Experiments in Dreaming

I've had a few experiences with lucid dreaming over the course of my life. A dream becomes lucid at the point you become aware that you are dreaming. The most distinct instance in my mind is a dream in which I was running away from something that was chasing me. I was hurtling over objects and each one was higher than the last. Soon I was jumping over 6 foot fences without putting more than one foot on top. I jumped a 10 foot wall and then over a wall higher than 30 feet. Some logic circuit in my brain tripped and I realized that this was not physically possible and that I must be dreaming. I wanted to take control of my dream and at this point, I decided to try to do something that everyone wants to do in a dream: Fly. Whatever threat that was pursuing me fell away and I continued to jump higher and higher towards the sky. Each time I reached the crest I tried to fly but somehow didn't have enough power to do it. I was surprised to see that I actually had to learn to fly and that a simple desire to do it was not enough. The key that finally unlocked the secret proved to be very much like in the Matrix how Morpheus coaches Neo how to jump across the rooftop gap. "(not verbatim) Do you think my ability to jump this distance has anything to do with my muscles in this world? You have to believe wholeheartedly that you can do it. Free your mind." I had to somehow change my belief that I would fall back to the ground and replace it with the belief that it was actually possible for me to break the bonds of gravity. I was eventually successful and consciously soared through the sky as high and as fast as I wanted. The experience was as real, as sharp, and as crisp as it would have been to fly in the real world.

My lucid dreaming experiences occurred rarely and with long periods of time between episodes. However, I recently read a book called The Art of Dreaming by Carlos Castaneda which has drastically increased the frequency of my lucid dreams. I went to sleep soon after reading an early chapter about how to become lucid and how to maintain stability in the dream environment. When I got into bed, I closed my eyes and set an intention that I would be aware of myself falling asleep. (I think I've described how to set an intention in a previous post but regardless, I will not explain it at this time because I find that it's the single most difficult thing for me to describe with words, as it's of an abstract, mental and spiritual nature.) After setting the intention, my consciousness stayed with me and I felt my body slip into sleep. Upon dropping into a dream, I became lucid almost immediately and began to explore my dream environment. Everything in a dream is in constant flux and is subject to change at any moment. For this reason, you must have an object of stability which can anchor you and allow you to briefly gaze at other objects in the dream. Castaneda recommends walking around the dream staring at your hands, glancing briefly at objects and then back at the hands in order to retain the stability of the environment. Observation of an object can change it and that is why the glances must be brief. I followed his instructions exactly and I observed several objects in this manner. Everything was very loose and watery, as if I was wandering through a Van Gogh painting. Castaneda explains that the level at which the dream environment is solid and stable is dependent on the dreaming power of the individual. Apparently I didn't have much dreaming power at that time because nothing in the environment was solid. I continued to observe objects until I found one that was very interesting and looked at it longer than usual. The object began to melt and morph in front of me, like the paint was swirling down an invisible drain that existed behind it. I immediately looked back at my hands and focused in an attempt to fight off the chaos and regain my stability. Everything around me began to melt and vibrate violently, like a scene out of The Butterfly Effect. I didn't panic but definitely felt like I had lost any control that I had managed to wrestle down for that brief time. The dream world and all the paint in it swirled down a massive drain into blackness, taking me with it. At the moment I disappeared down the drain, I lost lucidity and fell into a deep sleep.

The next significant dream occurred during a time I was reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. In the dream, I was having a secret meeting with a teacher figure. The secrecy of the meeting was imperative because the outside world was a strict and controlled totalitarian society and would not approve of the topics discussed. There was a knock on the window on one side of the room and then on a window on the opposite side of the room. There were figures wearing full face masks claiming that they were also students and wanted to take part in the meeting. They were wearing masks to conceal their identity in case they were observed en route to the meeting. Alarm bells were going off in my head and as I was looking back and forth between them, I expressed to my teacher that we might be in danger if we open the room to these people. My teacher did not answer and when I looked over at him, he had morphed into one of the figures wearing a mask and was holding a bazooka like cannon, pointed at me from his hip. He fired and I put up my hands as I let out a startled cry, only to be blasted with a high-pressure, harmless white cloud like the type expelled from a fire extinguisher. I realized that I wasn't hurt in the slightest and immediately felt extremely embarrassed and then angry, as if I'd fallen for an elaborate hoax. I was lying down on a couch at the time and when I tried to sit up, I realized that my entire body was paralyzed and that I couldn't even move a finger.

It was at this point that I became aware that I was dreaming. I tried to wake up but found that I didn't have the ability to do that either. I was aware that my waking consciousness was somewhere above me but I felt like I couldn't get through to it, like I was blocked by a thick rubber shield that gave way to pushing but just wouldn't snap. At this moment, I was overcome by a foreign energy. I didn't see it coming but I could certainly feel it. It was vibrating at a very high frequency and I associated the color orange with it, even though there was no visual experience of orange. It took over my body, my head jerked back, my fists clenched, every muscle in my entire body contracted and my mouth opened wide as I let out a roar of extremely intense pure rage. The emotion was very vivid and even though I knew it didn't belong to me, I experienced this feeling of rage as if it was my own. The scream lasted for around 5 seconds and I wasn't sure if I was violently purging the intruder from me or if it had somehow took over and made me exhibit this behavior. In either case, when the roar ended, it was gone and my body fell limp back down to the couch. I was still mostly paralyzed but was slowly beginning to regain mobility. The room was now dark and quiet and the masked figures were no longer present. I was able to slowly move a very heavy arm up to my head so that I could turn it and look around at my environment. I was looking into the depth of the room as I began to awaken in the most peculiar manner. I slowly rose back into waking consciousness in the same way that a submarine comes up to surface, getting higher and higher until it pokes through that last bit of water into the air above. I had been staring out into the depth of that dark room and at the moment I poked back into the waking world, the depth of the room collapsed and I was staring at the wall in front of me, awake in my bed with my eyes already open. I sat up in bed and strangely enough, in my real world body, I could still feel the energetic fingerprint of the being I had encountered in my dream. It felt like orange sparks that originated in my brain, crackling lightly down the length of my body like electricity. In his book, Castaneda mentions that our dreams contain objects and environments that are produced by our subconscious but that there are also real things and real places that we encounter in our dreams that are not of this world. He says that everyone encounters them but that since most people don't know what they are or how to recognize them, they write it off as coincidence or 'just a crazy dream' and soon forget about them. Castaneda writes that there are many types of energetic beings that we can encounter in the dream world and that some of them are aggressive. The thing that I encountered sounded very similar to one of the aggressive types that he mentioned but I don't feel like I have enough experience to really know if I encountered something real or if I encountered something that I created with my mind after reading about that type of energetic being. The most peculiar thing out of the whole experience was that I definitely felt some type of lingering energy in my real life body after I woke up. I don't know what to make of it but I will continue my dreaming practices in the meantime.