Sleep

Poor men! How little you know of the most ordinary phenomena that make up your life! You believe yourselves wise enough, you deem yourselves to possess a vast erudition, and, to these simple questions of all children: “What do we do when we sleep? what are dreams?”, you remain mute. I do not pretend to make you understand what I am going to explain, since there are things to which your Spirit cannot yet submit, because it admits only what it understands. Sleep entirely frees the soul from the body. When we sleep, we are momentarily in the state in which we shall find ourselves, in a definitive manner, after death. The Spirits who detached themselves early from matter at the occasion of death had an intelligent sleep; when they sleep, they reunite with the company of other beings superior to them: they travel, they converse, and with them they instruct themselves. They even work at works that, upon dying, they find concluded. This ought to teach us once more not to fear death, since, according to the word of a saint, you die daily. This is as regards the elevated Spirits; but for the mass of men, who at death must remain long hours in that perturbation, in that uncertainty of which they have spoken, they will either go to worlds inferior to the Earth, where old affections call them, or perhaps they will seek pleasures even more degrading than those here; they will go to learn doctrines still more vile, more ignoble, and more harmful than those professed in your midst. And what makes for sympathy on Earth is nothing other than the fact of feeling ourselves, upon waking, drawn together by the heart with those with whom we have just spent eight or nine hours of happiness or of pleasure. What also explains those invincible antipathies is that we know, in the depths of the heart, that these creatures have another conscience, different from ours, for we know them without ever having seen them with the eyes. It is also what explains indifference, since we do not attempt to make new friends, when we know that there are others who love us and wish us well. In a word, sleep influences your lives much more than you think. By effect of sleep, incarnate Spirits are always in contact with the world of Spirits, and it is this that makes the superior Spirits consent, without much repugnance, to reincarnate among you. God willed that during their contact with vice they should come to retemper themselves at the fountain of good, in order that they themselves should not fail, they who came to instruct others. Sleep is the door that God has opened to them toward the friends of heaven; it is the recreation after the work, while awaiting the great liberation, the final liberation that must lead them back to their true environment. The dream is the memory of what your Spirit saw during sleep, but note that you do not always dream, because you do not always remember what you saw or all that you saw; it is not your soul in all its unfolding; often it is nothing but the memory of the perturbation that accompanies your departure or arrival, to which is joined the recollection of what you did or of what preoccupies you in the waking state; without that, how would you explain those absurd dreams, which the most learned have as much as the most simple? The evil Spirits also make use of dreams to torment frail and pusillanimous souls. Moreover, you will soon see develop a new kind of dreams, as ancient as the one you know, but which you are ignorant of. The dream of Joan, the dream of Jacob, the dream of the Jewish prophets and of some Indian prophets: this dream is the memory of the soul entirely detached from the body, the memory of that second life of which I spoke to you a moment ago.

Seek to distinguish well these two kinds of dreams, among those that you recall, without which you will fall into contradictions and into errors that would be fatal to your faith.

Observation. – The Spirit who dictated this communication, requested to state his name, answered: “To what end? Do you believe that only the Spirits of great men come to tell you good things? Do you take into no consideration those whom you do not know or who are ignored on your Earth? Know that many do not take a name except to content you.”

[Note: The communication above served as a complement to answer No. 402 of The Spirits' Book.]

[1] [“Joan, merely carried along by the supernatural fascination of her dreams and the proposed mission to fulfill according to the divine will and without knowing anything about the art of war, commanded the rough soldiers, with an angelic air, in whose presence no one dared to say or do anything improper.” ]

[2] [The Dream of Jacob. Genesis 28:11.]