Usually my dreams seem to be my mind coming to terms with the things in my life. Sometimes I get them and sometimes I don't.
If Wayfers dreams were bad it may have been a result of the crapola they had to learn to believe as it opposed reality as a whole. especially for those who were in pressure cooker situations.
There is a family at HQ who apparently sleep only in 15 minute intervals or something like that. I'm not kidding. I guess they read a book or something that said we don't need a lot of sleep.
A bunch of self-aggrandizing BS. Eat lots of calories before you go to sleep, dream vivid dreams. Go to bed hungry, no dreams, at least not remembered. Works that way for me and everyone I know.
There are several levels of sleep that a person needs to go through in order to get the proper kinds and amounts of sleep. It is during sleep that the body heals itself. One of the levels involves dreaming, as indicated by rapid eye movement, but the others do not. It generally takes about 90 minutes for the brain to cycle through the sleep states. A good night's sleep is usually about five or six cycles depending on the levels of the neuro-transmitters, which vary from person to person and from time to time.
After I got married, I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and the mild form of bipolar mood disorder. I learned these things about sleep in learning to cope with these illnesses.
When a person cannot or is not allowed to sleep, his body and brain cannot heal themselves, leading to the condition known as sleep deprivation.
I think that there is a stage in the body's healing of the brain when it has to switch on some of the functions of consciousness without coming to full consciousness. I think that dreams are generally the brain's "screen-savers" during this stage of the process.
Those things being said, I know of three dreams I've had during the course of my life that had real significance, and I believe it was God preparing me for things I needed to consider.
I didn't dream much before I started sleeping with the CPAP (air pump) that keeps me inflated while I sleep. When I started getting enough proper sleep, my dreams became much more frequent and vivid. I tend to enjoy my ordinary dream-life.
Wierwille wasn't trained in the science of though control. He just knew from experience what worked. But Dan Toccini, the perpetrator of Momentus, was trained. It was while considering how I had been manipulated during the Momentus training that I realized I had experienced the deliberate induction of sleep deprivation for purposes of thought control.
I don't remember being taught that dreams are bad, but I don't put it past the ignorant know-it-alls that TWI is, and I was.
I like the dreams where I can levitate..
Whenever I realize I'm dreaming, I always start flying around!
I heard that teaching as early as 1973. It didn't make sense to me since people in the bible dreamed. Besides, I like to have dreams, they're fun. Even the nightmares, if you don't freak out they make a good horror story.
Dreams appear to be absolutely necessary for our mental as well as physical health. Experiments done on cats showed that if they were allowed to sleep, but not allowed REM sleep where dreaming occurs, they became insane. How do you know when a cat is insane??? They became gradually more and more wild and nasty in their behavior to the point that they could not be handled or controlled. Eventually they had to be put down.
Maybe kind of a silly point, but I remember that "no dreaming" teaching as well. So I condemned myself for years because I dream a lot. Then one day I was sitting in my living room and my dog was sleeping on the floor. At one point her little paws started moving and she started very softly barking. My dog was dreaming about something and I thought, "Hmm...is my dog out of fellowship? Does she have unresolved issues from her childhood that she hasn't worked out? Then I wondered what she could possibly be dreaming about. Perhaps, in her dream, the mailman actually stayed on the porch instead of leaving. Maybe the mutt next door ate her bowl of Alpo.
Obviously God can talk to someone any way He wants. I just don't think we should laud it too high.
There is a family at HQ who apparently sleep only in 15 minute intervals or something like that. I'm not kidding. I guess they read a book or something that said we don't need a lot of sleep.
Sadly enough, I believe this. Normally I wouldn't believe something like this, but knowing TWI, I do. Pitiful. If it's a family then there are kids involved. So this guy is sleep depriving his kids. That's called abuse. Do you realize how important sleep is in the physical developement a child? You probably do, I'm preaching to choir here.
Wierwille wasn't trained in the science of though control. He just knew from experience what worked. But Dan Toccini, the perpetrator of Momentus, was trained. It was while considering how I had been manipulated during the Momentus training that I realized I had experienced the deliberate induction of sleep deprivation for purposes of thought control.
I don't remember being taught that dreams are bad, but I don't put it past the ignorant know-it-alls that TWI is, and I was.
Love,
Steve
It is funny, I read your post and got curious . . . I am not all that aware of what Momentus is. . . . so I googled it. ... . I was taken to Fact Net where I started reading this really good article. . . . . . . got curious as to who wrote it. . . . looked up at the name and it was you!!
Well written, thanks for sharing your story on there.
I remember Wierwille teaching, in the earl 1970's, that, if you dream, you are leaving yourself in a vulnerable position for devil spirit visitation. This is the old "trap door" concept. According to Wierwille, people in the OT needed for God to speak to them in dreams because they didn't have "new birth spirit" by which to receive revelation. In retrospect, this contradicts "the great principle". (ie: "God is spirit and can only speak to spirit.") Wierwille rationalized this by saying that God "momentarily put spirit ON the OT dream recipients."----I believe VPW taught this in AC/1973.
When I was a Fellow Laborer, in the mid 1970's, we were actually taught that the human body could circumvent the need for sleep by virtue of "speaking in tongues much". (If we were tired it was our own fault for slacking off in the SIT category.)
Wierwille taught that God could talk to you in dreams but would only do so if you were so far out of fellowship that He couldn't get through to you via revelation. Naturally, if you did have a dream, you found yourself wondering how you had fallen out of fellowship.
I hadn't thought about that BS for years! The funny thing is, we watched a movie last night that I thought was much too violent. I had dreams last night of being trapped in my grandmother's house by the bad guys and needing to crawl out the coal chute in the basement to catch a horse in the garage so I could ride off for help. It was vivid and in color, green grass, blue sky, sorrel horse.
I can also think of at least one time when God told me something in an extremely vivid dream that was ultimately comforting and consoling, and reassured me of His love and care of someone I love very much.
I very frequently dream and more often than not, the dreams I recall are a source of great amusement to my husband, who also has weird dreams at times.
I do remember the SIT replacing the need for sleep in FLO. I also remember the young woman who looked that in the way, called it what it was, and enjoyed a nap every afternoon when she came home from work. Nothing could dissuade her from doing this and she was not impressed by the idea that it was unnecessary. So nap she did, probably with a smile on her face as she dreamed of the looks that were given her as she headed off for beddy-bye.
Oh and my dog dreams also, probably of catching the 40 lb tom turkey who lives with his family in the woods behind the house.
FLO (Fellow Laborers of Ohio) used Ecc. 5:12 (The sleep of a labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much: but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep.) to squeeze extra work out of us and convince us it was a good thing we never had much money or enough to eat.
When I was a Fellow Laborer, in the mid 1970's, we were actually taught that the human body could circumvent the need for sleep by virtue of "speaking in tongues much". (If we were tired it was our own fault for slacking off in the SIT category.)
Yup. Docvic used to say "10 minutes of S.I.T. is better than 8 hours of sleep", (or something to that effect).
I fell for a lot of what he said, but that line there was so absurd and over-the-top it defied credibility even *back then*.
some quotes from a dream journal i once helped make...
Dreams are illustrations…from the book your soul is writing about you.
~ Marsha Norman
We can be the curates or curators of our own souls, an idea that implies an inner priesthood and a personal religion. To undertake this restoration of soul means we have to make spirituality a more serious part of everyday life.
~ Thomas Moore
If I were sitting here describing a dream…there’d be a certain look on your face. And I know what that look means because I feel it myself—recognition. The pleasure of recognition, a bit of rescue work, so to speak, rescuing the formless into form.
~ Doris Lessing
He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the head, and in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
~ Aeschylus
Tradition teaches that soul lies midway between understanding and unconsciousness, and that its intrument is neither the mind nor the body, but imagination.
~ Thomas Moore
I believe that dreams are true interpreters of our inclinations; but there is art required to sort and understand them.
~ Montaigne
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
~ John Steinbeck
All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.
~ Elias Canetti
We have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.
~ Carl Jung
If we believe the Bible, we must accept the fact that, in the old days, God and His angels came to humans in their sleep and made themselves known in dreams.
~ Abraham Lincoln
Just as a burning fire inherently exudes heat, the unconscious inherently generates symbols…The unconscious speaks in symbols, not to confuse us, but simply because it is its native idiom.
~ Robert Johnson
Dreams say what they mean, but they don’t say it in daytime language.
~ Gail Godwin
The unconscious had developed a special language…symbolism… inner work is primarily the art of learning this symbolic language of the unconscious.
~ Robert Johnson
A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.
~ Erich Fromm
To me, dreams are a part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive, but expresses something as best it can, just as a plant grows or an animal seeks its food as best it can.
~ Carl Jung
Dreams are the voice of our instinctive animal nature or ultimately the voice of cosmic matter in us. This is a very daring hypothesis, but I’ll venture to say that the collective unconscious and organic atomic matter are probably two aspects of the same thing. So the dreams are ultimately the voice of cosmic matter. ... The dream strange to our rational mind.
~ Marie Louise von Franz
Even in the most sophisticated person, it is the primitive eye that watches the film.
~ Jack Nicholson
Every dream comes in the service of wholeness and the effort to harmonize interior and exterior life…and render feelings and emotions, thoughts, sensations and intuitions into metaphoric/symbolic forms.
~ Jeremy Taylor
The dream is a conversation between man and God.
~ Mahomet
I was not looking for dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
~ Susan Sontag
There are more things in heaven & earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
~ William Shakespeare
As we wander even further into the materialist desert that our civilisation has become, our dreams are the only oases of spiritual vitality left to us. They represent our primordial habitat, our last wilderness, and we must protect them with as much fervour as the rain forests, the ozone layer, the elephant, and the whale.
~ Anthony Steven
Although working with thoughts and feelings can be helpful in many situations, it may not be enough when someone faces serious, life-altering events and the questions they raise. It may be even “less enough” when someone faces death. At such times, people often find that reason and the problem solving activities of waking consciousness offer few answers and little comfort. In contrast, many believe that dreams approach the question of mortality - indeed, all the major questions of life - from a much different perspective.
~ Janet Muff
Personal opinions are more or less arbitrary judgments and may be all wrong; we are never sure of being right. Therefore, we should seek the facts provided by dreams. dreams are objective facts. They do not answer to our expectations.
~ C.G. Jung
I have dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.
~ Emily Bronte
the dreamer and his dream are the same…the powers personified in a dream are those that move the world.
~ Joseph Campbell
A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read.
~ The Talmud
Hear my words: If there is a prophet among you, I the Lord make myself known to him in a vision, I speak with him in a dream.
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Ham
I remember that nonsense.. I think it is impossible to sleep without dreams unless somebody wakes one up in approximately fifteen minute intervals.
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JeffSjo
Usually my dreams seem to be my mind coming to terms with the things in my life. Sometimes I get them and sometimes I don't.
If Wayfers dreams were bad it may have been a result of the crapola they had to learn to believe as it opposed reality as a whole. especially for those who were in pressure cooker situations.
But Wierwille's dream.....shutter.
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Bolshevik
There is a family at HQ who apparently sleep only in 15 minute intervals or something like that. I'm not kidding. I guess they read a book or something that said we don't need a lot of sleep.
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Jim
A bunch of self-aggrandizing BS. Eat lots of calories before you go to sleep, dream vivid dreams. Go to bed hungry, no dreams, at least not remembered. Works that way for me and everyone I know.
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Ham
I like the dreams where I can levitate..
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Steve Lortz
There are several levels of sleep that a person needs to go through in order to get the proper kinds and amounts of sleep. It is during sleep that the body heals itself. One of the levels involves dreaming, as indicated by rapid eye movement, but the others do not. It generally takes about 90 minutes for the brain to cycle through the sleep states. A good night's sleep is usually about five or six cycles depending on the levels of the neuro-transmitters, which vary from person to person and from time to time.
After I got married, I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and the mild form of bipolar mood disorder. I learned these things about sleep in learning to cope with these illnesses.
When a person cannot or is not allowed to sleep, his body and brain cannot heal themselves, leading to the condition known as sleep deprivation.
I think that there is a stage in the body's healing of the brain when it has to switch on some of the functions of consciousness without coming to full consciousness. I think that dreams are generally the brain's "screen-savers" during this stage of the process.
Those things being said, I know of three dreams I've had during the course of my life that had real significance, and I believe it was God preparing me for things I needed to consider.
I didn't dream much before I started sleeping with the CPAP (air pump) that keeps me inflated while I sleep. When I started getting enough proper sleep, my dreams became much more frequent and vivid. I tend to enjoy my ordinary dream-life.
Wierwille wasn't trained in the science of though control. He just knew from experience what worked. But Dan Toccini, the perpetrator of Momentus, was trained. It was while considering how I had been manipulated during the Momentus training that I realized I had experienced the deliberate induction of sleep deprivation for purposes of thought control.
I don't remember being taught that dreams are bad, but I don't put it past the ignorant know-it-alls that TWI is, and I was.
Whenever I realize I'm dreaming, I always start flying around!
Love,
Steve
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Keith
I heard that teaching as early as 1973. It didn't make sense to me since people in the bible dreamed. Besides, I like to have dreams, they're fun. Even the nightmares, if you don't freak out they make a good horror story.
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cheranne
That is just dumb. Dreams are awesome.
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krys
Dreams appear to be absolutely necessary for our mental as well as physical health. Experiments done on cats showed that if they were allowed to sleep, but not allowed REM sleep where dreaming occurs, they became insane. How do you know when a cat is insane??? They became gradually more and more wild and nasty in their behavior to the point that they could not be handled or controlled. Eventually they had to be put down.
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sirguessalot
dreaming also has the potential to become more and more vivid as we near the end of our life...or with practice
...and they also tell us a lot of things about physical illness
a people who are somehow taught to avoid "dreaming well"...end up like those cats
just look around
avoiding dreaming is like avoiding breathing
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Broken Arrow
Maybe kind of a silly point, but I remember that "no dreaming" teaching as well. So I condemned myself for years because I dream a lot. Then one day I was sitting in my living room and my dog was sleeping on the floor. At one point her little paws started moving and she started very softly barking. My dog was dreaming about something and I thought, "Hmm...is my dog out of fellowship? Does she have unresolved issues from her childhood that she hasn't worked out? Then I wondered what she could possibly be dreaming about. Perhaps, in her dream, the mailman actually stayed on the porch instead of leaving. Maybe the mutt next door ate her bowl of Alpo.
Obviously God can talk to someone any way He wants. I just don't think we should laud it too high.
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Broken Arrow
Sadly enough, I believe this. Normally I wouldn't believe something like this, but knowing TWI, I do. Pitiful. If it's a family then there are kids involved. So this guy is sleep depriving his kids. That's called abuse. Do you realize how important sleep is in the physical developement a child? You probably do, I'm preaching to choir here.
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geisha779
It is funny, I read your post and got curious . . . I am not all that aware of what Momentus is. . . . so I googled it. ... . I was taken to Fact Net where I started reading this really good article. . . . . . . got curious as to who wrote it. . . . looked up at the name and it was you!!
Well written, thanks for sharing your story on there.
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waysider
I remember Wierwille teaching, in the earl 1970's, that, if you dream, you are leaving yourself in a vulnerable position for devil spirit visitation. This is the old "trap door" concept. According to Wierwille, people in the OT needed for God to speak to them in dreams because they didn't have "new birth spirit" by which to receive revelation. In retrospect, this contradicts "the great principle". (ie: "God is spirit and can only speak to spirit.") Wierwille rationalized this by saying that God "momentarily put spirit ON the OT dream recipients."----I believe VPW taught this in AC/1973.
When I was a Fellow Laborer, in the mid 1970's, we were actually taught that the human body could circumvent the need for sleep by virtue of "speaking in tongues much". (If we were tired it was our own fault for slacking off in the SIT category.)
Wierwille taught that God could talk to you in dreams but would only do so if you were so far out of fellowship that He couldn't get through to you via revelation. Naturally, if you did have a dream, you found yourself wondering how you had fallen out of fellowship.
And we bought it-------That's the scary part.
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Ham
Imagine having a major "dream" when one is wide awake..
I think what sets these madmen apart from others.. they take themselves, far too seriously..
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Watered Garden
I hadn't thought about that BS for years! The funny thing is, we watched a movie last night that I thought was much too violent. I had dreams last night of being trapped in my grandmother's house by the bad guys and needing to crawl out the coal chute in the basement to catch a horse in the garage so I could ride off for help. It was vivid and in color, green grass, blue sky, sorrel horse.
I can also think of at least one time when God told me something in an extremely vivid dream that was ultimately comforting and consoling, and reassured me of His love and care of someone I love very much.
I very frequently dream and more often than not, the dreams I recall are a source of great amusement to my husband, who also has weird dreams at times.
I do remember the SIT replacing the need for sleep in FLO. I also remember the young woman who looked that in the way, called it what it was, and enjoyed a nap every afternoon when she came home from work. Nothing could dissuade her from doing this and she was not impressed by the idea that it was unnecessary. So nap she did, probably with a smile on her face as she dreamed of the looks that were given her as she headed off for beddy-bye.
Oh and my dog dreams also, probably of catching the 40 lb tom turkey who lives with his family in the woods behind the house.
WG
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waysider
'nother thought crossed my mind.
FLO (Fellow Laborers of Ohio) used Ecc. 5:12 (The sleep of a labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much: but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep.) to squeeze extra work out of us and convince us it was a good thing we never had much money or enough to eat.
And some people STILL don't think it was a cult!
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dmiller
Yup. Docvic used to say "10 minutes of S.I.T. is better than 8 hours of sleep", (or something to that effect).
I fell for a lot of what he said, but that line there was so absurd and over-the-top it defied credibility even *back then*.
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sirguessalot
some quotes from a dream journal i once helped make...
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waysider
Very cool, SirG.
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excathedra
sir g is the coolest
--
well, the way should pray for me to stopfruckingdreaming about them lol lol
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Thomas Loy Bumgarner
a levitating squirel?
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Ham
heh..
no, its really "cool"
the rest of the people around, don't even seem to notice.. I think they are doing the same thing..
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sirguessalot
according to concordances...the word for "old men" (who dream dreams) in both Joel and Acts, simply means "elder."
...which also seems to go with what i have said about dreams being more important as we age
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