It is quiet today here on MPP, so I have been giving thought to the subject of shared interactive dreamscapes. This is a big subject, and took up a fair part of the ATS Secret Life Of Fairies thread. So since I have time, I shall go into the subject here since ATS is no longer with us.

So what exactly do I mean by shared interactive dreamscapes?

* Shared: There is more than one dreamer.
* Interactive: The dreamers can interact with each other and the dream independently.
* Dreamscape: The dream within which the dreamers find themselves.

It should be kept in mind that dreaming bypasses the intellectual consciousness and happens in a more subjective manner. One may say that the dream is a closed space. Be that the common conception of the dream as a subconscious rumination of our daily life, the lucid dream, and experiencing a separate reality. A closed space is a five dimensional object. That is a three-dimensional object that has a defined boundary. A tennis ball is one example. The tennis ball has length x width x height, plus an inside and an outside. The boundary between inside and outside the ball gives two more dimensions. Therefore, length x width x length x inside x outside equalling five dimensions, 5D.

The topological understanding of dimensions is a deceptively simple understanding that allows us to navigate consciousness.

In a way, it can be said that the 'alien abduction' happens in a shared interactive dreamscape. The "aliens" can create the dreamscape around the abductee. The "aliens" themselves, knowing the structure of consciousness, can come and go within the abduction experience. The "Aliens" first create the closed space around those they contact. It is generally done in this way. One can also wander into closed spaces by accident, and if one knows the structure of consciousness one can exercise volition and enter into these places oneself.

I shall leave it here for the moment and post again in the near future. As always, I shall give examples of how I know these things. The examples, to my mind at least, are necessary to understand what is happening should one find oneself in a similar scenario.

The subject of shared interactive dreamscapes ties in with Lucid Dreaming (LD), and the alien abduction scenario. It also helps us understand the worlds of Carlos Castenada and Terence McKenna. So we shall go into these things here on MPP. ATS had a policy where drug related topics were forbidden. Mentioning the L, the S, and the D was grounds for getting banned. Presumably so ATS didn't fill with recipes and laboratory instructions. However sensible that may be, the policy had the effect of stifling intelligent conversations upon the subject of altered consciousness.

That said, my own view is our consciousness doesn't actually need the shortcuts of hallucinogens to altered states. The reason is the body knows how to dream instinctively. There is also the concern that artificially altered states last for a certain amount of time, and one can't suddenly change one's mind partway into a four hour "trip".

Nevertheless, the insights of people such as Castenada and McKenna are valuable, especially when it comes to altered states. Perhaps the most useful and mysterious of altered states is, one might say, right under our noses, and that is dreaming. After all, we do it every night of our lives. This is in keeping with the philosophy of having everything we need in life to explore consciousness.

That may sound very mundane, yet as we shall find out, what we are looking at with altered states is the ability to dream whilst awake. Be it by means of hallucinogens or self-discipline and a lot of hard work.

We shall leave LD'ing per se to Ksihkehe's thread Consciousness studies 3 - Lucid dreaming. LD'ing is dreaming whilst asleep, and the out-of-body experience. LD'ing by the way has a lot to do with Remote Viewing (RV). At least from listening to RV'ers such as Joe McMoneagle and from what is written by the Monroe Institute.

So in this light, we can see a simple difference between asleep and awake.

(05-30-2025, 06:45 AM)NobodySpecial268 Wrote: We shall leave LD'ing per se to Ksihkehe's thread  Consciousness studies 3 - Lucid dreaming. LD'ing is dreaming whilst asleep, and the out-of-body experience. LD'ing by the way has a lot to do with Remote Viewing (RV). At least from listening to RV'ers such as Joe McMoneagle and from what is written by the Monroe Institute.

So in this light, we can see a simple difference between asleep and awake.

There's most definitely a difference with the spontaneous or sleeping lucid dreams as opposed to moving into them from a waking state. This thread will probably end up being a decent intermediate step between parts 3 and 4 of my series, both for me and readers. I don't know if I'd call it dreams, but it's different. Easier to feel than to describe. You know when you got there, when you get there, if you remember the trip. I feel like remembering is the part that has no shortcuts. You either have a knack for it or you spend time working out how to do it, which involves time and effort.

Castaneda is a bit intense with his recommendations on open-eyed meditation in a totally dark room for long durations, but it's a clever use of Ganzfeld effect that also exploits the high sensitivity of the rods in your eyes. There's also a routine of what is sort of like shamanistic tai-chi movements. It has an analog in Eastern tradition. It may be a type of tummo, but I don't recall. It also fits under the Japanese definition of kata, I believe. Indian tradition has some variants too. I do recall an old video with a practitioner of one technique doing a "levitation" practice which amounted to leaping straight up in the air and then entering the lotus position before hitting the ground. Castaneda's physical work isn't that intense to my recollection, but it is done in the same totally dark space as the meditations.

McMoneagle hasn't offered much in the way of guidance that I know of. I think the most helpful thing he offered, for some people, is his method for distracting the frontal lobes with mathematics. I think that's a good technique in principle, but doing hard math in your head isn't something for everyone. It's not my idea of a good time, but doing intense visualization seems to have accomplished the same thing for me when I've been successful.

I consider it to be a sort of utilitarian twist on transcendental meditation. Emptiness meditation coupled with conscious intent.

Skywatcher is out on some branch of this tree with their psionics teams. I'm quite curious how they've assembled their psionics team, how they recruit, what they sign when they are brought on, and how they're going to monetize it... because they almost certainly hope to at some point. Greer already has with his CE5, but I wouldn't be surprised if Skywatcher tries to become a governing body for psionics practitioners at some point in the future. They also seem to be trying to position themselves as defense contractors, if they aren't already bankrolled by them.

Quote:There's most definitely a difference with the spontaneous or sleeping lucid dreams as opposed to moving into them from a waking state. This thread will probably end up being a decent intermediate step between parts 3 and 4 of my series, both for me and readers. I don't know if I'd call it dreams, but it's different. Easier to feel than to describe. You know when you got there, when you get there, if you remember the trip. I feel like remembering is the part that has no shortcuts. You either have a knack for it or you spend time working out how to do it, which involves time and effort.

We can always try to figure it out.

Remembering is something that needs to be explored. I know that the further out I go (in the waking state) the more difficult it is to remember what happens, and what one does there.

There is an inversion of consciousness when awakening and falling asleep. I studied that in an American teenager who would likely be diagnosed as a 'paranoid schizophrenic'. She is also a 'seer' in the sense that she can see normally unseen Beings and hear voices.

I drew this for the girl's mother when the girl was a patient of mine:

   

That may represent a 'chakra' in the eastern mystical sense. They may dismiss it as such, though I feel the diagram represents the entire consciousness. The colours are correct along with the number of petals. Though, the actual number of petals varies from person to person. At the time, it was found that if any of the petals' had not changed in colour during the process of waking up, one knew that some aspects of the sleeping state were still active. Vice versa, this would apply as 'poor sleeping' problems. If the colour change was clean and complete, so was the transition between asleep and awake. That may apply somehow to 'remembering' dreams. (more research needed here.)

Quote:Castaneda is a bit intense with his recommendations on open-eyed meditation in a totally dark room for long durations, but it's a clever use of Ganzfeld effect that also exploits the high sensitivity of the rods in your eyes. There's also a routine of what is sort of like shamanistic tai-chi movements. It has an analog in Eastern tradition. It may be a type of tummo, but I don't recall. It also fits under the Japanese definition of kata, I believe. Indian tradition has some variants too. I do recall an old video with a practitioner of one technique doing a "levitation" practice which amounted to leaping straight up in the air and then entering the lotus position before hitting the ground. Castaneda's physical work isn't that intense to my recollection, but it is done in the same totally dark space as the meditations.

Castenada did quite a few gazing techniques in his books. I wonder if anyone here can remember them.

Quote:McMoneagle hasn't offered much in the way of guidance that I know of. I think the most helpful thing he offered, for some people, is his method for distracting the frontal lobes with mathematics. I think that's a good technique in principle, but doing hard math in your head isn't something for everyone. It's not my idea of a good time, but doing intense visualization seems to have accomplished the same thing for me when I've been successful.

Agh! Maths. I will pass on that too : ) Ol' Joe does give examples of what it is like to do field work. I reckon those stories are valuable to give a feel for the work. The ol' fella is quite entertaining too.

Quote:I consider it to be a sort of utilitarian twist on transcendental meditation. Emptiness meditation coupled with conscious intent

I think you're right there. I always got the impression that meditation was completely without conscious volition on the meditator's part. That was what I didn't like about the Monroe writings. It was like they would go look at people as tourists. There was a case where Monroe visited deceased people who were caught in a time-loop of sorts, and there was no inclination to help them, to intervene.

Personally I find the interactive side to be the most interesting and where one can do some good.

Skywalker and their ilk, I would leave be. There is always someone who wants to be the governing body. That is when they lose sight of what they thought important in the beginning. In a sense that is when corruption of the original goal sets in, and they just become noise.

I was outside and reminiscing on the Castenada books, along with your mention of the Ganzfeld effect Ksihkehe.

While am of two minds in regard to the existence of hallucinations in the medical view, the exercise of gazing in darkness would sensitise the rods of the eyes. What they see is another matter.

In one of Castenada's books, Carlos walks into a room at the sorcerer group's main house. That is where the women are introduced to Carlos. In the house is a room with a clay floor. The floor has a strange, mesmerising patterns that draw Carlos's gaze. At a certain point, the floor begins to lift at the edges in a flower form and Carlos is trapped. Maybe Don Juan or Genaro shouts and breaks the mesmeric effect the floor was having on Carlos.

That is an example of the dream overlay upon waking consciousness. One of the women was practicing dreaming and created a closed space, and Carlos walked right into it. She probably did this on purpose and the fact that Carlos was saved at the last moment, indicates everyone, except Carlos, was aware of what was happening.  I can't help but smile at that. This is how these things work. How one learns.

Which brings us to an important point. Don Juan was always reminding Carlos to keep his agreements, no matter what.  Carlos agreed to learn from Don Juan, and therefore the encounters with the women is something Carlos also agreed to. So he should not complain when things like this happen to him.  This is an important consideration in this work. In venturing 'out there' we are going to encounter things. There is a responsibility to keep a level head and not panic.

This is how one gets taught, and brings to mind how I learned about the 5D world view.

There is an ordinarilly unseen creature which often lives in unused chimneys - a chimney worm. They build themselves a home in the soot (carbon). So a black hollow worm of the 3 dimensions of the chimney.  The mouth is the opening where we light the fire and the butt is at the top of the chimney.  What is carried up the chimney in the draft nourishes them. In turn, fire elemental spirits eat them when we light the fire. Just one of those things that happen in our homes unbeknownst to us.

These worms can extend out of the fireplace, and into the room. Not a good thing, especially if there are children in the home. The remedy of course is to take care of the fireplace and keep it clean, and the chimney swept as soon as fire season is finished, rather than leave cleaning for another day.

One day I was sitting in front of an unkept fireplace, the worm extended and enveloped me.

Where one found oneself was in a grey world that extended in all directions. No matter what one tried one couldn't find the boundary. So the question was, how does one get out?

A few hours later I realised a simple thing. I was inside the worm, I wanted to be outside.  That was the key to getting out: that there is an outside.  So this now becomes a problem of navigation within consciousness.

Being swallowed by a chimney worm becomes a problem of relative positioning  . . . , and relative positioning according to the 5D model is how one navigates consciousness.

The sixth dimension is time/motion.

Worms aside, Carlos found himself inside a trap, that is the closed dream space created by the woman. Curious that she made a floor pattern in the house as the basis of the dream. Kinda like a spider . . .

I only know the basics of Castaneda's wider initiation story, but did read about the methods he was taught. I was more interested in the methods than all the story around it.

While I say his method is intense, I mean mostly on the amount of time one might expect to spend on it. It's not like a drug-induced DMT experience that people talk about on the influencer circuit, or not commonly. It's probably not any more or less intense than any other methods, in its own way. I don't know anyone that tried it, but I believe they'll work for those inclined toward going through with them. It's an interesting flavor of folklore surrounding it, but not widely practiced. Even within their own culture these shaman are a bit of an acquired taste. The rigor of the method probably screens out people that aren't a little bit odd to begin with.

As far as I know the Ganzfeld experiments used a red static field, but I don't know how widely they experimented with other colors. I think the key triggers are the static field and the rods. Red is the best color light for preserving night vision. I think it would make sense that a totally static field in zero light conditions would maximize the exposure of the rods and intensify the Ganzfeld effect. It would make sense that if there is something that exists on the fringes of human visual perception, that a good way to see it would be with the eye's aperture wide open while starved of all other input. It's also a blank wall meditation, in essence, so not totally removed from transcendental meditation.

I see where a lot of things all tie in, but I cannot yet draw a diagram of the knot.

It's been nearly fifty years since I read Castenada's books, and now looking back, those books had quite the impact at the time.

And yes, I quite agree the work involves a huge amount of self-discipline. The stories of Buddhists and the yogi spending all their lives trying to attain a state of thoughtlessness is there too. If there was a turning point for me, it was the decision to walk away from book-learning and experience everything firsthand. One day I gave away my extensive esoteric library. The next twenty years were a lot of work with no clear plan.

Sorcery, as Castenada called it, aside, knowing how dreams work gives insights into how ideologies work too. That can give us a certain freedom, a sense of detachment if you will.

Quote:Even within their own culture these shaman are a bit of an acquired taste. The rigor of the method probably screens out people that aren't a little bit odd to begin with.

I think so too, and a lot safer. From memory, Castenada had a peculiarity in his energy body that caught Don Juan's attention, and why he decided to teach the "American idiot" at his door. The peculiarity was apparently needed to compliment the group of seers. So in a way Castenada didn't have much choice in the matter.

Quote:As far as I know the Ganzfeld experiments used a red static field, but I don't know how widely they experimented with other colors. I think the key triggers are the static field and the rods. Red is the best color light for preserving night vision. I think it would make sense that a totally static field in zero light conditions would maximize the exposure of the rods and intensify the Ganzfeld effect. It would make sense that if there is something that exists on the fringes of human visual perception, that a good way to see it would be with the eye's aperture wide open while starved of all other input. It's also a blank wall meditation, in essence, so not totally removed from transcendental meditation.

That reminds me of the idea of wiring the human mind to computers. I guess that might be a way for scientists to sit out of harm's way and watch a computer screen, leaving other people to take the risks. Still, it would be neat to take technology to the level where we can see into other realms. That in itself would change the world. Dunno if for the better though.

"Blank wall meditation" - I'm not familiar with the term. What is it about?

(05-31-2025, 07:12 AM)NobodySpecial268 Wrote: "Blank wall meditation" - I'm not familiar with the term. What is it about?

That's just the first exercise for emptiness meditation.

Communication through lucid dreams

This "breakthrough" used some type of interface to relay the message, but it was successful. I don't think they released any real data, though I also didn't look very hard. There's no reason to think it's not possible, but I'm guessing this was a very primitive experiment.

(05-31-2025, 09:20 AM)Ksihkehe Wrote: That's just the first exercise for emptiness meditation.

Communication through lucid dreams

This "breakthrough" used some type of interface to relay the message, but it was successful. I don't think they released any real data, though I also didn't look very hard. There's no reason to think it's not possible, but I'm guessing this was a very primitive experiment.

I had to look up "emptiness meditation" - developed by Jeff Hopkins who was interpreter for the Dali Lama and studied Buddhism. I remember the whole Castenada thing boiled down to stopping the internal dialogue. Which is a similar concept to looking into the void between two thoughts, and presumably the objective of mediation. -thanks.

That article was rather bare bones. The RV'er Joe McMoneagle spoke of meeting another RV'er in one of his sessions. She acknowledged afterwards that she saw him too.

I mentioned chimney worms a post or two ago.  Now, most spiritual people will advise ignoring these phenomena, or perhaps get rid of them through some spiritual practice. My own way is to not interfere and let nature take its course.

However, there is more to these creatures, and an interesting thing happened here.

That was when the Hindu practice of Agnihotra was temporarily introduced to my garden. Basically, Agnihotra is a practice where cow dung and ghee is burned in a pyramidal bowl at the exact moment of sunrise and sunset every day. The fire has beneficial spiritual effects on the environment. One can learn more about it at their website here: Agnihotra Australia. I can tell the reader that it indeed works as stated. Well worth consideration. But you have to do the practice properly without shortcuts.

The connection between Agnihotra and the chimney worm was rather interesting. One evening, it was raining, so I lit the fire in the pyramid inside the house rather than in the garden. I chose the fireplace with the idea of purification of the house interior.

Next morning, there was a small golden snake curled up in the ash within the pyramid. That golden snake was a chimney worm. It had been transformed by the Agnihotra fire. So we took the burner up into the garden and tipped the ash under a large gum tree. Last time I saw the snake, it had grown in size and now had several heads. Snakes in the Hindu mythos are called Nagi, and are guardians of springs.

I said the practice was temporary in my garden, well that is because the practice originates in the Hindu, and subsequently my garden got a lot of attention from other-worldly Hindu people who would visit here. That upset my garden's little Nature spirits, and so the practice was stopped. A similar thing with Biodynamic agriculture methods I employed here. That brings Anthroposophists in its wake.

Now in ordinary circumstances the employment of these practices would welcome assistance from experts of the spirit world. There is nothing wrong with that. However, it is something to keep in mind; we don't normally notice what comes unseen with the things we do. Especially when it comes to shamanistic and spiritual  practices.  Properly practicing Biodynamic agriculture or Agnihotra will build a shared interactive dreamscape, and the location will come alive in spiritual ways. That is how it works . . .

Which brings us to the use of the hallucinogen peyote in Castenada's books.