Nightmares

Nightmares or threatening dreams occur when the higher mind is dormant or in abeyance, and are caused in part by the automatism of the lower mind and the emotional centre when the reasoning faculties are suspended. The past, and conversations and meetings with others, may be brought back; but also the future may be depicted, with warnings, scenes of judgement or deadly perils. There may be encounters with hideous, deformed beasts or demons which often appear to be crushing the breath out of the victim; and the whole is imbued with a sense of terror. Threatening dreams may arise out of guilt or anxiety feelings, or they may be true presentiments of events to come. Explanations vary, from the prosaic (indigestion or pressure on some part of the body causing disorder of internal organs) to the psychic. Dream night-journeys to awesome, unfamiliar surroundings, and terrifying dream night-beings encountered, may in fact belong to another reality which is accessible to the subtle body and its perceptive faculties. These experiences are conceived by some as "out-of-the-body", "astral" projections of the "double"; and by others as resulting from a telepathic link with beings, human or non-human, who are actually experiencing what the dreamer dreams, or whose experience is recorded in the akashic records being dream-read.