Dreaming While Awake – The Duality of Consciousness

By Andrew Rutajit

We spend one third of our human experience sleeping. I’ve discussed the idea of nightly DMT production resulting in dreaming and internal visionary experiences; but what do we use these dreams for? Mostly, they are ignored and forgotten. Nearly every world religion treats dreams and visions with respect; they hold them in the highest regard, yet there is a serious lack of instruction for the masses today concerning what is to be done with one’s own dreams.

We are all aware of the two principal states of our consciousness – asleep and awake. Many are completely happy to detach from their sleeping consciousness. After all, sleep isn’t something we do, sleep happens to us. Sleep is rarely a part of one’s everyday list of things to accomplish; rather, sleep imposes itself upon you and overwhelms you. As the darkness of night overcomes us, we allow the external darkness to consume us as we enter into the realm of internal darkness. Before the luxuries of electricity, nighttime would often force us to sleep as we were all but helpless in the dark. A torch or lamp would have provided some temporary assistance, but when compared to nocturnal animals; a human with a torch is like a fish out of water. Like it or not, the pulsating rhythm of our lives is chemically connected to the natural cyclic pattern of light and dark.

Dreams serve as a substantial clue suggesting there may be more to our consciousness than we know. Without them, we simply enter a dark void each night and spend this third of our lives doing absolutely nothing other than “recharging our battery”. When we dream, we seemingly take a tiny part of our Self to another world. By and large, people are taught to wake from sleep and go about their merry way, wholly ignoring all they experienced during their sleep cycle. What a complete waste of such a large portion of the human experience!

For our primitive ancestors, dreams were surely much more puzzling and mystifying than to us. For them, dreams served as the assurance of “something else” beyond our waking consciousness. Their heavenly dreams and hellish nightmares were only precursors for religion.

Consider the fact that our ancestors were shamanic medicine men and women who ingested hallucinogenic brews and plants, which evoked a dreamlike consciousness while awake and you will begin to understand ladders to Heaven, burning bushes, and the almighty God “speaking” to man. Nightly dreams may have been far more mysterious to our ancestors than they are to us, but at least our ancestors found importance in them.

Dreaming produces a phenomenon known as REM or rapid eye movement. It has been suggested that REM happens because in dreamtime, events happen much faster than normal waking consciousness. The eye follows events within the dream as if you were looking at a movie screen, just as they do when you are awake. The eye is moving faster because events in the dream are not restricted by the physical world and occur in a much faster timeline. With this possibility in mind, and considering normal life while awake can be comparatively uneventful, we may be conscious more in dream space than we are conscious while wake.

We trust that we will emerge from sleep the following morning and we have faith that we will return from this alternate state of consciousness with all of our previous memories undamaged. However, memories of what took place in the previous hours of dream state consciousness remain evasive. Perhaps this is because our five senses seemingly fall asleep with us. Those senses are useful to us while awake but we cannot take them with us when we sleep and dream. But sleep is not oblivion; there is a part of the Self that crosses the threshold of sleep and allows us to remember (or even participate in) our dreams.

The fact that we remain conscious during sleep, coupled with the fact that the significance of this consciousness remains mostly ignored, is troubling. Any muscle will tend to atrophy if it is not used. If you do not use your arms or legs, they almost certainly wither, weaken, and stiffen up; classic signs of atrophy. If we are to understand and utilize this third of our lives, cultivation of the realm of dream consciousness must take on a more important role in each individual's life. Dreams were once considered an important part of human life. Modern humans need to take a hint from our past and nurture our dreams rather than forget them moments after we awaken.

The term, “sleeping like a baby” helps describe just how content we are when we sleep. As soon as we awaken, our minds begin to swarm with the thoughts and ideas regarding yesterday’s responsibilities left undone and the growing list of things to be accomplished today. The stresses of everyday life overwhelm us the moment we wake up and continue this bizarre reality of life.

It's wonderful to realize the untapped potential of the subconscious; but for some people, what is discovered therein would be frightening. For example, pent up sexual frustration, stress from work, lack of money, low self esteem – all of these things can manifest into all sorts of weird and violent impulses. Being unable to correctly analyze this may result in more problems. Certainly, the worst-case scenario is to think these impulses are actual unconscious desires, and act them out in real life! In this case, it would have been better to leave these unconscious fantasies buried in the realm of forgetful sleep.

Most dreams remain under a veil to the waking consciousness. We deliberately block out the abstract nightmare scenarios when we wake. Once we understand our personal dilemmas and adjust our belief systems properly, we may begin to heal ourselves; this is why I push for the evolution of religion. Reality is what you make it and your belief systems are a predominate factor in your perception of reality. For the majority of people, it takes a lot of hard work to overcome years of religious conditioning.

The first hurdle to cross is as simple as being able to remember your dreams. A simple, focused mental note each morning can suffice, but a cheap little pocket recorder may be even better. We have a considerable advantage in this regard over our ancestors. They had no such recording devices and relied upon their memories or the telling of the tales. Today it is quite simple to record our dreams or write them down; some will type them onto an internet blog and share them, others search for meanings of their dreams in books or online. Who knows what would happen if everyone began to nurture their dreams. It may become a fad or there may just emerge unexpected results that would change humankind forever. Proper diet and dream cultivation are excellent starting points to regain a missing third of our life’s consciousness. Beyond this, we begin work on the brain and how it can experience optimum function.

During an eclipse, the occultation of the sun causes those in its shadow to experience an eerie darkness during daylight hours. As a result, the eclipse is symbolic of the combination of night and day; more specifically, the combination of dream state consciousness and waking consciousness.