This suggests a change in you, or you are becoming aware of something new, or something you are not familiar with, and so it seems strange or alien. For instance a change might be occurring in the way you relate to people or events.
Your mind has the ability to view your experience as a whole, rather than in parts. But usually we only recover fragments of our memory or information we have collected through experience. This massive and usually unknown insight into life and yourself, this awareness of things beyond your usual ability to comprehend, is often presented to the conscious mind as images such as UFO’s or circles of light. Another way of explaining this is to realise that your conscious self is only a tiny part of the whole process of life active in you. There are amazing potentials in you that might only be glimpsed in stress situations. Occasionally this more powerful or bigger side of you breaks through and is experienced as an strange, or even frightening and thus alien, or greater or more powerful being. Because of the hallucinatory aspect of the dream process, and the fact that in dreaming we apparently exterior things as real, when this breaks through while we are awake, it is difficult to accept the source of it as our own unconscious. See: Altered states of consciousness; Space; Spaceship.
The ball of light or fire: This is a common waking experience as well as dream image. It occurs when the person touches their sense of wholeness as described above. We see this mentioned in the description of Pentecost – the flame on top of the head – and may account for cases of people seeing flying saucers.
Example: ‘A flying saucer dropped a man on our lawn. He was seven feet tall and stood in a ring of light. The sky was vivid pink and a peculiar aeroplane flew over. It was the shape of a cross.’ Mrs. A.
The circle, the light, the shape of the cross and the big man, are all symbols of that greater self we only occasionally glimpse or experience. See: Hallucinations and hallucinogens; Satellite; Spiritual life in dreams; Unconscious, the.
