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Chapter 6: The Psychology of Dreams

What are the different types of dreams?

There are so many types of dreams. We have seven bodies and each body has its own type of dream. The physical body creates its own dream - if your stomach is upset, then a particular type of dream is created. If you are unhealthy, if you are feverish, then the physical body creates its own type of dream. One thing is certain: that the dream is created out of some disease, out of some dis-ease.

Physical disease creates its own realm of dreams, so a physical dream can even be stimulated from the outside. You are sleeping; if a wet cloth is put around your legs, you will begin to dream. You may dream that you are crossing a river. If a pillow is put on your chest, you will begin to dream. You may dream that someone is sitting on you, or a stone has fallen on you. These dreams are through the physical body.

We have seven bodies - the physical, the etheric, the astral, the mental, the spiritual, the cosmic, and the nirvanic - so there is the possibility of seven types of dreams. The second body - the etheric body - dreams in its own way. Those dreams cannot be understood through the physiology - they cannot be understood. And those exact dreams have created much puzzlement in the psychologies of today - in either Freudian analysis, or in Adlerian, or in Jungian. Those etheric dreams have created so many puzzles and problems.

Freud understands them as suppressed desires. There are dreams which belong to suppressed desires, but they too belong to the first body, the physical. If you have been suppressing physical desires - if you have fasted for instance, then in the dream there is every possibility of some breakfast. If you have suppressed sex, there is every possibility of sexual fantasies. But these two belong to the first body. The second, the etheric body, is left out of these psychological investigations, or it is interpreted as physiological.

The etheric body can travel in dreams. There is every possibility of it going out of your physical body. But when you remember it, it is remembered as a dream. It is not a dream in the same sense as the physiological body dreams. The etheric body can go out of you when you are asleep. Your physiological body will be here, but your etheric body will go out and travel in space. There is no time and space binding for it; there is no question of distance for it. Those who don’t understand it may say that this is the realm of the unconscious, because they divide man’s mind into conscious and unconscious. The physiological dreaming becomes conscious; the etheric dreaming becomes unconscious.

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