Where do dreams take place.

Do you believe that consciousness leaves the physical body when we dream and that dreams take place in alternate realities and environments to where your consciousnesses has been projected/transported?

Or alternatively , Do dreams take place inside the brain as it rests?

The reason I ask this question , is because some dreams are precognitive and in these dreams would appear to call into question the laws of time and space as we in the physical world would consider them.

I also ask this question because of the incredibly tangible nature of dream environments. Dream environments that seem to be quiet distant in years and proximity to the head laying on the pillow that is slumbering.

I'd like to know what you think about the nature of Dreams as a sanity check for myself and also to explore this little understood phenomena that seems to affect most of us.

My own theory.

When wide awake our brain is tuned to this physical reality. At different states of consciousness (eg hypnosis, sleep, drugs, coma or death) our minds are tuned into different realities - just as real but on a different "wavelength" so to speak.

[Eudaimonia]

I think your consciousness merges with your sub-conscious on a sort of shallow level...I think dreams are a way to build connections in your brain between your conscious mind and what you think about and what goes on around you and impulses parts of your brain gets but doesn't enter your consciousness during daily life (your brain might sense something wrong with your body, like dehydration, or overwhelmed with stimulus, etc, that you aren't consciously aware of. I bet this kind of thing happens all the time).

That's just my take on it at least.

[Albalida]

I can't find the study now, but there was a study done that somehow correlated dreams while you're sleeping to memory.

The main function of dreams, I believe, is to encourage the growth of neurons that will hold waking life experiences. Dreams become strange because senses are actually very strange: what we see with our eyes is physically upside-down until our brain corrects it. So, there's that sort of strangeness that gets sorted out or not during dreams. Yes, dreams take place in the brain and are generated by the brain.

Now, as Echthalion pointed out, we can step into extra-sensory experiences with altered mind states. One of the deeper altered mind states is dreaming and sleeping. So, yes, dreams are a transcendental experience.

I'd put it at about an 80%-20% division, though, with 20% of dreams being the transcendental kind. So, no, I don't believe that we always leave our bodies while dreaming. We relax our bodies and minds, and that invites this influx of knowledge and information.

[Thunder Bow]

Your brain creates time, place, and self. When you are awake and asleep.

Thank you for your responses so far.

They still feel very much like consciousness excursions to me, Journeys to the "different realities" Ecthalion mentioned, so in effect not only tuning in /channeling into their wavelength/frequency rather actually interacting with and inhabiting those realities. Which would bear out adequately Albalida's
assertion that "yes, dreams are a transcendental experience."

The method by which the consciousness departs the human body is a little more open to controversy, but one imagines the same micro biological modus operandi is employed in all instances of awareness/consiousness projection/ejection.

[desert rat]

I believe dreams are in the brain . Most dreams are just bits and pices of events from waking reality . Our astral body does leave during deep sleep , a few dreams are brought back from astral travels .

Hi Neville. Good question! I am reading a really cool book right now, "The Modern Book of the Dead", by Ptolemy Tompkins (it was a book that I was not looking for, but I think now it was looking for me as it just appeared right in front of me while I was waiting for my mother in her doctor visit). The book talks about what happens to us after we die. He shares arguments about how modern science is getting closer to acknowledging that there is a part of a living being that survives physical death; that the "consciousness" (or mind) and the "brain" are two separate things in a person but work together. I also read in another book that there are basically 3 types of dreams: psychological ones, where our brain, as a material organ, dumps out material (or processes it) from all the info gathered in waking physical life; spiritual dreams, where the soul leaves the body and travels to the Other world and interacts with others on a spiritual plane (like ancestors, twin flames, angels, guides, etc.); and predictive dreams, where the mind/soul travels to the future and sees what is in the future that can be of assistance to our spiritual growth in the "present". (Otherwise we'd all travel into the future to learn the winning lottery numbers!)

But I definitely believe that in some dreams, our consciousness, the part of our essence that survives physical death, leaves the physical plane/body and goes on a little journey to get guidance and important messages, and in other dreams our brain just dumps the garbage and unnecessary info to make more room in the ole noggin! (So I can remember where I put the car keys - ha ha!)

[7luminaries]

Originally Posted by Raven Poet

Hi Neville. Good question! I am reading a really cool book right now, "The Modern Book of the Dead", by Ptolemy Tompkins (it was a book that I was not looking for, but I think now it was looking for me as it just appeared right in front of me while I was waiting for my mother in her doctor visit). The book talks about what happens to us after we die. He shares arguments about how modern science is getting closer to acknowledging that there is a part of a living being that survives physical death; that the "consciousness" (or mind) and the "brain" are two separate things in a person but work together. I also read in another book that there are basically 3 types of dreams: psychological ones, where our brain, as a material organ, dumps out material (or processes it) from all the info gathered in waking physical life; spiritual dreams, where the soul leaves the body and travels to the Other world and interacts with others on a spiritual plane (like ancestors, twin flames, angels, guides, etc.); and predictive dreams, where the mind/soul travels to the future and sees what is in the future that can be of assistance to our spiritual growth in the "present". (Otherwise we'd all travel into the future to learn the winning lottery numbers!)


But I definitely believe that in some dreams, our consciousness, the part of our essence that survives physical death, leaves the physical plane/body and goes on a little journey to get guidance and important messages, and in other dreams our brain just dumps the garbage and unnecessary info to make more room in the ole noggin! (So I can remember where I put the car keys - ha ha!)

Great topic...
I can very much relate to the 1st 2 kinds of dreams described above...the 3rd type is also fascinating and there are some dreams that I feel are when we move either "backward" or "forward" in time relating to our journeys. Perhaps at least some small portion of these out-of-time dreams are what we view as nightmares, LOL.

Peace & blessings,
7L

I read that Ptolemy Thompkins book too! I thought it was excellent.

I don't know the correct answer, but my dreams feel very much like excursions into other realities.

I think we can learn a lot of things by studying the brain but I am not impressed by theories that reduce dream activity to brain activity and not much else. It would be like getting ahold of a radio (when you didn't know what a radio was) and deciding that radios create music and words. Of course they do no such thing. But scientific reductionism favors that sort of explanation.