Is this post for real… 
I’m also being told to wear my mask, as well as being told that I don’t know whether I’m lucid-dreaming or not.
MagsJ,
That is a good question. Now if am actually dreaming and I posted it and then returned to respond to your post again autonomously would that be me having a lucid dream considering the level of self-awareness?
Told kind of suggests an authoritative voice, MagsJ. There was none of that there. Just a gentle urging for your sake.****
Is there anything wrong with questioning things which we think or believe? Isn’t “not knowing” (at least at a certain point) kind of the beginning of a journey into learning the truth about things and gaining knowledge? Where does “automatically”
assuming or “knowing” get us - except to that place where we are happy and comfortable because we presume to know just who we are and how we “work”. That was no reflection on you, MagsJ.
Do you/did you follow any of the criteria listed for a lucid dream before you decide that you have had one? There are road maps for many things.
****
[/b]The CDC has recommended that even those who have been vaccinated should still wear masks inside - anywhere. Unfortunately as of yet this has not been mandated at least not in New Jersey. We know how dangerous and how quickly the Delta variant is spreading due to those who have not been vaccinated and yet many refuse to wear masks. How is that for being lucid!
You have presumed that I need gentle, or any kind, of urging… I have a problem with that.
Can you please leave me alone… unless you actually have something to debate about, on this matter, which right now you currently do not.
Wow! The above was more than a bit much! Sorry to have stepped on your toes. I posted twice with regard to what you wrote. People do not have to have the same viewpoints. Life is far too short and precious these days to have to contend with your kind of personality.
_
The day before yesterday, when I was casually tidying my pad and trying on an assortment of clothes a’la catwalk/look-book stylee, I unintentionally triggered intense muscle-pain… soon to be accompanied by searing-hot stabbing pains in my lower abs.
The thought of having no pain-medication whatsoever filled me with dread, and an instantaneous lucid dream of me gulping down some opiates filled my field of vision and then disappeared as quickly as it had appeared… like popped balloons do.
Actually, I abandoned this thread because of a dearth of information [online or off] in regard to the relationship between dreams [lucid or otherwise] and free will.
It just doesn’t seem to fascinate a whole lot of others as it does me.
My point is that when we dream [lucidly or otherwise] we believe that we are actually experiencing the reality created in the dream. Or, rather, I certainly do in mine. Just as “in reality” we experience the same in the waking world.
But in the dream world it is our brain creating this “reality”. Chemically and neurologically. So, how is “reality”, reality, or, for the compatibilists, “reality” different in the waking world?
I could have dreamt that I typed words last night or I could be typing them now. You could be dreamt that you were reading words last night or you could be reading them now.
So, given the relationship between brain matter and the laws of matter themselves, what’s the difference?
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The most interesting lucid dream I had happened about 15 years ago when I was jolted out of a normal dream into a lucid dream by the sheer horror of what happened.
I was with a group of 10 people or so, on the top floor of an office building. A fire broke out in one of the middle floors below us and we soon found we couldn’t escape. We panicked.
Somehow, people in a skyscraper across the street managed to smash their windows and push a giant plank of wood from their building to ours in the hope we could crawl across it. The plank strung between the two buildings about 50 stories above street level. The plank was only about 40cm (15in) wide. We had to crawl 50 stories above street level or burn to death.
Some people jumped at the chance and made it across to the other building. I was eager for a woman and her child to get across as soon as possible so I tried to get her to crawl across with the baby tied to her chest. Unfortunately, she was petrified and couldn’t move. She was frozen in fear. Everyone was panicking and urging her to hurry up but she couldn’t move so, without really thinking, I grabbed the child, put it on the plank in front of me then got in a crawling position over the top of the baby and started to gently push it across with my knee while keeping it between my arms and legs.
Bit by bit, the baby slid across the plank till I was got to the middle of the plank where the baby started crying and flailing its arms to get away. Then it made a dive to get out from under my left arm and thigh and fell off the plank.
This terrified me beyond belief. I heard the screams from the people in the skyscrapers and saw the baby fall… fall… fall… toward the street below. I couldn’t think of anything worse. I had snatched the baby from its mothers arms then dropped the baby 50 stories to its death. I couldn’t accept what had just happened. I refused to accept it. I kept saying “No, no, no, no, no” and it was this inability to deal with the horror that suddenly snapped me into lucidity. I heard myself say “this is a dream. It’s only a dream. I can change it. It’s only a dream. I can change this. I WILL change this.”
I then spent what seemed to be eternity imagining the falling baby reverse direction like an old movie running backward. Over and over and over again I imagined the baby slowing down before it hit the street and then slowly reversing direction and moving upward faster and faster until it was on the plank again.
I don’t know how long I did this but it must have been around 10 minutes. It felt as though I was about to burst every vein in my head with the amount of will power I was forcing into making this image reverse course. I knew it was a dream and I knew I could change my dreams so I refuse to give up and kept imagining the image reverse. I was exhausted but refuse to accept what happened so I continued.
Then it happened.
The falling baby started to slow down. I screamed out “Yes!!!” and put everything I had in to imagining it coming all the way back up. It did bit by bit, halting and stalling but in the last leg, as I got more confident, it zoomed up quickly like rewinding a video clip. Eventually the baby returned to exactly the same position it had been before it fell. I took a deep breath and continued crawling and pushing the baby until we got to the other side.
Once on the other side, people grabbed the baby off the plank and helped me get to my feet. They were cheering and clapping that the baby was safe then I noticed that none of them seemed to have seen the baby fall. I realized then that I had literally wound the dream back to the point before the baby fell so, to the onlookers, it simply had not occurred. I was exhausted and grateful they didn’t see what happened so I didn’t say anything and then woke up.
I’m not sure how this helps or hinders the free will arguments. I just thought it was an interesting bit of info to add. Personally, I don’t subscribe to the idea of free will but in this relative, dualistic world, I think we should imagine that free will exists and act accordingly. To act like something else is choosing for us without the higher level of consciousness to experience that as a fact seems a bit fake to me but this is getting off the subject of this thread.
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I do not believe that I am experiencing the reality that I am dreaming of in any dream, for it is but a dream… tho sometimes they can seem very real, and we even interact within the parameters of the dream, like we are actually physically in it… but we are not, we are parallel to it, existing in parallel to the dream.
Reality and our dreaming-subconscious are operating in parallel to each other, so still occupying the exact same space/time dimension, and as/if we start awakening, our consciousness becomes aware of and starts merging with this dream-state that we are in, and can then become an observer of it… like watching a movie, and when the right level of consciousness is reached, the 2 parallel states merge, and then things can become interactive… in the physical realm.
It all depends in which wave-state your brain is at… delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma.
- Delta… a dreamless state, associated with the deepest levels of relaxation and restorative healing sleep, most common in babies and children.
- Theta… creativity, intuition, daydreaming, fantasising, a repository for memories emotions and sensations.
- Alpha… idling mode.
Beta and Gamma are reserved for another day/time/modality/reality…