhere they wanted—at least after they got over the shock of being free of their bodies. But they did not undergo the tunnel phenomenon. Most of them visited earthly locations.
Other group members reported being out-of-body during surgery. Anesthesia is a great way to induce an altered state of consciousness. Such members reported roaming freely while under anesthesia. One stayed to watch her surgery. Not surprisingly, she was a nurse.
If there are indeed, such differential levels of being as Moss reports, (possibly each dealing with a different altered state of consciousness), bringing these higher level bodies back down into the physical body may be responsible for that feeling of falling so often experienced by dreamers.
DISCUSSION
The so-called dreams that I have labeled as visions are first and foremost, separated from other dreams by the fact that they are perceived as real, or at least more real, than other dreams. This perceptual factor is the critical first element. Commonly in visions, visits from the deceased were seen as visits initiated by the deceased. Visits from future children are accepted as just that, along with accepting that the child had insight into things that the dreamer lacks. Enhanced sight is taken as more accurate than normal vision. Even demons are given credit for existing and initiating the contacts.
This sense that the dreamer is passive—that the vision is controlled by others or by sensory abilities beyond his own, marks many visions. If something or someone else is in control, this brings into question just what is real. This is not as simple a question as it appears.
Obviously, it’s possible to credit the dreamer’s internal psyche with constructing these visions—and that is what most psychoanalyst and psychiatrists do. In some cases, that might be easy. For example the woman whose dead father displayed such a venomous attack on her could easily be seen as her working out long lasting suspicions. Similarly, the woman fighting the devil when a child could be seen as overwhelmed with her church’s fearful demonizing.
In philosophy, a difference is made between Naïve Realism (we all live in the same world) and Conceptualism (there is no world: only a world perceived.)
Newberg and D’Aquili, physician radiologists from the University of Pennsylvania (WHY GOD WON’T GO AWAY) offer arguments for conceptualism:
All knowledge, then, is metaphorical: even our most basic sensory perceptions of the world around us can be thought of an as explanatory story created by the brain (p. 171).
We know that our dogs live in a quite different world than we do. First, they see in black and white. There are no cones, just rods, in their eyes; they have no receptors for color.
Yet in the world of smell, our dogs outclass us in discrimination. Indeed, they can be trained to sniff out cancer, drugs and explosives, among other things. And, instead of calling their differences illusory, we use them to our great benefit, giving their smell capacity credence as real.
As Newberg and D’Aquili say, what is real is contingent—not on what is out there, but on the nature of our (and our dog’s) receptors. Crediting our dogs’ sense of smell as being real, is a conceptual interpretation of reality. This is a small example of how we revert to conceptualism when it suits our pragmatic purposes.
Is accepting our dog’s enhanced capacity to smell really any different than crediting paranormal perceptions that stand the test of time as to their accuracy? Is time as malleable as is a sense of smell? Modern quantum mechanics also supports conceptualism over naïve realism. Zukav (THE DANCING WU LI MASTERS: AN OVERVIEW OF THE NEW PHYSICS.) captures that difference between the old so-called objective physics and the new physics. Of the older Newtonian physics, he says:
The old physics assumes that there is an external world which exists apart from us. It further assumes that we can observe, measure, and speculate about the external world without changing it (p. 31).
The new physics, in contrast, reveals a reality that can no longer be posed apart from the observer. As Zuvak says:
. . . quantum mechanics, tells us clearly that it is not possible to observe reality without changing it (p. 33).
New science makes it more difficult to say what is real and what isn’t. For the moment, we can neither prove nor refute the attribution of reality given to visions by many experiencers.
But clearly, some visions are not easily dismissed as purely psychological. The accounts that dealt primarily with sensory phenomena such as the woman having an “electrifying” feeling throughout her body during a hypnagogic encounter or the woman who experienced being a hawk are hard to set off as originating from psychological sources.
In our society, the normative world view rejects the thought of non-psychological causes for anything labeled as a dream. Yet the experiencers perceived and accepted the possibility of other sources in these larger-than-life experiences.
I was reminded of primitive societies where dreams were always shared and taken as portents for the whole tribe. My group members often prefaced their visions by saying that they had never before talked about them. This spoke to me of this society’s repression of right brain functions in favor of left brain talents. Is this repression of half of our being really a healthy thing?
My objective here isn’t to establish the ground on which these experiences rest but perhaps to let us see one set of human experiences that serve as a preamble to future research. Perceptually, my subjects indicate that visions have a different power than most dreams, and that, to the experiencer, they feel different, more potent. I assume, as Tart proposes, that they arise from different states of consciousness from more ordinary dreams. If these states are so common, don’t they deserve out attention?
Visions are marked by one or more of the following characteristics: 1) unusual content: death, birth, demons, aliens; 2) time of occurrence: before sleep, as awakening, within dreams, in waking trances; 3) unusual bodily events: enhanced sensations, levitating, bilocating, out-of-body experience; 4) paranormal events: telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition. Most of the visions reported in my classes touched on more than one of these aspects.
What was most important about the visions was the high percentage of them reported in my dream classes. Participants often enrolled in the classes because they were mystified by these visions. Yet I was surprised that so many people in my dream groups had visions. I came to appreciate the fact that we greatly underestimate the frequency with which people assume the altered states of consciousness that probably accompany dreams and visions.
Yet the nature of our language keeps these events masked. It’s easy for the people who have these encounters to say, “But it was only a dream. Forget it.” And so these events are discounted. It’s socially acceptable to have dreams, but it’s not so acceptable to experience altered states of consciousness, to have visions. The experiencers in my classes who reported these non-ordinary dreams insisted on two characteristics to the experiences: 1) that a special clarity attached to them, a clarity that was not dreamlike at all, and 2) that these visions had a power to stay with them, often for a lifetime. These were the dreams they could not forget and for which they sought understanding.
These visions hold properties quite different than our waking states or than our normal dreaming states. Do these altered states of consciousness put us in touch with different aspects or reality? Is reality quite different than our simple conceptions of it? Does it work to our benefit or disadvantage to discount clues that offer a broader and different notion of our existence?
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