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.
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.
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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Time for a little update on my sleep suggestion experiments that I wrote about in my last post. The last few days have yieled some interesting findings in terms of the potential and the downsides of sleep suggestion. When I say downsides what I really mean is the accidental misuse of our pre-sleep time that leads to negative emotions and beliefs into the next day. Most people are suffering from this kind of negative influence at some point in their lives.
We’ve all had the experience of waking up in the morning and just feeling sort of down without knowing why. Maybe later on when your doing the laundry or some other random chore a dream pops into your head that you remember from the night before and your mood upon waking makes perfect sense. What about the dreams and unconscious emotions that occur during sleep which we don’t consciously remember the next day? That’s why its so important to understand this intermediate state and consciously direct it.
Friday night I went to sleep at the usual time for me and neglected to practice my positive sleep affirmations before dozing off. Instead my mind was reeling over what had happened that day at work and constantly replaying some of the negative feelings I was left with that afternoon. I eventually managed to fall asleep and loe and behold what sort of dreams did I have? dreams about my negative encounters at work.
So I learned a valuable lesson when it comes to the moment before sleep. We either use it, or we let it use us. There is no neutral pattern here. A person can learn to consciously clear their mind out of all thoughts but for those of us who don’t live in a monastery its important to make this white noise less nonsense and more useful.
The moments before sleep at night are ripe with potential to either change our preset beliefs in ourselves or to re-enforce them, which is what I’m afraid most people do.
How many people who complain of sleeplessness at night are thinking about all the awful parts of their day as they fade into the hypnagogic state at night? How many people who wake up unrested in the morning, even after seven or eight hours of sleep are just suffering from the after effects of bad dreams and a restless mind?
In short I’ve learned in the last few days that not using this crucial moment will lead to random negativity building up.
The experiments continue and I will definetely be updating more as I learn more about this process myself. There have already been some interesting stories and comments from everyone about their own experiences with auto suggestion and sleep which I will be getting around to putting online soon. A major hope for the blog here is that it will become something of an information hub where the comments can help spread your ideas to others. So thanks and look forward to part 3 here shortly.
-Chris
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Sleep is something we’ve discussed before on the blog and how using relaxation and mindfulness techniques can help you doze off for a better night of rest. This time I want to talk about another aspect of sleep which is slightly different in aim than the techniques of the last sleep post. I want to talk about sleep programming.
So Sleep Programming is a common idea found in many different self improvement and psychology books as well as plenty of historical anecdotes. It’s basically the process of focusing intently on a certain goal or image just before you fall asleep at night. The idea is that something strongly visualized, maybe even a little obsessed over before sleep will work its way into the subconscious mind, programming your deep belief systems while you snooze away.
I would imagine nearly everyone has had some kind of experience with Sleep Suggestion in their own lives. Falling asleep with the television on, just to wake up from a terrible nightmare about getting chased by vicious dogs. You open your eyes to find a t.v. show about police dogs with angry german shepards biting the arms of bank robbers. Or maybe you needed to be up a half hour earlier than usual the next day for an important meeting at work that you’ve been preparing for. Worrying about the possibility of waking up late at the usual seven o’clock you set your alarm for six thirty and fall asleep. Six thirty… six thirty… six thirty….
and when do you wake up ? six twenty eight… just before the alarm.
This isn’t much different than the work and ideas of Emile Coue, who we discussed in the auto-suggestion post, but with the emphasis being on the unconscious sleep state as a back door to the underlying mental activity that occurs even beneath the awareness of the self.
I’ve been experimenting a little over the last few days… Trying to use auto-suggestion just before I go to sleep at night to help smuggle commands deeper into my consciousness. I’m far from a sleep suggestion master at this point but I do feel like I’ve already managed to gain a few interesting insights.
Sensory Modality:
The first night I tried, just as an experiment, to repeat the experience I mentioned a moment ago, only this time intentionally. Mentally setting a time to be awake and allowing your body to wake itself up on your pre-set command.
I usually hit the sack fairly late for someone who writes a self improvement blog but managed to get in bed at an early (for me) 11:30 and spend about ten minutes laying there repeating six thirty… six thirty… six thirty…. and dozed off into a well needed rest. Unfortunately I woke up the next day at seven thirty, well past my designated wake up time. So attempt one was a failure and I spent a bit of my morning mindfulness walk conjuring up ideas for why it didn’t work.
What was it about the type of excitement, the type of state I’m in on those nights when I do manage to unintentionally set my mind with a command? Maybe it was the WAY I was repeating it. In the past I’ve found that I can generate a positive state in myself through auditory mental suggestion, but going for the visual modality as they say in NLP, visualizing in the first person what I want to happen is much more effective for me personally.
So Saturday night I chose to VISUALIZE myself, in the first person, looking out my own eyes, rolling out of bed and looking at my alarm clock… the little red LCD numbers displaying in my minds-eye a really clear 6:30
I went through this mini-visualization journey maybe five or six times, from the beginning to the end, allowing the images to merge into the usual mishmash imagery of the hypnagogic state and gently drifting into unconsciousness.
To my surprise… I was awake the next morning at 6:22, rolling over, looking at my alarm, and realizing that the experiment had at least SEEMED successful. Of course it’s always possible that I just happened to wake up that morning around six thirty. Sunday night I repeated the practice and managed to wake up at around 6:20 again…
Visualization vs. Auto-Suggestion
I’m still experimenting with the process and plan to write a good bit more on the topic since I find it so fascinating. My next plan is to start visualizing certain goals and objectives for the next day while I’m falling asleep and explore the most effective ways of programming myself to accomplish them. My only conclusion about the whole process of self-programming at the moment is that the more vivid it is to the mind’s eye the better. Auditory suggestion is great for when your in the car, or to use as a mantra perhaps while practicing meditation, but engaging as many modalities i.e. visual images, movement, sounds, smells, feelings makes the command sink into the mind that much easier.
I’d love to hear from some other folks about their experiences with sleep suggestion and how its impacted their life. Look forward to some more updates shortly…
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but managed to get in bed at an early (for me) 11:30 and spend about ten minutes laying there repeating six thirty… six thirty… six thirty…. and dozed off into a well needed rest. Unfortunately I woke up the next day at seven thirty, well past my designated wake up time. So attempt one was a failure and I spent a bit of my morning mindfulness walk conjuring up ideas for why it didn’t work.
