I realize its been quite a while since I posted anything here and I’m hoping my reader base will forgive me. My writing practice had a couple of hiccups until recently while I’ve been busy with other activities. Luckily not blogging doesn’t mean I haven’t been experimenting.
My latest kick has come from rekindling my nearly forgotten lucid dreaming practice and taking my sleep hacking to the next level. For those of you who might have been living in a cave or intentionally hiding from things that are cool as hell, lucid dreaming is the act of becoming aware that you are dreaming… while you are dreaming. Thus giving the dreamer control over the dream’s content as long as he remains lucid.
There has been an surge of articles online recently about how to get yourself started with lucid dreaming although most of it is just rehashing the information thats already out there for beginners.
Keeping a dream diary to improve recall.
Doing reality checks during the day so the habit rolls over into your dreams at night.
Doing the various lucid dream rituals prescribed by Stephen LaBerge like MILD, WILD, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dreaming#Wake-back-to-bed_.28WBTB.29
All very important things for the beginning lucid dreamer. But after reading through what I could find online I was disapointed in the lack of information for intermediate and advanced dreamers. Like so many areas of self development and consciousness exploration everything seems to be geared to the beginner, once you’ve taken your practice beyond that level you’re on your own exploring undocumented territory.
Once you’ve already mastered flying and have “indulged yourself in the sex binge” to quote Tim Ferriss… then what?
Thats what I’ve been asking myself for a while now trying to carve out a plan for exploring some of the lesser plumbed depths of lucid dreaming consciousness.
One of the most interesting philosophical questions posed by lucid dreaming that rarely gets asked seriously is: once you have the power to do whatever you could imagine, with no limitations what-so-ever… what do you do? If I gave you a blank hola-deck and you could be anyone, anything, anywhere…. who would you be? and once all your materialistic and sensory pleasures were satisfied… then what?
When people think of billionaires… they usually imagine people who have everything sipping champagne by the pool on a tuesday for no other reason than they can. But how often is the billionaire satisfied with just a simple life of pleasure. What really happens to a human’s brain when we have everything we want, get bored with it, and have to start looking for new challenges, new horizons proportional to our vision and capability.
I think this is the real gift of lucid dreaming practice. Its an opportunity to find our true passion, that one thing that we would do once we could do anything… in a world where nothing would stop us. The potential for this application alone is enormous but sadly gets buried in the ‘be superman! sleep with run-way models!’ attitude so many lucid dreaming books have.
So that’s my only beef with the lucid dreaming work online. Most of it consists of simple lists of techniques to help the beginner and there isn’t too much in the way of group experiments into the weirder aspects of this powerful state of consciousness. I did however find a great site called SpiritWatch which has an archive of every issue of the ‘Lucidity Journal’ since the early eighties (I highly recommend reading the work by Jayne Gackenbach and Paul Tholey) but besides that and a few forums online there isn’t enough of a lucid dreaming exploration community for those of us who are past the beginning stage and ready to do more with our dreams that just fuck and fly.
One of the far overlooked aspects of LD I’m interested in exploring is the ability to interact directly with the contents of your own mind. The research on using lucid dreams as a tool to achieve physical and emotional healing is sadly lacking. There are countless first person accounts online of people using the dream state to visualize their tumor shrinking, or to interact directly with their unconscious mind to create changes in their waking consciousness.
The same kind of fascinating work on the limits of our own mind is highlighted in the research of dream characters and how much information and abilities they actually possess. I for one am continually shocked at how much valuable information and guidance I can receive from my own dream regulars and some of the accounts online of other oneironauts only drives my point home further that there is a storehouse of insight waiting for us in our dreams waiting to be tapped by those who know how.
Waking Life – Lucid Dream – More amazing video clips are a click away
Another interesting activity I intend to explore more is the ability of your dream consciousness to separate itself into two different points of awareness and experience two sets of dream sensory input. This means you could be staring up the staircase at yourself, staring down the staircase at yourself staring back up. Its fascinating areas of the mind like this that we discover in the realm of lucid dreaming that shed light on how our own waking consciousness represents the outside world to us and what the limitations on that consciousness really are.
These are just two of the topics I want to expand on in the next few weeks as I write more on the topic of Lucid dreaming and keep you all updated on my own personal experiments into conscious self growth using this method. Matt and I plan on doing some reviews of some of the books we’ve read and have recently begun to incorporate the use of various supplements to increase our lucid dreaming potential, all of which you will definetly be reading about in future posts.
As always anyone who would like to share some of their experiences with lucid dreaming, especially experiences pertaining to bending the boundaries of what people may consider possible… even in a dream, please feel free to share them either in the comments or email us at the blog, we’d love to put some up. Otherwise look forward to more posts in the future and the Focused-Awareness Blog coming back into action online.
-Chris
More stuff on the web:
Stephen LaBerge and the Lucidity Institute
LD4All Not my favorite site design ever but a good online community with some interesting posts.
Paul Tholey Some collected English articles by one of the most interesting oneironauts I’ve read about. Be sure to read his great paper called ‘The Importance of Light Heartedness’
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