Real Dreams Are Actions of the True Self

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 49 pages

At 49 pages the largest file in this batch, and the fullest treatment of dreaming anywhere in the section. It opens on the working definition — dreams are images of hopes and fears, and imagination is the best guide of our blind senses — and treats somnambulism, premonitions and second sight together as one disposition: the capacity, energised by imagination, to perceive and guess by intuition at reflections from the Astral Light.

Much of it is assembled from exchanges in the periodicals: a reader's letter to The Theosophist and Blavatsky's reply, an article from Chambers' Journal on dreamland and somnambulism with her notes on it. Two observations from that material are worth having. The first is the familiar experience of being startled in sleep without fully waking, and dreaming a long train of events within the brief space the sound occupies — the whole sequence generated by and attributed to that one noise. The second is her sorting of the vast number of meaningless dreams from the few in which presages of coming events are given, which may properly be called prophetic. The distinction the title draws comes in the second half: that real dreams are neither idle visions nor interludes which fancy makes, but actions of the true Self, and that the stronger the spiritual element the truer the dream.

Read the full text (PDF, 2.1 MB, 49 pages)