Dreams, Nostalgia, and the Alchemical Process of Memory

[kimberlysteele]

 

To dream is to sort. Dreaming is a process not unlike sorting the laundry before it is washed.

In dream-sorting, the bad stuff goes first. The initial phase of sleep plunges us into the lowest part of the astral plane to which we vibrate. The lower astral plane is the level of passions, urges, and strong emotions. To be caught in the lower astral feels like hell. When I used to suffer regular night terrors in my teens, it was so scary that my experiences made me horror-movie proof. I cannot be frightened by a horror book or film. Because I have a fairly decent memory of the lower astral, I find light sleep unpleasant. I try to avoid naps if possible: they are anything but refreshing. If dreams are a day swimming at the pool, then for me naps are being splashed with puddle water by an oncoming car while fully dressed. 

The Lower Astral

All beings pass through the lower astral but it is only the nasty ones (or the foolish) who want to hang out there. Ouija boards and seances access the lower astral. Suicides are often trapped between its layers, bouncing between the middle and higher astral and the etheric planes. Demons populate the lower astral, hoping to find hosts who can be suckered into a relationship. Why 19th century Spiritualists and their modern day equivalents failed to realize this baffles me: don't they understand the grey-water function of the lower astral in the series of planes? How is it that I know better than to stay in such a polluted place, as a former atheist no less? I find it astounding that seasoned professional mediums ignore the grave danger they put themselves in every time they deliberately channel what they think is a client's dead relative, and with no banishing ritual! The lower astral is, for lack of a better word, dirty because of its function. The lower astral is meant as a pit-stop, not a final destination or an entertainment lounge.

Dreaming is returning home, and it is a glacial process. I often dream about the cottage my parents used to own on a small lake in a nearby state. In the dreams I must pack to leave the cottage, which luckily was sold some twenty years ago just as my parents became to old to handle the long drive there and back. Packing in my dreams represents getting life stuff done on the material plane. For me, this means writing, running a music lesson business, performing, and starting a subscription library. Naturally I always dream I am running late. Packing also symbolizes the preservation of things I deem important, whether that means literally learning how to pack vegetables into canning jars or hanging on to the treasure trove of written language for other people's future great-grandchildren.

That Middle Layer: The Mid-Astral

Thank goodness the mid-astral is where I remember most of my dream time.  The function of the middle astral is also to sort, however, it isn't as crude of a wash as the lower astral where the larger chunks of grime are dealt with.  The middle astral is why dreams have a reputation for being silly.  There's nonsense in it, all sorts of Jungian symbols, ice cream castles in the air, animals who speak fluent French, and whatever goofiness you're prone to imagine.  During this form of sleep, the higher self separates and goes to hang out with the highest plane of beings it is attuned to while the conscious part of the self that usually has to do the "adulting" gets to play around with the themes of the sandbox of life.  Like any form of child's play, this sport isn't necessarily relaxing or fun.  I was the sort of child who hated childhood -- I am much happier now as a middle-aged woman.  For me, play often felt too dramatic and too pregnant with possibility of where it was leading me. 

The real question is "Who is my higher self hanging out with in Mid-Sleep?"  I get brief glimpses of it if I'm lucky: a flight over the ocean, a sunlit grove, some snippets of orchestral music.

Nostalgia vs. Nihilism

Mostly I don't remember the good stuff because it is harder to remember.  Allow me to repeat myself: the good stuff is harder to remember.  That's why we need to try harder to remember it.  Yes, I am talking about nostalgia.

Nostalgia can be extremely toxic.  The playwright Tennessee Williams had a knack for capturing the toxicity of nostalgia: think Laura's mother in the Glass Menagerie, forever pattering on about gentleman callers as she tried to imprint her halcyon days upon her pale, cowering daughter.  Nostalgia often paints the good old days in a wholly unrealistic light: maybe Pleasantville wasn't so pleasant after all, all things considered.  Nostalgia siphons off all the warm fuzzies and then pretends the rest of it never happened.  Nostalgia cleanses the past, or at least it cleanses our perception of it.  Nostalgia, taken too far, is taking pessimist nihilism and spinning it around to the opposite pole, which is an equally bad thing.  Nostalgia is of vital importance because it is our window to gratitude for the past.  Without the sorting effect of nostalgia, it is extremely difficult to remember anything positive or happy because of our evolutionary tendency to remember negative events.  

The past is what it is.  When considering it, we need to take into account that it is a spectrum between two poles: nostalgia and pessimist nihilism are only useful insofar as they allow us to see the spectrum between them.  The past was the best of times and it was the worst of times.  Neither should we shed too many tears for the loveliness of what was nor should we stew in frustration for the unchangeable horror that was.  The truth was always somewhere in the middle.  All of our ideals from back then may be tarnished, but that doesn't mean we should leave them behind.

When I was a child, my grandmother and grandfather would babysit my brother and me at their house in northern Illinois so my parents could catch a break.  During those weekends, I remember playing with a toy called a Lite Brite.  The Lite Brite was a black box with a lightbulb in it.  It had plastic pegs you could stick into a grid of holes to make colorful displays.  The nostalgist in me wants to romanticize the Lite Brite, to see it as  a representation of an idyllic childhood.  In this childhood, I could paint myself as a beautiful but misunderstood genius child.  The pessimist wants me to see it as plastic landfill junk, the stupid wastefulness of a decadent age for a spoiled, miserable brat.  The truth is in the middle. 

Time flies and the events of only a second ago are already in the past, never to be re-lived.  Mistakes can and will be made.  I suppose the trick is not to overreact, to put it into perspective, and to keep plugging away.

We are all on our way back home, better late than never.   

Comments

"We are all on our way back home, better late than never."

[cs2]

That's a great line! I too enjoyed Lite Brite. I had a revelation years later when I took sewing lessons and learned to cross-stitch. That was what I'd felt was missing with Lite Brite. I wanted it to be more tangible and to create something that was a solid accomplishment. Somehow my cross stitches exemplified that more.

Re: "We are all on our way back home, better late than never."

[kimberlysteele]

Thanks! I love that thing but you're right. It always seemed kind of pointless, like laying out all the tiles of a mosaic and then not gluing them down or grouting them, just clearing them away every time you felt like making a mosaic. I had the same frustration with Etch a Sketch.

Re: "We are all on our way back home, better late than never."

[cs2]

This has me thinking about childhood toys training us for certain tasks as an adult. I had no patience for Etch a Sketch because I had decent hand enough coordination to draw. Your mosaic comment is also how I feel about puzzles. If you frame the huge puzzle and keep it in storage (if not on the wall), then you have an encapsulated memory with grandma on that road trip with the RV. But if you got through all that work just to collapse the puzzle and put it back in the box...why?!

Re: "We are all on our way back home, better late than never."

[kimberlysteele]

I suppose it is just an exercise. Like my collapsible exercise bike that I continually pedal to Destination: Nowhere, it's only to work out. The results are fitness, though they are mental in the case of the Etch a Sketch or a puzzle.

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Kimberly,

What a timely piece. I wonder it the hypnogogic state is the beginning of the lower astral level.

If I could ask for some advice: My roommate shouts in his sleep sometimes and wakes me up. I ask what happened and he'll say that he was being chased by monsters and creepy things.

Now that I know more, I have realized he's hanging out in the lower astral. Perhaps since he is a light sleeper, this why he shouts. As you said, this is a pit stop for all of us, but we're deeper sleepers and don't wake up from it?

Since my room is next to his, I thought my banishings would help his room, but they don't. So with his permission, I also do a banishing for his room daily. He also wears the red bag with salt and the nail. These have seemed to work.

Now it gets weird.

Last night, he was shouting again so loudly I had to check up on him. I was disappointed that the banishings weren't working, but he told me something else happened. He was sitting on a couch talking to a woman he thought was his mother, but when she turned around, it was a different woman who totally freaked when she saw him. This woman grabbed the man next to her and he looked in shock.

I'm convinced he is astral travelling in his sleep and he doesn't like it. Is he doomed to this just because he's a light sleeper? For some reason my intuition is telling me to get a piece of iron to put under his bed or pillow. But iron is more for etheric issues, I think. Do you have any ideas?

Thanks,
Jon
tangential tangerine cactus

Maybe try a bedside geometric?

[kimberlysteele]

Definitely try a bedside geometric, they are more equipped to protect on the astral level than anything else I have found: https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/26916.html

The thing is ALL sleep is astral travel. Sleep takes place mostly on the astral plane. It is where our brains "go" while our bodies slumber. Does he do discursive meditation? Probably the number one thing he can do to improve his sojourns in the astral is 5 - 20 minutes of daily discursive meditation on his own dreams and other subjects.

The woman he thought was his mother is what I call an Impersonator. They are a nasty sort of vampiric entity extremely common to the lower astral. I have dealt with them quite a bit. They deliberately impersonate people you know in order to gain your trust. One of the telltale signs it is an impersonator is that the entity is misshapen or lopsided in some way: too squat or too tall, one shoulder larger than another, or blurry as if they were having trouble keeping in focus.

Maybe hang a horseshoe or some other iron doodad like a cross made out of nails under it. Every little bit helps.

Polka-dot Paradoxical Earthworm

Re: Maybe try a bedside geometric?

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks! Those are excellent pointers and I'll pass them on.

Per your recommendation, I've also been reading. "The Astral Body and Other Astral Phenomena" by A.E. Powell. Thanks for that, too.

Re: Maybe try a bedside geometric?

[kimberlysteele]

Nice! I hope it helps.

Re: Maybe try a bedside geometric?

[lincoln_lynx]

The Impersonators I usually come across aren't flawed but turn weird at the end of a encounter.

Other dreams?

[(Anonymous)]

I hope you continue this, Kimberly, as I do recognize the lower astral and a bit of mid astral in my dreams, but most of mine fall into three other categories: media replay (which is why I avoid movies and am cautious about video games: print media doesn't affect me this way), perhaps these are lower astral but they are just boring; worlds that are not, in which I am someone else entirely, going about his or her life, in a world that is definitely not ours though has humans-I've never been completely inhuman though shapeshifter is an option, and which are not worlds from someone else's imagination; and futures which may be, which are by far the spookiest of dreams. These are not certain futures: some have come to pass, others have not, many still lie in the undetermined future. Some are entirely mundane events, some are global. Most are just glimpses, with little to anchor them in time and space.

I know of one similar dreamer who has lost contact with reality as a result of believing her dreams, and in my moments of less-groundedness, wonder if the parrallel universe folks are right, because there are some minor events I remember and those around me do not, and vice versa, and a few things my husband is quite sure I've said are so abhorent to me now and always, that I wonder. (Mandela effect, but at a personal scale.)

I have not found any futures dream resource that passes the basic filter of 'does this person have a decent life?' so if you know of any, I am very curious. I have several friends with the same frustrating talent, but none of us knows any more than the others. It also is a genetic, or at least, family line talent, but of course the person I inherited it from is a materialist anti-theist, so no help.

Thanks much for your writings,
BoysMom

Re: Other dreams?

[kimberlysteele]

When I was an atheist materialist, I often astrally traveled to a world I called "The Writing World" for some odd, unknown reason. The Writing World was/is a bleak, devastated place where people were crowded cheek to jowl like Soylent Green. There were lots of urban, dingy apartment buildings and acid rain that rarely let up.

Re: Other dreams?

[kimberlysteele]

I also had and continue to have experiences of alternate realities -- they do seem like possible futures. Only the gods know what they actually are. I have been able to form the beginnings of my astral and etheric pyramid theories based on my dreams of these worlds.

[youngelephant]

Hey this is a fun post! FWIW - The one time I visited some kind of heaven realm (still not sure what plane it was on) it was 1 - 1.5 hours after falling asleep, and the first dream of the night. A lot of my best dreams happen in that time frame actually. I have had 4 extremely disturbing lower astral dreams, and am not sure what times those occurred.

[kimberlysteele]

My husband tends to have some deep sleep early on -- basically your results may vary as far as how deeply you sleep in the night. But generally the "deep dive" phases of sleep tend to be a product of getting enough sleep and for most they happen after approximately six hours of slumber.