Why do we Dream? (part2)
Robert Moss is an author who has written a number of books about dreams. His books provide suggestions on how to remember your dreams, understand them, and use them as a source of information to direct your future decisions. While he is not an Islamic authority or even en elite scientist on dreaming, his books are readily accessible and quickly digestible. One simple suggestion from Moss and many others is to keep paper and pen by your bed, and whenever you awaken in the middle of the night or in the morning, make note of whatever remnants of dreams you can recall.
He claims that by paying attention to our dreams, we may solve problems in our dreams, prepare for future challenges, develop our creative ideas, address psychological conflicts in ourselves, improve relationships, and find our callings.
He cites many examples in history and in our common era in which people heeded their own dreams or the dreams of others to good result. The first Roman Emperor Octavius was saved from assassination when he responded to a friend's dream about an impending attack. A friend of Moss's family reported that her dad saved her mother's life when he had a dream that a tonic she came home with was poison. When the next day she came home from the pharmacy with a new prescription, he refused to let her take it and took it the pharmacy for testing – it turned out to be rat poison that had been mislabeled.
Wolfgang Pauli, Nobel laureate physicist, made the vast majority of his scientific advances through dreaming about the topics, holding discussions with other leading scientists like Einstein and Niels Bohr in his dreams, and pondering his dreams upon waking. It turns out that many great achievements in history in all disciplines were accomplished by people who used dreams to direct their work.
Many elite Islamic scholars and pious people have also reported amazing experiences through dreaming, in which they were visited by holy people and given instructions or information. Some of our narrations relate procedures that people may employ to achieve such guidance in dreams, including recitation of Ziarat Ashura daily as but one example.
We spend perhaps as much as a third of our lives in the state of the lesser death, when our spirits are in another realm that is free of many of the limitations of our physical world.
The above is just a tiny survey of the evidence available that that time is not just serving some physiological purpose, but is also a time that informs our spirits and can greatly influence our lives and the course of history if we pay attention.
Other links:
The secret of Number 40
How many worlds are there?
Discipline and Islam
The secret of happiness
The Spiritual Worth of Man and Woman
