SPIRITUAL TRAVEL.ORG Travel in the Spiritual Worlds

CREATIVITY AND   SPIRITUAL TRAVEL Creative Visualization On the Way Into Sleep

When I was young, I used to love trains. In my travels to visit relatives, I would be a passenger and visit large railway stations and see dozens of different trains from all over the United States. The colors, the smells, the porters and brakemen and travelers, and the enormous thundering vehicles all served to stimulate my imagination.

Sometimes I used to visualize the various train cars designing the contents of the sleeper, diner, passenger, entertainment, and lounge cars. I would create my ideal train on the way into sleep. I would move from car to car describing and visualizing elements of the environment such as seating, windows, and the colors and textures of surfaces.

Sometimes, I would find that my dream would take up where my visualizations ended and I would continue designing and riding that ideal train during the dream. Because I entered that dream state while involved in a creative activity, I would sometimes find myself in an expanded state of awareness and able to control the progress of the dream to varying degrees.

These visualizations and the resulting dream experiences were antecedents to spiritual travel. Getting involved in a visualization that crowds out all other sensations on the way into sleep is one way to initiate spiritual travel. Creative interest in a subject matter is in many cases a less stressful and more enjoyable method of entering into spiritual travel states than alternate approaches such as concentration exercises. Painters and musicians can compose canvases and musical scores using much the same technique.