Hey everyone,

there is something I wanted to get rid of, it is a dream, that reappeared. I dreamed that I am lying on my deadbed, it was weird, the only thing that I could clearly see was my face, then the perspective changed and I could see me room was filled with a bright light, the shapes slowly begin to vanish.
The last thing I usually see are monks with long robes and hoods covering their faces. Their robes seem to consist of the same "material" as the light.
The confusing thing is, that their faces do not glow (usually you see some parts of a face, even when it is hidden under a hood) they are pure black, it is also not like being carried away by spirits into the light, as these kind of monks spread a feeling of pain, suffering, morbidity and damnation (at first everything seemed friendly, but when his hand tries to reach my chest, the whole friendly atmosphere is cut down to what I described before).

Love,

pulsar

Hey betson,

thanks for answering on this one. I never thought about overcoming fears with love, as it seemed to be childish and just over-romanticizing, yet to drain fears behind flowery pictures. I always tried it via rational or logical reflection, but in this case, I found an answer that is everything apart from romantic or flowery.
To name the fear (maybe the first step to get aware of), it is simply the fear of death and dying, the uncertainty comes from the point, that I do not know where I came from and where I will go.
The biological answer is simple, the body rots, and the brainfunctions, which are a matter of electric impulses and biochemical processes (exchange of acetylcholin from one cell to another, it has to pass the synapsis between both of the cells, to connect with the matching receptors) would also be ceased to exist.
Would be the same for consciousness, and the feeling of being alive, they would also be erased. So it is like having never lived before.
So with that on mind, one could argue if it is important to think about such fears, from what I talked before, one thing comes across, that it does not even matter. Just one more being, coming from evolution, passed the genes to the next generation, and than vanishes.
I talked about this sometimes with my parents, also my friends, my friends were just like me, atheists (the time when this thoughts first came across, I was convinced that god and everything that religions tell us, are simply not true, man-made to overcome fears), my parents always told me that I have only the chance to live my life to the fullest and cling to what I like to do (but it is stupid if you do not like what you do, just to do it because you have to, I just saw myself as one part of this evolution-machinery, that has to work, like the ones that lived before, and the ones who will come after, so f*** my fears and do what I was born to, to find a thing I am good at, make effort (to be able to make money out of it, building a house, marry, to have kids, and then die, just as nature works), the others things are matter of belief, and only through belief I would be maybe able to meet god/jesus, any saint up in heaven.
But darn, how could I believe without knowledge? Impossible!
Now I stick with agnosticism (sometimes it is like me being in connection with the divine one, but most of the time I am just arguing if it is real or not, so I would tend to say I am agnostic) , as I know that I cannot know if there is something behind the curtain (if there is, it must be such a blast of an existence, that my thinking abilities would be incapable of imagining them).
What does it mean....surely that I have to wait for the moment to come, then the moment of truth arises.
Anyway, what is left is that I have to care for the situation here and now, it is my task, and not to ask what comes next.

Love,

pulsar

Hey bets,

one thing I will regret for the rest of my life, when I decided to go to highschool I lost the connection because I left them with their crooked view, that I did so because I thought I was something special, waited too long, so it was too late, one of them had no time because he started to work in catering business, so he had to work during the weekend, the other one moved to life with his girlfriend (that were the two closest ones) . Some of them were stoners, the others drinking hard, but I did not care, as we had the same set of thoughts, like it is kind of usual for kids around our town, left-wing attitude, punkrock music, skateboarding, that were the only things one could do to escape the tristesse, when you did not only want to waste your time on drugs and alcohol (some kids were like this, but they had nothing in common with "us", so we hated them)
One thing we shared was that we were broke all the time, because we threw out our money to gather equipment for our band, or buying skateboard stuff, but in order we lost connection, our band vanished so fast as it was found. It was so typically teenage stuff, that it is sort of ridiculous, waiting for something to happen, sort of carefree, only the knowledge that we would die some day. So we grapped a hold of what we liked to share, at least to have something of our own.
The most precious thing, it felt like being alife. And I needed this also, not to go insane by what I mostly read Kafka, Nietzsche, etc, Hawking was the only author spreading no negative attitude.
This literature thing was the only I could share with noone, because noone was interested in stuff like this ("why should I care for someones ideas that has already passed over?", attitude like this).

But you are right, the past is something to get over with, as noone is able to press the rew button on life's recorder, it happened, and it was good, or you messed up. But it was and still is up to everybody to make his own choices, some come blind, some are reflected, and you will see what you get, but on the other have to handle with care, as phys. reality is not forever.

Love,

pulsar

Hi Pulsar,
typically, one's past is a sort of sticky stuff. You can't get rid of it as easy as saying "Forget the past, I'm looking forward". The funny thing is, at least from my experience, the more one puts itself in an open mindset to see what might be the right thing to do now, and have an outlook to the future, the more one is presented events of the past. That is the opportunity for gaining more clarity and balance. It's like, when one is about to take a new, fresh approach to life, the subconscious is presenting you something, saying: "Hey, I have some stuff here, start with this!"

Logical, rational thinking is for sure a good thing. In dreams, sometimes we are presented things we have on our minds, worrying us, for what reason ever. Simply stating "This isn't rational" is not likely to make this worry, this problem go away. A fair amount of dealing with what is presented, with the symbology, is needed to put it in words, because only then we're able to deal with it on a more rational, exact level.

Regarding beliefs, our life is full of it. Most of them can't be proofed. One believes there is no afterlife, the other believes there is one. That's just the same rational or non rational. So, an agnosticist of the hardcore fraction would state we cannot know anything, cause we can't proof one thing. Does that mean we can't believe anything? Rationality may say yes, but practical life says no, because at least we have to believe in some basic stability or we would find us in the hospital under heavy medication.

From this practical viewpoint, it is obvious we can't live very well with the certain (maybe forced) worldview that it is unknowable (at least as long we're here), therefore unbelievable if there is an afterlife or not. It's just calling for an answer. I for my part can't live only by embracing this physical life, as it turned out, without embedded in something greater it is all just nothing, meaningless and pointless.

Dreams, imaginations, plans, beliefs, preferences etc. is all reality. It often is not possible to melt it down to some single rational terms. One major step is to accept this all as reality, and play to the rules this reality owns; this sometimes can mean to deal with dream characters as if they were physical people, but sometimes it's appropriate to counter evil appearances with this reassuring, powerful thing most here call love. It's not the romantic childish sort; it's better thought of energy and a special viewpoint. This is something not well to explain, this is something to meditate about. Kafka and Nietzsche are for sure great writers, but they won't make you happy, will they?

I can't say what the message of this dream is for you, only one point: You noticed the oddity that they had shiny hoods, but darkness in it. Could mean darkness, nothing, inside a nice package? Something of you is feeling fooled by something? An interesting thing as well is, how can "nothing" show up in robes? Does it mean, there is really "nothing" to fear, the only substancial thing is the robes, the masquerade? One thing is this bad feeling at the end of the dream. When you're able to re-feel it, you maybe could track it down to where it comes from.

Spooky

Hi Pulsar,
if I got it right, you have/had the same worries as I had, which wasn't the state of non-existence in itself (my logic was strong enough to tell me that nothing is, after all, nothing bad), but the consequences this belief has on (my) life right here and now.

As long as you're not sure now if there is an afterlife, there's only left, as an intermediary solution maybe, to leave it open and keep looking 'round (I think that's more or less where you are now from reading your posts).

So, as your own interpretation suggests, your dream may be an illustration of what you're concerned with. Dreams can do this well sometimes, one short vivid story tells more than thousand words.

Spooky