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Mimi
Spirits from Arhem Land (Northern Territory, Australia) |
Extraterrestrials
or Interdimensionals?
by Robert Moss
Not often recognized in the huge corpus of literature on alien
encounters is that every night of the year, dreamers encounter
Otherworld beings who would certainly rate as “aliens” (by the
standards of ufology) if dreams were recognized as real experiences.
These dream visitors sometimes leave physical tokens of these
encounters.
It seems that because our society has denied the reality of the
dreamworld, the dreamworld is breaking through into our reality.
Terence McKenna may have been on to something when he pronounced
that “the waking world and the world of dream have begun to merge”
and that this would result in a transformation of our species.
Since we so often insist that what is “invisible”—that is, cannot be
seen with ordinary eyes — is unreal, we are getting more and more
bleedthroughs from hyperreality. This is surely one aspect of all
the alien encounters andUFOsightings, as of the proliferating
visions of the radiant goddess figures that the pious identify as
the Blessed Virgin Mary (even though such apparitions rarely call
themselves by this name).
Encounters with a “true and invisible order” are puncturing holes
in our definitions of subjective and objective, internal and
external, 3-D and multidimensional, leaving us struggling to find
new paradigms, as Jung struggled in his later years to describe an
objective
reality—“an alien country outside the ego,” a world invisible but
fully present to this one.
In fact, we don’t need to invent new models. We have had them
all along, above all in the shaman’s understanding that the
dreamworld is the real world. We need to recover what we have lost,
which will amount to an act of cultural soul retrieval. While we
cling to the notion that what is real is merely what can be
experienced with the senses or tested with lab equipment,
bleedthroughs from hyperspace are steadily sapping the foundations
of our consensual reality.
Go through a good collection of alien encounter and “abduction”
stories, such as John Mack’s classic
Abduction,
and you are likely to conclude that some larger reality is irrupting
into consciousness on a rather grand scale—whatever interpretation
you place on the source of these encounters. Are we dealing with
extraterrestrials or interdimensionals? Are the physical-seeming
experiences people report, sometimes with trembling shock, actually
their fogged memories of experiences they had in their dreambodies?
This is my personal suspicion, supported by the many accounts of
“floating” and “flying” and the character of some of the minor
injuries reported after the encounters, which are typical of what is
sometimes described as astral repercussion. (If the dreambody is
bruised or buffeted, marks may be transferred to the physical body.)
As for the aliens encountered, they often seem less like star
travelers than like spirits or elemental forces of the very Earth we
inhabit.
To get to the truth of these things—to help people whose reality
system has been shattered by experiences that violate physical laws
and linear conceptions—we need to go back to Paleopsych 101, the
understanding shared by early and indigenous humans who recognize
that spirits are real, that there are real worlds beyond the
physical universe, and that we can visit them in embodied form and
receive visitors from them. Hypnotic regression, with its
questionable crop of “memories,” is not the best way to clarify an
experiencethat may or may not be an “alien encounter.” Through the
techniques of ActiveDreaming, we can go back into the image or the
memory—fully conscious and fully protected—and see for ourselves.We
can move on to consider when and why beings from higher dimensions
(who are infinitely closer to us than beings from “outer space”)
might choose to materialize and dematerialize in our little 3-D
world.
It is fascinating to see what happens when people who have been
terrified by encounters with alien intruders can be helped to
revisit the experience as conscious dreamers, in a state of full
awareness. Many find that power and self-knowledge
are waiting beyond the fear. Joyce had been terrified since
childhood by a succession of intensely real experiences in which she
was torn from her familiar environment by
“space aliens” who somehow transported her to a “mother ship” where
she was subjected to painful “surgical penetration.” When she
described these episodes in a dream group, she initially balked at
the suggestion that she might be reporting
dreams.
“These things were
real,”
she insisted. She shivered, folding her arms tightly over her chest.
“This stuff really happened.”
I had no doubt that, in some order of reality, her experiences
had indeed taken place, though her memories might be fragmentary and
garbled. Given the force of her emotions, this did not seem the time
to get into ontological discussions. I simply asked Joyce if she had
a question about her abduction experiences.
“Why me?” she said without hesitation.
I asked if she would be willing to try to go back to a locale
she remembered— with the aid of shamanic drumming—to answer that
question. Joyce was understandably scared. I reassured her that she
would go escorted by a partner and “bodyguard.” A frequent flyer in
the group—a tall “warrior woman” who had mastered formidable
challenges of her own, in both worlds—volunteered for this role. To
her amazement, Joyce found a portal opening as soon as the drumming
began. “I whizzed through a kind of ribbed tunnel. It was like an
elevator lying on the horizontal. I shot right inside the mothership.
Except it didn’t look anything like a conventional spaceship. I
was a sphere, full of patterns of light. The aliens were also
made of light. They seem to be able to put on bodies as we put on
clothes. I felt safe and welcome here. They told me this is a place
of rendezvous, and I can come back in dreaming. I wanted to know why
they hurt me. They told me that without penetration there is no
birth—of life or understanding. They told me I have the same powers
they have whenever I’m ready to use them.”
Joyce has become a happy star voyager, inside the dreaming. What
she had previously encountered, she now believes, was molded into
the images of her fears. These experiences are happening in a realm
where thoughts are things in the most literal, palpable fashion. The
beings she encountered and revisited are transpersonal. In relation
to her normal self, they are “other” and “out there.” In the larger
scheme of things, within the limitless realm of Mind, they are in no
way alien: different but not separate, separate but not different.
Adapted
from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and
Life Beyond Death (New World Library, 2010) by Robert Moss. ©
Robert Moss.
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