The Three levels in dream work
1.: Meaning 2.: Energy 3.: Consciousness

Edited and translated from Jes Bertelsen: Droemme Chakrasymboler og meditation

Every dream can be worked with on all three levels, but in practice it is only relevant to let important dreams go through all three levels of integration.

1) Meaning
Most methods of dream work belong to this category. The dream has a text and a language, which has to be understood. It is important to know about dream symbols etc. in order to open the dream and understand its meaning; it is characteristic that the dreams is worked with one at a time.
Freud and Jung and Perls belong to this category.


2) Energy
The aspect of the aura that shows up as light, colours, vibrations and movements, is very closely resembling the energy aspect of dreams.
Thus it is possible through dreams to characterise the individual aura structure.
It could be said that the dreams in their energy-aspect is the aura reflecting itself in the individual.
Many dreams are needed to give a full picture of the aura.


3) Consciousness
The dream is understood and worked with as a dimension of consciousness. On this meditative level, the dream is seen as a dull light phenomena, and the task is to transform the dream to increased levels of light and consciousness.

Every lower level of consciousness is dreamlike
seen from a higher level of consciousness

Jes Bertelsen

Dreams and consciousness
The procedure is to do the opposite of what normal consciousness does

We have gone through an array of techniques on how to work with understanding and integration of dream symbols.
On higher meditative levels the task is radically different. The task is to dissolve any symbolising, any image.
When energy and consciousness is spread into content, colours, images etc. the intensity is lost, higher consciousness is impaired or impossible.
Consciousness has a tendency to separate and split phenomenon, in order to analyse them, understand them.
Dreaming is such a separation and splitting. First the ego is reflected in the - in an energy sense - weaker dream ego, the remaining energy is differentiated into the other elements of the dream, animals, tables, chairs, people, cars, grass, sky, events etc.
If we work with the dream while staying within our normal consciousness, we understand and integrate these symbols.

On higher levels of meditation the task is not to understand, but simply to collect the separated and split energy, take the projections back, allow the energy to stay in a more potentisised, and undifferentiated state. Meditation transforms the consciousness of the dream, the dream is transformed and lifted, it becomes light.
The procedure is to do the opposite of what the normal consciousness does.

The normal consciousness splits, projects itself into forms and content, meditation plays the tune backwards.

Higher consciousness, Ego consciousness
Collective unconsciousness (chaos)

The state of consciousness present in the collective unconscious is sleep. When the unconscious is touched by the ego consciousness, dreams occur.

Seen from the ego, the higher consciousness is essentially sleeping, thus the collective unconscious and the higher conscious is overlapping each other.

The Self is the possibility for higher consciousness.
The self first manifest itself in dreams, then in intuitions and finally in clear meditative experiences.

The plot is, in meditation to discover and locate those areas, where one is asleep, contact them, and through the light and clarity of the consciousness to transform the unconscious darkness into dreams, and to be able to wake up from these dreams.

DHARMA

We spend a lot of energy in a handful of areas:

Our attitude to our body Job, shopping and commuting
Friends and entertainment relationship and sex

The energy available, for higher experiences in dreams or in meditation, is the energy that is left after these areas have got their share!
This is often not enough, if we want to continue development beyond a certain level, we need to change how we spend our energy elsewhere.

The inner witness: The miracle is to know that one does what one does
while one is doing it

The witness is that level of consciousness that knows what is.

One is or does something
Simultaneously with this being or doing, one can be conscious of this being or doing.

Normally the ego only knows about the being or doing afterwards. This is not the witness.
The witness is only possible simultaneously with what is witnessed, in the now.

The witness is objective, it does not judge, categorise, tell wether something is good or bad, right or wrong etc. The witness, knows, it is a pure mirror.

Krishnamurti calls this level of consciousness for choiseless awareness, Christ gave the technique "Judge ye not".

First one has to realise how much, how often, and how unconscious one judges, assesses, chooses, then one has to exercise not judging.

The miracle is to know that one does what one does while one is doing it

The inner witness
a story

A disciple who had been practising for some time came to see Ikkyu.
It was raining, and as he went in, he left his shoes and umbrella outside. After he had paid his respects, Ikkyu asked him on which side of his shoes he had left his umbrella.
Now, what kind of a question? You expect masters to ask about God, about kundalini rising, chakras opening, lights happening in your head! But Ikkyu asked a very ordinary question. What does shoes and umbrellas have to do with spirituality?
But there is something immensely valuable in it; the question has meaning. The disciple could not remember - who bothers where you have put your shoes and on which side you have put your umbrella?
But that was enough - the disciple was refused. Ikkyu said, then go and meditate for seven years more.
Seven years the disciple said. Just for this small fault.
Faults are not small or big , Ikkyu said. You are just not yet living meditatively, that's all.
Don't make any distinction between things, that this is trivial and that is very spiritual. Pay attention, be careful, and everything becomes spiritual. If you don't pay attention, don't be careful, everything becomes unspiritual.
Spirituality is imparted by you, it is your gift to the world. When a master like Ikkyu touches his umbrella, the umbrella is as divine as anything can be. Meditative energy is alchemical; it goes on transforming the baser into the higher. Peel an orange as if you are conducting a symphony, and you will be coming closer and closer. The more meditative you become, the more you see God everywhere.
At the ultimate peak, everything is divine.

Osho: Take it easy, vol 2, Here from Neo Tarot p. 28-29.

The inner witness Lucid dreaming

The miracle is to know that one does what one does while one is doing it

This rare and high state of being is also possible in dreams.
The dream ego can be actively present to such a degree that he or she starts to realise that he is dreaming.

This is "lucid dreaming": the dreamer is fully aware that he is dreaming, and more than that - he is aware that he is able to direct and control consciously what is going to happen.

If an individual wakes up in a dream and knows that she/he is dreaming, it is lucid dreaming.

Lucid dreaming will occur gradually if there is a meditative practise.

In lucid dreaming, the person can consciously move towards inner guidance, his or her spiritual purpose, to the source of love or light etc., thus accelerating personal and spiritual development.

Lucid dreaming means that the person is being "tested" by the Divine.
There are several techniques to train lucid dreaming, but the risk is that the training interferes and destroys the mechanism of compensation crucial for mental and emotional health, so be careful!

A purpose in spiritual development is to have continuity of consciousness, also in deep sleep.

Namkhai Norbu in

"Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light", page 29.

Ego, Higher consciousness, unconsciousness

• Ego consciousness is the consciousness of differences

• Higher consciousness is the consciousness of unity

• Unconsciousness is lack of consciousness about differences

• The collective unconsciousness is the initial unity and its darkness.

• Higher consciousness is the acquired consciousness about the unity.

Jes Bertelsen

How to obtain clairvoyant or prophetic dreams

A person that generally is ruled by his emotions and thus not in a deeper sense have faced and integrated his shadow-sides will force the dreams to balance the emotions, and to again and again point to the shadow.
Likewise will sexual imbalances force the dreams to work with that.
On the other hand, the more a person knows his hidden aspects, is in charge of his emotions and acknowledges his sexuality, the more is the dream set free to mirror deeper aspects and impulses directly from the higher self

Edited and translated from Jes Bertelsen: Droemme Chakrasymboler og meditation

Technique to find out from what body-area a dream symbol is dreamt

Edited and translated from Jes Bertelsen: Droemme Chakrasymboler og meditation

Some times the appropriate body part is obvious in the dream, but if that is not the case, the following technique is useful:

1) Choose the dream symbol or dream image.
2) Sit in a relaxed and comfortable position.
3) With your eyes closed, see the dream symbol in front of you (in a reading distance).
4) Move with your awareness from the symbol to your body and back again, slowly and many times, and at the same time FEEL Your body and keep it relaxed.
5) Imagine that the symbol has grown out of the body just as a flower has grown up of the soil.
6) You try to FEEL your way back, from the dream symbol and back to the "roots" in the body.
7) Place the dream symbol directly upon the body area (if possible). This might help to a further understanding of the dream.
8) Dreams have a compensatory function. This can be important for the body as well, certain body-parts might be too neglected.

Place a hand on the neglected body-part with awareness, warmth and healing.

Meditation, an exercise

Choose a dream
Sit still, concentrate the awareness on the tendency to create images, symbols, dreams.

If this continue for some time, the door through which the symbolisation's, the differentiation's happen, will close, and the energy will by itself instead move upwards, towards higher states of consciousness.

A dream from July 19' 2001. Is it clairvoyant?

Well Last Saturday night after our sweat lodge I had a restless sleep.
Normally I will move into a space of being in the moment and being closer to nature after tending the fire and rocks.
This is the second such experience after being at the lodge.

The dream: I am watching flashing images of people from the middle east. It would show the person down to waist level, then it would show them turning charcoal colour and explode or turn charcoal colour with a sand-like consistency and sift to the ground. Sometimes the faces would have fear in them just before they turned to charcoal.
When they changed to the charcoal colour they looked like charcoal with very rough human-like features, they had been burned.
Then I sensed so strong that there will be a nuclear event in the middle east.
The sensing is so strong even now that it will happen! Which is against my nature.

From the net

A dream
(From J. B. Priestley, Man and Time)

I was standing at the top of a very high tower, alone, looking down upon myriads of birds flying in one direction; every kind of bird was there, all the birds in the world. It was a noble sight, this vast aerial river of birds. But now in some mysterious fashion the gear was changed, and time speed up, so that I saw generations of birds, watched them break their shells, flutter into life, mate, weaken, falter, and die. Wings grew only to crumple; bodies were sleek and then, in a flash, bled and shrivelled; and death struck everywhere at every second. What was the use of all this blind struggle towards life, this eager trying of wings, this hurried mating, this flight and search, all this gigantic meaningless biological effort?: As I stared down, seeming to see every creatures ignoble little history almost at a glance, I felt sick at heart. It would be better if not one of them, if not one of us all, had been born, if the struggle ceased forever. I stood on my tower, still alone, desperately unhappy.
But now the gear was changed again, and time went faster still, and it was rushing by at such a rate, that the birds could not show any movement, but were like an enormous plain sown with feathers. But along this plain, flickering through the bodies themselves, there now passed a sort of white flame, trembling, dancing, then hurrying on; and as soon as I saw it I knew that this white flame was life itself, the very quintessence of being; and then it came to me, in a rocket-burst of ecstasy, that nothing mattered, nothing could ever matter, because nothing else was real but this quivering and hurrying lambency of beings. Bird, men or creatures not yet shaped and coloured, all were of no account except so far as this flame of life travelled through them. It left nothing to mourn over behind it; what I had thought as tragedy was mere emptiness or a shadow show; for now all real feeling was caught and purified and danced on ecstatically with the white flame of life. I had never felt before such deep happiness as I knew at the end of my dream of the tower and the birds.

Here from Marie-Louise von Franz:
On dreams and death

You have reached the end of this little course.

If you want a certificate, give us an email, that you have finished the course, and we will send you a dream and questions in relation to the dream, that we want you to answer.

Send it to us, we will then asses your essay, and if it passes, send you a certificate.

Good luck

Ulla and Erik