The old axiom, “I will go to sleep on it,” has a greater significance than is generally attributed to it, for sleep and dreams have more to do in shaping your lives than you have any idea of.  You can go to school in sleep and study anything you are studying in physical life and make marvelous progress.  This requires much training, however.  Keeping the mind free from evil thoughts is most essential to enable the sincere investigator to enter that larger state of consciousness, for the thoughts of our waking state have a more or less effect on the ego during sleep.  Every individual harbors a certain train of thought, whether at business or pleasure this train of thought has a tremendous influence on the ego, in fact it shapes ones destiny.

     Choose well your thoughts
       for your choice
       is brief and yet endless. 
       —­Anna Besant in Thought Power

Man may be said to live two lives in one, one when he is fully awake and the other when he is sound asleep.  These two lives, of course, is the expression of his one existence.  The highly developed, spiritual man as he retires into the interior world during sleep, realizes a state of spiritual bliss that is far beyond the stage of ordinary mortals.  Man has been in the habit of looking at himself as a mass of flesh and muscle with a slight chance of realizing the Divinity within him.  As the earnest soul gradually arouses himself he finds his proper place in the universe, for within him are all the attributes of deity, and when he reaches the end of the long evolutionary journey that is ahead of him he will find himself and know what he is destined to be, a God.

VARIETIES OF DREAMS

In order to distinguish and classify the different kinds of dreams in which everyone has an experience they may be divided into four variations.  Nearly all dreams may be classified under this heading: 

  1.  Physical Stimulus.

  2.  Subconscious memory.

  3.  Telepathy.

  4.  The Actual Astral experience of the Ego or Soul in the Astral
       region.

Physical Stimulus may be the direct cause of impressing certain ideas on the physical brain which may appear to be a reality.  The falling of a book, picture or any article in the room may cause the sleeper to dream of firearms; a soldier may dream of a battlefield; a sensitive female may dream it is a burglar; a person who throws the bed clothes off him on a cold night may dream of snow and ice; the continual dropping of water from a faucet in the room of the sleeper has been the direct cause of a friend of mine dreaming of a passenger train; the steady tramping of footsteps overhead may be the cause of dreaming of thunder storms, etc.  We must also take into consideration the physical and mental environments of the sleeper.

THE SUBCONSCIOUS MEMORY