The trick to having access to other planes of existence is to realize that we exist in different places simultaneously.

When you are playing a video game, your consciousness is both in the room where your physical body is and in the avatar that is moving and experiencing the game environment at the same time. When you immerse yourself in the story line, your consciousness identifies with the actions and experiences of the avatar and you feel like what is happening to it is also happening to you. You might even forget your physical surroundings at moments. You suffer, fear, and enjoy as the avatar does. When you have to adjust your back, have some food, or answer a question in the room where your physical body exists, you pull your consciousness and your identity away from the gaming avatar and into your physical form.

The same principle is active whenever you dream.

When you dream, you create a dream avatar. This dream avatar is designed to move in and experience the environment created in the dreaming. You create a dreaming self through which you experience the dream. Are you not also in your physical body? Of course you are. You are in both your physical body and in your dream body simultaneously.

How much you perceive the dream as “real” depends on the level of abstraction and identification you attain in that dream. As your consciousness abstracts from the stimuli of the physical senses, your attention naturally fixates itself on the stimuli coming from the dreaming. Similarly, when you wake up and the attention moves from the dreaming to the physical world around you, the dreaming fades to the background and places itself on the signals coming through the physical senses.

We must understand, however, that we are always dreaming.

When we are awake and our attention is centered in the physical world around us, the subconscious continues to dream. There are inner dialogues going on inside us, images of past events, judgements about what is going on right now, questions popping up, and even full on dreams unfolding in the subconscious. Yes, the dream world does not stop just because we woke up. The dream continues, we just withdraw our attention from it and place it fully on the waking.

If during our waking life we happen to withdraw our attention from the stimuli of the physical senses, we experience day dreams, and at times even full on dreams, even if we are not sleeping. When we fall asleep, we withdraw our attention from the physical senses almost completely and therefore we enter fully into the action of the dream world.

The same thing can be said when we are dreaming. It is not that the waking world is not there. The physical world is still there, we just have withdrawn our attention from it. Notice that even though we close our eyes when we sleep, our five senses continue to operate. The skin registers temperature and movement just like when it is awake. The ear drums continue to receive sound vibrations. The nose continues to receive and register smells. In fact, even the eyes continue to receive light through closed eyelids. Yet, even though the senses still operate, we do not seem to be aware of the stimuli. This is because we do not really stop receiving it, but simply withdraw our attention from it.

This, then, is the key to learn to consciously go from the waking to the dreaming, and indeed to any other plane of existence where we have formed a body:

You must learn to withdraw your attention from one plane and place it on another at will.

Read more in my book, Dreaming’s Gate. This is available for preorder on Kindle.

You can order the paperback version of this book here: koyotetheblind.com