Thank you for this thread. I need to wake up and get back into active dreaming again. It’s been years since I had a lucid dream. I blame work.
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I agree with you. It is nice to see my father smilling at me again, even in a dream.
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FWIW, I had some awfully anxious dreams while I had Covid (early Jan.). Seemed as though I was barely sleeping at all because I kept waking up from the dreams.
I still get these. For example, I forgot to take ancient algebra in high school, and now my college degree along with my entire adult career are null and void, until I go back to high school and finish the class. Also, I’m naked and my desk is in the middle of the room (and so’s the terlet).
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They seem to be tapering off, but I’ve had a bunch of “COVID dreams” this past year.
The 2 main categories are:
- I’m out grocery shopping and realize I don’t have a mask on, and/or I’ve touched my face. The rest of the dream is a stress drama.
- I’m attending some small get together that I was assured would be safe, but then more and more people keep showing up, behaving in unsafe manners re: infection. Stress builds steadily until I wake up. I never just leave, though.
I haven’t had either in a while, thankfully. Not fun.
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Good book!
The dedication you need to not be tempted to make your wildest dreams come true while lucid.
From what I remember, they use Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming, where they focus solely on the mental image of the Tibetan letter Ah until it’s carried into the dream… again… that self control is unmatched.
I can’t seem to stay awake during a feature film lately
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I had a meta-dream last night in which I explained to some friends of mine that the reason they thought they knew people who they were sure they had never met before is that they were dreaming and in dreams you know things and know people even if you don’t because the knowledge in the dream is just true without needing to actually be true.
Then I went on about my business in the dream, trying to get through an old school building from my youth that didn’t look like any of the schools I actually attended in my childhood.
Then I woke up and realized I didn’t actually know the people to whom I’d been explaining dream logic in a dream in which I didn’t realize I’d been dreaming.
A few months ago I also dreamed of an actual real life friend of mine and then saw them in a dream again the next evening and told them in the 2nd dream about seeing them in the 1st dream.
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I frequently had last day of high school anxiety dreams for years even after graduating college. I eventually moved on to college dreams well after college. I started teaching some college courses in the last several years and finally had an anxiety dream in which I was a college instructor and forgot my lecture and couldn’t open my student’s homework files and I accidentally dismissed class before I was done with the lecture.
I also have been having Covid anxiety dreams in the last year in which people aren’t wearing masks and are standing too close.
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That is SO meta!
It reminds me a little bit of a technique I picked up from Patricia Garfield’s book, if you’re in a dream and someone is doing something bad (like, threatening you, or otherwise bad dream stuff) you ask them for a gift.
I haven’t done it in a while, but when I was more actively into this stuff, it was quite fruitful. I remember one in particular where a scary man was robbing me and I demanded a gift and woke up with a whole poem.
I need to be able to record it right upon waking or else it fades, though.
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I love that uncanny, vacant stare I get from dream characters, especially when I feel on the cusp of lucidity. It’s like that threshold of mutual understanding. How our dream characters are inadvertently trying to share messages with us, whether or not it’s the fact that we’re dreaming, or to deal with something crucial or trivial in waking life… It’s really just different parts of ourselves talking to ourselves.
But those visitations from deceased loved ones or friends feels like another story all together for some reason.
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A few weeks ago I accidentally discovered a brain quirk regarding sleep.
First, some background on me: I am not epileptic, but my mother was, and I am *not* a fan of blinkenlights; they both annoy and overly fascinate me, even in bright daylight. So perhaps my brain is more susceptible to entrainment than average, dunno. (Okay, I know it is; apart from just really high gain on some of the sensors, a propensity for entrainment is the centerpiece of my sensory issues.)
We have one of those electric space heaters with the fake shimmering fire in the front. We have a very large five bladed ceiling fan over the bed. If that heater is on the dresser just past the foot of the bed, its fake fire is reflected very well by the fan blades. If that fan is on low, the result is a sine wave strobe light somewhere in the 5–10 hZ range. If I am sleeping underneath that sine wave strobe light, the result seems to be that I don’t completely lose awareness during the lighter phases of sleep.
It is both creepy and fascinating, but it is also not at all great for actual sleep. And since my current schedule is a seven day routine, I haven’t yet had an opportune time to experiment further with this newfound “power”. The two nights that I experienced it though, it felt for all the world that I was able to observe my brain doing its sleep mechanics, or at least trying to. I felt like absolute shit the following mornings, though.
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Looks like you accidentally happened upon the discovery of the Brion Gysin DreaMachine!
*with your family history of epilepsy, don’t try it at home
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That sounds similar to some of the things Oliver Sack’s describes in “Hallucinations.” (The audio book version is great for a car ride!)
I also see a trade off in some of the cooler/weirder phenomena, and overall quality of rest, though. Definitely a balancing act.
It seems like if you have plenty of time to sleep, you can afford to play around with no ill effects, but if it means it will reduce your overall healthy deep sleep periods, there’s a trade off.
Last night/this morning I had success with lucid dreaming control in a new way. I was lucid, got excited to the point of mostly waking up (as happens a lot when I become lucid - it’s just so cool I startle myself awake), but I was able to, within the dream, get a handle on it and pull myself back into the dream.
I tried the thing someone mentioned down thread - focusing on the letter “Ah.” It calmed the excitement and brought the dream back. Pretty exciting. I’m looking forward to trying more of the “sleep yoga/dreaming yoga/sleep meditation” type things.
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it worked! well done!
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Thanks! It was really cool. Everything got sort of grayed out and shimmery like I was going to wake up, then I did the “Ah” thing and the shimmer turned more blue/violet and then coalesced back into the dream scene I had been in.
I don’t recall having that level of control before, so will definitely be trying to do it more.
Oddly the thing that finally broke it was something someone else mentioned down thread about trying to move your body. I was doing fine and could move most of my whole body (I was flying around), but when I insisted on moving my head in the dream (instead of angling my whole body to point where I wanted to look) I think I moved my head in meat space and it woke me up. So it seems I can generally, lucidly move my arms and legs, but nothing from the neck up, maybe?
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Interesting your description of the different levels of bodily control while lucid.
What sticks out to me is the colour blue/violet, which coincides with the crown chakra. (Don’t mean to sound hokey, but there must be a reason…)
I remember trying the WILD technique (I don’t have the self control to do it) but when I put an imaginary purple colour filter over the imagined scene, it brought me in for a split second, but I was definitely there.
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My impression of the control issue is that it might be tied to how deep in sleep I am. I need to read more, but it seems like there’s kind of a sweet spot for becoming lucid somewhere within the sleep cycle, and the deeper that I am in the sleep cycle, the more I can move my body around but the less I can control my overall environment.
This morning I was kind of hovering on the cusp of waking up, but able to maintain the dream…but with limited physical autonomy? I could do a lot more to alter my environment overall, kind of. Interesting to think about…
Stephen LaBerge went on a more spiritual kick with his lucid dreaming practice and workshops. In a CD I got when I was younger, he walks you through the body scan meditation to bring awareness to all parts of your body before transitioning to a lucid dream state.
For a long time I was reluctant to get in the driver’s seat, for all sorts of personal reasons. In dreams, I would get into a car and something would always go wrong. But when I finally took the wheel in real life and went on a long trip road trip where I did 90% of the driving, my dream car scenarios were smooth sailing.
Same goes for running away from people in dreams… when I started getting more physical exercise in waking life, I would find my getaways way more fluid in dreams.
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Thanks for the lead.
Early on (in my twenties) I approached this stuff from much more spiritual angle, but ended up freaking myself out when it worked. I think I shied away from that kind of (also not to be too hokey) power.
When I visualized stuff and it came to fruition, it made me really nervous about what I was wishing for. Not in a nefarious way, more that I felt too immature at the time. Like, what if there were unintended negative consequences of my benign wishes being fulfilled.
Def something to be said for the Tibetan approach of first mastering self control!
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Thanks for starting the thread. Couldn’t have come at a better time.
The detrimental effects of everything going on these days leaves a lot of room for mastery of self and this kind of liberation of sorts.
Always found lucid dreaming incredibly beneficial for creative inspiration.
Have had some really odd mystical experiences in those in between states that really made me question space and time.
I’m still in the camp that thinks the dream is that layer of consciousness that connects us all… I definitely should’ve been better to my mind and body growing up, so my logical brain is a bit mushy… but I just can’t deny that those experiences felt true.
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