Now never comes

[Taomeow]

I'm enjoying it too, Wayfarer... and thanks to all for thoughts and feelings shared! And, Michael, thanks for your "great truth!"

 

Here's what I meant by sleep-walking. I was learning how to lucid-dream at one point and since I had no one to teach me this particular skill in person, I read all I could on the subject (that's how I usually read when a subject interests me -- total immersion for a while, then let all the red -- um, black -- dust settle for a while... and then what settles usually contains what I need... alas, it often means the names of authors and titles of books have completely dissolved! ) --

 

so, what I gleaned from the best-presenting sources was that the way to learn to lucid-dream with intent that will make it possible to affect the waking reality from inside the dream is to become very aware of one's physicality and reality in the waking state. This seems to be the prerequisite, THE door that can help one take one's tangible reality into one's dream and back without losing touch with it, instead of drifting aimlessly in a dream world you can't call your own because you don't maintain a home there, have no lasting relationships there, and can't deliberately make things happen "here" by acting "there." So... there was this French guy who researched and then practiced and then taught lucid dreaming for a long time, and he suggested the following practice. Every time you pass through a door, any door -- another room, in or out the house, the bathroom, the classroom, the office, the supermarket, the car -- pause, touch the passage with your hand, feel your hand, feel the passage, feel your whole body -- and ask yourself a clear question:

"AM I DREAMING?.."

This helps one catch oneself "sleep-walking" through parts of his or her life... if not all of it... all the passages, changes, transformations... doors we don't notice... this is one technique, out of a few good ones, that teaches one to notice... and wake up. So then when you can, first and foremost, tell the difference between when you're dreaming and when you're awake, this makes you "more real" in BOTH states... for they are different realities and mustn't be de-differentiated unconscously. By the way, in one of Castaneda's books, he asserts that Don Juan taught him to remain conscious in his dreams by continuously looking at his hands with his mind's eye when going to sleep. Again this seems to be about taking one's physicality into the dream state in order to be able to consciously act there. (By the way, it is very difficult to do...)

 

So, basically, I meant that I touch doors and catch myself before I drift outta my body without noticing. If I do want to enter a space-time where the whole of my physical body can't follow, I at least try to make as much of it follow as I possibly can (e.g., the vital signs I mentioned -- they will match where my mind is taking my body, and I will be aware of it. More often, though, it's vice versa, i.e. my body can take my mind elsewhere in space-time... the smell of burning moxa does it to me every time, e.g. ...and a whole bunch of other physical things.)

[thelerner]

Developing a habit of touching doors as a lucid dream check, good idea. When I try to work on lucid dreaming I find I can't fall asleep. It seems to work best when I wake up extra early and fall back to sleep with a firm suggestion or listening to a hypnotic tape.

 

We should shift the lucid dreaming discussion to its own thread.

 

 

Michael