Following an Energy Stream (Astral to Lower Mental Plane)
AC 218: January 27, 2003 (Boston)I don’t know how I got from the previous dream, about eating in a restaurant with a friend, to this adventure in consciousness. The adventure began with a feeling of being pulled along in a shallow stream of very clear water. The stream was just wide enough for me to float along in it. At first it was winding along, but eventually it straightened out. I was content simply to let it pull me along.
Clearly this was an energy stream. It had picked me up (or I’d immersed myself in it) and was carrying me along to some destination.
The whole time I was in the energy stream I heard a woman’s voice speaking to me. I didn’t know where the voice was coming from. No one was with me. But I saw the events it described as they were described--all the while floating along in the energy stream. So, in a sense, I was experiencing two dreams simultaneously.
The woman’s voice was saying: “When I had my near-death experience, I was in a swimming pool at the Y. Something happened and I lost consciousness--or my body did. I was outside of my body looking down at it from the ceiling while the life guard and several others tried to resuscitate me. Then I felt myself being pulled higher and higher. Someone was with me, a comforting female presence who was responsible for guiding me.
“As we went through the roof of the building and I could see the city spread out below me, I asked her who she was. She said that she was something like a spiritual emergency technician.
“We climbed higher and higher, as if I was being airlifted to a nearby hospital in a helicopter maneuvered by my guide.
“‘That’s a good image to hold onto,’” my guide said to me. ‘Just relax. I’ll take care of everything.’”
We went so high that I could see the blue of the sky becoming darker and darker, moving eventually into a beautiful purple shade in which it was possible to see the stars. At this point, we stopped rising, and my guide said to me, ‘You can do this yourself, you know. You can move about simply by thinking about it. Try it.’
“I imagined myself rising from the surface I was lying back on to look at the stars, as if through the bubble of a helicopter--and I could move. I could levitate myself a few inches above that surface, all on my own! I’d never felt such a sense of freedom before. I was ecstatic--to be wholly free of my physical body, yet still myself. I’ll never forget that supreme moment of happiness.
“Those scientists who think that the out-of-body experience is only a production of the mind would never think so, if only they could have the experience themselves. It’s so vivid, so real. I suppose they’d say the same thing about happiness--that it doesn’t really exist, or is only a product of the brain--if they were ever able to study it. But they would never think to study it--because they’ve felt it. They already know what it is from inside.
“And even if an experience like mine--or like happiness--is merely a product of the brain, that doesn’t necessarily invalidate it. Anyone who has experienced either knows that life will never be quite the same afterwards. And so the ecstatic feeling of the out-of-body experience or of happiness itself is real as a psychological fact, even if it can’t be verified in the objective world of science, or seems to be explainable as a mere mechanism of the brain.
“A human being is the psychological reality of subjective experiences accumulated over a lifetime and not merely the mechanism that accumulates and processes them.”
When the voice stopped speaking, I was still floating along in the energy stream. It began to widen as it approached a boundary of trees planted like a shelter belt, but at a ninety-degree angle to the stream’s course. [Boundary between the astral and lower mental plane.]
On the other side of the trees was a large body of water, not deep. I could feel the bottom. The water was black. The trees’ gnarled roots reached into the water like those of mangroves in a swamp. But the water wasn’t stagnant.
I was still being carried along by a current, which seemed stronger here, rather than weaker, as one might expect that of a stream to be once it has entered a larger body of water. Suddenly, I was with others--a mixture of men and women, all being carried along by the current. All but one person in the group seemed to be allowing this process to take place in a passive, half-awake, half-asleep state. They’d been carried along by other energy streams, which had pooled together in the vast swamp.
I found myself thinking that the water level seemed higher than usual [higher than that required by the usual astral plane dream]. The current behind me seemed stronger than that behind the others, so I shot past them to the side of a beautiful blond-haired woman, who resembled the girlfriend of one of my close friends. My friend’s girlfriend’s last name was Fairservis. Here was a visual pun--the blonde in my adventure was a Facilitator (she offered “fair service”).
At this point, the water deepened considerably and I was having some difficulty keeping my head above it. Apparently, I was beginning to lose my focus of consciousness. I began flailing about, as if I were drowning.
The Facilitator came to my rescue. To my surprise, she took something from me that resembled several sections of a daily newspaper, saying, “I’ll hold onto these.”
Immediately, I was calmer. Later, I realized that the newspaper sections represented the night’s dreams [from the astral plane], my memory of which would be waiting for me upon awakening, like a morning paper on the doorstep.
Years ago, I developed a technique for remembering dreams that had occurred early in the night by reserving a portion of my consciousness for the purpose of continually replaying them until I was ready to wake up and recollect them. Evidently, in the present adventure, I was having some trouble multitasking in this way--that is, in trying to keep the earlier dreams (of which there were several) in memory while remaining open to the adventure. When I awoke this morning, I’d lost some of the dream that had occurred earlier in the sleep cycle, but was able to recall everything that had happened since the dream just prior to my entering the energy stream.
After helping me stabilize my level of consciousness, the guide indicated that we should all move over to a wharf-like area that jutted from a distant shoreline far into the water. On the wharf was a gray, weathered wooden building. To enter the building, which gently rose and fell with the water, each member of the group, including myself, had to duck under a portion of the wharf.
I was afraid. What if I tried to come up on the other side and hit my head on the wharf? Wouldn’t I drown? But I soon discovered that there was open airspace under the wharf. From there it was possible to pull myself up and out of the water into the enclosed space of the building.
While the rest of us gathered in the room (there were about ten of us), I looked around. The interior of the building seemed to be set up as a yoga studio, with mirrors, and all sorts of equipment to help people develop strength and flexibility. Apparently, our guide was to be our instructor in using this equipment.
Just as I realized that this was a class in the development of flexibility of consciousness, I awoke, feeling the pressure of a full bladder. Most of my adventures in consciousness take place between three and four in the morning. This one, however, took place just before I needed to wake up and begin the day, a little after 7 A.M.
I must have been in the Dream Zone. The other people with me would then have been Dreamers. Was the woman who told me her NDE among them? There was a resemblance between her guide and the one who met us. Is the latter where I got the story about the NDE? I’ve occasionally attended dream classes in the past--but had never joined one so consciously.
It has been a long time since I’ve had one of these adventures. Maybe I was testing my flexibility of consciousness to see how well I would do?
The format of the experience suggests that there may be private and public areas of the Dream Zone, with energy stream connections between them. That’s something I’ve never noticed or thought about before.
The shelter belt of trees must be some sort of thin boundary between zones. I was still in the Human Zone of Otherwhere, though (man-grove).
Gaining access to dream classes apparently depends upon the fluctuating level of one’s consciousness (ups and downs of the wharf). One has to dive deeper into oneself in order to achieve a higher state of consciousness, perhaps, as we students had to dive under the wharf to enter the classroom.
What was the wharf attached to at the land end, I wonder? I’ve sometimes seen such structures in dreams and recognized them as having their origins in physical reality or waking consciousness, but stretching far out into the nonphysical reality of Otherwhere. Or maybe a more appropriate way to think about this is simply that teaching areas like this one float along, as it were, on a certain level of consciousness, as part of the overall structure of the Dream Zone. That feels right.
Too bad I couldn’t stay long enough to see what the class was about!
[When I wrote these speculations, I wasn't aware that I was in the mental plane Dream Zone. I wouldn't learn about the planes for another couple of years.]