Lucid Dreaming

I remember a lot of my dreams in the first few minutes after I wake straight up from the dream. If I focus on it for a while, I can conceptualize what happened and some of it stays with me. I also feel like I “know” my dream self at this point. I remember how it feels like, what the usual formats are…

In a lot of my dreams I am in complete control of reality, or maybe my id is, I do know it comes from inside of me, from my own feelings. Often in these dreams, the thought that I am dreaming comes to mind, and this brings me to the point of this thread: When the thought does cross my mind, it usually doesn’t stay there for long because it is much more interesting to explore the dream itself. “I am me, I am in this reality, if I am dreaming it doesn’t change anything. In fact, that is the only way this can make sense. But enough of this boring nonsense, let’s jump from this extremely high cliff and see what happens.” Do you see what I mean? What is the point of a concept like lucid dreaming if you are already in control, if it doesn’t change anything about the dream?

I would also be interested in just reading Lucid Dreamers’ thoughts on lucid dreaming in general.

I haven’t done it much but I remember once were I was lucid dreaming and then I woke up but had the strong feeling that I could quickly go back to my dream so I did, basicaaly I just dreamed I was still in my house flying around, but I felt like waking up so I flew into the ceiling fan (as of course not getting hurt would prove to my subconscious that I was dreaming and therefore wake me up.).

Flying and sex are two of my favourites, it’s surprising how easy nightmarish vampires are to avoid, by either flying away from them, or having sex with the “lesbian” ones.

I tend to become conscious sometimes for no reason, and other times when I am threatened, I think it’s an interesting creative exercise, and find if I try and manipulate everything too much I end up just being conscious, so it’s a bit of a skill, trying not to be too logical about the environment, that doesn’t help when trying to fly either; I get scared of heights sometimes, and sometimes not, and some mental control helps, but overthinking it does not. Doesn’t happen every week or even month but its quite fun when it does. If I was scared witless I tend to give myself an edge in the situation and then slowly let my lucidity fade away as the dream returns to a safer climate. If there was no reason for it I tend to just get very creative and invent situations of interest within the already existing structure of the dream. I’ve had some truly extraordinary dreams that seem to take months to play out when doing this. And some that are hellishly action packed that seem to take mere minutes to unfold but involve a great deal of different events.

I used to dream of flying, but the dream disappeared in my childhood. And yes, the sexual dreams are great; however, I usually wake up at the best scene and cannot go back to sleep. I have no idea what causes dreams of flying. Dreams of sex, for men, often indicate a full bladder.
Human minds operate in narratives with the “I” (Self) as protagonist. Awake, the narrative complies with a certain form of logic. Dreaming, the I is still what it’s all about, but the logic is not the same.
The most recent dream I had was one in which I was beating the crap out of a man my girlfriend spent a month with. He kept coming back. I kept pelting him. The cops were called. We were arrested. I found myself in a yard that was fenced in. Members of a ball team were pelting me with snow balls. It was cold out there. One poured water over my head so it would freeze. Then, I started talking to the coach and all the players began to like me. I awoke happy to have my I in a different narrative, but really angry. Really pissed off! In lucid dreaming, it is emotion, not event, that tells you what the narrative was all about.

Good stuff, I wonder if y’all could give us some info on how to acieve lucidity? If nothing else, to make sure that I was indeed lucid and not just remembering a dream and retroactively injecting lucidity into the memory.

Interesting you should say that, I usually dream in different characters, and I will pop in and out of them. Like I am watching a movie but some scenes I watch as one of the characters. Maybe there is still an “I” like a soul, a central perspective if you will, but I fail at the mental projection of my digital self.

Just the other day, one of the characters killed himself. This was the character that “I was the most.” right before he killed himself, or right after, or somehow simultaneusly, I popped out of his body and kept roaming for some seconds until I think I woke up.

As you say, the emotions are more central than the narrative or the logic.

Lucid dreaming is not only being aware in the dream that you are dreaming but also effecting what you do in the situation by your own reasoning. Levels of awareness and mental functionality vary a great deal, just like in the waking state.

It is a learning environment. The foundation is the same foundation as being awake, the mind has a function, a job to do. This is a path to becoming more competent in doing that job.

You can waste your time there, just like people waste their life.

There is a teacher there, however, I actually do not understand it all that well.

If you proceed long enough, and do well enough, you will find things written long ago are true, however, how we approach that knowledge has changed a great deal.

That sounds like a ggood deal… Any tips?

I say a little about it in Language and Experience on the Internet archive.

You have to be very careful about one thing. Should you learn about the existence of what men call “God” you have to learn to let go of the mythology, and remember exactly what you know and what you don’t know. Otherwise, you will go off on a long and probably a dangerous tangent.

You have to believe that it is not about the ability to recite doctrine, but learning real mental functionality. To think in accordance with the truth of things.

That happens to me as well sometimes I’m even the female characters. And no I don’t spend all my time looking at myself naked in the mirror. :wink:

Thinking about it I think this is not something that is instinctive, more something that people have developed from reading books, watching films, plays etc, where the character focus can shift dramatically all the time.

I’ve learned something here about possible different persons being the dream protagonist or at least a focal point in the narrative. My dreaming mind must be rather limited. I’m always me. I’m interested in recurring dreams. Mine are lucid.

I think Calrid might be right, I have also thought that it might simply be a matter of being “brainwashed” by movies. They are filmed in a way that you are “there” and sometimes even in 1st person. When I dream like that, it does feel a lot like a movie.

I don’t think it’s limited as such. I mean that sort of dream has often happened to me, throughout my life, although generally more now than when I was younger; but then I have always watched, read and absorbed media in massive amounts. Perhaps you did not, perhaps it’s because you are older than I am and your narratives have always been fixed on yourself, couldn’t possibly say, but it’s not a limitation you have it’s just a difference in the way we grew up. The fact that you can lucid dream at all means you are more creative and self aware than those who can not. I’d take that as a bonus.

I’m not sure why some people just happen upon lucid dreaming naturally, I always hoped it was because I was someone who didn’t accept things easily unless I’d thought about them, and someone who was quite creative. I might be wrong, but I like to think I am not so mundane. :slight_smile:

Incidentally my first lucid dream was when I was about 7, I was being chased by a tiger, I then felt the fear but knew it was somehow not real, I turned on that tiger, I didn’t kill it I just made it cease to exist by looking at it. Not sure it’s a revelation but it is a memory… I had control at that point, how and why I have no idea, it just happened, was it something intrinsic in me, or just something I had learned. I am genuinely not sure.

I have learned that a recurring dream happens because one has not figured out what is to be abstracted from it. We have a misconception and we need to set it aright.

For example, I use to have recurring dreams of telephone lines, I was always trying to go over them, I saw them as an obstruction. However, I could never do it, the higher I climbed the more lines there were. Then, one day, or rather one dream, I figured it out.

Telephone lines are lines of communication. They are not an obstruction. I followed the lines of communication and I learned what it was to be free. Our own body provides us with a number of “lines of communication.” This lesson is actually in scripture, the seven last plagues of man refer to our own environmental acquisition systems. They are only a plague because we are not yet up to doing our own work.

It was a lesson about the relationship of mind to body.

Now, one can believe that they are learning from their own subconscious, which means relation to self, or they can start to suspect that the mind does not teach itself.

If you intergrate yourself more with the basil ganglia while your awake, you have less control over your dreams. This means MORE imaginative thinking, literally daydreaming, MORE just doing stuff, such as ‘This can be done, therefor I will do it’, and more fluidity and elegance of motion, and responding enthusiastically to social moods and atmosphere. Your dreams will be rather unimpressive over time, and your waking time will be in a increasingly more dreamlike state. This will in time effect your memory, and your ability to keep track of time via place vs time via situation… you can get the two mixed up quite easily. When I am exploring, I sometimes forget WHEN I am, and the where within that. Sometimes I am ten years ago, sometimes ten years from now… in a existential projection of a shadow self. This phenomena happens in my dreams as well, and it’s as close to lucid dreaming as I can get in this mode.

Now, yeah, the farther you move away from a exhortive mindset- a removed, controlling, encompassing mindset that tries to struggle and understand everything, then Lucid dreaming will explode. That is my usual mindset, but being a hobo requires my to submerge into the first when around others if you want to blend in so you can continue on unmolested. The activities of the day dictate what the night will be like.

I think dopamine restriction is a key aspect of lucid dreaming. It would explain the Old Hag and Incubus phenomena, as it’s sounds almost exclusively a effect of the right hemisphere reacting to sleep paralysis in it’s hypnagogic form (haven’t mapped the hypnopompic functions yet, as it rarely hits me at this juncture, but I do note a similarity in floating in meditation in the sea, the effects of the continuous feeling of waves hitting me, and how I feel when I first get up, I am not in a position yet to say with any degree of accuracy what the difference is yet, as I note the inner ear and body’s temperature control is modulated oddly before waking or coming out of floating water meditation). I suspect the image generated of the incubus and the old hag responding to the inability of the nervous system to complete the feedback loop to the supplementary motor area is essential, as TWO conscious aspects in connection to one another are in play here… they can communicate, but cannot override the sleep paralysis- hence the incomplete feedback loop, and the generation of a female character in archetypal form. In Micronesia, for a while if I recall correctly, this could lead to death… survivors would recall this phenomena. Scared the shit out of many dream researchers for many years knowing something here could override the cardiac cycle. As I suspect it is the Vega nerve, dopamine control relating to the dichotomy between the the basal ganglia and the supplementary motor area seems clear to me. However, I can’t figure out which pathway it would be, and am afraid to explore it myself. However, I’ve read of a disturbing meditative technique in the Srimad Bhagavatam where one sticks their heel up their butt, right along the nerve- in order to exit through the 108th gate in the mind up into heaven… sounds like it’s reversible in part, and testable on mice.

In lucid dreaming, I can have a variety of occurences, with varying degrees of conscious control- but the sense of self isn’t always the same in this means of control, and over the year has increasingly become trapped in a scheme. I can fly for example, but it’s usually me flying in a way that restricts my lower limbs- I can ride in a cross leged position and fly anywhere, or in a restrictive rail like system where I am in semi-control- I can propel myself forward, but can’t control the tempo, and god forbid I hit a low laying branch of lean backwards, I’m fucked for the rest of the dream getting a headrush tipped backwards unable to slow down or sit back up, or control where I am going. Both do result oftentimes in lucid dreaming if I recall this has happened before to me and this is a dream. However, just as often I recall I discovered how to fly and how much more awesome I am over the people around me, and do the heliodromus stint of Leto in the desert, the running man- or the flying man, doing his thing while everyone else is stuck. This doesn’t result in lucid dreaming, but the dreams are characteristic of a higher degree of consciousness, though humility and joy of the ego over others is a anoying characteristic once I wake up and note how stupid that was. I can’t turn that aspect off, tried to for years.

I can stimulate a pathway around my Broca block- the point where my spelling degrades while I am awake. I can while awake note when others misspell, but can’t see it in my own language. I can understand the minutia of a accent to it’s location on the planet, but only rarely can I pull off a accent myself- though the few times I’ve done so it was right on, suggesting strangely enough this aspect of myself is highly developed. But I can almost never replicate this, being at a total lost on how to do it again on demand. In a lucid dream, I can see perfectly streaming text, a literal narrator, of the most beautiful knowledge knowable within my mind, writen elegantly in form, streaming past me 2 dimensionally straight down, green text, black background, and am amazed by it’s characteristics and insights. I become conscious of meself in this regard, but I am a different self from other self in lucid dreaming. There is no body, and the way my cognition works is different. I am self aware, but have no control over the text, and upon waking, if I recall any of it, am mystified how I arrived at that knowledge, as I don’t wakingly have access to such depth or even learned it. It’s just in there, formulated by who knows what. However, I seem to at times to align with it, and it does take charge in scheme in some of my conversations where I dramatically increase in formality as well as delivery, though even then, broca issues still occur. My work arounds seem to suffice none the less.

I can also have dreams where I am aware I am dreaming WITHIN a dream observing another dream where I am not aware I am in a dream there. I’ve tried to map this out for years, but can’t. First experienced this in the army. I was in the space between my skull and my brain, and was looking down into a viewer, and saw another dream, and I think there was the mask from the movie scream in it (memory might be corrupted here, but I was definitely looking at something). There was another entity in the dream with me, a capacity to think verbally, but it was retarded as shit in terms of expression, damn near caveman level in terms of logic and expression, next to no understanding of grammatical expression, but quite capable of speaking and formulating words. I remember a hammer being hit alot, and knew it controlled it. It was controlling REM rhythm, as I formulated WITHIN the dream. I was lucid dreaming analyzing my dream! I cannot consciously track how the hell I arrived to this sleep state- it’s like I was taken and flung to some far, otherwise unaccessible part of my being.

I naturally have Hypogogic hallucinations while awake, and can will them, something called ‘Phosphenes’ which are geometrical patterns of varying colors of light, or static play in your sight, usually noticed when the eyelids are closed. I have experienced them involuntarily, but can usually manipulate the patterning to a certain degree, and get a effect similar to how the eye gets a retina burn. I know statistically 30 percent of the population gets this. Most artists ironically do not- I’ve questioned a great many on this. I’ve created some complex patterns with them, once making even a shoe. I noted when I was in a mediation session, when the footlight was reduced, which I hadn’t previously encountered, after a few minutes, the hallucinates came in a wave like pattern, with one eye sending the waves one way, while the other the next, and one eye, my right, would at times dominate and bleed back into the left overtaking most of it. I would note this phenomena, and it would dissapear! I would enter back into the breathing cycle, and it would appear, note it, and it would go away again. After a while I was like, fuck it… noting the right to left pattern was my frontal eye field, and my thinking process shifted where I was conscious in. It was impossible for me to mediate at that light level, as the longer I went, the more dramatic the light show would be. I was told at first to ignore it, but I called bullshit on that quick, noting it was reacting to how I thought, and either way I was ego conscious, and wanted to know if there was any methodology that acknowledge this and knew a work around. Since I saw both sides of it, it suggests in my case the center of my personality in judgment mode is centrally located, cross lateralized, and not in the back of the mind or in one lobe, and is dis-activated when I think verbally in regards to ‘what is that’, entering into a left hemispheric mode abserving the geometric or wave patterned show of the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere cannot see the occurance of the right from my usually middle position. I am left to assume I am indeed the supplementry motor area observing and controlling the flow of information between these two hemispheres, and sit on one side of the lucid dreaming dichotomy, and have a wide variation of experience… much more than others who dream in terms of shadows and black and white, who can with only great difficulty will a color or two, or are dazzled with shaped with no solid structure or meaning to them beyond the notional right or wrong of them.

I will note that the rarity of my dream within a dream occurance was known 500 years ago in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, and later on by Edgar Allen Poe in his poem a dream within a dream- and of course everyone knows inception. However, the pathways that are used in the minds are not realistically possible with any degree of competency to map out. I don’t bloody know how I arrived to it, and don’t know how to achieve that doubled layer reality, as it doesn’t sound like the usual seeing yourself phenomena many people have, nor does it quite align up with the mythos around the phenomena of remote viewing as people describe it, as I am projected within the dream in a location, and am interacting with another part of me, that I know to be a part of me, in a artificial projected environment looking at another dream self, and it being aware of me and being too busy to deal with me, but does so begrudgingly. It’s like a double awareness of two different capacities not getting along watching each other while ANOTHER dream is going on down there on the other side of the viewing glass. Camera Obscura doesn’t begin to get to the root of it.

I’ve had limited experience with lucid dreaming, but I agree with this statement - as long as I’m just going with the flow, worry free, the awareness in the dream seems to continue… as soon as I fear something in my dream… and notice I can’t control it… they usually go sour and/or I wake up

Usually when it comes to the point that I ‘understand’ something… or interpret something… its in that same instance I wake up