Consciousness studies 3 - Lucid dreaming

[TokenLiberal]

Researching new fields can be intellectually stimulating, figuring out the way these things work and how to work with them is very challenging. Conventional psychology isn't always helpful and can become an impediment to progress.  Even more challenging is to translate findings into plain language without the mystic jargon.

One can learn to think outside the box.

But what is 'the box' that one must learn to think outside?

Well that would be conventional thought.

In many ways dreams are five dimensional. That is to say Length X Width X Height X Inside X Outside. The dream itself is contained within the dimension of inside, and to have an inside one needs an outside.  - The container and the contained. That means we can have a two-dimensional object without length width nor height.

Working these things out can be quite trippy in what it does to conventional intellectual thinking. More so to put it into practice.

Any armchair explorer can do this sort of research if they are inclined to try.

What it really is is introspection and when it comes to introspection, I'd rather reflect on my thoughts and actions from when I'm "fully there". In dreams, lucid or no, we are shadows of our conscious selves, and the psychology of this shadow is not that interesting to me when I have a perfectly good view of the real thing. I can see why it would be intriguing to others though, especially to spiritual people (which I am very much not).

[Nugget]

It's actually likely you'll have one soon. If not, somebody that's following along is likely to even if they aren't doing the protocols. I haven't kept track of how often it happens relative to how often I've had in-depth discussions on it, but often enough to have noticed even with a pretty small sample size. Every little nudge counts, even the ones that come from the environment. Those that are already having them are now getting subliminal priming from this exposure to the topic. The more exposure, the harder the nudge.

I think it will be Nugget. She's got almost all of nudge right in her name. She's going to become Nudgget.

 That very night i'woke up' in my dream, as usual and waswondeering if I could read. I loooked around, saw a desk and went over to investigate.
There was a fairly thick stack of papers stapled together and the cover sheet only had the printed word "CONFIDENTIAL' on it. 
I thought"Well, I guess I can read in my dreams, and carried on with my dream.

Nearly every night since then I've been reading things in my dream. Tonight I was dreaming about buying a blow-up waterboard and ran into my hubby. There was a rack of books on the wall and I asked if he wanted me to buy the car manual one; he said he's rather have the one that titled 'Compromise'. I was aware at the time that I was reading again in a dream.

Hubby said he had some car parts to pick up and would see me at home. I decided to get some candy-which was odd because I seldom eat candy. The store had every kind of candy imaginable, including Christmas and Easter!
I was loading up on huge bags of candy and realized I knew where everything was in this store because I'd shopped here in my past dreams many, many times before. There seems to be nothing that this store doesn't carry; it's like a giant mall all in one large space....the 'Home Everything Depot'.

I decided to wake myself up so I could write the dream down. Usually all I have to do when I'm dreaming is tell myself to remember it in the morning so I can annalyze it, but once in a while that doesn't work.

I don't know if I've always been able to read in my dreams, or it was the power of suggestion that freed my mind to do it,but I was definitely 'Nudggetized'.

[NobodySpecial268]

Here is some of my own research on dreams from a few years ago. It may apply to lucid dreaming in a way, these things should be worked out. It was explored within my Fairy thread on ATS. Originally, I worked it out in regard to schizophrenia. A dream of a (living) schizophrenic girl was over-laying her waking consciousness. The question at the time was where exactly did she wake up in the morning?

Today I looked into an autistic girl.

The diagram below represents the inversion of consciousness when we awaken and fall asleep. It is close enough to use as a dowser's diagnostic tool.

   

In the autistic child, not all the "petals" lit up with consciousness when "awake". In the case looked at, only 20 out of 22 "petals" were lit up while awake. That suggests the autistic does not wake up properly. In other words, an incomplete inversion of consciousness from asleep to awake.

I wonder if, with lucid dreaming, there is, in a way, a similar but reversed occurrence with the lucid dreamer where the "asleep" conscious is partially "awake".

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ETA: The key to understanding here is to put aside the commonly held belief that our consciousness somehow disappears or stops working when we are asleep. Try thinking instead of an inversion of consciousness when waking and falling asleep. The sensation experienced is the mind feels like it is turning inside out, thus "inversion". If one can remember a time when life ended, the sensation of turning inside out will be familiar. It is that inversion where we don't remember our dreams.

[NobodySpecial268]

Perhaps not exactly Lucid Dreaming, perhaps it is. The story does illustrate the value of the dream diary, and Ryo could read in her dreams.

In my Russian newsfeed, a curious entry, it is the story of a Japanese girl by the name of Ryo Tatsuki who in 1999 published a manga (comic book) called The Future I See. The book was a collection of dreams from her dream diary. The dreams were from a period of her life from the mid 1970s to 1999. Ryo wrote the book when she realised her dreams were showing her events in the future. The events include the deaths of Princess Diana and Freddy Mercury, the Kobe earthquake and others. Some of the events are yet to happen, including an event in July 2025. That date is not far away.

I managed to track down a short 8 minute video that talks about what Ryo dreamed, and here it is:

The Japanese Phantom Prophecy Comic Book: "The Future I Saw" by Ryo Tatsuki.



Another link to an article about this: Ryo Tatsuki: ‘The Future I See’.

[Ksihkehe]

I just got everything quoted and started a draft reply, which was sort of prompted by coming across this in my feed. I'd never heard of her before that I can recall. This is Art Bell with an episode of Midnight in the Desert with guest Dr. Gillian Holloway on lucid dreams. She's pretty well spot on, though I was distracted at times and maybe missed a bit. You can skip to 4:20 to get to the introduction.

I started my own practices again just a couple weeks ago or so to start ramping up for more intensity. A couple times I dropped into a fairly deep state relatively quickly. There are some interesting comments since I last went through, so I hope I can address most of them. I'll maybe have another homework assignment for those having experiences.

[Nugget]

Loved the video! 
I came across an interesting article last week that explains some basics and shows how much knoweldge has advanced through the years.


Lucid Dreaming Brain Network Based on Tholey’s 7 Klartraum Criteria

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...01885/full

[Ksihkehe]

I may be answering some stuff a second time. I gathered quotes where I thought I had something to offer and just ran with it. I probably didn't answer the same as the last time at least, though the meaning and thrust should be the same.

I've often wondered if LD'ing is just really more a product of not sleeping well, or some other kind of a sleep disorder.  I can't honestly say I get the sleep I would like to get most nights, and I've wondered if LD's are just some space where I'm half asleep and half awake.

I guess I still don't understand why people think this is some paranormal thing.  I used to know this girl who was really into the whole dream and dream analysis thing.  Her big thing was training yourself to remember your dreams after you woke up.  She said this had some connection to whether you dream in color or black & white (but you don't perceive it this way in your dreams).  I'd never thought about that before, and I honestly believe it was me trying to remember my dreams in detail after I woke up which led to the ability to have these lucid dreams.

In any case, there's no paranormal about it, at least not for me.  I don't see or experience anything abnormal, like ghosts or other weird shit.  Of course I sometimes have dreams which involve people who have passed on, but it's not like they're ghosts, but rather like they're still here (things like parents and friends who have passed).  I don't think that's anything out of the ordinary though; most people have dreams about loved ones.

I will say this though, and I've said it repeatedly.  By far...the most disturbing lucid dreams are the 'dream inside of a dream' kind, like the little Russian dolls.  Those dreams are straight-up troubling.  I've had some which were so unbelievably real that it took me over an hour (seriously) after I woke up to confirm I wasn't still dreaming.  I don't like those dreams at all!  Even if they're not like nightmare type dreams, I still don't like them.  I had one instance where I woke up and sat on the edge of the bed for a good 40 minutes convinced it was still a dream and I was going to wake up from it any moment.  Worse, I've had dreams where I was dreaming (in my dream), and woke up (in my dream), and knew I was having a dream inside of another dream, and woke up from that dream (again still dreaming) and was sitting on the edge of the bed wondering if I was dreaming (in my dream)...only to really wake up and then not be able to figure out if I was still dreaming or not.

And I guess the big differentiator is the realism of these types of dreams.  They are hyper-realistic, almost impossible to distinguish from a non-dream state.  Thank God I don't sleep walk, and I never have!  I can't imagine having one of those dreams and sleep walking at the same time.

I'd love to see an EEG of what the brain is doing during one of these dreams, compared to a normal dream.

It is quite literally paranormal though. There is no scientific explanation for it, not even vanilla dreams. There are studies and data, but it's not explained by any stretch. Contrary to what The Science likes to assert, large chunks of what it considers to be consensus science actually meets the definition of paranormal. The word has been warped to mean ghosts and supernatural, but it's really just something that science is unable to explain. Physics, the core of classical physics, is still technically paranormal. This is how mafia science works and isn't much different from when heretics were punished for going against the doctrine of the time. Humans know virtually nothing about the nature of reality, existence, the universe, or our own biology, and what little we do know is just models that work in vacuums.

I'm not really into symbolic analysis of dreams or applying Jungian or Freudian type meaning to them. I recognize some themes from recurring dreams as being things that may play on my latent fears, like lost keys or a lost car, but for the most part I don't expect to find any hidden meaning that I need a textbook to understand.

Sleep quality is an interesting thing as it relates to lucid dreams. A schedule and good sleep improve the chances of inducing lucid dreams, BUT... bad sleep, sleep apnea, stress, and other factors can also trigger disturbances. The dream within a dream, also usually tied to false awakenings where one thinks they've exited to a waking state, is often tied to sleep paralysis. There are people that experience an even more disturbing disorder, since you mention about sleepwalking, where they are up and ambulatory while the brain is still throwing dream-like content into the sensory portions of the brain. In light of how dangerous that is, sleep paralysis is actually not that bad. I had a friend that found herself "waking up" standing on the front lawn more than once. It's quite dangerous.

In all likelihood an EEG would should spikes in the frontal lobes, probably the left frontal lobe, that corresponds to the level of lucidity experienced IMO. Just a guess, but the prior research on induction of altered states from the last thread would point toward that. Executive functions would become more prominent.

I'll have a broader comment on the usefulness of these dreams further down.

Kind unrelated, but something else I wanted to mention is...as we've noted, one of the big differences between regular dreams and LD's is the ability to read things, and the ability to control things in LD's.  BUT...I would equate this ability to using a keyboard or calculator with sticky keys...where you have to punch the same key several time to make it work.  Now, this may just be something which is specific to me because I type really, really, fast (or so I'm told).  It drives me crazy to have sticky keys because I have to go back about 8-10 words to fix it.  In other words, I'm way down the road by the time I see the issue.  So, not having instant tactile feedback and response on a device is something I am hyper-sensitive to, and obviously in a dream nothing is real , but I notice those things bigly.

Typing works in more than one way in this metaphor. As long as you forget what you're doing and do it automatically then it works fine, but when you try to think about it then you're dealing with hurdles. That's how it works for me anyway. I can push out a lot of volume without thinking about the syntax and spelling too much, but once I start thinking about it actively I end up fouling the flow and forgetting how to spell things I've known for decades. It doesn't happen often, because I spent a lot of time maintaining that state of flow. Usually it's because of excessive distractions during multi-tasking, but sometimes it's just my brain getting in the way of my brain. My reading comprehension seems fine in dreams, but I can't seem to actually read... which doesn't make sense but seems to be the case. I suspect I could overcome that, but aside from confirming the nature of writing in my dreams I haven't done much. It's the sort of thing that will become clear to me eventually, if it's meant to. It's been good to hear other people's experience with it though, even if I don't agree with any of the causation proposed just yet.

Real is a nebulous term. Emotions are real. Past events are real. Unless one were to exclude everything except for the transient and ever-present "now" then real is a much wider category of things than just the observable/measurable physical universe. If one were to only include "now" in the definitions of real, then lucid dreams specifically because of conscious awareness, meet that criteria. You experience lucid dreams very much in the now. The emotions, sensory input, and memory, are all part and parcel of conscious observation in that state. The underlying data we rely on for what is real boils down to electronic impulses. Nothing physical remains unchanged from moment to moment, so even things that are real are only real within the narrow parameters of our observational abilities.

Eventually the battle over what's real and what isn't will need to incorporate the mind over matter interactions observed under controlled conditions. Time, mentioned above, will need to figure in there too. Humans may be computationally incapable of understanding it or putting it into a model. Even the advanced modeling of 4D objects in 3D space tells us very little, though we have the math. It's just is a bunch of variables that mathematicians can play with.

UPDATE - I wanted to provide a brief update of something I found interesting from last night.

Last night I fell asleep on our reclining couch with the heat and message function on.  My bride said I looked pretty comfortable with the blanket so she just left me there when she went to bed (I was definitely in comfort heaven).  I woke up around 2am and decided to retire to our bedroom for another hour of sleep (I usually get up at 3am).  My hip has been bothering me lately, so I got a pillow between my calves and ankles and conked out for what I thought would be an hour's worth of sleep.  Well, I must have been really tired because I actually slept for another 4+ hours (which is a good thing for me...I sleep really poorly).  During this 2nd sleep segment I wound up having a 'sort-of' LD.  I say 'sort-of' because it was strange, and this is what I wanted to relay here.

The subject of my dream is not relevant here, other than to say it was, well, ominous (i.e. not pleasant).  There was no soaring, but I could vaguely tell it was an LD (sometimes).  I can remember wondering (in my dream) whether I was having a LD.  I concluded (in my dream) that I was not having an LD.  So, the first point here is, I had a level of consciousness in my dream to ask myself this question...and determine an answer.  It wasn't a vague question either; I specifically wondered if it was a "Lucid Dream".  The second interesting point is...I also concluded I was not experiencing a dream, that I was in fact awake.  I didn't realize this difference, of course, because...I was actually still dreaming.  (confusing, I know).  This concerned me. 

Fast forward to waking up.  When my furry bestie and 90 lb. Australian Shepard landed squarely on my ballsack and started licking my face, there was no question about waking up...like instantly!  As I sat there, I then realized that I had actually been dreaming when I asked myself if I was still asleep (and was still asleep) and concluded I was awake.  At that time, I had hoped I was still asleep and dreaming, but my conclusion was that I was not (which was troubling).

The bottom line here is...this was another permutation of lucid dreaming.  It was a level of consciousness in between a dream state and an awake state, a nether world of sorts.  Per my bride, I just looked like I was peacefully asleep the whole time until when my dog jumped on me..."Morning, Dad!!!  Love ya!"

A period of brief waking time between chunks of sleep is one of the methods often recommended for inducing lucid dreams. It was actually quite common in pre-industrial times for people to wake up to do a few menial tasks, tend the fire, have a little food (that had limited shelf life), and then go back to sleep. I think that there is a synergistic effect that has on people that are already inclined toward spirituality (most often in those cases either Abrahamic and maybe some pagan folk beliefs).

Trusting yourself to know the difference between dream and waking is mostly planning and experience. The tricks I mentioned before are all part of that. When we're awake and alert there's no real doubt about it being real under most conditions. Emotional and mental conditions can make it surreal or give outright hallucinations, but that goes well beyond the simple harm of mistaking a dream for reality. I asked about people falling when flight or levitation fails, but I think only Nugget chimed in to mention that there wasn't a fall. It's more a drifting. Physics in general don't seem to work quite the same in dreamland, which is a good test for if you're dreaming... BUT you have to engage your conscious brain to get too fancy with physics tests, so there's a balance. If you happen to have a bowling ball and a feather in one of your lucid dreams I'd be curious to hear what happens when you drop them both at the same time.

It is indeed a very interesting experience, one which I attribute directly to sleeping very poorly except for on rare occasions.  On a somewhat laughable note, I sometimes wonder if this ability isn't my mind simply just rejoicing in getting some actual "sleep".  I think this may also be why I remember the events so clearly, but I'm not certain though.

As I have noted on several occasions above; I don't have LD's all the time, and I never know when I am going to have one.  They just sort of happen.  I do pay attention though, although I'm not sure why I pay attention.  At first, I had to sort out that I was dreaming at all (which is kind of hard to explain).  When you go from an awake state to a dream state, you don't necessarily "know" you are dreaming, and this is what I am referring to.  That took a while.  And...it wasn't something I was necessarily trying to 'refine', per-se; it just happened.  Once I was able to 'realize' what was happening (in my dream state), I definitely did try to exploit whatever abilities I might have (in my dream state) (i.e. soaring, reading, controlling events, etc.).  Also, as I've noted, 'soaring' is by far the coolest part, and I love those dreams, but they are very rare (i.e. maybe once or twice a year).  I will intentionally stay in bed, even fall back asleep, to continue with one of those type dreams.  And here's a factoid which is kind of funny.  As noted, I can wake up and use the restroom, and then fall back asleep and 'continue' a dream.  When it's a 'soaring' dream, I definitely 'try' to do this.  But, what's weird is...my 'soaring' ability diminishes the closer I get to being awake.  So, sometimes I'll fall back asleep and I can 'soar' a little bit, but maybe just a few feet.  I can tell, then, that I'm close to waking up.  It's kind of like running out of gas in a car.  I know this sounds weird, but that's about the only way I can describe it.

A few months ago I had to do a sleep study for sleep apnea.  This is where you go into a facility and they hook you up to about (75) different sensors and you're supposed to 'sleep'.  I went in hoping I'd have one of these dreams so I could look at the EEG charts afterward.  But sadly, this experience was such a bad experience that not only couldn't I LD, I couldn't sleep at all.  I wound up laying there for six hours and just being pissed off the entire time, so I couldn't fall asleep.  And, just to give you an idea of just how mad I was...I'm still angry about that whole experience fully five months later...so much so that I know I would never be able to go to one of those facilities ever again.  The whole experience just straight-up pissed me off (like seriously).  And, without going into a lot of detail as to why, the main reason was...they stuck all these (75) sensors on me to where I couldn't move, and then said..."Okay, now go to sleep...like now".  Now, I don't know about anyone else, but if you tell me to...'go to sleep'...probably the one of the last things I'm going to do is go to sleep.  There was no explanations, no nothing, just..."Go to sleep".  You're in this hospital like setting, and they just turn out the lights and expect you to immediately fall asleep.  I was so pissed off after this event I told my PCP I'd probably never do that again, and he told me my experience was very common (and inexcusable, as they're just in it for the insurance money).  GRRRRRRR!!!

Anyway, I'd hoped to get some intel about lucid dreaming from that experience, and all I got was the need for a handful of Rolaids!

It's commonly believed that a CPAP impairs the ability to lucid dream. It could be reducing the frequency because the people are no longer extremely sleep-deprived or it could have something to do with breathing and biorhythms, but I haven't seen a definitive study or even exploration of it. There's a certain sleep stage you have to get to for dreams to even be possible and a certain state of active awareness to be lucid, so it's probably quite complicated. Since sleep studies are a huge thing now so it would be great if they started doing an EEG as a standard part of the studies. I'm sure there's information in there that would be informative as far as sleep health in general.

No, I just lose altitude and 'float' and slowly come down to the ground. I like the feeling of being that light, so when I get close enough to the ground I 'kick off' and manage to get to tree level height, which is all the higher I want to go. lol

I have found myself in the clouds on many occasions, but I'm always afraid to look down. 

My father used to say the greatest fear is the fear of the unknown, and that holds very true for me. No 'warior spirit' here!

That's sort of what I expected on the flying. I don't think I've heard of anyone dropping like a stone.

I stopped in and a chat with the LD'er girl and her mother.

Ksihkehe.  In response to the question of reading in her lucid dreams, The young lady says that she hasn't been in the position of having to. Though she says there are other people who sit at tables with pamphlets. The setting is a shopping mall.

FCD, the young lady reports there is a similar thing for her as your 'stop signs'. She saw a sign for a shop that was the 'GG' symbol which she recognised as Gucci.

For the young lady, that seems to be symbolic recognition rather than reading per se.

We sometimes forget that writing is just really complicated and layered abstract symbols. That's another aspect of piecing all of this together. We have some odd underlying processes for dealing with symbols that nobody really understands. Through conditioning we associate some symbols with certain things, but there also seem to be symbols that are not recognized purely through direct conditioning. That gets deeper into mentalism and magic than fits here, but it's definitely interesting. Even if a 4th part is forthcoming, unraveling how we process symbols will remain as clear as mud.

Of course. I have no illusions about actual intimacy in dreams. It's purely the sensory experience I'm after. Since it's impossible to do anything intellectually stimulating, what else is there to do but pursue sensory experiences? (other than the sort of "dream research" the rest of you are discussing).

What it really is is introspection and when it comes to introspection, I'd rather reflect on my thoughts and actions from when I'm "fully there". In dreams, lucid or no, we are shadows of our conscious selves, and the psychology of this shadow is not that interesting to me when I have a perfectly good view of the real thing. I can see why it would be intriguing to others though, especially to spiritual people (which I am very much not).

Dreams are born from the same processes as every invention our species has ever created, with discoveries sometimes coming from dreams directly. Lucid dreams are just an entry point for intellectual stimulation and are not much more than novelty at the ground level. I find most topics boring at the ground level and most practices are like that. Higher levels of skill are when cooler things are possible. You can learn parkour in an afternoon and you won't be jumping across the rooftops of the city or scaling industrial architecture the next day, but eventually you can get so good as to appear superhuman.

You're assuming that we're a shadow of ourselves in all dreams simply because that's the only state you've known. It's certainly the case for most people, but isn't an inherent trait of consciousness in the dream state. Treading water or basic locomotion in the water is pretty easy, but it's not possible for the average person to hold their breath for three minutes while diving to 40 meters. It takes lots of practice and conditioning.

Introspection is great and I've always been naturally inclined to do lots of it. I'm of the opinion that introspection is incomplete if large chunks of those internal functions are left out though. You can be introspective about things, but there is always a locked door where your subconscious is holed up. The subconscious drives much of the emotional and mental behavior we engage in, naturally feeding into our physical behavior as well. You have to get the door open at some point, but lucid dreaming is a little bit like a mail slot. We can't have full access to what's behind the door with a few lucid dreams, but we can peek through and open lines of communication.

Much of what we do, what we consume, what we process, is all handled subconsciously. The rails are already there and our day to day lives are typically just running those rails without much conscious thought. Estimates vary, but it's not a controversial assertion that it's most of what drives us. The deeper and more veiled those motives become the more dysfunctional we can become without even recognizing it. Lucid dreaming and recognition of dreams states is just the start of unraveling those subconscious drives. This article discusses it a bit. I think that the subconscious actually fits within all those models. We could consider the effects to be of a few categories. Acute effects that drive momentary decisions based on stimuli (slamming on your brakes to avoid an accident or catching something you just lost your grip on), chronic effects that drive behaviors over the longer term (task avoidance, fear of things, social difficulties), and then categories of dysfunctional behaviors (which are often irrational or counterproductive manifestations of both acute and chronic behaviors).

I'm not an advocate for people to all take up intense mental practices, just an enabler for those that might wish to and a fellow traveler for those that already have. I'm definitely an advocate for people taking control of their lives, their emotions, and their drives, through exploration of themselves. Nobody is better equipped to understand the subconscious drives of an individual better than that individual, assuming they're properly enabled to do so and possess the mental faculties.

I don't recommend anybody that suffers from serious mental illnesses or neurological disorders undertake any of these practices except under medical supervision, though eventually I believe it will be a more standard societal practice that will prevent many mental disorders before they form. Psychedelics are showing promise in dealing with some types of mental disorders, both physiological and psychological. Lucid dreaming and altered states have that same potential for addressing traumas and psychological dysfunction as those classes of intoxicants without the vomiting and diarrhea. The blurred lines can be very dangerous for people in compromised mental states. It can be dangerous to those not in compromised mental states and it can be weaponized to great effect by those with sufficient skill. That's much more involved than just a few lucid dreams though. Lucid dreams are just one possible entry for people to start learning about themselves. The real work is in meditative practices and resolving the fractured nature of your mind.

I suspect a lot of people that get into it, those that aren't just woo hobbyists or new agers, are doing so because they're already experiencing things that don't fall within the scope of conventional science or medicine. Even if one is to take a purely materialist perspective, in the event these experiences are disruptive to their life, understanding the underlying mechanisms (even as strictly electrical impulses within neuronal cells) is a rational step toward finding a way to end those disruptions. Whether the experiences are real or not is mostly irrelevant if the impacts are real. Much of life, many of life's problems, boil down to perception. Perception of pain, of loss, of fear, and many other things, we can simply stop perceiving in the same way with a holistic approach to the mind.

 That very night i'woke up' in my dream.

I don't know if I've always been able to read in my dreams, or it was the power of suggestion that freed my mind to do it,but I was definitely 'Nudggetized'.

I strongly suspect I could induce a lot more, but I don't tinker with people's brains (too much). This is just a common one that seems to happen simply as a result of conveying information. I suspect that I could put together a 15 minute audio file for you to listen to before bed and you'd be doing laps around the moon within a couple nights. You believe in everything you need to, except for yourself.

Stephen LaBerge is cited in that last link of yours. I have one of his books, which can be found here, on lucid dreaming. One of the books cited, coauthored with Rheingold, is here. I don't know that I read all of the book I have, nor that I remember what I did read specifically. There may be a lot of crossover between the books as well. In general I recall agreeing with him on most points. Some of these folks get into their personal beliefs and experiences, which doesn't interest me so much. The following quote is from the former link.

In many ways, these masters seem to have gone beyond anything known to Western psychology today. For example, according to an ancient manual for would-be yogis, it is claimed that the practice of certain dream control techniques leads to the capacity to dream any imaginable experience. But these dream yogis evidently set their sights far above the pursuit of any trivial pleasures that might result from such a power. For the Tibetan yogis, the lucid dream represented an opportunity to experiment with, and realize the subjective nature of the dream state and, by extension, waking experience as well. Such a realization was regarded as of the profoundest possible significance.

Through the practice of lucid dreaming, the Yogin is taught to realize that matter, or form in its dimensional aspects, large or small, and its numerical aspects, of plurality and unity, is entirely subject to one's will when the mental powers have been efficiently developed by yoga. In other words, the yogin learns by actual experience, resulting from psychic experimentation, that the character of any dream can be changed or transformed by willing that it shall be. A step further and he learns that form, in the dream-state, and all the multitudinous content of dreams, are merely playthings of mind, and, therefore, as unstable as mirage. A further step leads him to the knowledge that the essential nature of form and of all things perceived by the senses in the waking-state are equally as unreal as their reflexes in the dream-state, both states alike being sangsaric. The final step leads to the Great Realization, that nothing within the
Sangsara is or can be other than unreal like dreams.

Readers who find that this explanation itself needs an explanation will find their needs satisfied in Chapter 10, when we return to the topic. Similar practices were evidently being carried out in India at about the same time. Although Tantra was primarily an oral tradition, handed down from teacher to disciple, there is a tenth-century Tantric text that alludes to methods for retaining consciousness while falling asleep. However, the techniques are so obscurely described as to be of little use to the uninitiated. For example, the yogi is said to attain mastery of dreams by means of the "intermediate state," as a result of making himself "profoundly contemplative" and then placing himself "at the junction between waking and sleeping."

Several centuries later, during the flowering of Islamic civilization, came the next references to lucid dreaming. In the twelfth century, the famous Spanish Sufi, Ibn El-Arabi, known in the Arab world as "the Greatest Master," is reported to have asserted that "a person must control his thoughts in a dream. The training of this alertness... will produce great benefits for the individual. Everyone should apply himself to the attainment of this ability of such great value.

A century later, St. Thomas Aquinas mentioned lucid dreaming in passing, citing Aristotle's supposition that the senses may occasionally show relatively little diminishment during sleep. Aquinas asserted that this happens especially "towards the end of sleep, in sober men and those who are gifted with a strong imagination." He went on to explain that in this case, "... not only does the imagination retain its freedom, but also the common sense is partly freed; so that sometimes while asleep a man may judge that what he sees is a dream, discerning, as it were, between things and their images.

We here have evidence that medieval Europe knew of lucid dreaming. But the fact that dreams were generally held in
disrepute during the Middle Ages, considered more frequently the inventions of demons than of God, suggests that public discussion of lucid dreaming might have resulted in a private audience with the local Inquisition.

Part 4, should it ever get written, will move into the "obscurely described" methods alluded to above for retaining consciousness when going to sleep. I need more time and experience before I can put that together well enough to present for public consumption, but as I mentioned in my prior post I'm already back at it. That will probably leave a lot of people behind as far as level of interest. It becomes a much more solitary pursuit beyond the simple enjoyment of lucid states, but there are still things to learn even for those that don't wish to spend the time and effort practicing.

If anyone has questions that are not things they want to mention publicly they can always be sent via PM. My name @gmail.com also works for inquiries. As things get more complicated and veer further afield of conventional experiences I know that some people would prefer to stay out of view when discussing things that are person to them.

[TokenLiberal]

Dreams are born from the same processes as every invention our species has ever created, with discoveries sometimes coming from dreams directly. Lucid dreams are just an entry point for intellectual stimulation and are not much more than novelty at the ground level. I find most topics boring at the ground level and most practices are like that. Higher levels of skill are when cooler things are possible. You can learn parkour in an afternoon and you won't be jumping across the rooftops of the city or scaling industrial architecture the next day, but eventually you can get so good as to appear superhuman.

You're assuming that we're a shadow of ourselves in all dreams simply because that's the only state you've known. It's certainly the case for most people, but isn't an inherent trait of consciousness in the dream state. Treading water or basic locomotion in the water is pretty easy, but it's not possible for the average person to hold their breath for three minutes while diving to 40 meters. It takes lots of practice and conditioning.

Introspection is great and I've always been naturally inclined to do lots of it. I'm of the opinion that introspection is incomplete if large chunks of those internal functions are left out though. You can be introspective about things, but there is always a locked door where your subconscious is holed up. The subconscious drives much of the emotional and mental behavior we engage in, naturally feeding into our physical behavior as well. You have to get the door open at some point, but lucid dreaming is a little bit like a mail slot. We can't have full access to what's behind the door with a few lucid dreams, but we can peek through and open lines of communication.

Much of what we do, what we consume, what we process, is all handled subconsciously. The rails are already there and our day to day lives are typically just running those rails without much conscious thought. Estimates vary, but it's not a controversial assertion that it's most of what drives us. The deeper and more veiled those motives become the more dysfunctional we can become without even recognizing it. Lucid dreaming and recognition of dreams states is just the start of unraveling those subconscious drives. This article discusses it a bit. I think that the subconscious actually fits within all those models. We could consider the effects to be of a few categories. Acute effects that drive momentary decisions based on stimuli (slamming on your brakes to avoid an accident or catching something you just lost your grip on), chronic effects that drive behaviors over the longer term (task avoidance, fear of things, social difficulties), and then categories of dysfunctional behaviors (which are often irrational or counterproductive manifestations of both acute and chronic behaviors).

Maybe this has no basis in science but I view dreams as semi-random streams of consciousness. As such they are indeed useful for creative pursuits, in fact some of my own ideas (mostly in the realm of game-making) originated in dreams. One is a card game inspired by and intended to be a happy marriage between Dominion and M:TG, which currently exists only in digital form but I plan to eventually release as a physical card game. Another is a chess variant that I had a lot of fun developing and playing with friends. I get a lot of mileage out of my dreams, so don't get me wrong.

I recognize that dreams can be useful in introspection as well, but I have not found that to be the case personally. Only rarely do I wake up from a dream and get any meaningful introspection out of it. As a window into our subconscious, I haven't found them to be of much use. I think we have much better windows into our subconscious in our waking lives. At least I seem to.

Lucid dreams are particularly uninteresting because you lose most of the stream of consciousness. It feels to me like at that point I'm more awake than dreaming, and I might as well be fully awake except that I will lose whatever imagined environment I find myself in. That environment can be fun to explore but isn't intellectually interesting, at least not to me. It seems likely that, if I would spend a significant amount of energy developing the skill, I would get more out of it, but I would rather spend the energy elsewhere. Lucid dreams are disruptive to the sleep cycle, and I would much rather sleep better and be sharp in waking life.

[NobodySpecial268]

We have some odd underlying processes for dealing with symbols that nobody really understands.

I may have something to contribute here.


The word "grok" was originally coined by Robert A. Heinlein and appeared in the sci-fi novel; Stranger in a Strange Land. The story was about a human child who was the last survivor of a Martian colony. He was brought up by the Martians. If I remember correctly, the Martians were not intellectuals and did not understand in that way, rather they "groked".

the Oxford English Dictionary summarizes the meaning of grok as "to understand intuitively or by empathy,

Personally, I don't agree with Oxford's definition because they themselves approach from the direction of intellectualism..

My own interpretation of the word 'grok' is understanding that bypasses the intellect, like a joke.

We get (grok) a joke in an instant and laugh. If someone intellectually explains a joke, no one will get it and find funny. Telling jokes is an art.

Werner Erhard who developed Erhard Seminars Training (EST) in the 1970s had a similar approach in his seminars. The seminars were presented in a way where you "got it".

Erhard Seminars Training, was an organization founded by Werner Erhard in 1971 that offered a two-weekend (6-day, 60-hour) course known officially as "The est Standard Training". The purpose of the training was to use concepts loosely based on Zen Buddhism for self improvement. The seminar aimed to "transform one's ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with clear up just in the process of life itself".

As est grew, so did criticisms. Various critics accused est of mind control or of forming an authoritarian army; some labeled it a cult.

Source: Wikipedia - EST

If you understood the seminar, you didn't get it. was a phrase from the seminars.

I would suggest; Stop thinking, and perceive. The intellect builds thoughts that are a counterfeit of something real. Like putting pictures of trees and waterfalls on the windows of our house. Sooner or later we can't see the world outside our windows any more because we can't see past the pictures (of our minds). We become estranged from everything in this way.

I think, in a way, intelect blinds us, we cannot see what is and see only the pictures of our minds.

Bypassing the intellect may be the "some odd underlying processes for dealing with symbols" you are referring to.