Why Dreams Aren't "All In Our Heads"

And why this matters as for us as co-creators in the Conscious Cosmos.

Hello, dear friends! I’m wishing you all a joyful, grounding Taurus New Moon.

Before today’s essay, I have a couple of announcements up front: I’ll be traveling a lot during May, so if you’ve been wanting to book a session with me, it’s a good time to do so soon as my spots will be more limited this coming month. General psychic readings are discounted until the Summer Solstice — details are at the bottom of this post as usual.

Two, I’ve posted a new live-recorded session on Youtube, with huge thanks to my client for allowing me to share this glimpse behind the scenes:

Inside Your Mind is A Portal To The Whole Universe

This topic comes up in my client sessions all the time, so I thought to do an in-depth exploration of it.

Most of us, unless we’ve done some serious re-programming to the contrary, believe there’s a sharp distinction — like a thick iron-clad gate — dividing the inner state belonging to a visionary ritual or ceremony, or a psychic reading, on one hand, and the spontaneous goings-on inside our mind day-to-day on the other.

The divide, of course, is between “real” and “not real”.

Idle reveries and fantasies are “not real”, nor are nightly dreams, we assume, other than to the degree that they represent our subjective experience.

But, ideally, a psychic experience shows us something “real”, versus “made up”.

A ceremony designed to put us in contact with with a divine presence or non-human entity — we hope — is held and facilitated with the right alchemical elements and the skill to give us a “real” glimpse into something beyond the veil of the mundane.

True, our average state of consciousness isn’t the same as an exalted frame of mind or spirit. Some non-ordinary states are more spectacular than others. But the divide is not as mighty as most of us picture it to be, and more like a free-flowing gradient than an impassable gate.

The sense that somehow the psychic state is privileged reminds me a lot of how so many of us internalized early on the idea that we need to be possessed of unusual talent and genius to claim the label of “artist”. (For the record, in my book, art is an innate human activity, as is two-way exchange with the subtle and psychic realms).

In the same way, my clients often at first, however innately intuitive, wonder-about-yet-doubt that their intuition is truly psychic.

Meaning, that they’re in contact with verifiable realities beyond their own subjective world “in their heads”.

Doubly ironic, because the creative self and the psychic self might as well be two sides of the same coin.

Both of them dwell in, and draw from, the realm of imagination, or better yet, the Imaginal.

Drawing from the work of medieval Persian philosopher Suhrawardi, French philosopher Henry Corbin coined the phrase “Mundus Imaginalis” — the Imaginal World — to refer to the plane that we can access through our imagination, which nevertheless isn’t imaginary. It’s neither “unreal” nor a figment. Instead, it’s the interface through which we can come into contact with the larger realities that lie beyond our immediate sense perception.

(An aside here for my readers who experience any degree of aphantasia: language around these topics is biased in favor of the visual, but what matters here is that we’re addressing symbolic and creative inner processes, which we can use any of our inner senses for. Words, concepts, knowings, sounds, motions, textures and more are included in all I’m sharing here under the umbrella of “imagination”).

Today, I’d like to invite you to explore the Imaginal through the lens of dreams, the crossover of remote viewing and dreaming, and the metaphysics that gives all of this context. Let’s dig into how and why dreams aren’t “all in our heads” and what that all might mean.

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“Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I.

"He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, ‘If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.’ It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought. He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me.”

C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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Why Dreams?

Whether we realize it or not, we inhabit multiple realms. 

We’re here, in our bodies, on planet Earth.  At the same time, we’re inside the rich ecology of the subtle spiritual realms.

Our spiritual ecosystems are just like our Earth’s jungles, prairies, mountains and oceans: as dynamic and intricate as any earthly ecosystem, filled with manifold beings with lives of their own. 

And while many of us aren’t acutely aware of the subtle landscapes that surround us, one habitual way we experience them is through our dreams. I should add though, that we can easily get in touch with the invisible realms whenever our attention is relaxed, and for some of us, a few minutes of simply staring into space is all it takes — no elaborate meditations, substances or complex interventions required.

That being said, of all intuitive avenues to explore, dreams can be an easy “in” for many of us, since we dream  every night, and if we don’t readily recall our dreams upon waking, it’s often just a matter of practice and tweaking our routine to start to remember them.

As our daytime awareness is turned off, dreaming allows meaningful information to bypass our conscious mind, which is an added help for those who struggle to turn off our linear minds during waking life.

Purely neurological theories of dreaming tend to portray dreams a kind of byproduct of the brain’s “defragmenting processes” as it processes the day’s events, consolidating memories and experiences — for instance, as outlined in this paper.

Meanwhile, psychological dreamwork takes the contents of our nightly adventures more seriously, seeing them as symbolic scenarios that tell us something about our deep self, our motivations beyond conscious awareness, and even as instances of wise guidance or creative inspiration.

These two perspectives may hold slices of truth indeed. But the thing that’s missing is that both assume that dreams are primarily a subjective and self-contained affair. To my knowledge, this perspective is truly a Western materialist culture thing, as other cultures through time and around the world have given dreaming its due as the liminal, creative meeting place of the mundane and the divine.

When I’m giving a psychic reading to someone who’s never had one before, I often explain it like this:

“Imagine that what’s about to happen is that I’ll be having a waking dream about you, and about the questions you’re bringing to the session. I’m going to describe the dream images, feelings and impressions to you, while exploring their meaning out loud at the same time”.

This is a way to help my client envision what’s happening in my head during the session.

But to me, it’s not a metaphor so much as what’s exactly going on. 

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Remote Viewing in Dreams

In a recent essay, I wrote about my love for remote viewing as a sort of experimental lab where we can see, front and center, the workings of our consciousness as it filters psychic information coming through, recasting it into uniquely symbolic forms.

A while back, I had the chance to participate in multiple group remote viewing experiences. These were fascinating to me because part of the process was to publicly document our sessions and experiences before our target was ever revealed. We got to see not just our own, but each other’s mental and psychic processes, out in the open.

Some of these remote viewing experiences included trying to dream of our intended objective, and documenting the dreams as part of our sessions.

I’ve had a mega-colorful dream life ever since I can remember. I started keeping dream journals from age 13 on, and haven’t stopped since. Together with an early interest in depth psychology, I took to dreamwork like a duck to water. In the decades since, a robust relationship with my dreams has helped me tap into inner guidance, wisdom teachings, mystical states, and more.

Yet it was experiences like the one I’m about to share that drove home that when we dream, we’re often unknowingly coming into contact with a reality outside of ourselves, and might never be the wiser.

Indeed, while I still believe dreams have layers, and some of those layers contain psycho-spiritual guidance, I now feel I must have over-psychologized my dreams in the past, trying always to “interpret” them — to find personal complexes, hidden motivations or emotional symbolism — where my dream self may have “just” been psychicly receiving future events and other people’s experiences… you’ll see why in a moment.

Our group was given a “blind target”: just a number to focus on, representing an image that would be revealed to us on a specific date. Our task was to focus our mind to have a dream that would show us the intended image, right before waking up, so we could have it fresh in our minds and document it.

In my dream there was a single mom who worked at a government-type agency with offices in a big skyscraper. The agency itself dealt with magic, sort of like in the Harry Potter universe. She was called in to work after hours, but it was a secret ploy by a kind of rival faction to trap her and her group of allies in the building. The desks were on fire but not burning down.

One of my sketches depicting the office building in my dream.

The dream evolved as the plot against the protagonist was thwarted. And then, bizarrely, the dream ended as two members of her party — a man and a woman — went off on their own to practice a highly acrobatic dance routine, in a big warehouse with huge windows, through which you could see the bright blue sky. The warehouse had piles of white snow around it.

I shared all of this, including drawings I made of the dream, in a community forum with my team prior to us being shown the image.

One of my fellow group members, someone I didn’t know well at the time and who was thousands of kilometers from me — in other words, we had no deep bond of any kind — also reported dreaming of going into an office building.

Her dream-self also found problems with her office, had to deal with a group of people, and discovered rumors of some secret danger that prompted her to urgently want to leave. Her dream ended with a message about a “magic key”.

Still not knowing what the target image was going to be, we marveled at the parallels between our dreams: magic, office buildings, secret dangers. It felt to us like we’d dreamed two versions of the same dream.

So, what was the image we were meant to see during this experience?

Two dolphins jumping out of the water in the Caribbean, courtesy of this National Geographic article.

OK, not quite what I dreamed, on the face of it. But have a look at this drawing I’d made of the final dream coda, of the pair who went off to practice a dance choreography:

I see parallels — do you?

Again we see two figures — in joyful or expressive motion. There are some similarities in the colors (grey, blue, white). I’d noted the white snow and the blue sky in my documentation. Snow/clouds/sea foam… not quite the same, not so different.

What is more, my sleeping mind’s “remix” of the scene appears poetic:

Might a poet not describe two dolphins swimming in the ocean, as two dancers, performing an acrobatic choreography?

Even though at this point I’d had more than a few very meaningful and relevant dreams over the years, and some of them decidedly foretold future events, up to this point, I don’t think I’d ever had such a stark experience of how my dreams could show me something plainly objective in the world out there — and not just objective, but quite psychologically detached from my life.

Thanks to this and subsequent experiments, I got to know, repeatably, that verifiable facts in dreams show up all the time. It’s just that they’re typically cloaked or disguised in poetic garb.

Further dream remote viewing exercises have continued to yield similar results, so the issue doesn’t feel like a one-off coincidence or me trying to stretch the parallels between dream and target to fit the facts.

Luckily, in not doing these experiments alone, I have been able to witness that other people’s minds work the same way. The pattern extends from dreams, to when we’re aiming to practice with our psychic perception during waking hours too:

Our mind just seems to prefer to serve up psychic information in its own, idiosyncratic symbolic language.

No wonder we don’t realize that we’re being psychic a lot of the time!

Oh, and the story doesn’t even end there.

Half a year later, in completely different circumstances, my fellow remote viewer and I learned that, even though our office building dreams had nothing to do with the target image, they perfectly mirrored the issues our group moderator, who oversaw the assignment and revealed the target image, was facing at the time. Namely, faction politics related to their position of leadership in a group which indeed dealt with metaphysical topics.

I wondered how many of my random dreams were dreams about the lives of random strangers.

To cap things off, it turned out that my husband also got somehow unintentionally plugged into the shared dreaming bonanza.

As I told him about my whole remote viewing dream saga, he recounted that his dream at the time that I was doing this experiment also shared parallels with the intended target image. For subsequent dream remote viewing targets, I’d check in with him to see if his dreams corroborated my own impressions or connected with the objective. They always did.

Bonus moral of this story: if you get involved in developing your psychic antenna, prepare for reality to get bendier and bendier.

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Metaphysical Context

To put this all in the right context, allow me to take a big step back from dreams for a bit. Let’s consider, instead, how we might conceive of dreams inside the context of a conscious, multi-dimensional Universe.

Earlier I mentioned that the realms and dimensions beyond our material reality are ecosystems we can inhabit and experience, the same way you’re experiencing the place you’re sitting in as you read these words. 

We each “live somewhere” in the spiritual dimension. Our inner world is that virtual home.

The universe that exists within our hearts and minds, with all our selves, memories, longings, unfoldings, alternatives, imaginations and questions. Our averaged mood and habitual emotional range, our constructs, beliefs and enduring thought-forms, all make up the ecology of that home-world. This whole complex world is projected in our energy field, our aura.

(This is why I make such a point of insisting that we each need to hang out in our “home frequency” as much as possible, as that makes our energetic abode a healthy match for our Soul ). 

But this inner landscape doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Whether your personal energetic home is themed more like a cozy cottage or rainforest tree-house; a condo in the midst of a bustling city, or a mountain-top temple, each one of us is rooted in a much larger dimension of Spirit.

The subtle realm “outside” that inner home consists of the activity of a much greater Field beyond your personal life: intertwined with you, but comprised of the spaces and lives of other beings, both physical and non-physical.

(And while I’m using spatial and geographical metaphors to illustrate my point, time is also at play here. Past, present, future, as well parallel timelines make up the diverse processes in our subtle ecosystems.  I can’t do his work justice in this essay, but Eric Wargo’s books on precognitive dreaming build a fascinating case for how we are always “time traveling” via dreams and creative endeavors, sending information back to our past selves from the future.)

I’m betting your physical home isn’t a hermetically-sealed bunker.  The world outside and the world inside your physical home are always in flux and always impacting each other.

Every day we leave our homes for work, to get groceries, to go to school. Every day, too, we exchange with fields, energies and dimensions beyond our energetic home space. We are co-creating the Universe with an impossible number of intelligences, including but extending far beyond humanity. 

But most of us don’t know that we’re in a constant state of interplay and exchange with the realms beyond the physical. We assume that anything that happens behind our eyes and between our ears is purely our own subjectivity. And our mainstream environment does tend to see the mind as hermetically sealed in the bunker of our skull. 

Well, the mainstream is very wrong on this one.

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Worlds Bleeding Into Each Other

The thing is, what happens inside our own mind — whether when dreaming at night, or daydreaming while awake, in altered states of consciousness or in the most average moment while walking down the street — reflects a mix of what takes place “inside” our subjective, inner world “home”, and what is happening “objectively” beyond that inner landscape.

Sometimes, the contents of our minds arise within us, and sometimes they arrive from beyond the bounds of our here-and-now self. 

This understanding, for instance, gave rise to the “dream cures” taking place at the temples of Asclepius, in ancient Greece, where people would go to receive instructions for healing in dreams.

Inspired by this ancient practice, psychiatrist Henry Reed developed a series of group experiments and experiences that centered using dream empathy to help others.

He called these “Dream Helper Ceremonies”. In them, he would lead a group of people dreaming on behalf of one focus individual, who had a pressing real life problem they wanted assistance with.

However, the dreamers wouldn’t know in advance what the problem was. They made a commitment to have a “helpful dream” on behalf of the focus person, and followed practices designed to facilitate dreaming. The dreams would be shared in the group the following day, and finally, the focus person’s problem would be revealed. Reed documented these ceremonies, finding time and again that the dreams held true value and genuine solutions for the focus person — in addition to personal insight for the dreamers.

In a different experiment using similar principles — that empathy and a genuine commitment to help will reliably produce helpful psychic guidance — Reed worked with pairs of strangers. Instead of dreaming, he guided the partners to connect with each other, where one would be bringing the problem to be solved and the other would be invited to have a “reverie” about their partner’s problem.

About these experiments, Reed writes,

“As in the previous experiments, the participants didn’t recognize the meaningfulness of their reverie until they compared notes with their partner. Thus these daydreams often evidenced what therapists call an ‘inter-subjective’ reality (…), in which the two partners were processing the same reality, but from their individual, subjective point of view. The ‘objective’ knowledge was hidden within subjective expression. They came to know something of the other person by looking within themselves, yet the knowledge was not evident to them, because it seemed so totally subjective and ‘imaginary’”

The Imaginal might appear the same to our inner senses as whatever scenarios, thoughts or reveries we can conjure up on purpose, but as both Reed reflects on in the above quote, and Jung describes about his relationship with Philemon — it has a reality of its own that’s not at all made up. 

The more we realize this, the more we can become full participants of the subtle, non-local, spiritual and imaginal realms. As we do so, we don’t only receive information through our imaginal experiences, be they dreams, daydreams, active imagination exercises, visualizations, psychedelic journeys or psychic readings. We become full participants who realize that the life inside their mind is co-creating the worlds around us.

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Over To You

I’d love to know what this post sparked for you!

Do you keep track of your dreams? Have you had dreams that gave you glimpses into realities beyond the ordinary? Let me know in the comments (or via email if the story is a bit too personal to share on Substack).

A huge thank you for reading, and if you know someone who’d enjoy this, I hope you’ll be inspired to share <3

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“Anything Goes” Psychic Readings in May and June

Starting from May 1st up to the June 21st Solstice, I’ll be offering discounted “anything goes” psychic readings: bring any topic you’d like some added clarity on, whether that’s relationships, work, personal development, soul lessons and purpose, energetic balance, unfolding your spiritual gifts, and more.

These sessions are 60-90 minutes each, 88€ (versus 111€ regular rate).

If the topic or question(s) on your mind are quite deep, complex or far-reaching, I suggest preparing for the session by crystalizing your question into a single intention, so that I can really do your intention justice during the session.

If you’d like to check whether a reading might be helpful, check out the Psychic Readings section on my website. You can also find more information on working with me here. If you have additional questions, or to sign up for a session, feel free email me at hello@karineglinton.com

As always, I look forward to working with some of you in the coming weeks!