I just finished reading (Ok just listening to my computer read it for me) a book called Beautiful Dreamer
It's about the dream world and how it can affect a person in his waking life.
You can download it free here:
Beautiful Dreamer linkIt talks about the Dream Realm being in the Astral Realm. It's based on metaphysical theories and Lucid Dreaming, NDE, OBE etc.
It is very congruent with information from this site:
Near Death Experience SiteIf you want to read the book ignore the following because it's kind of a spoiler for the final chapters.
The point given in this book at the end is that each person has deliberately created their own life experiences and the choices to make at each moment.
A Life Script.
But it is more like each person programmed their own Non-Linear RPG game with different choices at different moments leading to a different storyline , but with the purpose of always encountering scenarios that will develop a soul trait such as Learning to Love, Learning to fight, Learning to lead, Learning science, etc.
Most of all learning to evolve from the previous predominant nature of Basic Animalistic Desires.
So each person reincarnates on Earth until their soul is at a high enough level with certain traits to move up to Higher Planes of existence.
This is kind of refreshing since the only theories of Programmed Reality I had heard before this are that people are born innocent and get bombarded with information that programs them to behave in a certain way, and are being manipulated to serve some agenda.
This books' view is that Each person knows beforehand what kind of experience they will have and even if its tough it is to bring out certain traits and lessons to learn that are needed for their true self , So getting too attached to the avatar is like the geeky kid who is Careless of his life because he spends too much time on Second Life or World oF Warcraft, or on the avatar that is their Professional name amount of money earned etc.
It gave me a pretty acceptable view of what Programmed Reality is except that I do not Know If the Astral Realm is also a Programmed Reality or if it is where Free Will can be expressed more fully. I guess that you earn skills on Earth to be able to do more stuff in The Astral Realm but thats just my view.
Made this thread on Programmed Reality Philosophy to learn others' point of view on this subject , That we each created our experience
We are the gamers constantly programming our experience