Dreams: Origin and Formation – The Mother

It is sometimes said that in a man’s sleep his true nature is revealed.

They are a part of the body’s functioning. Dreams are as natural as the activities of the day…

From experiments, it is concluded that mental activity never really ceases; and it is this activity which is more or less confusedly transcribed in our brains by what we know as dreams. Thus, whether we are aware of it or not, we always dream.

We must therefore learn to know our dreams, and first of distinguish between them, for they are very varied in nature and quality.

Indeed it often happens that the sensory being, which throughout the whole day has been subjected to the control of the active will, reacts all the more violently during the night when this constraint is no longer effective.

Certainly, it is possible to suppress this activity completely and to have a total, dreamless sleep; but to be able in this way to immerse our mental being in a repose similar to the repose of our physical being, we must have achieved a perfect control over it, and this is not an easy thing to do.

As a general rule, each individual has a period of the night that is more favourable for dreams…

One must learn how to quieten one’s mind, make it completely blank, and then when one wakes up, one feels refreshed. One must relax the whole mind in the pure white silence, then one has the least number of dreams.

You can organise your dream as you want. One can arrange one’s dreams. But for this you must be conscious that you are dreaming….

… there is a very close connection between dreams and the condition of the stomach. Observations have been made and it has been noticed that in accordance with what is eaten, dreams are of one kind or another, and that if the digestion is difficult, the dream always turns into a nightmare….

Your brain is like a recording instrument; something comes and strikes hundreds of cells, each thing must strike a small note. Things will strike the brain convolutions — a remembrance, an impression, all kinds of tiny memories — it depends on your condition. But you have the control, ideas follow each other in accordance with a certain logic; there is also a mechanism which puts memories into movement through contagion, and the movement through contagion is made according to logic (what you call logic). But when you sleep, that faculty usually goes to sleep, so all those little cells are left to themselves and the connections — like the connections of electric wires — don’t work any longer, things come the wrong way round or in any direction at all. You must not look for a meaning. It was a contagion… your logic works no longer. And you have fantastic dreams, absurd dreams.

“The mind is an instrument of formation, of organisation and action.” Why? The mind gives a form to the thoughts. This power of formation forms mental entities whose life is independent of the mind that has formed them…. There is a mental substance just as there is a physical substance, and on this plane the mind can emanate innumerable forms. These forms can be objectivised and seen, and that is one of the most common explanations for dreams…. When you are asleep, your eyes are closed, the physical is asleep and the mind and vital become active.

On the mental plane all the formations made by the mind — the actual “forms” that it gives to the thoughts return and appear to you as if they were coming from outside and give you dreams…. Some people have a very conscious mental life… these people have mentally objective nights. But most people are incapable of doing this; it is their mental activity going on during sleep and assuming forms, and these forms give them what they call dreams.

…If you like, there is an experience, a fact, something happens — there is also translation in your brain…. There is one part of the being which has an experience; when that part of the being which had gone out of the body re-enters it, brings back the experience, the brain receives a contact with this experience, translates it by images, words, ideas, impressions, feelings, and when one wakes up one catches something of this, and with that makes a “dream”. But it is only a transcription of something that has happened — which has an analogy, a similarity, but which wasn’t exactly what one receives as a dream.

In everything you see, in sleep as well as in visions in the waking state, there are always a considerable number of subjective details. If you do not see the person as he was when you saw him last, the difference always comes from your own thought. If you think that the person must be older, you will see him looking older… and so on. An absolutely objective vision, which conforms wholly to the reality, is very rare.

Unless you concentrate in a very special way you always dream of things you have experienced or felt or been aware of some time before; but you don’t dream of the things that belong to your present life…. Except in a few very rare instances, a dream is the awakening of something recorded in the subconscious.

There are also symbolic and premonitory dreams, but very rarely do dreams consist of true memories of past lives, because for that one must dream in one’s psychic consciousness and there are not many who are capable of this. One dreams in the mental or vital consciousness but rarely does one dream in the psychic consciousness….

At times, there are dreams which one takes for memories, but they are only symbols: what one sees comes from a mental formation which is objectified on an inner screen and which enacts a scene, so to say, in which you are an actor.

Sometimes in dreams one goes into houses, streets, places one has never seen. What does this mean?

There may be many reasons for this. Perhaps it is an exteriorisation: one has come out of the body and gone for a stroll. They may be memories of former lives. Perhaps one has become identified with someone else’s consciousness and has the memories of this other person. Perhaps it is a premonition (this is the rarest case, but it may happen): one sees ahead what one will see later.

When we see you in a dream, is it always a symbolic dream?

No, not necessarily. It can be a fact…. If I send out a force or a thought or a movement, an action to someone, in his atmosphere in his mental consciousness it takes my form. So he sees it…. It is not my whole being… but it is something of myself…. certainly, it has a significance… mostly even a very precise aim…

Symbolic dreams are usually very coherent, one remembers everything, to the least detail… more living, more real more intense than the material life….

– THE MOTHER

(selection by Roshan Apurva)