Religiously, what does a beautiful mountain with a lantern near the top signify?
Re: Dreams...
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*Originally posted by Zakk: *
Religiously, what does a beautiful mountain with a lantern near the top signify?
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You are interested only in religious interpretation. So do not consider my post to be specific answer to your query. I want to share the latest scientific research results about "dreams".
What are dreams infact? First we should know about the "conciousness". Well, conciousness can be considered as a feeling of being alive or can be considered as "concious experience". So we feel ourself. We feel our presence in the world etc. all this is due to "conciousness". This state can be called as "awakening conciousness". The point to be noted is that during our awakeing conciousness, all what we experience, we consider it real.
Now come to dreams. Dreams are also a state of conciousness. In dreams, we can feel ourself. We can feel our presence etc. The point which should also be noted here is that ** during the state of dreaming, we cannot say that we are just dreaming. We take it as reality. It is only when we wake up, then we say that oh! it was just a dream.** So we can conclude that dreaming is also a state of conciousness.
Then what is the difference between "awakening conciousness" and "dreaming". Well, we only can answer this question during our "awakening concious" state. During awakening state, when we analyze our own dreams, we can easily find that all what we "saw" in our dreams, it had no logical sequences. For example, at one moment I was doing one thing in one place and in the next moment I was doing entirely different thing at some other place. It means that while awaken, we can easily detect logical inconsistancy of our own dreams. But we cannot do the same during our dreams.
So the dreams which are also a state of conciousness are different from our ordinary concious state due to this logical consistancy. The dreams, therefore, can be considered as "altered state of conciousness" according to latest reserches on this issue.
What we see in the dreams..??
WE GET ALL THE RAW MATERIALS OF OUR DREAMS FROM OUR OWN ORDINARY CONCIOUS EXPERIENCES, OUR PREVIOUS DREAMS AND FROM OUR OWN IMAGINATIONS.
You cannot see any thing in your dream which you never had seen during your awakening state or during your previous dream or which you never have imagine yet.
And what about imaginations..??
Also note this fact that WE CANNOT IMAGINE ANYTHING WHICH WE NEVER HAVE EXPERIENCED IN OUR ORDINARY CONCIOUS STATE OR IN OUR DREAMS OR IN OUR PREVIOUS IMAGINATIONS.
This fact you can test easily. Just try to imagine anything that you never had experienced in your awakening life or in your dreams or which you never have imagined yet. You will not be able to even imagine anything which satisfy these conditions.
You can say, however, that I have successfully imagined a flying dog. Since I never seen any flying dog throughout my awakening life, since I never saw any such dog in any of my dreams and since I never imagined previously about any such dog so your above statement is wrong because I successfully imagined a thing which satisfy all your conditions.
My Answer:
Well. What you have imagined IS NOT A NEW THING AT ALL. You saw a flying dog. You already know about "dogs". You already aware about the concept of "flying". What you have done is only that you have "combined" two different "known" things into a single thing. Technically speaking it is an example of compound imagination. You only have combined two different "known" entities in your "new" imagination. So nothing new has been imagined.
What is the latest Research about Dreaming..??
Well, wise nations are tring to find out real causes of different phenomeno. They also have carried on extensive research on the issue of dreaming. Scientists have detected two distinct states of human sleeping. Nearly all human sleeping states can be divided into two distinguishable forms. First state is called NREM (Non-Rapid Eye Movement) and the second state is called REM (Rapid Eye Movement).
During sleeping, a persons eyes shall be moving rapidly or shall not be moving rapidly. These are actually two different phases of our sleep. When our eyes are not moving rapidly, it means that we are not dreaming at that moment. If our eyes are moving rapidly, it means that we are dreaming at that moment. The REM state comes normally 2 or three times during sleeps and each time it lasts for about 10 minutes.
Other interesting fact is that while REM state, a sleeping person's brain waves always resemble to that of "awakening state". That is why dreaming is considered as "altered state of conciousness".