Dreams

Dreams

What are dreams?
Definitions

A series of thoughts, images, occurring in a person’s mind generally during sleep.

a succession of images, passing through the mind during sleep.
Visions occurring to a person when awake. Visions can be voluntarily indulged in while awake;

Throughout history, dreams have fascinated and mystified. Messages from a transcendental realm ? Images of the subconscious?

Dreams can then be distinguished by possessing the following further characteristic;
  The phenomena, when studied from the viewpoint of the mature
  personality in the physical world, seem to proceed irrationally , no adequate reflective power or control having been active at the time. In particular, we have no power ( or virtually no power ) to compare the dream life, while it is proceeding , with memories of our physical life, or even to realize the simple fact that we have two such lives.

Dreams are states in which our own thoughts take form.
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Differentiations  of psychological states:


      1.The Dreaming state.

2. The Sleeping state.
   
   ..Dreams and Other Altered States of consciousness.
   
   
3. The Hypnagogic State occurs between wakefulness and sleep at the best onset of the sleep-dream cycle.
   
   4. The Hypnopompic State occurs between sleep and wakefulness at the end of the sleep-dream cycle.
   
   5. The Hyper alert State is characterised by prolonged and increased vigilance while one is awake. ..intense concentration..
   
   6. The Lethargic State is characterized by dulled, sluggish mental activity.
   
   7. States of Rapture are characterized by intense feeling and overpowering emotion, subjectively evaluated as pleasurable and positive in nature.
   
   8. States of Hysteria are characterized  by intense feeling and overpowering emotion , subjectively evaluated as negative and destructive in nature.
   
   9. States of Fragmentation are characterized by the lack of integration among important segments , aspects, or themes of the total personality.

        …forgets his past and begins a new pattern..

10. Regressive States are characterized by behavior that is clearly inappropriate in terms of the individual’s psychological status and chronological age.

11. Meditative States are characterized by minimal mental activity, the lack of visual imagery, and the presence of continuous alpha waves on the EEG.

12. Trance States are characterized by the absence of continuous alpha waves on the EEG, hyper suggestibility  ( but not passivity ).

13.Reverie is frequently characterized by rapid eye movements on the EEG but occurs during trance. Typically , the state is experimentally induced by a hypnotist who suggests that the individual will have a dreamlike experience.

14. The Daydreaming State is characterized by rapidly occurring thoughts which bear little relation to the external environment. It may occur with the eyes open or closed

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Levels of dreams
By marinus Jan Marijs
(level specific)

Level  1

Daydreams, eidetic imagery, memory imagery, imagination imagery, hallucinations,  reverie, a state of imagining or thinking about pleasant things, as if you are dreaming. and half-sleep states..

Level  2
“Ordinary dreams” , they would, to a considerable extent , build on one’s own personal memories.
Reliving elements of waking life, Determined mainly by  the forms, shapes and structures that are in  memory of one’s physical life.

Often aspects of experience , which clearly belong to different and unrelated frames of reference, may fuse to give rise to novel, if strange , combinations
It may be simply a collection of a series of the disconnected images and normally impossible alterations.

Here there is a disordered consciousness divorced from the normal controls and rationalizations of the waking state that would be exercised across the mind- brain frontier.
Then is strong emotional involvement It is a sort of passive dream state which consists for the great part of a series of images, one of which produces the other; merely by associative’ thinking
….. These are mostly random images, they have here no discernible deeper symbolic or other meaning beyond themselves but just are.
When, rarely, the imagery does have continuity and a kind of story line unfolds, the narrative is experienced as having no intrinsic  relevance.
The pseudo sensory-level images typically lack continuity
 Moreover, there is only a limited recognizable associational link between succeeding images.

Representational dreams
Characteristic imagery unfolds, takes representational shape,
recollective, where the exploration is of one’s own mental “inner space “.  The concern is increasingly with personal problems and values. Long forgotten and also repressed experiences may come up freely and sometimes be vividly relived.

Emotional involvement then is strong, and there remains only a slight residual awareness that the events participated in are fictitious

Level  3
Magical dreams

Thinking directed away from reality and not following ordinary rules of logic.
Thinking is here dominated by inner fantasy life, to convey the disregard of, or divorce from reality apparent in this kind of mentation.

Surrealistic dreams
There are recognizable associational links between succeeding images, which are not logically structured, but are symbolically meaningfully loaded

In general, phenomena of this level are the ones with which psychoanalysis deals, and so this might also be described as a “Freudian “level of consciousness. It is the level of the literal stuff of a life’s personal history.

Symbolic dreams on this level have an individual meaning, and not a universal meaning.

Here are dreams with personal symbols. Personal symbols can often only be recognized with knowledge of someone’s personality and life history.

If we know nothing about the dreamers personal situation and personal history, than  the symbols are not recognizable.­­­­­­­­


Level  4
Archetypical dreams (Jungian archetypes)
Mythical dreams

Interpreting of Archetypical dreams, (Jungian archetypes):
Explaining common symbols that are common to many people is possible because they are universal As for the more common symbols, the metaphorical meaning will differ greatly from the literal meaning.

 Symbol interpretation can only be done if the context in which the symbol is located, that the meaning of a symbol can be given.

Epic dreams, archetypical structures, which are experienced either as spectator or as a participant
On th[s level, the expansion involves basically a movement beyond the particular- personal and toward the collective-universal – a movement toward broadening contexts and more universal 
It is the level of Jungian depth psychology, of the complexes and fantasies built upon experiential foundations.

Archetypes
In Jung’s publication: “Man and his Symbols.” In the chapter “The archetype in the symbolism of the dream” Jung writes that ordinary dreams can be excellently analyzed on the basis of associations of the dreamer. “However, if it is an obsessive or strongly emotional dream, then the personal associations provided by the dreamer are usually not sufficient to find a satisfactory interpretation. In such cases we must take into account the fact (first observed and explained by Freud) that in a dream elements often occur that are not individual and therefore cannot be derived from the personal experience of the dreamer. These elements are, as I have already mentioned, what Freud called “archaic remains” – psychic forms, the presence of which cannot be explained by anything in the personal life of the individual and which are apparently original, innate and inherited “models of the human mind.”

Level  5
Lucid dreams
Dreaming and waking are normally mutually exclusive states of consciousness, but in lucid dreams they overlap, the dreamer becoming aware of being in a dream. Most often this occurs in the middle of a dream, but some people remain conscious while falling into sleep, while others stay alert after awakening while going back into dreaming. The duration of lucid dreams depends on the dreamer’s levels of skill and experience.
Within a lucid dream one has fully access to ones higher mental functions.  

Lucid dreaming has been described since antiquity but has only recently been the subject of research. It can be acquired as a skill with training, and offers extraordinary potential for physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being, with largely untapped relevance for mastering everyday reality.

In Lucid dreams,  reflective self-consciousness together with the ability to exert effort and think logically

Lucid dreams
What differentiated the experience from an ordinary dream is the sense of clarity, control and intentionality in perceiving the given environment, in moving through it and taking spatial bearings within it.  It is simply that ome is functioning as a fully purposive and intelligent person in an unusually lucid setting – which is both objective and yet more intimate to consciousness than the physical world appears to be. One is aware of encountering a place, not dreaming of it.

In the lucid dream, the dreamer is fully  conscious and purposive, and its  perceptions have  coherence and lucidity.
It is the perception of an objective environment. 

D.I. Mendeleyev, the famous chemist, saw his entire periodic table of elements in one night during a lucid dream.

Level  6
Luminous dreams
Very strong visual imagery increased in frequency and vividness
Dreams that have different parallel lateral value structures.
Are remembered years later
On this level dreams do not only express visual imagery, but also social and moral value structures.


Level  7
Integrated multilevel dreams
Dreams who have different simultaneous meanings on different levels.

Integration dreams
On the integral level, the dream experience is one of psychological integration, “illumination“.

The following levels cannot properly be classified as a dreams, but more as visionary states:

Level  8
Insight Dreams (Kekulé’s dream)
-creative illuminatory   insight dreams
The content of the experience is self-validating and known to be true.

Niels Bohr
Examples of this exist in scientific endeavours. Niels Bohr, the physicist, dreamed he was sitting on a sun composed of burning gas while planets attached by their filaments revolved around him. Interpreting the sun as symbolizing a fixed center around which electrons revolved enabled Bohr ton conceive a new model of the atom.

Kekule’s visions
Most organic chemical compounds contain loops of six carbon atoms called benzene rings. The nineteenth-century German chemist August Kekulé claimed to have pictured the ring structure of benzene after dreaming of a snake eating its own tail.
And with that a new chemical bond which nobody ever thought of before was conceptualized.

Chemistry’s visual origins
Vivid imagination was key to unlocking the secrets of molecular structure in the nineteenth century.

 Most organic chemical compounds contain loops of six carbon atoms called benzene rings. The nineteenth-century German chemist August Kekulé claimed to have pictured the ring structure of benzene after dreaming of a snake eating its own tail. In Image and Reality, Alan Rocke offers a definitive account of Kekulé’s life and the significance of visualization in the development of chemistry.

The scientific understanding of benzene was of crucial importance. Isolated as a liquid from compressed coal gas by Michael Faraday in 1825, it was used to make the first synthetic dye, mauveine, from aniline (aminobenzene) in 1856. In 1865, Kekulé proposed that benzene’s structure was a hexagonal ring of six tetravalent carbon atoms, each able to form four bonds: one to a hydrogen atom and the others to adjacent carbon atoms. This concept — foreseen by him as “an inexhaustible treasure-trove” — was rapidly accepted by organic chemists because it predicted the existence of many benzene derivatives that were quickly synthesized in the laboratory.

Level  9
Inspirational dreams,  inspiration,  Platonic archetypes
While Jungian  archetypes are inherited from common experiences of the past, but Platonic archetypes are timeless.

Deep structures  (or higher archetypes )  Their origin is in the Platonic realm.

Paradigmatic shifts
inspirational dreams

Creativity in dreams
Robert Louis Stevenson learned early in his life that he could dream complete stories and that he could even go back to the same dreams on succeeding nights to give them different endings. Later, he trained himself to dream plots for his novels and short  stories.
Stevenson’s short story The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  came to him in a dream after two days of failing to come up with a satisfactory plot by a conscious deliberation

The famous mathematician Gauss had a similar experience. One of the number theorems was discovered by him in the same way. He says about it: ‘My thoughts were full of the problem, but I did not see the solution, but then suddenly, by the grace of God, in a flash of lightning I saw it all, even later I could not say how I had arrived at it, how I had reasoned or what the connection was.’ He saw the whole order timelessly, but his conscious mind then had to go along the connecting operations and convert it into a mathematical proof, which is after all built up of a first, a second, a third, a fourth step, and so on.

Composers
Giuseppe Tartini , the composer who invented the modern violin bow, dreamed that the devil had become his slave. In the dream , he gave the devil a violin and , to his surprise, Lucifer played “a sonata of such exquisite beauty as surpassed the boldest flight of my imagination. ”After
Tartini awoke, he recalled the music as best as he could; the result was  “The Devil’s Sonata, “ his most famous composition.
Richard Wagner, describing his opera Tristan and Isolde to a friend, wrote, “For once you are going to hear a dream , a dream that I have made sound… I dreamed all this; never could my poor head have invented such a thing purposively”

Level  10
Prophetic dreams, Revelations
Prophetic dreams are dreams that express knowledge of a future event or situation, especially through extrasensory means.

Technical description: Precognition, supernormal knowledge of future events, with emphasis not upon mentally causing events to occur but upon predicting those the occurrence of which the subject claims has already been determined.
Like telepathy and clairvoyance, precognition is said to operate without recourse to the normal senses and thus to be a form of extrasensory perception (ESP).

Phenomenological description: The ability to place ones focal point of consciousness in a location in the future and to have impressions, knowledge about or visual perceptions from that location.  ( M.J.M.)
Trans-temporal perception


Level  11
Eschatological visions, Unitary
Mystical dreams, cosmic processes.   
An example would be the apocalyptic visions, which  reveals cosmic mysteries. 
Mystical union

Here the ideas , images, body sensations ( if any ) , and emotions are fused in what is felt to be an absolute purposive process cumulating in a sense  of self-understanding.


Level  12
Enlightenment visions about Kosmic transformations
The person here experiences what one regards as a confrontation with the Ground of Being,  Mysterium, Noumenon, Essence, or Fundamental Reality.
Christ his concept of the kingdom of heaven, which is generally considered to be the central theme of Jesus’ teaching, is on this level

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Dream interpretation

The interpretation of dreams implies that dreams have a symbolic meaning. This goes back thousands of years, in the Old Testament with Joseph, with the prophet Daniel and others.

The Stoic Artemis (135-200 AD) was especially concerned with the interpretation of dreams.


Interpretation can be literal or ‘symbolic’. Symbolic dreams can in turn be divided into dreams with general symbols and dreams with personal symbols.
As put here above:

Personal symbols can often only be recognized with knowledge of someone’s personality and life history.

If we know nothing about the dreamers personal situation and personal history, than  the symbols are not recognizable.­­­­­­­­

ALLEGORY

The word ‘symbolism’ or Allegory is in a dream that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning. 

The 150+ allegorical stories that are given om this  website with its interpretation are  examples that illustrate how the symbolic or Allegorical  interpretation can be done with universal symbols, in dreams, myths Jungian archetypes (and to a certain degree with  
to indicate various figures of speech and modes of thought, such as the simile, metaphor, apologue, metonymy, synecdoche, allegory, parable, all of which are of course differentiated by philologists.  Mythological , artistic, magical, religious, and mystical fields of thought, as well as that of primitive metaphysics and science, are often called symbolic).

Definitions:
1. A symbol is a representative or substitute of some other idea, from which in the context it derives a secondary significance not inherent in itself. It is important to note that the flow of significance is from the primary idea to the secondary, to the symbol.

The Symbol. By this term we understand a special kind of indirect representation which is distinguished by certain peculiarities from the simile, metaphor, allegory, allusion and other forms of pictorial presentation of thought material to all of which it is related.  The symbol represents an almost ideal union of all these means of expression: it is a substitutive , perceptual replacement-expression for something hidden, with which it has evident characteristics in common or is coupled by internal associative connections. Its essence lies in its having two or more meanings, as indeed it originated itself in a kind of condensation, an amalgamation of individual characteristic elements. Its tendency from the conceptual to the perceptual indicates its nearness to primitive thought; by this relationship symbolisation essentially belongs to the unconscious, but , in its function as a compromise, it in no way lacks conscious determining factors , which in varying degrees condition both the formation of symbols and the understanding for them.”

One can specify the characteristics of true symbols as follows: “Representation of unconscious material, constant meaning , independence of individual conditioning factors, evolutionary basis, linguistic connections, phylogenetic parallels in myths, religion, etc.” These attributes will next be examined and commented on in order.
Representation of unconscious material. This is perhaps the characteristic that most sharply distinguishes true symbolism from the other processes to which the name is commonly applied. By it is meant , not so much that the concepts symbolised are not known to the individual , for most often they are , as that the affect investing the concept is in a state of repression, and so is unconscious. Further , the process of symbolisation is carried out unconsciously , and the individual is quite unaware of the meaning of the symbol he has employed, and often of the fact that he has employed one at all, for he takes the symbol for reality.  The actual comparison between the idea symbolised and the symbol has either never been conscious at all, or has been forgotten.

Phylogenetic parallels. One of the most amazing features of true symbolism is the remarkable ubiquity of the same symbols, which are to be found , not only in different fields of thought, dreams, wit, insanity, poetry, etc., among a given class and at a given level of civilisation, but among different races and at different epochs of the world’s history. A symbol which today we find , for instance, in an obscene joke, is also to be found in a mythical cult of Ancient Greece, and another that we come across only in dream analysis was used thousands of years ago in the sacred books of the east.

‘Psychologically considered, symbol-formation remains a regressive phenomenon , a reversion to a certain stage of pictorial thinking.

The word “iSymbolic” as in allegorical, means “not communicable by words that are analytic, abstract, linear, rational, exact, etc.
“-Poetic and metaphorical language, physiognomic and synesthetic language, primary process language of the kind found in dreams, reveries, free associations and fantasies.

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Dream  space
Where is dream space located  ?

Many think that it is localized within the head.

However there are indications that dreams manifests themselves in a higher ontological space, in the mental world
The mental world is the place, the  
space where Out of the Bode Experiences take place, be it that these later take place on a higher level
This is indicated by the phenomenon of Shared  dreams, Changes in photographic emulsion by mental concentration.
(This phenomenon is described in an article on this website)
Symmultainios Perceptions of apparitions by more than one person and the concept of Extended mind

The eidetic image is never localized within the head.

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The  Concept  of  Mental  Space
By Ian  Stevenson: 

An  important  error  in  philosophy  and  hence  in  psychology  was  Descartes’  assertion  that  although  bodies  have  the  property  of  extension,  minds do  not.  Henry  More  (1700/1925)  and  later  David  Hume  (1738/1911)  said  this was  a mistake,  as  have  some  subsequent  philosophers;  but  the  idea  that  minds cannot  have  the  property  of  extension  has  had  wide  acceptance.  Yet  the  briefest introspection  will  assure  anyone  that  mental  images  do  have  extension.  Imagine  a cheetah  running  after  a gazelle,  and  you  will  find  that  the  images  you  have  of each  animal  have  some  extension  and  are  also  in  some  spatial  (or  extensional) relation  to  each  other.  The  images  exist  in  your  mental  space.  Some  longer  intro- spection can  show  you  also  that  your  mental  space  differs  from  the  physical space  with  which  you  are  familiar.  Walk  around  a building  and  notice  how  the images  of  it  in  your  mind  change  as  you  proceed,  while  the  building  remains unchanged.  As  you  do  so,  you  can  have  an  awareness  of  two  distinct  spaces,  the phenomenal  one  and  the  physical  one.

Conceptions  of  mental  space  have  to  include  a capacity  for  interaction between  a mind  (in  mental  or  phenomenal  space)  and  a brain  (or  parts  of  a body) in  our  familiar  physical  space.  I think  no  one  knows  how  such  interaction  could take  place;  it  may  be  one  of  many  ideas  that  observations  force  us  to  accept  before we  understand  any  process  that  could  implement  the  assumed  connection.  It  has been  objected  that  minds,  if  they  are  different  in  substance  from  bodies,  could  not influence  bodies;  but  there  is  nothing  illogical  in  believing  that  two  different  sub- stances may  interact.  Moreover,  reasonable  conjectures  have  been  made  about how  a mind  might  influence  a brain  (Eccles,  1986,  1989,  1990;  Wisdom,  1952).5

The  further  question  arises  of  whether  all  our  mental  spaces  are  somehow joined,  as  are  the  seas  of  the  earth  around  the  continents  and  the  continents  under the  seas.  I am  inclined  to  think  our  mental  spaces  are  so  united,  although  only  a handful  of  mystics  and  religious  geniuses  claim  to  realize  this  directly.

During  our  familiar  life  our  minds  are already  in  a mental  space,  as  I believe,  we  might  say  that  at  death  our  bodies  leave us,  while  we  continue  to  exist  in  our  mental  space.
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Dream space

Some dreams experiences can be best understood in terms of extra-sensory perception of higher ontological spaces, to which must be attributed the same degree of objectivity as we ascribe to the physical world.
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Higher ontological spaces

In dreams one is indirectly connected with Higher ontological spaces.
But in Out of the Body Experiences one is directly connected with higher ontological spaces. 


Non-physical worlds: Accessible Temporarily in an OBE and permanent after death

Levels of Out of the Body Experience (OBE):

1. Physical world, so no OBE;
2. OBE in physical surroundings: Moving through walls. Birds eye view of physical world;
3. OBE Tunnel experience: Illusionary projected worlds. Very strong emotional functioning. Dreamlike world. Temporarily purification. Form-creation coming from the unconscious;
4. OBE ideoplastic formed worlds: Conscious form-creation;
5. OBE immediate travel (instantaneous point to point travel):
   Transcending of space. Non-spatial aspects;
6. OBE form/light worlds: Light beings;
7. OBE movement: Jumping to past and future times. Possibility of transcending time. Trans/non-temporal aspects;
8. World of wavelike, spiraling conscious subtle energies. Light worlds;
9. High devanic world. High energetic subtle energies, communication by union. Archetypical;
10. World of seraphim. Wheel like high subtle structures, Kosmic teleological forces;
11. Oneness principle. Total connection, monotheos. Divine oneness-theosis;

12. Supreme highly energetic harmonic patterns of light energies. Light, color

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The relative sizes, the relative speeds, and the shapes of objects can be altered, more or less at will.
More-over , experience –patterns in the psychic space are ordered , not by physical distance, but by emotional , ideational and habitual linkage.

The conscious Self can occupy a Position in Psychic Space.
Relevant is here is the phenomenon of apparitions:

In cases of conscious apparitions of the living, and of travelling clairvoyance, shows that the self can occupy a spatial point of view.

There is undoubtedly evidence to show that apparitions behave as if they were aware of their surroundings and therefore of being at a particular place among them…
There is evidence that the apparitions of a living person can be seen at a place in space and that the person afterwards remembers viewing the scene from that identical position…There are also the cases of ‘travelling clairvoyance ‘… in which the sensitive describes a distant scene as from a particular point of view.

Being located at a given point in space may be defined as being able to observe and to operate directly from that point, and being capable of being observed and operated upon directly at that point. It means having one’s focus of consciousness at that point, and also being observable and accessible directly at that point.

The conscious selves of at least some apparitions , do observe and operate from, as well as being observe and operated upon at, specific points in space.

http://www.dreamscience.ca/en/documents/New%20content/lucid%20dreaming%20pdfs/vanEeden_PSPR_26_1-12_1913.pdf

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Shared dreams 
reciprocal, dreams
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Shared Dreams

Objective criteria that dream space is not just a subjective phenomenon, may be sought along the lines of a shared dream experiences, that is, of experiences in which two or more individuals are aware of participating in the same dream  and who can thus confirm each other’s reports

The dream can, in the case of collective dreaming, be seen as an objective reality, since there are multiple observers who perceive the same thing.

Shared dreams  
Shared dreams indicate that the perceived structures are not just subjective, but may indeed have an objective existence

Shared dreaming is the idea that two or more people can share the same dream environment.

The degree to which the dream is shared can vary, from simply having common elements or events that happen in each person’s dream, to the entire dream being identical. The experience is known by different names including mutual dreams, dream meshing, and linking.

Hundreds of people have described experiencing mutual dreams.

Shared, or reciprocal dreams
Shared, or reciprocal , dreams need to be collected- i.e., dreams in which two or more people interact with each other, and which are remembered independently by two or more of the participants, and dreams occurring at approximately the same time, repeated independently by two or more dreamers, when the dreams are more similar to each other than can reasonably be explained by chance or by shared waking experiences. Points to be particularly noted about such dreams include the following:  ( 1 ) the extent and degree of similarity and of differences;  ( 2 ) the amount and types of communication which occurred in the dream between the reporting dreamers; and ( 3 ) possible emotional factors which might have generated the dream.

Clear dreams need to be collected ( i.e., dreams in which the dreamer becomes aware of the fact that he is dreaming, but still continues the dream.)

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Extended mind
The ‘externality‘ of imagery  
A further but very important observation may be added. Subjects on the whole emphasize the ‘externality‘ of their imagery, that is, of its seemingly taking place outside them.

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Related approaches:
Classic Greek philosophy

Sheldrake:
Feeling of being stared at

Eccles:
Visual binding problem
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In the following essay examens the philosopher H.H.Price the nature of life after death related to the dream world:

The Next World,
H.H.Price

“The next World, I think, might be conceived as a kind of dream-world. When we are asleep, sensory stimuli are cut off, or at any rate are prevented from having their normal effects upon our brain-centres. But we still manage to have experiences. It is true that sense-perception no longer occurs, but something sufficiently like it does. In sleep, our image-producing powers, which are more or less inhibited in waking life by a continuous bombardment of sensory stimuli, are released from this inhibition. And then we are provided with a multitude of objects of awareness, about which we employ our thoughts and towards which we have desires and emotions. Those objects which we are aware of , behave in a way which seems very queer to us when we wake up. The laws of their behaviour are not the laws of physics. But however queer their behaviour is, it does not at all disconcert us at the time, and our personal identity is not broken.

In other words, my suggestion is that the New World , if there is one, might be a world of mental images. Nor need such a world be so ‘thin and unsubstantial’ as you might think. Paradoxical as it may sound, there is nothing imaginary about a mental image.  It is an actual entity , as real as anything can be.

Indeed, to those who experienced it, an image-world would be just as ‘real ‘as this present world is ; and perhaps so like it that they would have considerable difficulty in realizing that they were dead. We are , of course , sometimes told in mediumistic communications that quite a lot of people do find it difficult to realize that they are dead; and this is just what we should expect if the Next World is an image-world. Lord Russell and other philosophers have maintained that a material object in this present physical world is nothing more nor less than a complicated system of appearances. So far as I can see, there might be a set of visual images related to each other’s perspectivally, with front views and side views and back views all fitting neatly together in the way that ordinary visual appearences do now. Such a group of images might contain tactual images too. Similarly it might contain auditory images and smell images. Such a family of inter-related images would make a pretty good object. It would be quite a satisfactory substitute for the material objects which we perceive in this present life. And a whole world composed of such families of mental images would make a perfectly good world.

It will be objected , perhaps , that one cannot be said to be alive unless one has a body. But what is meant here by ‘alive‘? It is surely conceivable (whether or not it is true) that experiences should occur which are nit causally connected with a physical organism.

If we now apply these considerations to the Next World, as I am conceiving of it, we see that the question ‘where is it ?’ simply does not arise. An image-world would have a space of its own. We could not find it anywhere in the space of the physical world, but this would not in the least prevent it from being a spatial world all the same. If you like, it would be its own ‘where‘.

It follows that when we speak of ‘passing ‘from this world to the next, this passage is not to be thought of as any sort of movement in space. It should rather be thought of as a change of consciousness, analogous to the change which occurs when we ‘pass ‘from waking experience to dreaming.

Next World would not only be other than the space of the physical world, but would also be a different sort of space.

So much for the question ‘where the next world is’, if there be one. I have tried to show that if the next world is conceived as a world of mental images, the question simply does not arise. I now turn to another difficulty. It may be felt that an image-world is somehow a deception and a sham, not a real world at all.

I have said that it would be a kind of dream-world. Now when one has a dream in this life, surely the things one is aware of in the dream are not real things. No doubt the dreamer really does have various mental images. These images do actually occur. But this is not all that happens. As a result of having these images, the dreamer believes, or takes for granted, that various material objects exist and various physical events occur; and these beliefs are mistaken. For example , he believes that there is a wall in front of him and that by a mere effort of will he succeeds in flying over the top of it. But the wall did not really exist, and he did not really fly over the top of it. He was in a state of delusion. Because of the images which he did really have, there seemed to him to be various objects and events which not really exist at all. Similarly, you may argue, it may seem to discarnate minds ( if indeed there are such ) that there is a world in which they live, and a world not unlike this one. If they have mental images of the appropriate sort, it ,may even seem to them that they have bodies not unlike the ones they had in this life. But surely they will be mistaken? It is all very well to say, with the poet, that ‘dreams are real while they last’- that dream-objects are only called ‘unreal ‘when one wakes up, and normal sense perceptions begin to occur with which the dream experiences can be contrasted. And it is all very well to conclude from this that if one did not wake up, if the change from sense-perception to imaging were irreversible, one would not call one’s dream objects unreal, because there would then be nothing with which to contrast them. But would they not still be unreal for all that? Surely discarnate minds, according to my account of them, would be in a state of permanent delusion; whereas a dreamer in this life, fortunate for him) is only in a temporary one. And the fact that a delusion goes on for a long time, even for ever and ever, does not make it any the less delusive. Delusions do not turn themselves into realities by the fact that their victim is deprived of the power of detecting their delusiveness.

But this only amounts to saying that the world I am describing would be an other world, other than this present physical world, which is just what it ought to be; other than this present physical world, and yet sufficiently like it to be possibly confused with it, because images do resemble percepts. And what would this otherness consist in? First, in the fact that it is in a space which is other than physical space; secondly, and still more important, in the fact that the causal laws of an image-world would be different from the laws of physics. And this is also our ground for saying that the events we experience in dreams are ‘unreal ‘, that is, not really physical, though mistakenly believed by dreamer to be so. They do in some ways closely resemble physical  events , and that is why the mistake is possible . But the causal laws of their occurrence are quite different , as we recognise when we wake up; and just occasionally we recognize it even while we are still asleep.

I have said that such a world would be mind-dependent even though dependent on a group of minds rather than a single mind. In what way would it be mind-dependent ? Presumably in the same way as dreams are now. It would be dependent on the memories and the desires of the persons who experienced it. Their memories and their desires would determine what sort of images they had. If I may put it so, the ‘stuff ‘or ‘material ‘of such a world would come in the end from one’s memories, and the ‘form ‘of it from one’s desires.

Moreover, if telepathy should be part of the equipment of the discarnate personality, then that personality’s image –world would not be entirely subjective. It would , to some extent , “be the joint product of a group of telepathically interacting minds and public to all of them” .Yet each mind would, to a considerable extent , build his own dream world-his memories providing the “material “for it; and his desires , whether consciousness or unconsciousness, determining the “forms” the memory material would be given.

Thus there would be just not one Next World, but many-some , overlapping to some extent, and others “impenetrable to one another, corresponding to the different desires which different groups of personalities have”.
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Some dreams experiences can be best understood in terms of extra-sensory perception of the the higher ontological levels of reality, thus can be attributed the same degree of objectivity as we ascribe to the physical world.

All visual after-images and other entoptic phenomena, are literally seen as a percept is seen, but unlike a normal preceptothey move with the movement of the eyes.

An eidetic-image can be  scanned and differs fundamentally from visual after-images and other entoptic phenomena.

Characteristics of eidetic imagery
is that an eidetic-image is the fact that it is seen in the same way as a sense perception is seen. This indicates that eidetic-images are nort in the brain like
entoptic phenomena, but are localised in mental space.

The eidetic image is never localized within the head.