Almost had a lucid dream...

[tryptonaut]

I haven't been preparing for it in any way, I just knew that you should make it a routine to twitch yourself during the day so you would do it in your dreams as well and then realize you were dreaming when it didn't hurt. I never actually did it, but it was seemingly stuck at the back of my head.

Then I was having this experience lately where I was walking around (don't exactly know where, or what I was doing) and suddenly it struck my mind that I might not be awake... I twitched my right hand - I felt nothing at all. I twitched my leg, and still no feeling at all. I twitched the hand again and still couldn't feel anything - but then I concluded it was normal not to feel much and that if I twitched any stronger now I'd be hurting myself. So I walked on - and then I woke up in my bed and realized I had just totally fucked up a lucid dream!

Damn, this has been a few weeks now and I didn't have anything similar since then. I remember I had had 3g L-tryptophane that night, but although I've been taking at least 2g every night since then I wasn't able to repeat it. Maybe I need to take a break from the L-tryptophane and then dose 3g again? Or it wasn't the L-tryptophane at all? Although it seems a little odd because I had never had such a high dose of it before and just that night I get a shot at lucid dreaming...

 

[Nomada]

Beyond the L-tryptophane or other anything, I've had to work really hard to get a cuasi-lucid dream, for two or three weeks at a time at least.
The hand trick can work as long as you do not become dependent on it. Keep building bridges between the two domains. Every time I've failed I know I actually didn't, completely, since in order to have effectively failed I must have faced whatever it was I failed to.
Amass quantities of these experiences and the frontier between the two spaces becomes thin because the phenomena starts been computed in your intuitive circuit. I like to see it as a game-I'm just playing a really weird game.

EDIT: I think you had a lucid dream

 

[????????]

damn brain conspiring to keep us unconscious! a friend of mine has almost gone lucid a couple of times but dream characters have convinced him he was not in fact dreaming

I think because a dream world needs to be consistent to deceive us, our brains try to force logicality even in spite of the most bizarre happenings. But yeah you can't rely on just one method of reality checking, to achieve lucidity you have to be sure without a doubt that you're in dreamland. The twitching thing actually is a bit unreliable, I think grasping the meaning of pain is asking too much in that state. What I used to do is stare at my hands a bit to see if my fingers morphed or something, then I would look to my surroundings to spot weird things, or try to see a clock if possible. Then, if I wasn't convinced yet, I would start spinning around like we used to do as kids. Something about all that movement helps you to be more aware.

Also, your success rate is increased when these topics are hot in your head and you're constantly thinking about dreams and stuff, so don't postpone it unnecessarily.

 

[themoles]

The authentic Tibetan Book of the Dead declares the terms "Sleep" and "Death" as synonymous, and you find the same symbol in many scriptures, for example in greek mythology where Thanatos, the god of death and Hypnos, the God of sleep are brothers. If you want to know what is behind this symbol, try to fall into sleep consciously (i.e. try to reach the state you are after by will). Through this you will know why you cannot enter the internal worlds - something keeps you from it, something that surrounds you day and night, whether you sleep or wake. What is this "something" ...

What we call "sleep" is a continuum of that which we call "wakefulness." This is why the wise men of old times exclaimed "humanity lies asleep." You can read about this in countless of scriptures, or even better, experience it yourself. It is logical that if you are not awake by day you will not be awake in your dreams. Now what it means to be "not awake," that is the big mystery that you will hopefully encounter in this life. Waking up in these worlds is an act of conscious awareness, it is opposed to any mechanical action, be it dropping a pill or otherwise. And if you have been there, fully conscious, you will know it. For many people it may sound crazy, but the same mechanisms that keep you asleep in your dreams are at work while you walk around, brush your teeth, drive your car, talk to friends, gulp some drugs, write forum entries, etc.

Educate yourself about Mindfulness if you like, then you will know the terrible reality we are in. Later, you do not need to twitch yourself anymore, since awareness comes naturaly as you learn to awake during the day, here and now. You will learn to induce the truth of the internal states willfully and spontaneously.

Your best start would be here:
http://www.gnosticteachings.org/the-tea ... indfulness
Also check out http://www.dream-yoga.org/ - it presents many interesting scriptures and techniques about the lost art of dreaming, a science which we have long forgotten.

Good luck on your path my friend!

 

[restin]

tryptonaut: amazing!

themoles: interesting thoughts.homepage: I was kinda disappointed. This homepage (at least after 5 mins of investigation) only said that you must recollect what you dreamt after waking up and not move. What a luxury it is to wake up in silence and not having to move to kill the alarmclock! And after the ziiiiiiiiiiiiiiing ziiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing of the clock, all my dreams are woosh wooshed away. And I cannot just start to sing ooohm ooohms in the bed in the morning

 

[themoles]

tryptonaut: amazing!
you must recollect what you dreamt after waking up and not move.

It's a simple technique, one of many, that is all. You also can use this method to enter the internal worlds by will. In your natural sleep (if you have a natural sleep, that is) you will awaken several times, up to 21 times - this is also established by common science. Yet we have absolutely no perception of it when we wake up in the morning. Sleep as we know it is complete unconsciousness, in other words death. But if you work on yourself during the day and gather enough awareness, you can use these sleep cycles. When you wake up in the middle of the night and you have enough awareness to do this experiment: DO NOT MOVE, PLAY DEAD. It will take only a few seconds and you will consciously enter a world that will shatter your concepts of it. Do not underestimate these links, they are more worth than gold. Try it tonight, interest generates some amount of awareness or at least directed attention or will, which is rare. Good luck!

 

[restin]

I never established any philosophy about sleep...I sometimes fear falling asleep when I lie in bed...I sometimes try to capture the moment when I fall asleep but I never succeed...

When you wake up in the middle of the night and you have enough awareness to do this experiment: DO NOT MOVE, PLAY DEAD.

mhm!! I shall try...

natural sleep

what do you mean? Sleeping without pills/drugs?

death

What is the dream then?

 

[druglessdouglas]

this technique can work well in generating lucid dreaming:
while awake, shift your awareness out of your body and go for a wander. visualise it well. use the door or windows. make it real.

get yourself into a relaxed state, have a smoke or whatever you enjoy, and imagine yourself leaving your body and then the room you are in.
visit friends, wander down the street, whatever. you wont get far at first but keep doing it anyway. dont let yourself get frustrated when you ping back into your body.

do it in bed before you sleep. whenever you can. try and interact with your environment as much as possible.
it wont be long before you are doing the same thing in your sleep

 

[themoles]

what do you mean? Sleeping without pills/drugs?

No, everything that alters your natural sleep rhythm.

What is the dream then?

A dream as we know it is the outcome of sleeping consciousness.
We dream day and night, non-stop, always. The worst type of dream is the one in which we dream ourselves to be awake. (As Tryptonaut was able to find out by experience, yet it is quite another step to experience this truth during the "waking-state").

Wish you a happy peeping-behind-curtains.

 

[JohnDoe_2012]

Just reading about lucid dreaming has caused me to have dreams of varying ludicity increasingly since that time. I haven't practiced any of the techniques or implemented them yet as I have other areas of my life I'm still working on at the moment. They happen to me without any warning and I never know how much lucidity I will get.

Sometimes it's very basic like I'm a character in a play/movie and I have my lines to say and my actions to perform and even if I know those I am still obliged to follow the 'rules' as it were. Other times it's like I'm the director and I still have to stay within the story or script but I can make little changes or interpret the way it will play out, I can rewrite a bit here and there. I've had very few but on rare occasion a chance at full lucidity. Sometimes not necessarily understood consciously by me, like being able to essentially engage with characters in the manner I want to. I had one experience where for a moment I realized I was FULLY lucid, suddenly the entire dreamworld burst into the most vivid colour which felt more vibrant than real life even. Then I began to fly off the ground a few feet and... yep you guessed it, I woke up.

Just making your unconscious/subconscious aware that lucid dreaming exists and can be accessed makes it more likely for those rules to apply within your mind is my theory.

Anyway a book I have but haven't gotten around to reading yet which a number of people tell me is good is Stephan LaBerge's 'Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming'. You can get a PDF of it off demonoid.

Also as drugless hinted at without saying explicitly: lucid dreaming has its connections with astral travel and that field of work. For the more esoteric they might like to read up on both as I imagine one will help the other.

P.S. As part of my self-training in other esoteric areas I've been keeping a dream journal everytime I have a dream I can remember when I wake up. That seems to have helped me remember dreams more often and have lucid dreams more often, sounds like a hassle but once you do it for a few weeks it becomes really easy so give it a try.

 

[Scarecrow]

When you wake up in the middle of the night and you have enough awareness to do this experiment: DO NOT MOVE, PLAY DEAD. It will take only a few seconds and you will consciously enter a world that will shatter your concepts of it.

I've successfully done that three times, and each time was quite remarkable. I found it interesting, because when I become lucid inside of a dream, there are always two forces that almost feel as if they are physically pulling me: one toward nonlucidity and the other toward awakening. In practicing the skill of lucid dreaming, I had to master the balancing of these forces. However, one morning I awoke, but was still laying comfortably in bed and closed my eyes so that I could drift back to sleep. Suddenly, I felt the sensation of walking through silk and I was in my room, but dreaming (I could tell because there was a giant radio embedded in the hillside outside of my window). The funny thing was, there were no forces pulling me toward nonlucidity or wakefulness, and when I did wake up, I was able to go right back to where I had been without effort. It seems that this parallels the state of which you speak.

Also, though I no longer practice it anymore, I had great success in lucid dreaming about five years ago with an extremely simple technique. The problem with methods such as tryptonaut's twitching is that the dreaming mind can come up with all sorts of excuses to explain away blatant discrepencies in reality. However, I would simply ask myself whenever I thought to, "Am I dreaming right now?" To answer this I would look at clocks, try to read small text, turn a light on and off, or whatever I could do using my immediate environment (exactly what was relatively unimportant). This soon became a habit so that I would perform a dream check about five times a day, and then it got to the point where every once in a while I would remember to do a dream check and then in the middle of it realize, "Hey, wait a minute. That text is all weird. Oh shit!" Within a few weeks I was lucid dreaming about every other night.

Any other oneironauts notice that you don't feel as rested after regular lucid dreaming, though?

 

[Scarecrow]

When you wake up in the middle of the night and you have enough awareness to do this experiment: DO NOT MOVE, PLAY DEAD. It will take only a few seconds and you will consciously enter a world that will shatter your concepts of it.

I've successfully done that three times, and each time was quite remarkable. I found it interesting, because when I become lucid inside of a dream, there are always two forces that almost feel as if they are physically pulling me: one toward nonlucidity and the other toward awakening. In practicing the skill of lucid dreaming, I had to master the balancing of these forces. However, one morning I awoke, but was still laying comfortably in bed and closed my eyes so that I could drift back to sleep. Suddenly, I felt the sensation of walking through silk and I was in my room, but dreaming (I could tell because there was a giant radio embedded in the hillside outside of my window). The funny thing was, there were no forces pulling me toward nonlucidity or wakefulness, and when I did wake up, I was able to go right back to where I had been without effort. It seems that this parallels the state of which you speak.

Also, though I no longer practice it anymore, I had great success in lucid dreaming about five years ago with an extremely simple technique. The problem with methods such as tryptonaut's twitching is that the dreaming mind can come up with all sorts of excuses to explain away blatant discrepencies in reality. However, I would simply ask myself whenever I thought to, "Am I dreaming right now?" To answer this I would look at clocks, try to read small text, turn a light on and off, or whatever I could do using my immediate environment (exactly what was relatively unimportant). This soon became a habit so that I would perform a dream check about five times a day, and then it got to the point where every once in a while I would remember to do a dream check and then in the middle of it realize, "Hey, wait a minute. That text is all weird. Oh shit!" Within a few weeks I was lucid dreaming about every other night.

Any other oneironauts notice that you don't feel as rested after regular lucid dreaming, though?

 

[FluidDruid]

I find that when I sleep in and continuously wake up at 30 minute intervals (towards the end of my sleep) that my momentary waking experiences fused directly into my dreams. Every night I smoke a bowl in bed, and meditate on a place I would like to go to (usually simultaneously listening to trip-hop i.e. thievery corporation) and end up having an amazing experience at the location, then waking and remembering it very well and in detail. I tend to try to keep my dream experience with me into the day and remembering it for as long as I can using que's. This method usually leads to vibrant hypnogogic auditory and visual hallucinations neatly nesting into an LD, for me anyways.

 

[Gem_E]

I agree with JohnDoe - if you maintain a dream journal, you will remember more dreams, as well as details of what occurred during dreams. Then, when you are dreaming again, you will be likely to remember a similar dream from the past, which will usually cause you to realize that you are in a dream.

This usually works for me when I am in a place or situation which I dream about frequently, e.g. when I find myself back in the old hood where I grew up, I know right away that I am in a dream. Then the fun begins!

Several times I have awakened from a vivid lucid dream, updated my dream journal, then when I went back to sleep, I found myself in precisely the same dream as before - location, people, etc.

Once I had a "false awakening", sat down on a park bench, and began updating my dream log while I was still asleep and dreaming.

 

[Hyperion1980]

For experiencing lucid dreams and so on. Use Hemi-sync from Robert Monroe Institute.

tip: do some search on some torrentz sites, you can download many cd's and even dvd's from him.

Plz keep a dreamnightbook. I write down most of my dreams every night. I'm doing this now several years. Remember. Lucid dreaming is nice. I fly above my village once because I knew I was dreaming. I said: "If this is a dream than I can fly". And I lifted off at high speed. Pretty crazy.

A dreamnightbook is very interesting for knowing future events. My dreams a re sometimes like a trip. Very wierd. You know that sometimes I say to myself: "I need to write this dream down". But than I start to write it down in my dream... When I wake up I look at my paper: "I thought I wrote it down." And I did, but in my dream. And it is very real. But even when you wrote it down in your dream, you are not able to recall the dream the next morning...

Also, when you dream that you are falling down and when you reach the ground you wake up abruptly... This means you are out of your body and your body needs attention. (because you forget to breath for some seconds or something...

I have had some recalls of dreams that I think were out of body experiences. I knew I was dreaming and tried to walk through a wall of a home, and it worked. I was nothing more than a white fluid thing, without a physical body...

A good tip to recall your dreams and to lucid dreaming is to sleep long enough. The recall of your dreams works better when your mind begins to awaken, but your body is still asleep. It is no coincidence that during the weekend I recall more dreams than the rest of the week...

 

[Gem_E]

An easy way to maintain a dream journal is to use a voice recorder to describe dream events, then update your text journal later on, at your convenience. I use the recorder on my mp3 player, then key/copy the recorded material to a file. Or you could simply download the recordings to sound files, and use the sound files as your journal.

The Hemi-Sync Metamusic CDs are very nice, and can be purchased at http://www.hemi-sync.com/store/home.php?cat=9 ; these CDs contain binaural recordings of music. Some of my favorite Metamusic CD's are Ascension, Higher, Dreamcatcher, and The Return.

 

[thrashpsychonaut]

I have lucid dreams nearly once a week. I just got out of jail and I had them 4-5 times every week I was in jail. I remember in one of them I was slapping myself over and over to wake myself up. I kept dreaming I was free, but I knew I was in jail.

Once you figure out how to stay lucid, it happens more and more.

 

[cockknocker]

I twitched the hand again and still couldn't feel anything - but then I concluded it was normal not to feel much and that if I twitched any stronger now I'd be hurting myself. So I walked on - and then I woke up in my bed and realized I had just totally fucked up a lucid dream!

the most annoying thing ever

 

[IJesusChrist]

I have had a number of lucid dreams... Some amazingly beautiful... The best feelings one can experience.
Others have been dark, and confusing, and always seemed to explain my entire life to me.

I remember one of my most lucid, where I didn't know when I was awake.

Goes like this:
I slept on my couch, and I woke up wondering why I was on my couch, realized I had to to go to the bathroom, and did, came back and sat on the couch. I woke up as I sat down, wondering if it was a dream. .. Then I really woke up.
A dream in a dream in a dream.
(Yeah it really happened, and yes I know both before were only dreams... I had to piss and it had only been 1 hour since i went to sleep)

 

[????????]

i'm reading The Sandman right now. i hope Morpheus pays me a visit