The astral realm

Where exactly do we go when we travel in our dreams?

It may come as no surprise to you that I have a very rich dream life.

This richness also applies to the scenescapes of my meditations, shamanic journeys, and “day dreams”, revealing a deeply nuanced, intricate and visually stunning world just beyond the world we perceive in material reality.

This other world is called the astral realm.

Wikipedia defines the astral realm as the “plane of existence of the celestial spheres, crossed by the soul in its astral body on the way to being born and after death, generally believed to be populated by angels, spirits or other immaterial beings.”

Ancient Greek philosopher Plato referred to the astral realm as the world of ideas: a world which is totally separate from the material world and houses the “perfect” thought form of everything we find, enjoy and engage with in our world.

Put another way, the world of ideas houses the original version of everything. The purest and best iteration. That which was intended.

In contrast, our world is housed with the copies and iterations of those original thought forms, resulting in distortions and version control issues and the general disappointment we experience here in 3D reality.

Plato goes so far as to assert that the world of ideas— aka the astral realm— is actually the real “reality”, and what we experience as the material world with our waking minds and bodies and senses is an illusion: a series of shadows on the wall of what’s known as “Plato’s Cave”.

It’s a fascinating concept, isn’t it?