Soul travel, our journeying at night, takes us through many levels – etheric, astral or simply dreaming.

Elizabeth Clare Prophet Talks About Soul Travel and Dreams

What you eat before you retire may affect how you sleep, your dream state and the kind of dreams you have. Other influences may include such things as the temperature of the room, proper air flow or the proximity to other people whose vibrations may be different.

When you retire, you hope you are leaving your physical body and going forth. But sometimes due to the tensions and pressures of life, we stay very close to our bodies.

Sometimes when the body is in danger, we stay close. In the process of being close to home, we may not get any farther out of the physical body than into the astral body, particularly when we have difficulties in sleeping.

On the other hand, you may be journeying in the etheric, but the journey is like a knife passing through a cake—sometimes it comes out clean and sometimes it has a little cake and icing on it after it has passed through.

And so, when you pass through the different planes, you pick up impressions of those planes, and that is what may be quivering or vibrating on the portion of us that dreams—the residue of passing through.

You may go into the etheric octave and be in a very deep sleep where you are having experiences at inner levels. But you may return and pass through the cities, pass through the earth. You may pass through the levels of your own soul's evolution, where a tea party may not be an actual tea party but a symbolical way in which your Christ Self, your Higher Self, is teaching your soul a lesson.

All Kinds of Dreams

There are all kinds of dreams. And one way of looking at them is to understand that a character in the dream may represent your soul. Most often that character isn't you, it's someone else in the dream. By objectively observing this other character, you may be observing something happening to your soul that your Higher Self wants you to know.

So, it could be an astral kind of a dream. It could be a chase. It could be all kinds of topsy-turvy, Alice-in-Wonderland things. But there's a thread running through it. Your conscious mind is not ready to accept the lesson, so in the dream state the lesson comes through the subconscious, which has no barriers to incongruities. When you wake up, if you write down this dream, you may receive the interpretation of it.

Elizabeth Clare Prophet's Dream

Now, I had an interesting dream once in which I figured myself with a young child. I was in the ocean with this child, and she fell down in the water and was drowning. She was going deeper and deeper into the water, and I dived after her and saved her from drowning.

The lesson of the dream was that the child was my own soul, and my own soul was drowning in a particular circumstance that I was allowing to continue in my life. My interpretation of the dream was that I, in the person of my Christ Self and my conscious mind, would go after and save my own soul. I would see to it that my soul was not left to drown in an unjust and insupportable circumstance.

I came to the realization one day, when this whole situation was through, that while I had been trying to save another soul, it was my own soul that could have been lost. And so, I realized that my soul had been saved by the love of God and by my own determination of right action.

Dreams are Teachings

There are all kinds of situations in dreams. They are actual teachings if you can pull the threads of them together.

But the unpleasant things and all kinds of details that make no sense are like the cake on the knife if you've been traveling and are coming back—or even if you never did travel but just hung around the astral plane because of some impurity of your body or mind.

All of these things can happen in one night because it doesn't actually take that long to go to an etheric retreat and come back….

Soul Travel – The Astral and Etheric Planes Are Different!

There is a conflict of terms in different writings about the astral and etheric planes. In the etheric plane, there is a lower etheric level that contains the perversions of the memory of God, or the records that are not of the light.

So you might say there's a lower and a higher etheric plane, and the lower one has a certain correspondence to the astral plane and the astral body….

Life is a Schoolroom and We Have Free Will

There's an amazing thing about life—there is nowhere you can go and read a rule book that comes up with a perfect answer to every equation. We have all this teaching, and the teaching itself is like input in the computer of our Christ consciousness. We have all the vastness of the teaching and certain elements are brought to bear on certain situations.

Because of our divine experience, our ongoing experience of thousands of embodiments of being chelas* of the masters, we have a set of experiences, a set of teachings. And then we have a Christ mind, which is infinite. When we meditate on that mind and on the experience and the teaching, we arrive at the best possible way of dealing with a situation.

Sometimes we make a misjudgment or a miscalculation, and we learn by our mistakes. That's the nature of the schoolroom we're in and the nature of free will. But even that becomes a part of our cosmic computer of divine knowledge. That's our personal gnosis. We're not going to make that mistake again because it was very costly.

So in the mistakes as well as in the victories, we forge our Christhood. That's why it takes time to become Christlike, because you become that by free will and by experience. It just isn't brought down upon you like some kind of a machine that is superimposed upon you and all of a sudden you're there.

Night Classes and Nightmares

On another occasion a student asked Mrs. Prophet about nightmares. She replied:

Some dreams are recollections of experiences in the temples of light. They will be very high. They will be full of light.

You may remember an experience of being in a classroom studying. This means that as you were leaving your body, your soul rose into your etheric envelope. And in your etheric envelope, you slid right through the astral plane and the mental plane to get into the etheric level, where the masters' retreats are.

Soul Travel Needs Spiritual Protection

Now, astral nightmares are a different matter. If you don't have your protection on or if you've had an argument or discord in your house before you go to bed, then when you are leaving your body, you kind of get caught in the astral. You don't slide through with your energy field of protection. You get caught there and you start dreaming about the astral plane or episodes in your own astral body that are coming to the fore.

Now another circumstance of dreams may be that you get out just fine. You go up to the masters' retreats. Around five or six in the morning, you come back to your body. But as you return, you don't get through the astral debris. Just before you reach your physical consciousness, you bump into the astral mire and have one of those nightmare dreams that occur just before you wake up in the morning.

The astral plane is where you have the bad dreams, and the etheric plane is where you have visions and memories of high experiences.

Dreams of Flying

Mark Prophet, Elizabeth Clare Prophet's husband and ascended twin flame, was also a pioneering spiritual leader. He once made this comment about out-of-the-body experiences:

Quite a few people have told us of dreams where they were flying. This is a subconscious memory that often functions for two reasons. One, because there was a time when humanity knew how to fly physically. Those of you familiar with the story of the great yogi Milarepa recall how he used to pass across the sky and people would say, “There goes that crazy yogi Milarepa again.”

We've lost the art of flying. We're not birds; we're very much earthbound. But some people travel in their finer bodies—they “fly” in that way. And so these two memories of flying are within us.

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*Chela is a Sanskrit term for a student or disciple of a master.

The above is an excerpt the book Dreams: Exploring The Secrets Of Your Soul (Sacred Psychology Series) by Marilyn C. Barrick, Ph.D.