In my own personal experience, many dream experiences given to us are actual meetings and visits to either other realms or other places on earth.  They are not all psychological dreams, i.e. the product of our thoughts and memories and desires stored in our subconscious.  These special dreams are either a form of clairvoyance or astral travel.  However, dreams about the future are easier to prove.  If the event happens later in our usual, conventional reality – then the dream was obviously more than an ordinary dream.  For this reason, these sorts of dreams need little discussion.  However, there is one thing I would like to say about them, and what they can teach us.

When I was in my late twenties, living at the State Street house, I had many dreams of the future.  One of them was more unusual than the others, in that I dreamt it in black and white.  I am not sure what consciousness I was in, but it was a fairly long, complicated dream, ending with a view of the night sky.  Ordinary events of a fairly ordinary day led up to this view of the stars – conversations with friends and my housemates, a telephone call, walks outside the house and moving  from room to room within the house for various tasks.  But because the dream was in black and white, and not especially vivid in terms of colours and visual clarity, I forgot about the dream.  It seemed like just an ordinary dream, and not a very important one.

However, a few days later, the dream unfolded in our usual, conventional earth reality.  I was not even aware that I had relived the events of the dream in our conventional reality, until the end of my day, when I went outside to stand on our front porch.  As I looked up at the night sky, and admired the clarity and beauty of the scene above me – I recalled the “dream” in its entirety.  Yes, all the events had happened, as they had in the dream.  All the conversations and all the people of my day had been in the dream.  And the sky above me now was the same night sky that had ended the dream.  Except for one extraordinary difference.  A difference that I had not noticed until standing on the front porch.

The difference was striking and unforgettable.  There was an unusual excitement about the dream  – I still remember it fairly well some thirty years later.  However, standing on the front porch, in waking state, and looking up at the stars and constellations was an entirely different experience than that of the “dream”.  Standing there that night, I think I finally understood the word “alive” – for the experience in waking state consciousness was certainly alive in every imaginable way compared to the dream.  The vividness, the wholeness to the scene, the clarity.  As I gazed about me, I tried to analyze the difference between the night in my dream and what I now saw and felt.  All I could come to was that the human emotions, the human senses of the body, the clarity of human waking state consciousness – all these played a role, were a factor.  There was an emotionality missing in the dream, and I do not mean that in the usual sense of the word “emotion”.  It might better be described as an emotional perception of the world than emotionality.  This emotional perception added an intensity and a completeness that was sorely lacking in the dream.  The clarity of our waking state consciousness added still more, and the breeze of the night against my skin, the temperature of the night, and the sounds and fragrances and taste of the night gave an entirety to the scene the “dream” could never provide.  Even though there had been an excitement to the dream, a mental one, perhaps the thrill of being in a less-experienced consciousness – the excitement and Beauty I now felt, looking out onto the street and up to the stars, was incomparable.  Incomparable and extraordinary.  I was bathed, submerged  in the night, suspended in it and yet a part of it.  The wonderment was awe inspiring and unforgettable.

The Beauty and Clarity of the night as I stood there on the front porch imprinted itself on me with such intensity – because I now had something to compare it to.  I could compare those few minutes of my ordinary, waking state life on earth to the remembered dream experience.  And in that comparison, I was given to see all the Beauty and Wonder and exquisite Vibrancy of every second of our waking state lives here on earth.

Because of this new awareness, this realization, I would call these few minutes on my front porch a mystical experience.  Dreaming of the future, in itself, need not be a mystical experience.  Many prophetic dreams, or dreams of the future, are more psychic in nature; they might warn us of a future event, or prepare us for a coming hardship – or even give us a pleasant glimpse into the future to cheer us, to give us hope.  But I would call my experience of the night sky, while in waking state, a Mystical one.
  
Has this gratitude for the ordinary, human, waking state consciousness stayed with me?  Yes, it has.  And that is another reason I might call the experience of that night, those few minutes on my front porch, a mystical one, a mystical Glimpse into Consciousness.