SPIRITUAL TRAVEL.ORG Travel in the Spiritual Worlds

SPIRITUAL   TRAVEL VERSUS DREAMS Distinguishing One From the Other

Spiritual travel is different from dreaming in a number of important ways.

In spiritual travel, the traveler's awareness is heightened and the traveler is able to direct the experience if desired. This is unlike dreaming, in which the dreamer's awareness is dulled, and the dreamer lacks initiative. In most dreams, the dream drama unfolds as if controlled by some outside force with little or no control exercised by the dreamer.

In spiritual travel, the traveler is also aware that he or she has left the physical body and the world that is encountered is not the physical world. In normal dreaming, however, the dreamer believes the dream to be real as if he or she is acting in the physical world. This explains the great fear in nightmares where any threat is perceived as a threat to the physical body which could result in death.

Since the spiritual traveler's awareness is clear and concentrated, there is usually no difficultly remembering the experience. Many people have trouble remembering their dreams because most dreamers experience a dulled form of awareness during dreams.

Following a spiritual travel experience, very seldom does the traveler fall back into a dream state or unconscious state. The intensity of spiritual travel does not lend itself to immediately reentering sleep or dreams. In most cases, there is an awareness of returning to the physical body, and the person awakens immediately after a spiritual travel experience.

Though spiritual travel may begin by "waking up in a dream" (lucid dreaming), the dream drama usually stops as soon as the dreamer awakens. The symbolic content of a dream usually stops immediately when the lucid dream begins, and the dreamer senses that he or she is now in control of the dream's events.

Spiritual travel also provides a much broader range of experience than is present in dreams. The lucid dreamer with the right training can use the lucid dream as a jumping off point to explore a wide variety of spiritual and psychic states not available in dreams. Once one inner reality is entered consciously, it is relatively easy to enter another because the lucid dream state is much like being in an elevator in a building. The dreamer who learns how to push the correct buttons can trigger a transition to a different floor or plane of reality.

Lucid dreaming is only one of the ways that spiritual travel can be initiated. Spiritual travel may also begin during meditation, or as a result of a traumatic shock to the body. The fact that a spiritual traveler can go directly into an inner world via meditation without the loss of consciousness that occurs when spiritual travel begins from the dream state seems to indicate that spiritual travel states are independent of and not to be identified with the dream state. The dream state is only one of a set of doorways which can be used to reach spiritual travel states.

One of the difficulties of distinguishing a normal dream state from a lucid dream state is that there are degrees of lucidity. Sometimes there is increased awareness in a dream where the dreamer believes he has awakened but then goes on to act in a way that is uncharacteristic of someone who is completely awake.

Awakening completely means that the dreamer reacts to dream situations in the same way he or she would react if awake in the physical world. Sometimes this semi-waking state manifests as an inability to act to change the dream. Here there is a strong sense of waking awareness which is accompanied by a passive attitude of acceptance and powerlessness. Another form of semi-waking consciousness occurs when the dreamer has limited access to normal memory and cannot recognize familiar persons or situations. Here, the dreamer has a subset of his normal memories and cannot react normally to the dream situation because of these missing memories.

This semi-waking consciousness muddies the distinction between normal dreaming and lucid dreaming. True lucid dreaming has a crystal clarity that somehow feels even more powerful than the usual clarity of waking awareness, and it is this kind of lucid dream state that is easily distinguished from a normal dream state. The spiritual matter page illustrates just how clear and convincing the reality of lucid dreaming is by describing how reality testing is done with the objects in the lucid dream. For a more cosmological discussion on the relationship of dreams to "higher states of consciousness", see the hierarchy of dreams page.

Another important point to note is that spiritual practices affect dreams. The contents of dreams often echo significant activities performed in the waking state. Therefore, spiritual practices done in waking life on a regular basis will sometimes lead to the dreamer spontaneously repeating such practices in dreams. This will likely result in waking up in the dream and can even precipitate powerful spiritual experiences. Even when the practices are not having obvious results in a waking state, the openness of the dream state can permit such practices to produce the out-of-body states that they are intended to produce while awake in dreams instead.

The discussion above assumes that the lucid dreamer has a "dream body" which is usually the case in lucid dreaming (a subcategory of spiritual travel) but this is sometimes not the case. In the case where there is no dream body and the dreamer experiences being a point of consciousness or existing in another type of body (shape shifting), there is no difficulty in distinguishing this kind of spiritual travel from normal dreaming. The differences between normal dream body consciousness and these other types of consciousness are striking and unambiguous. Such experiences are clearly not dreams.

Finally, it is not necessary wake up in a dream to do spiritual travel while asleep. Many of the experiences at this site occurred spontaneously while the traveler was asleep without actually beginning in a dream. Adopting a spiritual practice that emphasizes spiritual travel will tend to produce such spontaneous travel experiences where the sleeper "pops into" out-of-body states while asleep without first being in a dream.

Having tried to describe the differences in analytic terms, it is necessary here to state that none of these distinctions really captures the qualitative differences between normal dreaming and spiritual travel or lucid dreaming. The quality of awareness is just different in ways that seem impossible to describe. One thing that can be said is that this "difference" in consciousness sometimes inspires awe and fascination. There is also many times the direct and immediate sense that one's soul is composed of spiritual energy with much potential. It only awaits thought to activate that potential energy and direct it towards some end. It is up to the traveler to train his or her mind and increase the ability to concentrate to be able to direct this energy towards some desired state of consciousness or new form of knowledge.

It is important to understand the differences stated above so as not to confuse spiritual travel with dreams. However it may be difficult to convince someone who has not done spiritual travel that it is different from dreaming no matter how many distinctions are drawn.

Introduction | The Geography of Spiritual Travel | The "Travel" Analogy | Leaving the Body in Spiritual Travel | Spiritual Travel Versus Dreams | Sacred Light | Sacred Sound | Psychic States | Spiritual Travel in Western Religious Scripture | The Self in Spiritual Travel | Returning to the Physical Body | Near-Death Experience | Navigation During Spiritual Travel | Spiritual Matter | Method and Techniques To Induce Spiritual Travel | Shamanism and Spiritual Travel | After-Death Experience | Spiritual Travel as a Rehearsal for Physical Death | Beyond Spiritual Travel | Conclusion