The Consciousness of a Dream Scholar
by Dr. Barbara Condron
Holograms are photographic images that are three-dimensional and appear to have depth. You probably carry a few in your pocket, either on dollar bills or credit cards. Holograms are those shiny, metallic patterns with ghostly images floating inside of them.
Holograms work by creating an image composed of two superimposed 2-dimensional pictures of the same object seen from different reference points. In reflection holograms, the kind of holography that can be viewed in normal light, two laser beams and a photographic plate are used to take an image of the object. One beam illuminates the object from the side while the second beam, called a reference beam, travels through a photographic plate directly to the object. Both the relecting light from this reference beam and the light reflected by the object from side beam leave images on the photographic plate. That combined image is a hologram.
Holograms were science fiction before computer-generated images were born. Most people first encountered them when Princess Leia pleaded, “Help me, Obi wan Kenobi!” in the original 1977 Star Wars movie. Little did they know, they experienced this technology every night.
When we sleep, only our conscious, waking mind rests. The remainder of our consciousness goes about its cyclic work – restoring and rejuvenating the energies we used during our day’s experiencing and assimilating their content. Dreams are holographic images in consciousness. They are multi-dimensional and, when interpreted, can have great depth.
In my work as project director for the Global Lucid Dreaming Experiments, I am in a position to study dreams from dreamers worldwide. Our team of researchers at the College of Metaphysics in the United States receives and catalogues hundreds of dreams each year. You may have wondered if people in Australia, South Africa, and Oregon dream about the same things? I can tell you the answer is – “yes!”
People around the world dream about their parents and their children, their friends and business acquaintances. They dream about the place they live and the place they work. They dream about love lost and love gained, birth and death. We dream in what Swiss psychologist Carl Jung called archetypes. Archetypes are subconscious holograms.
In Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, Jung wrote “parents, wife, children, birth and death are inborn in him as virtual images, as psychic aptitudes.” Jung observed that these have “individual predestinations.” This means the images are both universal and personal in nature.
With hundreds of websites offering dream advice, interpreting dreams has taken on the tone of artistic license. In this pop-culture view of dreams, whatever you “feel” the dream means, it means. Such a self-centered approach disconnects the dreamer from the billions of dreamers on the planet. If dreaming is a universal phenomenon among human beings, then it stands to reason that there are universal elements in what we dream and what those dreams indicate. The pursuit of this universality, humanity calls science.
Our research documents these elements, lending a scientific discipline to the mind’s capacity to dream. The science of the mind works like a hologram. First, there is the light in the mind. This light does not have an external source. It does not come from the sun. The mind’s light comes from Spirit within. It is the gleam in someone’s eyes, and the radiance in their countenance. It is the bright idea you had this morning and the light bulb that went off earlier today when someone else brought you a new way of looking at things.
As the mind’s light expresses, consciousness is formed. The light spreads just like the beam spreaders used in holography. In this process the light’s coherence is lost, yet the light remains an exact wavelength. This splitting of the light is what enables the hologram to be made.
This property of light is also evidenced in Mind. However much we feel out of touch, are vague in beginning something new, or seem to lose our sense of purpose in life (the light lacking coherence), the exact wavelength Light of our existence is steady. When these two come together, we can see life and ourselves in a new three-dimensional reality. This potential learning is the holography of the mind.
The Dreamschool Scholar online program of study is designed to afford the serious student of dreams the information, knowledge and practicum that strengthens the inner mind's light in you. In this way, the consciousness of a dream scholar is yours.
What can I expect to learn in the Dreamschool Scholar Program?