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Oct 2, 2021

The Origin and Nature of Dreams

There is much debate today about the origin and meaning of dreams. Have you ever noticed that in dreams, you know certain facts without ever being told them? You know your brother will get a new job. You know the car in front of you will go through a red light. You know your boss is embezzling money. No one had to tell you these things. You know them, just as surely as you know your name. We know things in dreams without being told them because dreams are spiritual in nature, and spiritual information is not communicated through speech, but through thoughts—directly to our spirit. 

The human brain has difficulty making sense of spiritual information because it is of a different nature than intellectual information. Spiritual knowledge is information of a different order. Allow me to illustrate this difference: 

The brain can make sense of the emotion our soul produces called grief when it is connected to the intellectual context of a situation called death. In this case, the brain’s cognitive center receives a message of death and the soul attaches the emotion of grief to it. The emotion and the intellect agree. The brain can likewise understand the emotion called joy when the cognitive setting is a wedding. Again, there is emotional and intellectual agreement. This is how the soul and brain—emotion and intellect—normally operate. But in dreams, we’re just as likely to feel joy when someone dies or grief at a friend’s wedding. Dreams create emotional and intellectual disagreement. 

 The fact that an emotion is felt in a dream does not necessarily mean it is created in the soul. If the soul were to create an emotion, it would likely correspond to an appropriate event. The fact that in a dream, the emotion is connected to an inappropriate event suggests that emotion and event are joined by some other mechanism. That other mechanism is our spirit. Like the soul, the spirit receives and transmits emotions but it does so for a completely different purpose. 

Our spirit sends and receives messages that have symbolic rather than literal (logical) meaning. Spiritual messages are not about what they seem to be. Our brain doesn’t understand them because they’re symbolic rather than literal, and they must be decoded. Our soul doesn’t understand them because it did not create them. Dreams are an enigma to the soul and body because they are manifestations of our spirit. 

Some dreams do originate in the soul. These dreams, like a poorly written tale, have no point. Because they’re not spiritual in nature, they’re not symbolic, and the dreamer typically doesn’t feel a strong emotion. Soul dreams are devoid of the encouragement, instruction, warning, or other features found in spiritual dreams. Although most dreams are spiritual in nature, they are not created by our spirit. They’re created and sent by other spirit beings. Some spirits act as messengers. Under the right circumstances, our spirit receives them. 

This is an excerpt from my new book, Dream Interpretation Made Simple, which is available through the links below: