Ever Now: Non-Ordinary Dreaming and the Enduring Present

Dreams? Yes, dreams are important! They are one of the most creative expressions of our mental and emotional life, an activity whose contents reveal complexity, depth, and potential for future growth. In this work dreams are given attention as a resource for philosophical reflection and a prompt for explorations of possible change and future transformation. My approach is to recognize dreams as a primary medium for mythic, paranormal, and transpersonal encounters that can encourage spiritual development and a deeper, richer understanding of the psychic life as linked to cosmological processes. Beyond "ordinary" dreams there are many extraordinary, lucid dream states that can lead us to a better understanding of our innate potential for discovery and creative insight.

• Dreams have many different forms and not all dreams are "ordinary" as some dreams induce exceptional encounters gained through spontaneous, altered states in sleep.

• Dreams are not one-dimensional but break through the structures of ordinary perceptions and reveal a multidimensional cosmos in which dreaming plays a creative role of discovery.

• Dreams do not have fixed or subconscious meanings, they are a form of creative play and synthetic assimilation meant to stimulate creative thought and reflection.

• Dreaming is a conditional state, not strictly functional or neurological, dreams can induce receptive states to transmissive meanings beyond the brain, open to cosmological influences, to the Infinite.

• Dreaming is a means of contact with the sacred, in many different forms, images, symbols, and states, directing the dreamer to deeper self-awareness through dream recording and analysis.

Dreams are linked by themes, shared aspects of psychic life, that induce meditative reflections on the theme as providing experiential encounters revealing unsuspected depths and possibilities. Dreams in this model do not simply reflect subconscious influences but also hyperconscious intuitions directed toward spiritual awakening and new thoughts about the emerging metaverse in which consciousness is a shared network phenomenon. Dreams can link us with other dreamers whose mutual awakening supports dreaming as a shared matrix of co-discovery. Dreams also place emphasis on the transtemporal nature of dreaming and imagination, in what I call the Ever Now, a timeless state revealing a variety of insights into the sacred nature of dreaming beyond normal linear time. Dreaming is an induction into altered states that reveal cosmological dimensions and new ways of thinking about the past, present, and future. To understand this, we need to record, study, reflect, and think creatively about our dreams. Dreaming is a form of creative art, and this book seeks to illustrate how dreaming and waking are interactive in forming a positive spiritual worldview.