Silent Lucidity: Active Dream States and the Otherworldly

Many people will tell you, when it comes to remembering their dreams, that only bits and fragments will emerge; aside from this, there is, in essence, really very little else that manages to break through to the human mind of the waking hours. On the other hand, there are also many who will state that in addition to being able to recall their dreams, some of them are incredibly vivid, with a number of interesting elements that spill over into the realms of the active imagination, where one can actually control aspects of the dream; in essence, the dreamer is aware of the fact that they are dreaming.

The term “lucid dream” was first coined by psychiatrist Frederick van Eeden, in reference to such vivid dreams that one can seem to learn to control and manipulate, and many today have claimed that virtually anyone can learn how to achieve a lucid dreaming state. My own interest in the phenomenon is related not only to the lucid dreams themselves, but also to some of the strange activity that seems to occur concomitant with them. Among these are the ability not only to control their dreams, but also to develop certain psychic senses that appear to be related to the lucid dreaming state, as well as that familiar (and terrifying) condition known as sleep paralysis.

A while ago, my brother shared an interesting experience where he had claimed that while in a lucid dreaming state, that he had managed to gain control of aspects of his dream. There had been a butterfly present in the dream, which he had consciously begun to try and manipulate, as a sort of measure of his control. He transformed this butterfly into a mouse in the dream, which subsequently was captured and eaten by a cat. Then the following morning, to his surprise he learned that just outside his bedroom door, his cat had actually captured and killed a mouse!

Many listeners of The Gralien Report Podcast have written to me sharing similar stories. One woman described having a number of vivid dreams in her lifetime that appeared far more “real” than the average dream, and often where she had been cast as a character in some real-world scenario she did not understand. Upon awaking, she would often find that very similar events–often tragedies–had seemed to have occurred elsewhere in the world. Why, if there was no way she could help or prevent these occurrences, was she plagued with such dreams? Was there truly any kind of connection between the dreams she had, and the events she would often learn about in the news afterward?

Lucid dreaming has become such a popular motif in our culture today that there are many “practitioners” that seek to do it almost on-demand, where they practice various methods of entering a lucid state while dreaming. BBC News recently reported on the popularity of the strange process, as well as how technologies are influencing the methods used to achieve it:

Once confined to a handful of niche groups, interest in lucid dreaming has grown in recent years, spurred on by a spate of innovations from smartphone apps to specialist eye masks, all promising the ability to influence our dreams.”A couple of years ago there were about four or five people organising meetings” says Mac Sweeney, a dentist and lucid dreaming expert from Islington, London. “Now there are closer to 50, and that’s in the capital alone.”

Also somewhat related to the Lucid Dreaming fad is the more unsettling phenomenon known as sleep paralysis, where an individual entering REM sleep becomes paralyzed through natural processes aimed at preventing the body from moving while vivid dreams occur. Sometimes the same chemical processes within the body that are underlying the paralysis phenomenon can occur at other times, however, the most peculiar (and frightening) resulting in an individual who enters a waking state, but is unable to move. There are also a variety of hallucinatory experiences that may occur during this time as well, hence leading to a state where the individual may perceive strange activity that occurs immediately around them, and which is rather ghostly in nature.

Another of my listeners recently shared an experience with me where he had been visited by three entities, one of which had apparently been a aged-looking female with short white hair and frightening white eyes. The female being crawled onto his chest while the other two held his arms down (though he was paralyzed already), and she began to whisper things into his ear. At one point, she even advised that “praying wouldn’t help,” despite the fact that he was an atheist! The being also tried to kiss him, and once he eventually came out of the paralysis, he still was able to see the “entities,” which walked out the door into another room. Shocked and terrified after this experience, he then opened his window, where he claimed to have seen three bluish colored orbs floating outside; upon witnessing this, he passed out and collapsed onto the floor, where he awoke again three hours later. When he came out of the bedroom, his brother, who had been up for several hours, claimed that he had seen what looked like a shadow exit the room several hours before… had his brother witnessed some physical aspect of the creepy manifestations that “attacked” him?

It is difficult to say whether the sleep paralysis phenomenon, or that of lucid dreaming itself, is entirely spiritual in nature. My personal view is that they are natural phenomenon for the most part, but that there are a number of factors here which may be conducive to altered states of consciousness, where the mind is thus made more “open” to the influence of strange phenomenon. Thus, while many will recall having experiences that are obviously natural and even mundane during their lucid dreaming or sleep paralysis episodes, there are others who will describe far more involved and frightening occurrences, too. The trouble, of course, is trying to draw the correct distinctions between the two in either case, and learn from them scientifically. After all, how, exactly, does one quantify or validate a frightening encounter of the otherworldly variety that may occur while the “victim” isn’t fully awake?

TAGS: ghost, lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis

http://dailygrail.com/ Red Pill Junkie

After reading Castañeda’s books in my tweens, I decided that I wanted to experience what he called ‘the art of dreaming.’ And to my utter surprise, I was successful!

The most difficult part is maintaining the ‘lucid’ state without slipping into conscious-less normal dream. Castañeda’s advice to repeatedly look at the palm of your hand was useful up to a point. Despite my efforts, I was never able to retain lucidity for more than a few moments.

The most strangest occurrences however, is when you dream yourself in your own bedroom. Then it’s REALLY difficult to ascertain whether you’re really dreaming or awake. Is that a preliminary state to go to the next level –and OOBE?
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_AV4QUUPLKA5DQYQ2JPWM2FGHJQ Alan Borky

Micah were you at all suspicion of the BBC guy’s use of the word ‘craze’ in relation to lucid dreaming – or is it just me?

I’m intrigued by the guy with the hag on his chest seeing her and her chums depart only to leave behind blue orbs.

I tried to reach me brother via lucid dreaming when he started working in the Lake District but ended up swept elsewhere to find myself observing these fascinating super intelligent spiders. One of them spotted me though and suddenly two of them were hurtling at me through the air. I had the sense I was about to die but something yanked me out there and I now found myself madly scrambling across the bed to get as far away as possible from the translucent ‘screen’ hanging in the air which the two of them went splat against.

For several minutes I stood there dripping in sweat shaking like a leaf watching their uncomfortably large technicolour outlines seemingly printed on the very air itself cycling through a series of colours in the manner of an afterimage until they gradually faded away.

I may’ve actually got pretty close to me brother though because when I described the odd architecture I’d been moving through he reckoned I was describing the ceiling of the corridor outside his room.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_AV4QUUPLKA5DQYQ2JPWM2FGHJQ Alan Borky

RPJ in my experience dreaming you’re in your bedroom’s usually significant (in the likes of Carlo Ginzburg’s The Night Battles it often signifies – especially combined with paralysis – the onset of an OOBE…as well as the odd orgy or two).

A mate of mine screamed the house down after a bedroom dream but couldn’t understand why?

I made her go through the details and it turned out she started screaming the moment she entered the bedroom via the outside wall on the second floor instead of the door!

My own particular ‘inexplicable’ screamfest happened in my late teens early twenties when I noticed a steaming cup of coffee beside me. Turning towards it I thought that’s odd I don’t drink coffee then suddenly struck by how incredibly vivid and detailed it was I started shrieking “It’s too real! It’s too real!” and only stopped when the whole household rushed in to shake me awake.
http://dailygrail.com/ Red Pill Junkie

Fascinating. Thanks for sharing, and I hope I get a second chance at it
http://dailygrail.com/ Red Pill Junkie

Exactly. Because, personally, the question we should be asking ourselves is this:

Are some elements in some of our dreams coming from a source independent of our own subconscious?

And if we answer Yes, then a whole world of possibilities opens up that would make Chris Nolan drool
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=689491676 John Lyes

It may be that the dream state is actually another sense of reality, an amalgam of this world and another state of being where an alternate reality is played out to either cause or solve problems with this reality.
http://mindofmisterpold.wordpress.com/ Misterpold

It is alarming to have bedroom dreams. I had one when I was 18. I heard the phone ringing in the other room in the middle of the night and got up to answer it. But when I reached for it, my hand went straight through. Then I looked back through the open door into my bedroom and saw myself in the bed sleeping! I went in and started yelling at myself to wake up, which I finally did. Quite a strange experience.
http://dailygrail.com/ Red Pill Junkie

Thanks for sharing. It really makes you wonder what would happen if you calmed yourself and wander about the house.
Holeg

I am a 23 year old Male from Western Australia, I often have very intense Lucid dreams, which is odd coz im such a light sleeper, often wake several times a night. Over the last 24 months my dreams have gotten much more lucid and vivid than before and I rather enjoy it. They tend to always centre around very adrenalin fueled situations. I at times become aware I am dreaming, sometimes I am questionable as to whether I am dreaming so i am inhibited in acting abnormal for fear I am actually awake. It seems once u start lucid dreaming it naturally becomes more common and frequent.
Espinoza Ruben81

I’ll always will remember attempting to walk though a wall, it was a feeling of falling back and then being on the other side.
http://dailygrail.com/ Red Pill Junkie

Do you play a lot of videogames?

No, I’m not joking this time. Some people think there might be a correlation.
B

I have had lucid dreams all my life and my brother has also. I quite enjoy them and find that it is hardest to stay in the dream when you become excited about your lucidity and accidentally wake yourself. One experience I had however was quite unlike any other I have ever experienced.

I woke in the night and found that I couldn’t move. Having heard of the sleep paralysis phenomenon I stayed relatively calm but found it to be very uncomfortable. I started trying to get up with all of my power and started to hear a very loud ripping sound. I finally sat up and got out of bed. I looked at the bed and saw myself lying there next to my fiance. I thought “awesome I am lucid dreaming” and walked down the hall to check my cell phone. I have found that trying to use a cell phone in a lucid dream is very confusing and quite difficult for some reason. This time, however, it was quite easy and I proceeded to dial my brother. I thought better of it right before sending the call through because I have accidentally sleep dialed people in the past and it was quite embarrassing to hear of my nonsensical late night babble the next day.

In any case I decided to go flying, something that I find very entertaining while lucid dreaming, and proceeded to fly about the city and mountains that surrounded the area I lived in (Denver, Colorado). It was weird because it was night and there was little going on. Also, unlike prior dreams everything was exactly as it was in real life. I could even read the freeway signs! Eventually I flew to my home town and tried to see if I could meet up with my brother in the “dream” and was unsuccessful.

The really crazy part was that one of my dogs, who shares the bed with my fiance and I, roused and woke me while I was several hundred miles away in the “dream”. At that moment I felt myself pulled, instantaneously, back into my body and found myself back in my bedroom fully awake.

I am convinced that it was an OOBE and tried to train myself to do it again after that for a few months with no success. I finally quit trying when I had repeated experiences of sleep paralysis where I could swear that some unseen entity was in the room with me and the bed was moving. It totally freaked me out and I haven’t tried it since.
http://dailygrail.com/ Red Pill Junkie

Castañeda remained controversial to the end. And the fact that he died of cancer and the way he handled the inner circle of women around him proves most of what he wrote was fiction.

But, so what? I say. I also know Star Wars is also fiction, but that doesn’t negate the potency of its message, of the resonance it has with numerous mythical archetypes

If one is smart enough to sort the wheat from the chaff, there’s a lot of useful wisdom in Castañeda’s books.

Also, I read Teachings of Don Juan at a point of my life when I really needed it. The part about ‘a path with heart’ gave me a lot of comfort
http://dailygrail.com/ Red Pill Junkie

Like gravity pulling you out from your stomach? I know the feeling.
http://dailygrail.com/ Red Pill Junkie

I have often wondered if some of our dreams might be a glimpse of the actual lives of those copies of ourselves living in another level of the Multiverse.
Koni490

Over the years I’ve had several episodes of sleep paralysis. They always start as a bad dream. In the middle of the dream I seem to be aware it’s just a dream and then I try to wake myself up from the dream. That’s when I have sleep paralysis which is more frighting than the nightmare, because unlike most people with sleep paralysis who are able to open their eyes. I can’t. I feel like I am traped in a dead body. I am aware of what’s going on but I cannot open my eyes or move my body or even yell. When I finally wake up, my heart is pounding and I’m sweating bullets.
http://dailygrail.com/ Red Pill Junkie

I wish there was some sort of mantra or meditation technique one could learn to ease the fear.

Or maybe we should all recite “Fear is the mind killer…”
http://dailygrail.com/ Red Pill Junkie

Ok, time for shameless plug:

Daily Grail publishing recently edited Lucid Dreaming: Accessing Your Inner Virtual Realities, by Paul & Charla Deveraux. It’s a book which shows techniques to reach and enhance the lucid stateNow, the first obvious disclaimer is that this book was published by Greg Taylor, my dear Commander-in-chief at The Daily Grail.And the second is that I personally haven’t had the chance to read the book myself. So I can only endorse the book on the basis that knowing as I know Greg, he wouldn’t put his name on material not worth reading Best of lucks in your lucid endeavors.
lee-ann / aka cosmic girl

The strangest things happen to me at night, well compared to other stories mine aint that grand but still its rather unsettling to me, i have strange dreams like: i dream my dog has 7 puppies on sunday morning infront of my front door, sunday morning i awake and my dog has had 7 puppies in the yard, i dream about turtles the next day i find 2 ( i live on a farm in kzn) give them to my son as pets then a few hours later they are gone, i awake at night and my mind is racing, thinking of so many things, then in the morning i wake up and wonder did i realy wake up in the night? was me having telephone conversations with friends a dream or did i really do that. i have the same recurring dream of my brother for a week then he is brutally murdered, sometimes i just know things that i simply cant explain, am i psychic or is someone / something sending me subconscious messages, ???? i know about lucid dreaming i practice it regularly, i started controlling things in my dreams years ago and now its just breathtaking. if anyone out there wants to find out whats really happenning to them at night as badly as i do, email me on: harmzenl@gmail.com or call me on : 072 228 9006
Jimbob

I have sleep paralysis every so often and i fond it ends basically the same way for me. Im lying in my bed on the verg of going into a lucid dream and all of a sudden out of the corner of my eye i see a dark shadow forming at the top corner of my bedroom door way. Then i try to sit up and it doesnt work. And all of a sudden the shadow gets sucked out of my room theough the doorway and im able bodied again. Its fucked up
j skinner

When I was in my early 20′s I decided to take up lucid dreaming. At the time I had already realized that it was easier to gain control when you weren’t that tired, like after a long nights sleep you lay there and go back to sleep when you don’t need it. I had recently started a job that gave me a better schedule for sleep that would let me try this more often when I didn’t necessarily need the sleep. Tenuous, of course and easy to wake, so I wanted to refine my skills. I bought a few books and found the most helpful method was the Senoi tribe traditions. It was actually much easier than I’d thought to get efficient at it with their methods in mind. Achieving awareness wasn’t difficult, and through a bit of practice staying asleep after the achieving became fairly easy as well. Then came the time to try to weave content and actions, and this was much more problematic. I found the flying dream quite easy and normally I would just fall into that. I would try to move myself down into a house, and couldn’t do it. I would try to land and walk, couldn’t do it. I would try to conjur a room or another person, couldn’t do it.

I was confused, I had managed all of these things in the past, though without as much control over things after I had conjured the environment, why now that I had refined that aspect was I less able to do the actual conjuring? I had never considered the possibility that I was being purposely held back. This idea
actually didn’t make me curious or scared, it pissed me off. I might have too big an ego for my own good, but I thought “nothing and nobody is going to stop me from doing with my own mind what the hell I want to do, I will f-ing destroy them”.

With this in mind I embarked on a year long quest to gain complete control of my dreams and eventually managed it to a less than desired degree but much better than I’d been having. After a few dozen sessions of enjoyable experiences, some sexual, some conversational with fictional characters from my imagination or books I’d read.. (A great one with a character named Kruppe from the Malazan tales of the Fallen, he was a dream walker in the book!) the night finally came for a confrontation with something I couldn’t quite explain.

I had become aware while flying, which was normal. It would normally take what seemed like a few minutes for the scenes around me to refine enough to see details, normally until then things were quite blurry and shifty. This time however, as soon as I felt aware of the dream, everything was crystal clear. I was over a desert like landscape, moving slowly, almost floating on the wind and I could feel a presence there next to me. I could sense it, and it was not friendly. I wouldn’t say malevolent at this point, but almost a feeling of I was its charge, it was in control and I was a follower. At first I wasn’t really bothered by this. I kept straining to turn back and forth so that I could see what this presense was, but wherever I would look I would see nothing. Also my sense of where it was seemed to change as I would look for it, as though it were darting out of my sight deliberately. So I just acquiesced and went along for the ride.

Soon the scene below began to change from sparse desert to the beginning of a forest. Immediately, from a deep place in my bones I felt I did not want anything to do with that forest. I was repelled and disgusted with the idea, less fear than an outrage or revulsion to it. I began to try to slow myself, but I continued on, just as slowly though, so I had some time and didn’t panic yet. I again tried to see the entity, to no avail. I then began to try to speak with it, saying I had no intention of going there, why did it want to go there? I felt nothing in reply but was able to finally see a blurred smudge in the air where I felt it was flying. Looking at it finally, I felt the same feeling toward it as I did the forest still coming up below. I tried again to slow but couldn’t, I tried to veer sideways but failed. I then yelled at the entity, “I will not go there, if you force me I will kick the shit out of you!” I was less than cordial, again, doing this for so long had perhaps grown my ego a bit. Normally I was unstoppable in this state so fear had never seeped in before. Now though, fear was there, but my reaction to it was violent rather than timid and I think this is due to my overall feeling of dominance over this state.

I then began trying to reweave the scene below into something other than the forest. Concentrating as hard as I could to visualize my home, my street below me. All the while yelling threats and obscenities to my companion, who had never communicated anything back at all. As I began to descend toward the trees, failing to get a rise from the entity or change the scene below I inwardly began to scream. I knew that I had failed and whatever it was about this place I didn’t want any part of was about to become my world. Just as the leaves of the treetops became clear enough to see individual leaves and branches, the thing next to me let out a high-pitched wail. I then awoke in my bed, drenched in sweat, with dry mouth and a pounding headache.

As was the Senoi tradition, I immediately picked up my pencil and paper next to the bed and scribbled everything down that I could recall. This wasn’t difficult, because while normally the more you move around physically the more you lose the tendrils of a dream, this experience was crystal clear, and fresh in my mind. I haven’t ever really forgotten any of it, and if I sit and think on the entity or the forest too overlong I get almost naseous and a bit nervous. I don’t really know what to make of any of it honestly. I have listened to nearly the entire back catalogue of shows, and been an avid listener for about a year. I was always interested in this sort of thing before as well, and had read on the subject alot over the years, but my experience just doesn’t fit up with anything else I have read or heard. I don’t know what would have happened if the entity had achieved its goal, and I’m not completely certain that the entire thing wasn’t my own creation and not an entity at all.

I did quit practising for quite a while after this happened, but eventually started again. About a year or so went by with no repeat of this ordeal. I then met my future wife, bought a house, got married, had a baby, etc. and never really had the time or concentration necessary to practice lucid dreaming. I remained that way for over a decade, but the last three years have seen a divorce and my kid is getting older and I now find I have the time again to do this, I just haven’t found the courage yet to start.

Mysterious Universe