I woke up this morning after a long, complicated and technicolor dream.  My first thought on awaking was:  that dream was terrible.

I rarely remember my dreams, save for these vivid dreams in color where events follow each other fairly logically, even if the events themselves are rather strange.  And these vivid dreams in color often later turn out to be actual visits to other places on earth – not dreams in the usual sense at all.

Most dreams are what I call ‘psychological’ dreams, i.e. our own subconscious mind and our own soul trying to tell us something about ourselves and our life through the symbology of dreams.  The sort of “dream” I am about to relate here – is something else entirely.  It is not just a product of my subconscious mind.  It was an actual visit to someone else on earth while I was in dream state.

My dream this morning was, as I said, fairly upsetting.  Well, nightmarish.

I was in a large building with many rooms and women I did not recognize.  I met my close friend S. there, in a hallway, with throngs of noisy women streaming past us – and she was telling me things that now I do not remember.  She was very agitated, upset.  To escape the crowds of women, she took a right turn off the hallway we were in and led me onto a small terrace. Suddenly she slipped and fell over the balcony.  Horrified, I ran to the edge and looked downward – we were two stories up and she had landed on a concrete sidewalk.  She was injured but still miraculously alive.  Someone called the hospital and she was taken away on a stretcher as I watched from above.  I was told that she was fine, just lower back injuries.  At the time I incredulously repeated to myself: “All she has is lower back injuries?  That’s impossible.  I saw her fall from that balcony and land on the concrete sidewalk – from two stories up.”

I went back into the hallway and turned right, to a medium-sized room where the Dalai Lama of Tibet was giving a lecture.   Still deeply worried about my friend,  I took an empty seat and cried silently as I listened to his words,.  The Dalai Lama spoke of kindness and peace between peoples, and I felt his Love filling and surrounding me.  I finally woke up.  The dream was so intense and vivid that I kept running it through my mind, scene by scene – all the time wondering what it could mean.  S. was in Chicago for a few days, at a conference, and I wondered if she were in some sort of danger.

A few hours later S. called from Chicago.  I asked her how her day had gone and she launched into an account that very closely followed the outline of my dream.  She was at a conference, and all the lawyers at the conference were women – and they were bickering throughout the classes and meetings, even openly fighting.  S. is an advocate of collaborative law, and was horrified at the behavior she saw and heard around her.  

At the time I had my dream, all but a small committee of lawyers in their workshop were told to leave the room, following a long session of bickering and angry discussion.  This must have been when I met her in the hallway, in my dream.  S. said she had felt like jumping off a balcony by that point – or leaving the conference.  They were two flights up in the building, overlooking concrete sidewalks, just as in my dream.

My friend added that to end the morning session, a woman judge had given a lecture, the high point of the entire conference.  This woman was a very compassionate and beautiful person, in stark contrast with the behavior of many lawyers at the conference;  her lecture had been inspiring, uplifting, healing. When S. told me this on the phone, I immediately thought this judge might be the Dalai Lama in my dream.

When I thought about the lower back injuries S. sustained in the dream – in dreams lower back pain and injury often signify the burden of taking on too much responsibility.  On the phone, S. said that because of the behavior she had witnessed at the conference, she felt that she needed to introduce the concept of collaborative law to this group of lawyers, so that they would learn to work together peacefully.  This would be an added burden to her already very overcrowded work schedule and life.  And then I remembered that collaborative law was developed by a follower of the Dalai Lama of Tibet.  Thus the symbolic appearance of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in my ‘dream’.

This dream, even though an actual visit with my friend S. in Chicago,  used symbology as in a psychological dream: S. did not jump or fall off a balcony, the Dalai Lama of Tibet was not there at the lawyer convention.  Mainly when I have these out-of-body visits in my sleep, I do not use symbology.  In fact, in clairvoyant dreams of this sort I know exactly where I am and why, and could describe the people and the location perfectly on awakening the next day.  And despite the symbology of this dream visit, if I hopped on a plane and went to that conference tonight, I would know where every room was in that building and what every room looked like – and recognize the people that attended.

This sort of mixed dream is unusual for me.  Either I have clairvoyant dreams, or occasionally psychological ones.  However, most people who are not ordinarily clairvoyant will use symbology even in their clairvoyant dreams – and it is for this reason that I use this dream as an example of a nightmarish dream that in fact is not a dream at all, but an actual visit to help a friend in need.

This sort of clairvoyant dream is fairly easy to analyze because we can later check with the person or people in the dream and see that it was an actual visit.  However, sometimes we will visit people while we are in dream state that we do not know, sometimes in countries across the globe.  We can go to help them, or because we are curious – or for any reason under the sun.  But all these special dreams should be analyzed differently than psychological dreams.  The people and places and events in these special dreams are not merely the product of our own subconscious – but often have their own independent existence.  Therefore, we should only analyze our own behavior in these special dreams – and perhaps ask why we went there in the first place.

In my case, in the dream described here: it would have been better to have gotten up earlier in the day and phoned my friend S. during the conference to see how she was doing – instead of trying to help her while I was asleep.  As it turned out, I wasn’t any help to her and I awoke confused and unhappy.  

However, the main point I am trying to make here is that sometimes we do travel to other places on earth while we are asleep.  And many of our confusing and nightmarish dreams – are not the product of our own subconscious mind, but rather actual visits to another place on earth.  Or in some cases visits to other realms.