The Dream Holds True in [at Least] Half the Universe

 

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James (1842-1910) observed that "The founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine."

That “direct personal communion" has been conducted through dreams, visions and interior dialogue and observation of signs and marvels in the natural world, all facets of dreaming in the broader sense understood by our ancestors and by active dreamers in all cultures. James reminds us that religion without dreaming is divorced from its very origins.

In a letter to Henry Rankin on June 16, 1901, he put it this way: "The mother sea and fountainhead of all religions lie in the mystical experiences of the individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense. All theologies and ecclesiasticisms are secondary growths superimposed."  Borrowing from his friend, the great British psychic researcher and scholar, Frederic Myers, James explained that "mystical consciousness" is related to the existence of an "extended subliminal self, with a thin partition through which messages make irruption."

For most of us, it is through dreams that the subliminal self most frequently irrupts through that "thin partition" into everyday awareness.

In The Principles of Psychology (1890), James offers these interesting reflections on the orders of reality we may enter in dreams, and why dreaming is our mode of experiencing half the "total universe":

 "The world of dreams is our real world whilst we are sleeping, because our attention then lapses from the sensible world. Conversely, when we wake the attention usually lapses from the dream-world and that becomes unreal. But if a dream haunts us and compels our attention during the day it is very apt to remain figuring in our consciousness as a sort of sub-universe alongside of the waking world. Most people have probably had dreams which it is hard to imagine not to have been glimpses into an actually existing region of being, perhaps a corner of the spiritual world. 

"And dreams have accordingly in all ages been regarded as revelations, and have played a large part in furnishing forth mythologies and creating themes for faith to lay hold upon. The 'larger universe,' here, which helps us to believe both in the dream and in the waking reality which is its immediate reductive, is the total universe, of Nature plus the Super-natural. The dream holds true, namely, in one half of that universe; the waking perceptions in the other half." 

Dwell with that last statement for a moment.  The dream "holds true" in half the "total" universe, and is our way to access and experience this reality. If James is correct, then if we have divorced ourselves from dreaming, we are only halflings, only half present in the universe.

So it is a mystery why he chose not to include a chapter on dreams in The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book that continues to exert enormous influence in the field of religious studies and beyond that. 

During his life on Earth, William James seems to have invested less effort in recording and exploring his own dreams than in sitting with psychic mediums and seeking verification of paranormal phenomena according to the protocols of the Society for Psychical Research. He did record some powerful dreams, including a series of nocturnal adventures he had while sleeping at Stanford University in February 1906. His San Francisco nights that shocked him into the realization that in dreams we may be in several places - or worlds - at the same time.

If William James is truly the speaker in Jane Roberts' channeled book The Afterlife Journal of an American Philosopher, his understanding of the importance of dreamwork grew measurably on the Other Side. If he had his life over, he declared, he would pay more attention to "how soul operates in life". For this the study of dreams is essential. 

He observes that dreams may be “test patterns” for waking events. "Dream images and imaginative acts prepare the way for physical ones, impressing large areas in general, preshapes which are later ‘filled in’. It is as if the mind makes preliminary test patterns that are projections in space-time, but in a ghostly fashion. These dream images, however, are laid upon initial fields of probabilities which are characteristic of the physical medium itself.” If this is correct. as I believe it is, then dreams hold true in more than half the universe. 

 

The afterdeath journal of an American philosopher

The Afterlife Journal of an American Philosopher is  Jane Roberts’ version of the afterlife reflections of the great American philosopher and pioneer of psychology William James. Jane Roberts, an excellent writer and thinker in her own right, became famous for channeling the "interdimensional teacher" known as Seth. Seth was unknown to the public before Jane started publishing the Seth material but was quickly recognized as an extraordinary guide to the multidimensional self and to dreaming as the best way to explore the multiverse and practice reality creation.
    Here we find Jane in contact with a mind that influenced many in this world before it left the body. Like other luminaries of the Society for psychical Research, William James was keenly interested in assembling scientific evidence of the survival of consciousness after physical death. Like his British associates F.W.H. Myers and W.T. Stead, he let it be known that after he took up residence on the Other Side. he would seek to report back, via sensitives, on what he had discovered. What better scientific data on survival could there be than first-hand reports from the afterlife from towering and trustworthy intellects like his own?
    I have deep appreciation for what came through from Stead (The Blue Island) and Myers (The Road to Immortality).  The Afterlife Journal of an American Philosopher has less geography and fewer road maps. It was transcribed  69 years after the death of the supposed communicator in 1910. However, it is a wonderfully plausible account of a desirable afterlife environment, especially interesting on what persuades the dead to take a lively interest in the living.

     Can we believe that the voice is really that of William James? We are told, “I am the William James that I was but I am no longer William James in the same way that he adult is not the child.” He says he is more “lively” now than he was in life, when he was prone to deep depression.
     His role has changed. He is no longer an investigator of psychic phenomena but an ideal case study for later investigators. “I have turned from being an investigator of ‘strange sources’ into a perfect instance of the kind of phenomena that in life I would have tracked down.” 

     Looking back over the life he left behind, he says that had he known what he now knows: “I would have sought more ambitiously for proof of the soul’s existence in life rather than seeking for evidence of its afterdeath existence through communications from the dead. The soul’s abilities in life, clearly defined , would in life show themselves to be independent of the body’s physical confinements. Therefore I would have looked even more vigorously for accelerations and extensions of the creative abilities as they appear in telepathy, clairvoyance, healings and out of body travel, and I would have examined those characteristics of mind (or soul) that display mind’s control of matter” 

    He tries to describe how the mind generates the reality we inhabit often without recognizing what is going on. “The private cast of consciousness works upon the objective world landscape by giving it its final, private, definite form; as if before the individual perceives objects, here is instead a field of pliable, malleable, pseudoshapes. The perceptions themselves bring these into focus and form…The processes are so smooth and automatic, so beautifully executed, that man rarely catches himself in the act of this multiple creativity, as the mind forms the world pattern of objects and events.”
    Active dreamers will be encouraged by the suggestion that dreams may be test patterns, rehearsals for physical events that will follow. “Dream images and imaginative acts prepare the way for physical ones, impressing large areas in general preshapes which are later ‘filled in’. It is as if the mind makes preliminary test patterns that are projections in space-time, but in a ghostly fashion. These dream images, however, are laid upon initial fields of probabilities which are characteristic of the physical medium itself.”
    One thing the philosopher reporting from the afterlife can confirm for sure: "lifelines begin before birth and continue after it."

For more on the adventures of the great Victorian "ghost hunters" before and after death, please see The Dreamer's Book of the Dead.