Dreams will sometimes come back to us during the course of the day, but it is better to try and recapture them as soon as we wakes up. If we can get into the habit of doing this, it will be easier to remember an experience or perhaps a warning or some advice received during the night, which will help us see what we should do during the day.
We may sometimes come across the following experience: while meditating we suddenly find ourselves face to face with something terrifying and we cannot understand what happened. It is simply that we went out from the body and were lured into the shadowy regions of the astral plane, where we sensed we were being harassed and threatened. For we must not forget, the encounters we have on the astral plane will not always be very reassuring. If we find a mole creeping about in our garden and try to catch it, it immediately runs into its underground burrow because that is where it feels safe. How does it know it can escape by hiding in a hole in the ground? As for human beings, depending on the danger that threatens we try to escape into a cave or up onto the roof or climb a tree or take to the water. The dangers that threaten human beings are not only physical, they can also be psychic. When we are pursued on the astral plane, in regions inhabited by monsters and malicious entities, we must run back as fast as we can into our physical body, in other words into our burrow. This is what happens when we have a nightmare, we escape by waking up because, by re-entering our body we re-enter a different world. Nightmares usually end abruptly, we wake up with a start and a sensation of immense relief to find ourselves in the safety of our own bed. We say to ourselves, ‘Thank goodness it was only a dream!’ In reality the safe refuge is neither the bed nor our room, it is our physical body. The abrupt awakening was caused by the fact that we knew subconsciously that in order to defend ourselves against the hostile forces and entities of the astral world we had to flee to the shelter of our body, which is like a fortress in which we can take refuge. If we stayed on the astral plane we would continue to be at the mercy of our aggressors; by leaving that plane and taking shelter behind the solid walls of our physical body we escape from them. Spirits are not given access to all planes as they have been created to live and work on one particular plane. The entities of the astral plane, therefore, cannot pursue us wherever we go. If we know how to move from one plane to another we will be safe. In fact it is this ability to move from one plane to another that gives human beings their superiority.
It is here in this physical world, which the ascetic despises, the materialist overvalues and the mystic undervalues, that we have to fulfil our spiritual destiny and realise our higher individuality, and gain the nature and knowledge of life after death. For it is only the maturity of wakefulness and its paramount contribution that can lead to such a realisation and knowledge. Dreams, however, come as tutors to show where one has erred. Nature further breaks up human modes of mental life into the triple degrees of unconsciousness, semi-consciousness and consciousness (corresponding to deep sleep, dreams and wakefulness) and thus renders it possible for humans to grasp certain truths. We are so powerfully mesmerised by the belief of world materiality, so strongly chained during our wakeful condition to self-identification with our body alone that nature has to enable us to detach ourselves periodically from our bondage by periodically breaking up both the wakeful state and our earthly life.
This she does by interrupting the one with sleep and the other with death. One similarity that can be observed, showing sleep represents or corresponds to the region of life after death, relates to the timing of the two states. One recalls one’s dreams in disjointed fragments and sudden revelations. They are rarely remembered as complete parts.
The process usually is as swift as it is unexpected, quickly lost on awaking, save for blurred broken memories of the last scenes. We often regret this swift transience of dreams that allows us to remember them only in meagre scraps. Similarly, in an occasional flash of memory we remember our past lives in disjointed fragments. Before one is awake one cannot understand that what one sees in dreams does not exist externally. Similarly, the true reality of the regions of life after death dawn on a human only when he or she leaves the physical body.