"I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?"
- Chuang Tsu

"Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?"
- Morpheus, The Matrix

Where do you go when you dream? Are you really a human dreaming you're a butterfly, or are you a butterfly dreaming you're a human? How do you know you're not actually travelling to, or experiencing realities other than this one? When you dream, the reality you're part of seems real. How do you know that when you wake up from that dream, you're actually waking up? You might be falling asleep in the 'other reality' and dreaming again that you're a human.

It's a philosophical and a spiritual question that has plagued mankind for ages. It's now even a scientific question, as theorised by quantum physics, as it explores alternate realities and multiple universes. At the moment, no one is really sure. We have our feelings after we wake from vivid dreams that seem so real. We create descriptive ideas to make us wonder about reality and what it is. But we don't really know.

There's a lot to reality that we don't understand. Spirituality goes some way towards explaining the mysteries, but many people don't believe in spirituality either, and so the unexplained, to them, remains that way. Most of those who 'don't believe' feel there is a completely legitimate scientific explanation for the unexplained - they just haven't scientifically found that explanation yet.

I agree with those people who say there has to be a scientific explanation for psychic or spiritual events. But in order to find the scientific explanation for it, science will need to disover a way of measuring psychic and spiritual realities beyond the three dimensions that we exist in. There are far more dimensions than just these three, including the dimension of the mind, as well as the dimensions of life after death. Ghosts, for example, exist in some of these extra dimensions, and since all the various dimensions are part of each other, just like the three dimensions that we know about, that's why we can occasionally see or feel them. Parts of their reality are mixing with our own - especially as it really is all the same multidimensional reality.

Many years ago, Estera and I woke up from a dream that we both had, at the same time. We had come back from Adelaide that day, a 13-hour drive, and the dream we shared was brief, but vivid. It was even more interesting because we both had it. There was a long, barren road, at dusk. The trees - what few trees there were in the barren Australian semi-desert that this road passed through - were lit up by the cyclic flashes of red and blue lights. There was an overturned car, remarkably similar to the one that we had rented for the trip, along with miscellaneous debris from the crash strewn about on the road. There were police cars, ambulances and fire engines around, their flashing lights illuminating the darkening landscape around the sight, and emergency workers milling around.

That was it. We woke up from that, and looked at each other.

Her: "Did you...?"
Me: "...have a dream?"
Her: "...about us having an accident?"
Me: "Yep."
Her: "Cool..."

My automatic writing the next day confirmed it. What we had dreamt was actually a glimpse into an alternate reality where the possibility of an accident had become an inevitability. We saw the consequences of actions that we hadn't experienced ourselves, but which were experienced by our alternate selves in another reality.

Spooky stuff.

But there's an interesting lesson with all this. The theories of quantum physics say that for every choice available to you, an alternate reality exists where that choice becomes real. You may have a smooth drive home, but in other realities, other choices play themselves out. Anything you can imagine - anything - is being experienced by you in some other reality. If you can imagine it, it's happening, plus a whole lot more that you can't imagine. There are an infinite number of realities popping up from the infinite number of choices we make on a daily basis. All of us, all the time, are creating realities as we think, and as we act.

Some realities are created just for an instant, replaying over and over again the reality that was created. They're the ones that are least likely to occur as fullblown realities, like the one you're experiencing now. This universe, to us, is a fullblown reality. It goes beyond now, and includes the passage of time. Sometimes realities that are created and replay themselves undergo a transition into this one, and we see the repeated experiences of what we call ghosts.

The consequences of your actions go beyond what you experience here. What you imagine will become real. Not necessarily in this reality, but your imagination has created a reality based on it. You can use this knowledge to help yourself make better choices. Imagining the consequences of your actions and seeing how it plays out in your mind is a great way of determining if you really want to do whatever it is you're imagining doing. If what you imagine has bad results, don't do it. If what you imagine has GOOD results, then do it! Reach out and grasp that reality, make it your own.

You've become a God, in a way, where you have the power to create realities and influence this one. What kind of God do you want to be?