OBE, AP: dream symbolism

[RJA]

Jung asserted that in addition to our individual "unconscious", there is a collective "unconscious" which I would describe as the pool of humanity's remembered experience and thought.  Through various means, such as dreams we can catch glimpses into our unconscious and I tend to think that via our innate spirituality we all tap into the collective unconscious also - especially during altered states of consciousness such as trance, OBEs, dreams, etc.

So yes, I tend to think that dreams and OBEs are just as likely constructions that our unconscious builds for us in order to nudge us in certain directions in our lives.  The building blocks of these messages, can originate either in our personal or cultural unconscious or even from the collective unconscious of all humanity.

Because we are ego driven, we are likely, unfortunately in my view to see most of these experiences as being objectively "real" - i.e. real for all people rather than subjectively meant for us personally to chew on, per se.

That's not to say that we are not in touch with "real" entities outside of us, or that we can not telepathically tap into others' minds or other dimensions - it's just that, in my opinion, we tend to interpret the messages within that experience as something that we must shout to the world as objectively true and relevent to everyone - when I suspect most transcendent and mystical experiences hold spiritual value mainly for that person who experienced them.

Taken in this context, I suspect the astral planes are in some way a manefestation of the collective unconscious, - essentially a vast gathering of knowledge and experience containing many different versions of the "truth".  So when someone says that they were abducted by aliens and told all kinds of secrety knowledge about the origins and future of mankind, - I would suggest that their experience was real but that the resulting information is not objectively real.

[shaman]

Some OBEs are in the plane near the physical world but most of them are not, they look extremely similar in context, appearance and stories to dreams, and more precisely to Lucid Dreams but with a higher state of consciousness. My question, or more precisely my suggestion is therefore that the same symbolism that appears in dreams might be at work during these OBE that are far from the physical plane, in that sens that these OBE should be INTERPRETED like dreams in order to be understood, and they should not be taken directly as they are. For example if during the OBE a big animal is attacking you, you might want to check what would it mean first if such a thing would happen in a dream. For that specific example that kind of dreams with animals attacking, more like nightmare actually, represent some physical difficulty of the person, in that sens that these kind of nightmares are induced by indigestion or other physical conditions. And then the animal represent our "physical" that is trying to tell us that it does not feel well. Deep water in dreams represent our deep inconscious and I would suggest if this happen in OBE it should be interpreted as such too, and so on with all the symbolism that are attributed to dreams. There are more "complex" situations where one needs to interpret for her/himself, since many dreams are very personal; in that same manner I would say that many interpretation of OBE might have to be at a personal level, where everyone would have to look into the OBE for him/herself and try to think what each thing means personally. THere was even something mentioned in the online book of Robert Bruce, but it was more on the side of the premonitions. It was the wind of the future, where suddently during AP, Robert felt like taken away to a place where there was a fridge, a road I think and a wall in front of him... later on he understood that it was a premonition of something important hapening in his life at that moment where (if I remember correctly) he had an old fridge standing outside his house for quite a while, and when he decided to throw it away it was at a time when a big change/decision was hapening in his life (Robert you might want to correct me, thanks). Anyhow, in that episode there was symbolism being used the same way as it is in dreams. To use symbolism to interprete OBE/AP does not mean that it refutes OBE/AP as such, but it just means that the astral realm and the dream world are very close. ANd I am adding: it does not mean that OBE are just dreams, but rather that dreams are mostly OBE, take it that way. Since we know how to "solve" dreams and try to interprete them with symbolism, why not try to do the same with OBE/AP?

Shaman The Dreamer