squirrels
Master Don Juan
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2003
- Messages
- 6,627
- Reaction score
- 178
- Age
- 45
Lucid dreaming (knowing that you're dreaming) is something that's always interested me.
I started messing with being able to recall my dreams a while back after poking around on Steve Pavlina's blog. It's interesting how your mind is rigged to wipe out all but the most intense dreams just seconds after you wake up. The trick is to just remember one detail...if you can catch a single "thread" of the dream...remember one key aspect where you were, what you were doing, it stimulates the same neural patterns you were just conditioning and the rest of the dream comes flooding back.
Actual LUCID dreaming, being able to realize I'm dreaming, has always been difficult. Usually when you realize you're dreaming, the excitement overcomes you and you wake up almost immediately. Even though you can sometimes sustain the thoughts, you're not "immersed" in them.
Lately I've been doing a couple of different things...one is considering the possibility that I was dreaming when I was in fact awake, or that philosophically, everything I saw around me was created through "universal collective consciousness", through kind of a "shared dream", shared subconscious patterns, ideas, etc. Makes sense when you think about buildings and things like that, since someone DID consciously create them, but things like trees and grass...just patterns repeating, possibly created by greater shared elements of the same consciousness...you get the idea. I'm not gonna go full-hippie.
Another is thinking about specific recurring patterns in my dreams...for example, I have dreams all the time about being back in school and either feeling like I "don't belong" there or being late for some class or failing a class that I never attended. I started telling myself, "I'm not going back to school any time soon, so if I'm in school, it means I'm dreaming".
So last night I go to bed and I have this bizarre series of dreams...I'm not going to go into all of them in detail. First I was the personal assistant of a retarded Sauron from Lord of the Rings, then I was in a liquor store with some college buddies (who I never see any more...that alone should have been a trigger that I was in a dream)...then all of a sudden I found myself hurled out over an ocean, flying maybe 20 feet above the water speeding at a good 70MPH or so as if I was thrown out there...and for some reason I said to myself, "the physics of this are impossible....which means...I must be dreaming!"
So I managed to will myself to slow down and stop in mid-air, setting down on a bridge over this endless body of water. I found it odd because I wasn't able to immediately "throw the brakes on"...all I could do was gradually scrub off speed until I came to kind of a stop. I really had to envision being static above a body of water...really imagine some detail about the lapping of the water against the bridge, the way the light reflected off of it...otherwise it felt like my subconscious mind was rejecting the construct.
Then once I had stabilized the image, I tried the "Matrix jump"...a long jump, maybe about 1/4 mile, across the water to this body of land.
When I first jumped, it's like my brain was still trying to work out the physics of what I wanted to do and reconcile them with real-world experiences. I flew kind of horizontally at first, then started getting lift mid-way through the jump, enough to make it to the land I was aiming for. I kind of did a Tony-Hawk-skatepark-glitch bounce when I landed, too.
The reason I'm talking about it is that to actually DIRECT dreams in a conscious fashion, you need to draw from things your mind has experience with. For example, if you try to fabricate a Ferrari, but you've never seen or sat in one in person, you're not going to be able to construct one from scratch. You'll be going completely on images that you've garnered from television or magazines. The interior, you'll imagine based on other cars you've sat in. The smell of the leather, the feel of the seat. Your mind CAN take certain creative liberties (I've seen some very realistic-feeling tornadoes, for example, in my dreams), but you're limited by the "blocks" of your experience, plus how your imagination can creatively assemble them.
So I walked down this road for a little bit and ended up walking into a building that looked an awful lot like a school. (what a surprise) It made me aware of something else...that even though you're technically "lucid", your subconscious mind is still creating the dream patterns in a fluid sense. You can't just seize conscious control of the dream and force it to do what you want, you have to respect your subconscious flow. I didn't "intend" to be here, and shifting to somewhere else without fabricating a segue would have probably woken me up.
I ran into two girls...who looked like sisters. I asked one for her name...she was like, "Uhhmm..." and I noticed something else...I could actually SENSE my subconscious mind searching for girls' names. And it wasn't pulling REAL names, it was pulling like, screen-names of girls I've talked to on PoF.com, for example, or pet-names I've put girls in my phone under. It's like I "stumped" my brain for a second...I just kind of laughed.
So I sat down on a step and invited her to sit on my lap. Apparently my mind can recreate the precise weight and balance of a sexy girl's ass sitting on my leg, the feel of her lips as we kiss...but her face kept fading in and out as the dream destabilized. It's like my brain couldn't construct specific face-details of this girl...I wonder if that means I don't hold eye contact with women as much as I should.
Then I woke up...just as it was getting good.
Just wondering if any of you guys have had experiences with lucid dreaming or learned any lessons from it on how to direct your dreaming or what you are/aren't capable of...any tips for it and whether it's ever helped you with REAL-life problems.
I started messing with being able to recall my dreams a while back after poking around on Steve Pavlina's blog. It's interesting how your mind is rigged to wipe out all but the most intense dreams just seconds after you wake up. The trick is to just remember one detail...if you can catch a single "thread" of the dream...remember one key aspect where you were, what you were doing, it stimulates the same neural patterns you were just conditioning and the rest of the dream comes flooding back.
Actual LUCID dreaming, being able to realize I'm dreaming, has always been difficult. Usually when you realize you're dreaming, the excitement overcomes you and you wake up almost immediately. Even though you can sometimes sustain the thoughts, you're not "immersed" in them.
Lately I've been doing a couple of different things...one is considering the possibility that I was dreaming when I was in fact awake, or that philosophically, everything I saw around me was created through "universal collective consciousness", through kind of a "shared dream", shared subconscious patterns, ideas, etc. Makes sense when you think about buildings and things like that, since someone DID consciously create them, but things like trees and grass...just patterns repeating, possibly created by greater shared elements of the same consciousness...you get the idea. I'm not gonna go full-hippie.
Another is thinking about specific recurring patterns in my dreams...for example, I have dreams all the time about being back in school and either feeling like I "don't belong" there or being late for some class or failing a class that I never attended. I started telling myself, "I'm not going back to school any time soon, so if I'm in school, it means I'm dreaming".
So last night I go to bed and I have this bizarre series of dreams...I'm not going to go into all of them in detail. First I was the personal assistant of a retarded Sauron from Lord of the Rings, then I was in a liquor store with some college buddies (who I never see any more...that alone should have been a trigger that I was in a dream)...then all of a sudden I found myself hurled out over an ocean, flying maybe 20 feet above the water speeding at a good 70MPH or so as if I was thrown out there...and for some reason I said to myself, "the physics of this are impossible....which means...I must be dreaming!"
So I managed to will myself to slow down and stop in mid-air, setting down on a bridge over this endless body of water. I found it odd because I wasn't able to immediately "throw the brakes on"...all I could do was gradually scrub off speed until I came to kind of a stop. I really had to envision being static above a body of water...really imagine some detail about the lapping of the water against the bridge, the way the light reflected off of it...otherwise it felt like my subconscious mind was rejecting the construct.
Then once I had stabilized the image, I tried the "Matrix jump"...a long jump, maybe about 1/4 mile, across the water to this body of land.
When I first jumped, it's like my brain was still trying to work out the physics of what I wanted to do and reconcile them with real-world experiences. I flew kind of horizontally at first, then started getting lift mid-way through the jump, enough to make it to the land I was aiming for. I kind of did a Tony-Hawk-skatepark-glitch bounce when I landed, too.
The reason I'm talking about it is that to actually DIRECT dreams in a conscious fashion, you need to draw from things your mind has experience with. For example, if you try to fabricate a Ferrari, but you've never seen or sat in one in person, you're not going to be able to construct one from scratch. You'll be going completely on images that you've garnered from television or magazines. The interior, you'll imagine based on other cars you've sat in. The smell of the leather, the feel of the seat. Your mind CAN take certain creative liberties (I've seen some very realistic-feeling tornadoes, for example, in my dreams), but you're limited by the "blocks" of your experience, plus how your imagination can creatively assemble them.
So I walked down this road for a little bit and ended up walking into a building that looked an awful lot like a school. (what a surprise) It made me aware of something else...that even though you're technically "lucid", your subconscious mind is still creating the dream patterns in a fluid sense. You can't just seize conscious control of the dream and force it to do what you want, you have to respect your subconscious flow. I didn't "intend" to be here, and shifting to somewhere else without fabricating a segue would have probably woken me up.
I ran into two girls...who looked like sisters. I asked one for her name...she was like, "Uhhmm..." and I noticed something else...I could actually SENSE my subconscious mind searching for girls' names. And it wasn't pulling REAL names, it was pulling like, screen-names of girls I've talked to on PoF.com, for example, or pet-names I've put girls in my phone under. It's like I "stumped" my brain for a second...I just kind of laughed.
So I sat down on a step and invited her to sit on my lap. Apparently my mind can recreate the precise weight and balance of a sexy girl's ass sitting on my leg, the feel of her lips as we kiss...but her face kept fading in and out as the dream destabilized. It's like my brain couldn't construct specific face-details of this girl...I wonder if that means I don't hold eye contact with women as much as I should.
Then I woke up...just as it was getting good.
Just wondering if any of you guys have had experiences with lucid dreaming or learned any lessons from it on how to direct your dreaming or what you are/aren't capable of...any tips for it and whether it's ever helped you with REAL-life problems.
