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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When you think about yourself in the third person, you’re thinking about the way you appear to the people around you in your life. You’re thinking about the interpersonal image that you’re communicating to the world. The existentialist Jon Paul Sartre constantly reminds us that being a good human means taking responsibility for your actions.
When you behave in certain ways you’re taking on the responsibility to show the world how you think a person should behave in that context.
That’s why our image of ourselves we hold in our minds should be consistent with the kind of message we’re sending out to the world.
I’ve talked before about my love for affirmations and what they can do for your life. I’ve even experimented on myself with a number of different methods for developing effective affirmations, and it hasn’t all been easy. I’ve had a mixed bag of experiences while trying out things like positive self talk during the day while I work, practicing positive visualization while I fall asleep at night, things like that. I’ve had some positive effects and some negative effects but after going back over my own experiences and notes carefully, certain trends started to develop that made the difference between affirmations being effective and affirmations failing to make the desired change.
This key factor determines whether your self talk is going to be effective… and its truly simple.
Think about it… Focused-Awareness Blog has been rolling around the ideas required to align yourself with the kinds of things you want to accomplish and BE in your life. Everything is about where we place our attention and the kinds of thoughts we think. We practice seeing in our minds eye, visually, what we want to achieve. We verbally repeat the commands to ourselves that we want to ingrain deeply and start to live by. We take care of our body/minds to optimize as best we can our potential for awareness and more expansive self growth. But none of this will truly change you without one simple thing…
The assumption of change.
This idea goes by different names in different self development philosophies but the jist is simple… if you aren’t acting AS IF your visualizations and affirmations are true… YOU WON’T CHANGE!
I know this is shocking to alot of arm chair self development people who enjoy cracking open a good Tony Robbins book and indulging in a fantasy of actually getting off their ass and changing themselves but its true.
No amount of mental energy is going to cause you to change if you don’t walk out the front door and start occupying the frame of mind that you want to act from. Its that simple.
I was practicing a technique some people call Mirror Affirmations, which is really just the simple act of making solid eye contact with yourself in the mirror and repeating what it is you want to believe about yourself. Basically affirmations in the mirror, you get it.
I spend most morning doing my little routine which involves some meditation and grounding practice but I’ve been mixing in the whole mirror affirmation thing after I brush my teeth, before I head out the door. The results were suprising.
Growing up I had what you might call confidence issues, which if lefted unchecked I might still have to this day. So one of the important qualities I like to try and ingrain in myself in an unapologetic/confident attitude about who I am and what I want from this life.
Now all that is fine and I’ve made all sorts of progress but the real changes in my internal frame have come from this assumption of change that is so important.
If I do the mirror affirmations and walk out the door telling myself ‘Ok, I’m going to have a great day today, I’m walking tall, feeling good, grounded and mindful’ etc that might help me start to take actions in that direction, but I think for most people who practice affirmations they quickly find that its not just as easy as telling yourself the magic words and heading out there. You have to DO something about it.
When you practice a lot of affirmations yet walk around still acting and behaving the same way, what you’re really doing is draining your positive statements of their power.
Think about it…
If I tell myself all day long that I’m confident and assertive and I walk into work that day and fall right back into my old behaviors while still using these affirmations, I’m creating a negative association in my nervous system between SAYING I’m confident, and ACTING unconfident. I’m literally making my positive affirmations work against me.
This is why the assumption of change is so critical. For deep seated habits and belief patterns change isn’t always simple. Its not as easy as just performing some NLP move and WHAM you’re all better.
Thats why for me, I know that physically pushing myself into areas that make me confident is the first step and using the affirmations to change my internal frame comes second to the real world effort.
Thats what I’ve learned from using mirror affirmations. When I know that I’m going to push myself into encounters today that will make me grow as a human, then those affirmations and positive statements can be support beams helping me feel congruent with the way I’m acting.
So here’s a little challenge for the folks who have been keeping up.
Make a commitment to yourself to do one thing that pushes you into being the kind of you want to be. If you’re terrible at saving money, make a serious commitment to stop spending frivolously even if you can only manage to really commit to it one day. Maybe you’re shy and you make a commitment to meeting at least one new stranger a day for a week. Whatever it is, take a moment to really appreciate the importance of making this commitment to yourself and enduring whatever suffering it might cause you to break those old patterns.
Now that you know its something you’re really going to do whether you want to or not, you can start working on the part of you that ‘wants’ to do it. Now try those affirmations, visualize yourself from the outside being the kind of person you really know you are. Look yourself in the mirror and remind yourself that your doing this no matter what so its time for your mind to jump on board.
The key to making the switch is behaving as if its already true. Remember the assumption of change and don’t wait to start being the person you aspire to be.
Thats when these tools work. No one is demanding perfection or an instant 100% change, all you really need to do is make that initial commitment, that you will DO something, then tech like affirmations and creative visualization really start to make the difference.
How do you see yourself every day? When you’re having a thoughtful moment and thinking about what you want to become in the future, how do you see yourself? do you spend time rehearsing in your head the kind of future you would like to see yourself in… or do you use most of that time to visualize all the negative things that could cause your plan to fail?
I’m guessing that for a lot of people unfortunately the second one is true. Many people have a tendency to focus the majority of their awareness on the possible bad outcomes of any kind of new endeavor. We have a built in theater in our own minds for the evolutionary purpose of seeing into the future and avoiding danger… so its no wonder that for many people thinking about the future has more to do with fear than it has to do with possibility.
We all see ourselves in third person from time to time. We imagine ourselves from the outside almost like a character in a movie, going through the slides from our favorite scenes. Its easy to imagine yourself at least for moments far off into the future where you’ve accomplished the kinds of things you only dreamed were possible. But the next day when you wake up that sense of where you wanted to be has faded into the cold reality that your present negative habits and fears of making changes right now override that desire to evolve.
For example take a habit change like wanting to get up earlier every morning… Your sitting there reading a post online about the many benefits of being an early riser and you’re seeing yourself in your minds eye, getting up, stretching your arms, well before the sun has come up with a smile on your face. You go to bed that night and you set your alarm for 5:00 am and doze right off to sleep. The next morning you wake up at five to the sound of your alarm and roll over almost instinctively and hit the snooze button falling right back asleep till your usual seven o’clock or nine o’clock or whatever rolls around. Merely having a clear visualization of what you would like to have accomplished in the future doesn’t necessarily give you the willpower or perspective to break free of the daily habitual patterns that stop you from making the first step.
Maybe you’re about to go into a big meeting where you need to make a good impression, you know just how bad you want to succeed at this yet all you can manage to think about as you go into the encounter is all the negative experiences you’ve had with meetings. Reminding yourself of all the things that can go wrong as if any of it can help you do what you need to in order to make the encounter go right. Your mind makes a habit out of its usual fear mongering and before you know it you’re blowing every opportunity because all you can visualize is how its going to fail.
I’ve been trying lately to take into account all the ways my mind uses my fears and past negative experiences to keep me stifled in a sense and inhibits me from taking risks and going after the things I really want. I’ve always had to deal with a mental habit I picked up early in life, where I tend to see the ways I could fail or make a fool out of myself easier than I can visualize how its going to look to succeed and really be the kind of Chris I want to be. The habit is anchored deeply in my unconscious as it is, but with enough positive reference experiences I’ve slowly began to push myself through those barriers and watch myself do things I previously didn’t think I would ever have the willpower to do. Taking charge of your negative thinking habit can be one of the most important first steps on the road to discovering what the limits of your actual potential really are.
So how do you break through this habit when it takes a little more than ‘just thinking positive’? We all know that we have dreams and aspirations but what is it that makes the negative images and possible failures habitually spring to mind and stifle our ability to change our ways? Its simple really…. the negative patterns are just habits themselves. My tendency to think negatively or cynically about the possibility of success begins to break down when I do two things:
1. Intentional Positive Visualization
This means sitting down every now and then and taking a few moments to actually visualize what it is that you really want to be or do. See it in full richness and color, exploring both the way your dream looks from the third person outside view and the first person account seeing what success will look like when seen through your own eyes. When you catch yourself engaging in those negative visualizations again, change their color and push them away in your minds eyes, intentionally bringing in the successful images you were visualizing before. Repeat this kind of visualization as often as negative thoughts occur, changing the color or sound of them, playing cheesy music the background, then pushing them farther away, drawing those full color images of success closer, training your mind to associate thinking negatively with the desire to shift into something more positive.
2. Visualized Steps
This is something optionally that I’ve found of great use when dealing with changing personal habits of all kinds whether they are just ingrained in the body or whether its a negative mental pattern that is engraved in my consciousness. We were talking a little earlier about how easy it is to visualize yourself successful in say five years time or something, but when you wake up tomorrow taking that first step in the face of all the negative habitual patterns you’ve built up daily can be nearly impossible. So my remedy for this kind of thing is to spend a little time after you have doing some intentional visualization to visualize clearly, in color, in third and first person, not just what success will look like for you in five years time, or what its going to look like when you’ve already succeeded but also what successful decisions you’ll be making just tomorrow when you wake up and start your day. See yourself making those first steps with the deep intention of creating new patterns and new habits for yourself and remind yourself how amazing its going to feel when all that discipline pays off. Make it a new goal to break down the big goals and single task on each one of those steps. Its not about making it all in one day, its about discovering the deep capacity for sustained change inside yourself when you give up those old belief patterns.
3. Follow Through
Like all the change technology we talk about on the blog, its only effective with the right attitude and follow through. No magic hat trick is by itself going to be sufficient enough to undue countless years of negative thinking… unless you yourself have made the clear decision to be done with it… and under no condition allow yourself to ever look back on those limiting beliefs…. you will never manage to accomplish the things you wish to achieve in the time you have. If you decide for yourself that you will accomplish your goals no matter what, and only use these ideas as far as they solidify your resolve on that path, you can’t go wrong.
Breaking down the entire process of visualization like this into both the practice of seeing your end goal, and visualizing the steps between here and there as individual goals in and of themselves to rehearse will give an added advantage to your visualization practice and help you start to see success right now…before it even happens.
At home, work, and everywhere throughout or live anchors exist that in part determine but are not wholly responsible for our inner states. Image yourself at home after work. In your mind walk through your door and notice the first objects that you associate with being in your space, calm, and relaxed. Image yourself at work, stressed out there are probably objects, people, or sounds you associate this with that help your body and mind know it is time to be anxious. In the same way one might go to a certain place in the home to meditate, we can place and strengthen anchors intentionally to assume the brain state we wish to achieve. We all do this automatically, mentally associating physical sensations or objects with inner states, it is empowering to take control of those anchor and use them to our advantage. In fact if we do not become aware of these anchors the negative association will continue to exist that will hamper our growth.
So many times when we set a goal, try to start a new routine, or attempt to change an unwanted habit, we fall short because of all the anchors that exist in our life and our environment. An example might be if part of your routine is to relax after work, catch your favorite crime drama, and bite your finger nails to the quick, it is going to be difficult to excise the negative nail biting habit while it is anchored to your unwinding time. Another example might be that pet project you canít ever find time for. You come home, tired from work and fall into the same routine of home life or start into your project but get distracted by our own personal life.
When I was younger and my friends and I had a scheme in the works, either some business idea or if one of us had their eye on a girl that was way out of their league, we would convene a serious meeting and hang a sign on the wall to designate this special strategy time. I would take a sharpie and a piece of scrap paper, write in big letters ëWAR ROOMí. Once the sign was up we all got into character, and the scheme or strategy was launched. Once we assumed the role of the General our sixteen year old selves rose the occasion.
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As much as our internal environment is and should be independent from the external it is clear that our external environment does have an effect on our inner state, the extent we are affected varies with the anchors that exist in our environment. We can use this tendency in our nature to our advantage by placing and strengthening positive anchors we come into contact with everyday.
When I embark on a new project I create a list of goals, a time table, or at least a rough sketch and in the time designated to work on this project I stick my goals to the wall above my work station at home, I donít have an office. Iíll also put up a calendar, not the same one in the kitchen but a ëworkí calendar, no birthdays or dentist appointments. When my side project is posted, I get into that mode, if my phone rings or I get tempted to surf You-Tube I see the room I have created for myself and realize Iím on the clock. I realize that Iím in character.
Now simply putting up a calendar isnít going to get you to your goals. To strengthen that anchor you have to own it. Put it up and really get into character, exaggerate it if necessary, make a commitment to yourself that when you are in your new space you will be ëon the clockí.
This can also be very liberating, when you ëclock outí and revert your office back into that same old dining room table you can allow yourself to be free of the anxiety that may be associated with your new project. The anchor will become more ingrained the more you use it, you more you are able to visualize yourself in that new space where ever it is, doing what you desire to be doing and associating it with the augmentation you have made.
Challenge: Make an Anchor: Find or make an object, quote or sign. Use your favorite relaxation technique, visualize your new space, see it as wholly different from its former form. See yourself in this place, in character.
Strengthen Your Anchor: Get into character, if you are writing a resume put on a tie over your Metallica t-shirt. If you are putting together a business get a green visor and roll your sleeves up, soon the act of arranging your space will put you into the desired mind set and the character will be you.
Clock in and Clock Out: The time you are not using the anchor is just as important, allow yourself to be free of your self imposed obligation when you are on your own time. Use that lack of anchor and have control over your own mental state.
Screw Your (future)self Over: If you know you are going to be worn out and will make any excuse to avoid what you really should be doing, put the anchor up before you leave for work. When you get home you will just be entering your office, ready to work and not resenting the time.
If You’ve ever been up late watching T.V. you have probably seen five or six commercials for different sleep aids. Forty million people in America alone are reported to have chronic sleep disorders. Thirty million more report intermittent sleep difficulties. Itís not all surprising that so many people are affected, between all the thoughts circling around in our heads from work and our personal life. The general pace the outside word is moving at has made it difficult to slow our brains down at the end of the day and convince them it is time for sleep.
However, using awareness techniques you can get great sleep every night, and even fall asleep on long flights or when your neighbors are having a raging party and you have to be at work at six in the morning. Here is one technique for easy sleep, an easy self hypnosis technique, popularized by Milton H. Erickson, actually invented by his wife Betty.[singlepic id=37 w=320 h=240 float=right]
-Lay in your bed/ plane seat / boring lecture. Focus on three things in your field of vision. Shift your awareness as fully as you can from one to the other, take in one fully, and slowly move on to the next.
-Focus on three things you can hear, listen to each one, experience the sound and shift your hearing to another.
-Now concentrate on things you can feel in your body. Remember to divert your focus as much as possible from your external senses and feel individual sensation from within.
-Move through the series again with only two visual, auditory, and tactile.
-Next concentrate on only one thing you can see, one thing you can hear and only one thing you feel
-Close your eyes.
-Imaging a visual images concentrate on it, see it fully. Now imagine a sound, imagine a sensation in your body concentrate on it.
-Now two imagined visual, two imagined sounds, and two imagined sensations.
-if you are still awake at this point, i.e. the party next door goes critical, you can proceed to three visual, three auditory, and three tactile imagined sensations but it almost never takes a third round. There are many meditative/self hypnosis techniques that will work as well or better then pills, with no side effects or dependency and they are all 100% free.[singlepic id=36 w=320 h=240 float=right]
Sweet Dreams
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