I am afraid to say that this is going to be a post about how bloody hard it is to read in the dreaming/astral, so forgive the rant and try to look for the bits worth reading. Or pass it up all together as I get rather academic when I am working out a problem.

I love to read and do so veraciously, naturally this caries over in to my dreams and sometimes into my astral work. Its rather interesting to note that I will often find myself reading something in a dream and it will be deep and profound, and yet also perfectly unintelligible scribblings- even while lucid dreaming. In the astral proper I find that particular symbols, words and what have you are a pain to read, discern, or even see clearly, if I can manage that at all.

On the other hand the general type of symbols such as trees, plants, buildings, and furniture, are all quite easy to make out. As are grand motif’s of existence, such as Jungian archetypes. So it would seem that, in perfect consistency with the contrary nature of the astral, the vaguer something is the easier to make out. It might also be put as something being vague in meaning and particular in role is it is easier to relate to ones experience.

However, I have, on occasion, seen personal symbols, and unique symbols that I have seen elsewhere quite clearly. The unique symbols are often complex but also composed of common element that one would not see as a symbol in the waking world. Think for example of a picture of happiness or absolute misery on might find in Time magazine. The personal symbols are more abstract, often resembling a sigil- sometimes a three emotional one.

So I have it that neither the complexity nor the abstractness of the symbol is what determines the ease of reading. Being that the personal symbols are abstract/complex and the clearest ones are complex/vague and the hardest to see are simple abstraction. It might well be that the shear mass of symbols that make up a page of text is just too much information to process though my projected mind. My ability factors in to it in odd ways as well. Over the past few months I have been doing third eye work, and now I can make out the shapes of the letters, but cannot relate them to any thing like words or meaning. Yet I find the complex symbols involving photograph like scenes with clear meaning also have the “blurriest” appearance.

I am tempted to say that symbols when viewed in the astral are separated from the thing they signify, relying on context and personal inference to establish a grander meaning. I believe that they are also made clear by their emotional content. This would explain why writing is so hard to make out and derive meaning form. The symbols (letters) have no emotional content, and are being assembled into bigger symbols (words) that compose bigger symbols (sentences), that are part of a grand symbol (the page of text.) At every stage the meanings grow in implications and nuance, creating noise as it does do, until the only thing discernable is the emotional content of the whole- and so I feel that the page is deeply profound.