Chapter 6

Control Over Dreams

Words of the Mother

When you are very tired and in need of rest and if you know how to exteriorise yourself, if you go out of your body and enter consciously into the vital world, there are regions there, in the vital world, which are like a marvellous virgin forest, with all the splendour of a rich and harmonious vegetation, and beautiful, mirror-like pools. And the atmosphere is filled with the living vitality of plants, with every shade of green reflected in the water… And there you feel so much life, so much beauty, so much richness and plenitude that you wake up full of energy. And all this is so objective! I have been able to take people there, without telling them anything at all about how it would be, and they were able to describe the place exactly as I can myself, and they had exactly the same experience. They were absolutely exhausted before going to sleep and they woke up with an absolutely marvellous feeling of plenitude, of force and energy. They had stayed there only a few minutes.

There are regions like that – not many, but they exist. On the other hand, there are many unpleasant places in the vital world and it is better not to go there. Leaving aside those who are so attached, so rivetted to their bodies that they don’t even want to leave them, those who can easily learn to go out of their bodies ought to do so with great care. I haven’t been able to teach this to many people, for that would mean exposing them, sometimes without protection – when they do it alone, without my presence – to experiences which can be extremely harmful to them.

The vital world is a world of extremes. If, for example, you eat a bunch of grapes in the vital world, you can go for thirty-six hours without feeling hungry – fully nourished. But you can meet with certain things, enter certain places that drain all your energy in a trice, and sometimes leave you with illnesses and after-effects that belong to the vital world.

Words of the Mother

Sweet Mother, you have said that one can exercise one’s conscious will and change the course of one’s dreams.

Ah, yes, I have already told you that once. If you are in the middle of a dream and something happens which you don’t like (for instance, somebody shouts that he wants to kill you), you say: “That won’t do at all, I don’t want my dream to be like that”, and you can change the action or the ending. You can organise your dream as you want. One can arrange one’s dreams. But for this you must be conscious that you are dreaming, you must know you are dreaming.

Words of the Mother

There are children who know how to do this, they continue their dreams. Every evening when they go to bed they return to the same place and continue their dream…

Nothing is more interesting. It is a most pleasant way of passing the nights. You begin a story, then, when it is time to wake up, you put a full stop to the last sentence and come back into your body. And then the following night you start off again, re-open the page and resume your story during the whole time you are out; and then you arrange things well – they must be well arranged, it must be very beautiful. And when it is time to come back, you put a full stop once again and tell those things, “Stay very quiet till I return!” And you come back into your body. And you continue this every evening and write a book of wonderful fairy-tales – provided you remember them when you wake up.

But this depends on being in a quiet state during the day, doesn’t it?

No, it depends on the candour of the child.

And on the trust he has in what happens to him, on the absence of the mind’s critical sense, and a simplicity of heart, and a youthful and active energy – it depends on all that – on a kind of inner vital generosity: one must not be too egoistic, one must not be too miserly, nor too practical, too utilitarian – indeed there are all sorts of things one should not be… like children. And then, one must have a lively power of imagination, for – I seem to be telling you stupid things, but it is quite true – there is a world in which you are the supreme maker of forms: that is your own particular vital world. You are the supreme fashioner and you can make a marvel of your world if you know how to use it. If you have an artistic or poetic consciousness, if you love harmony, beauty, you will build there something marvellous which will tend to spring up into the material manifestation.

When I was small I used to call this “telling stories to oneself”. It is not at all a telling with words, in one’s head: it is a going away to this place which is fresh and pure, and… building up a wonderful story there. And if you know how to tell yourself a story in this way, and if it is truly beautiful, truly harmonious, truly powerful and well co-ordinated, this story will be realised in your life – perhaps not exactly in the form in which you created it, but as a more or less changed physical expression of what you made.

That may take years, perhaps, but your story will tend to organise your life. But there are very few people who know how to tell a beautiful story; and then they always mix horrors in it, which they regret later.

If one could create a magnificent story without any horror in it, nothing but beauty, it would have a considerable influence on everyone’s life. And this is what people don’t know.

If one knew how to use this power, this creative power in the world of vital forms, if one knew how to use this while yet a child, a very small child… for it is then that one fashions his material destiny. But usually people around you, sometimes even your own little friends, but mostly parents and teachers, dabble in it and spoil everything for you, so well that very seldom does the thing succeed completely.

But otherwise, if it were done like that, with the spontaneous candour of a child, you could organise a wonderful life for yourself – I am speaking of the physical world.

The dreams of childhood are the realities of mature age.