A different NATURE of the Dream - A Brand new experience

Beyond Dreaming
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This is the main reason I joined this site, ive been seriously researching lucid dreams for about a year and a half give or take, ive classified levels of lucidity, used different methods for gaining a lucid dream and investigated the IN-BETWEEN state, the phase between the sleeping dream and the waking dream. Ive realized the grand potential of dreaming. Of course there is much more to be done, knowing that just get me more excited!

Not long ago I had an out of the ordinary experience, after experiencing different kinds of lucidity, dreams which feel real and other that feel MORE than real, having hallucination and others I came across something new.
I felt I should reach out to see if anyone else experienced this. The experience itself is of the nature of the dream and not its content, it is hard to describe but I did my best, if anyone reading this can relate please let me know, if you are in need of clarifications or have your own opinions to add please go ahead.

I have a small group with two others where I share my lucids, im going to past from there clarifying as much as I can, since im doing this youll also get the entertaining chance of getting to see me obtaining self-conclusions as I write down the dream ^^
I was using a sleep yoga technique for this one which you do before going to bed and when waking in the middle of the night, its purpose is to draw awareness into the dream, keep awareness present.

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!! NEW NEW NEW NEW NEW !!

third night - using sleep yoga tech

a completely new experience regarding dreams! did sleep yoga tech and fell asleep. woke up in the middle of the night and as the tech goes, i did it again. something completely amazing happened ! all this time it was about becoming lucid, and while this is definitely a part of it, it was nothing i never really thought of. this is hard to explain, through the tech i became asleep but completely awake. if becoming lucid in a dream requires one to be dreaming but conscious then id say i was conscious but dreaming, it might be that state i believe which Bashar talks about, being always awake and always dreaming, as his people are, or at least a glimpse of it (thats the idea that came to me at the time) later i thought this could also be that state of being aware of the unconscious blackout stage which sleep yoga talks about. if you are in a dream and you know that youre awake = youre lucid dreaming if you are completely awake in the physical but you know you are dreaming = ?
i was completely awake in bed but had this definite feeling of the dream. i can only describe it as CLARITY, being clear.

wait theres more!
i laid there in that new unique feeling and went on dreaming. again i wouldnt know if to say i was lucid, in a way it feels like a different phenomenon, but i was conscious, i was but i was flowing with the dream. Mostly the overall feeling was that this whole dream felt clear. i could feel things very well, and see very good unlike when your lucidity is low, even though it was a bit low since i didnt fly off there. i even got to eat, first it was white rice, feeling every individual one of them, than some spaghetti with meat or was it chicken? While eating them i was astonished how real they felt, i was aware that my body did not need them, it didnt make me heavy as if i have a digestion system in my body. This made me think about the idea of not eating. i knew it was a dream and so i understood eating is meaningless, i wonder if this is the kind of feeling you get when you completely understand the dream within physical reality (the waking dream). And over all there was this unique feeling of clarity in the air. it was quite amazing. it was effortless but i could really see what’s going on, for example, you know how in dreams character disappear all of a sudden? you don’t realize it, only after you wake up and think back to the story line of the dream that you say “ohh wait, i think he might gone somewhere and there was someone else instead” or “he went somewhere i was alone” so i was with someone there and the character completely disappeared in front of my eyes, i was THERE i saw it happen i was conscious of it.

And another dream after that! still with that unique feeling.
there was a small car crash with fire and someone even blew her nose in a tissue and a friend of mine smeared it on my face xD oh yes, felt extremely realistic, i did the same on his face while he was driving so were even lol. And now that i think about it there was even another short dream after that one.

so what is this?
first of all i just want to say that im not going into the details of the dreams because they are basically just normal dreams it was this overall feeling that im trying to explain, but really i dont think i can, I believe it can only be completely understood by experiencing it. but while writing all this down i have come up with a way to explain it better. i saw everything much clearer and so this feeling of clarity, in other words my awareness was way high in the sky it slipped in the dream from that in between state i was in, but wait, usually we tie awareness to lucidity and consciousness, the more you are conscious the more you understand you are in a dream and thus gain more lucidity. as it is true that in the first dream i had some lucidity in hand, the other two were lucidity free, it was pretty much that high clarity stage, the dream was going on as it would as if i have no lucidity, i didnt actively choose anything or was aware it was a dream, the only difference was that overwhelming amount of clarity, i was aware of every little detail in the dream, WHILE i was in it, it didnt jump from one place to another blacking out parts of it, it was very fluid and full.

This brings to a dual path.

  1. The formula is wrong, high awareness does not equal more consciousness, the two are separate. you become lucid by heightening your conscious state, yet awareness is a completely different variable on its own, when you have more awareness (clarity) it gives you the ability to perceive that much amount of details. Clarity and awareness are different words for the same phenomenon.

  2. The formula is right. More awareness means more consciousness and vice versa, they are tied and intertwined together. Clarity is another phenomenon of its own…

The second one feels wrong while the first feels incomplete. Maybe bringing up the word clarity (even though its the best word i find to describe the sensation) brings about confusion.

Maybe we should ask the following questions instead:

  • can one have high awareness without having the same amount of lucidity at hand? Well, obviously after tonight’s discovery, that is possible = YES

  • can one become highly lucid without having an equally amount of awareness at hand? i would say NO, the more lucid you become the greater your awareness is. But wait, how can you be sure? Perhaps you are with high lucidity at hand but do not recognize it of yet since your awareness did not come about, this would mean they are two separate things.

We measure lucidity by the amount of action we can take when figuring out it is a dream and by the removal of the “fog” of unawareness. So conscious and awareness, or should we really measure it as WILL and AWARENESS which are the makeup of the CONSCIOUS being/state?
(x

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So what do you think?
There are two phenomenon, the first which happened when I was completely awake yet felt an incredible feeling of being in the dream, a kind of reverse lucidity. The second phenomenon was the one that followed into my dreams. Anyone who’s been through different levels of lucidity would know that as you up your lucidity there is this kind of “fog” that clears up, details become clearer as you make your way to feeling how real a dream can become.
The way people actually see in a normal every night dream (a none lucid low consciousness dream) can be compared to in some way to the way you see when your drunk, everything hazy, a bit unclear? This is the best example I can give for people who did not experience this.
It is when you explore different levels of lucidity that you find that out, when you get to objectively observe the dream. That being said you can say that every person normally have this fog vision in their dreams they just don’t know anything else so they don’t mind it, as you get lucid you have something as a comparison.
That is why I usually tied awareness with lucidity but in that experience my whole dream was amazingly clear in such a way that im not sure if to use the word awareness or clarity, and I was not lucid at all in some of them!

Ill stop here before I keep repeating what I already wrote.

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If I follow correctly, I think I can relate to what you’re saying. I haven’t necessarily experienced the same thing, but I’ve considered the separation of consciousness and awareness for some time now. I have issues with dissociation during waking life; I feel as though I’m conscious but not aware. During dreams, whether lucid or non-lucid, I feel as though I am aware but not conscious. In lucid dreams I have autonomy, but the general feeling and perception are as described. I’ve been wondering if I can use this as a way to bridge the gap between waking and dreaming reality, but unfortunately haven’t had much time as of late to devote to figuring this out. It’s actually a bit comforting to see someone else thinking about this. I’ve not encountered people before who talk about it.

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well. this is where the fun begins, and i like to have fun.

im not so sure were talking about the same things, but that doesnt mean we cant be of help to each other.
the bridge between dream and waking life does exist but it is much higher than your ambitions, to be always awake and always dreaming, the cessation of sleep and dream. this is a side effect of enlightenment.
there is this story about Buddha, it is said after his enlightenment he would walk around the markets with this radiant glow around him.
seeing this, one of the commoners approached him, asking: “are you a god?”
Buddha responded “no”
“then are you a man?” asked the commoner, yet Buddha’s respond was “no”
“then what are you?” asked the commoner.
to this Buddha responded “i am AWAKE”.

i personally dont think the two are separate, awareness is a compound of consciousness, the mere fact of being conscious includes one’s ability of being aware of the situation. the conclusion i got up there is that consciousness i built out of Awareness and Will.
that being said, i do believe i know what youre talking about and i dont think you need to reach enlightenment to sort it out (;
i would like it if you can give me specific examples. also i could help you more if you can tell me if youre practicing meditation and subjects as such.
feel free to PM me if you feel uncomfortable to write it here.

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I’m comfortable posting stuff here. Can you elaborate on what kind of examples you want?

I currently don’t practice meditation or anything of the sort. I’m in my last year of college and work two jobs and I haven’t found a way to incorporate stuff like that into my day, although I would love to be able to. When I was in high school, I got into lucid dreaming and basically devoted by entire existence to it. I did a lot of self hypnosis and dreamscape creation, but I never did much with conventional meditation. I’ve done a bit of dreamscape stuff recently because I’m working on creating a tulpa (in a purely psychological sense) of my dream guide.

Can you also expand a bit on what you mean by will? I’m not sure I follow what you’re saying about that.

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examples of waking life situations where you feel youre not aware, and examples of dream life situations, lucid or not, where you feel youre not conscious.
i think youre defining it in a certain way, an example will help me understand what you mean more because by definition when you are conscious you have awareness and when you are aware that means youre conscious. you can though have levels of awareness (or consciousness for that matter) being MORE aware or Less aware of yourself or your surroundings.
its like in dreams where you gain high lucidity, more awareness/consciousness of the realm, or perhaps, more awareness that this is inside you, that it is a dream, more awareness that it is bent to your WILL. once that happens you start experiencing the dream as “real” (i put quotation marks cause what we call real, is just a comparison to our waking reality/physicality in which we got so used to take for granted that it is the real thing, while labeling others non-physical things as “not real”. but this is closing in to a conversation of what reality actually is so ill put this aside for now ^^) as your waking physical life. you realize more awareness and suddenly it actually feels even MORE real than waking life.

so if it is about feeling more aware here and less aware there, it could be that you are less focused when awake?
but you tell me what you think of this so far.

this is also why i wanted to know if you have background in meditation or metaphysics, because this goes both ways, you can gradually increase your awareness of physical reality and thus experience it in a different way, this might get confusing for someone going through this at a certain point.
since you said you werent doing anything of that stuff im going to rule this out, probably are other ways of this happening but i think its unlikely…

WILL
such a great subject, taken for granted by most i think, not realizing the amazement of it. will power/ the will to act. i kind of made up a definition of it energy wise but im not sure how much this forum indulges such things.

as in relations to dreams… and this is my prospective.
lucidity (as in lucid dreams) equals being conscious in a dream, meaning:
lucidity = conscious
the same.
i define being conscious in a dream by two factors:
Awareness and Will

Awareness in the dream would mean the removal of the fog. when you start discovering different levels of lucidity (thus awareness) you find that the higher you go in those levels, the clearer it gets, your vision becomes sharper, the scenery very clear, i even saw shades of colors i never saw in waking reality.
after seeing this you realize that everyone’s ordinary regular dreams are very much coated in this fog of unawareness that slowly is removed when you become more and more lucid. the “ordinary” dreamers dont notice it only because they havent had the experience of heightening their level of lucidity, so they just assume this is the way its suppose to be, probably not even thinking of the possibility (not trying to be condescending, i believe this is just the way it is, i was there once myself).

Will in the dream will be the amount of change you are able to make, how malleable is the dream for you. even though you are lucid does not mean you can do anything, i often reached my hand in front of me while lucid attempting to conjure up/summon a weapon but nothing happened, how come!? im lucid, i know its a dream!
in a way its like bypassing the everyday mind, you can do crazy things but you have some limits that need to be crossed, since you cant just pull out your arm and manifest something in waking reality theres still a part of you thats used to that when youre sleeping. this is why they suggest the walking over a corner or opening a box technique expecting to find what you want there, it seems its easier for the mind to make sense of it.
so your Will will be the amount of action you can take in the dream, things you can create. and this goes hand in hand with lucidity, the more you have it the more you can extract your Will.

they both go together, supporting each other.

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Ah ok. Dissociation is kind of tricky for me to describe. Most of the time I feel as if I am not the one operating my body. I still have perception, which is why I consider myself conscious, but I’m very distant from any sort of actual awareness. My cognition is somewhere else entirely, but I’m present enough to interact and function with “reality.” Sometimes other “personas” (not like full MPD, but still kind of alters) are more present and it’s their mind doing stuff, but I still have my perception and my cognition is still present, just elsewhere. Sometimes things get all foggy like you described in dreams. I feel like my body isn’t mine and that nothing is real. It’s very disorienting and I just go on autopilot, so that’s why I say I’m conscious but not aware. My cognition is there, it just doesn’t really interact with anything. As for dreams, I don’t really have much cognition (I have had quite a few lucid dreams where I would consider myself “awake” as you described with the Buddha story) but I’m perceiving everything exceptionally. Here, there’s nothing really to do the interacting, unlike waking reality when nothing interacts.I’m a bit terrible at describing this stuff, so sorry if that made absolutely no sense. If you want to ask anything more specific feel free. I’ll try my best to answer.

And I follow what you’re saying about will now. Makes a lot of sense. I’d love to hear your “definition of it energy wise” if you’re willing to share. Always happy to indulge interesting perspectives :wink:

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what is it about your awareness that you have in dreams which you do not have, or as much, in waking? is it that you feel more clear minded in the dream?
i take it you do have full control over your body while awake, so these personas are more about internal mental procedures? internal thoughts?
what do the “personas” do when they are more in “control”, consider these might be other parts of yourself, so paying attention to what they do could be important.

you could be also handling more of your thoughts, giving more attention to your thoughts from overly addressing them, and by doing that in some way you transfer the attention from physical reality around causing that side effect of fogginess.
this could also be from a growing awareness of your thoughts in general.

this part will need explaining.

what do you think about what i said?
this is not the kind of experience i initially described happening to me, but in some way it might be similar to something else.

WILL in an energy sense, as far as ive come to experience it, is the fuel for one to act. in order to accomplish any task you need a certain amount of Will.
since everything is energy it seems funny to divide energy to “kinds of”, but if we do go that way, i would say that will is a kind of energy which amplifies all others, strengthening them. either that or that Will is the actual act when energies are powered up.

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Yeah so… that is a lot of reading, and unfortunately I tend to forget large areas the more I read, but I’ll contribute here where I can…

Firstly, I need to say that consciousness is a form of awareness, but awareness is subjective, wheras consciousness is not. They are not the same thing. That is what separates the two. You can be aware of your surroundings, but not conscious, or you can be aware of your own state, which is consciousness. If that makes sense.

If you simply knew more about me this would be easier to explain, but since you don’t, I’ll just do what I can to be brief.

I was born with a super-conscious mind. In so being, my thoughts and perceptions were consumed by themselves every waking moment. I am super aware of myself and state of mind and thoughts, but my awareness of the outside world is indicative of extreme dissociation and null-awareness. In a sense, I am very conscious and aware of myself, but I have zero awareness of the world around me.

This can be applied to your observation of lucid dreaming in a way. You may still be conscious of yourself in your dreams and not be lucid. This is something I have often, and pass off the dream as me being some form of deity-like entity simply visiting another reality. I maintain all control and “lucid-like abilities” that I would have if I was lucid, but I do not recognize the dream-state. To me, it is reality. That is a lack of awareness of my surroundings, but high consciousness (self-awareness), aswell as not being a lucid dream, as lucidity is defined directly as being aware that you’re walking in a dream world.

Awareness can take many forms, and is never truly a universal thing. I can be aware of myself, but not aware of my environment. Consciousness, is simply self-awareness.

In a sense… when dealing with lucid dreaming, both of them are required, but can be at different levels. The higher both of them are, the more efficient of lucidity you can obtain.

When high consciousness is present with no awareness, or high awareness with no consciousness, you get a result that we call “false lucid dream”.

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Great discussion here but I don’t wanna get into it, not into terminology because even though it is determined what is what we can see that every one of us can interpret it differently.

What I wanna discuss is this part you mention:

I believe you experienced what I experienced through WILD. Which techniques we used doesn’t matter because it seems that we experienced the same thing. I don’t see many dreamers talking about that exact part and that’s because they never experienced it.

Usually just before I enter lucid dream from the “in between state” I would experience this blackout but I see it just as a brains transition from waking state to a dream state and as we are aware up until that very moment we know that it actually happened because usually people lose awareness a lot before that point and they’re never aware of it and that’s why it’s hard for them to do WILD, for example…

Being able to maintain awareness up until that point and carry it on into the dream next second is what I believe made you have this great experience. Once when you are that much aware in a dream it’s not hard to be lucid or to remember a dream or more dreams in a row.

Being able to maintain that fine balance of awareness while falling asleep takes much practice but it’s definitely something that intrigues you into doing more and more of this stuff, hell, I had such dreams that just blew my mind and the funny thing is that it weren’t the dreams in which I could do the most crazy stuff that left me speechless upon awakening but the dreams that were the closest to a waking reality, dreams that seem closest to waking life were the dreams that made an impression because by experiencing this dual existence where one reality weren’t almost any different then the other, well that made me ask what is real or to better say what can be real…

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i feel like i should thank you all, i bow my head with gratitude, thank you :content:

the termonoligy is tricky here. super conscious you say? i probably wouldnt term it that way but lets leave those aside and ill just adress it through the way you explained it. Lumessence, it does sound like you have a similar experience to what Raissu is talking about.

this is interesting. on one hand i can relate, in the first dream i did have some awareness that this is a dream but in the other two following that one, i wasnt aware of the dream at all, but i can say it really was like waking life, some sort of another reality, so clear to seem just like waking reality.
which would make sense if i would have been lucid at the time, since the sensation of a dream being real does happen when your lucidity is high, but at that time i wasnt lucid at all, i didnt question the dream i just experienced it the way you experience waking life. guess you can put it that way.

on the other hand!
have you ever wondered that what you experienced could have actually be another reality?
i would say in my experience i knew they were dreams, but who knows what dreams are anyways?

Lumessence can you explain more about a “false lucid dream”?

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dB_fts, mind if i call you Dragon Ball?
i was waiting to have a conversation such as this with you. read some of your posts, by the way you write i understood we have some things in common.

YES! it really does not matter the technique you use, the point of it is to keep you aware through the transformation into the dream.
and Yes! what you say is very correct. please let me explain how i classify the In-Between state. this should probably be in another topic but heck! this conversations is way too interesting!

The IN-BETWEEN state
the in between state is the blackout state experienced.
this is a state we all go through when were falling asleep. i started calling it he Blackout stage/state since most of us do not experience it, we always find ourselves right inside the dream, but how did we get there? we were just laying in bed who knows how long ago?
so you see, its just like we blackout and our awareness pops back up when were already inside the dream.
being fascinated by that stage while exploring lucid dreams i would try to keep myself conscious, my mind busy, and figure out whats going on in that blackout stage.

it turns out, when you keep your awareness with you as you go to sleep you actually start seeing how your thoughts take form, molding into visual mind stuff (since you dont see with your eyes when dreaming).

if you ever experienced a lost of lucidity near waking up you might have noticed that the way you step back out of the dream and into the waking is done by the removement of your senses from the dream in a certain order and their reappearance in the waking state. you can say youre moving your senses from one place to another, or simply that is by the drawing of your consciousness from one plane of existence to another (but were not using terminologies in this topic!!).
that being said, the disappearance of senses is done in a certain order. your sight goes first, noticed a lot of times when you lose lucidity everything goes black but you can still feel your body as being present in the dream?
that is why researchers like Stephan Labarge recommend that if this happens, keep moving your body, even if you cant no longer see it does not mean your not still in the dream, by doing so you refocus your attention in your dream body and can reverse the process and stay in the dream.

going back to our initial point.
as you go through the blackout stage you can start seeing thoughts form but its still not clear, the senses move into the dream in the opposite order they disappear from it. if sight would go out first when you lose your lucidity then it would be the last to show up when you gain your entrance into the dream.
i had personal experiences where i would first feel my body running on the road but it was only later on that i actually saw the road and where im running.

from understanding the blackout stage came the change in name to the In-Between state.
the more you experience this you realize that his is a middle stage, the point between the waking and the dreaming.
yes, this is the place of weirdness, it is also the stage where SP comes into play, where you can “hallucinate”. it makes perfect sense since this is the point where the dream and the waking meld, where you are in both, not completely anchored in any of them. this is really a gate of sorts. and from this came its name.

youd be surprised how easy you can get there. getting to that point when you just go to bed might not be that easy but every time you wake up in the middle of the night youre practically somewhat in the stage already, it depends on how much sleepy you are or not (since that is how much you already anchored yourself in the waking reality or stayed in the hazy line in between), much like these times we wake up in the middle of the night and then go straight back to sleep in a matter of seconds, if you can Will yourself to remain focus, keep up your awareness, it is much easier to be aware of that state.

there was actually a research about that stage, they called it he “phase”. there is a video you can look up about it, i dont agree with most of their research but they did manage to prove how easily you can use this stage to become lucid.

so for closure about this subject. all of what i write is from my own experience, i really have no intention nor motive to lie about any of this.
like i said before i had an experience with this that i first felt myself running and then saw as the dream formed visually, entering the dream lucid. i also had another time where i actually found myself looking into, what you can call, picture frames where i choose to actually step into one of them which was like stepping into the dream by choice.
another example of an experience through the in-between i wrote roughly at the bottom of this page ld4all.com/forum/viewtopic.p … order=asc& &start=60

there is a lot of potential in this unexplored state, a gate that leads to many places i believe.

were you able to preform a WILD from a complete wakeful state? all the times i managed to WILD were when i woke up in the middle of the night and then undergone the technique to do WILD.

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to be honest there is another part to the experience i initially wrote in this topic which i left out.
ive been experiencing this other being a lot of the times when i found myself in the in between (also wrote about that being in the link i provided). most of the times i just feel like he’s siting on me and touching my back, and yes i somehow know its a male.
instead of getting creeped out i decided to see it as another part of my full self
(you can say higher self or sub conscious but i understand there are many parts of the self and i dont quite know what he is).
that night when i had the experience i wrote about, i decided to look at him when he appeared, it was frightening in some sense. i felt as if he was just horizontally lying on my back that night, i opened my eyes to look at it and i saw a figure which looked like me very statically lies with arms to his sides the way i described, it wasnt physical.
once i saw this i became very calm, knowing that it is a part of me and i just said “ohh so lets merge”. i felt as its body merged into mine and i became extremely calm leading to that point where i felt completely awake in the physical yet with a strong sense of the dream as i described. after that i fell asleep and the rest is as i wrote it.

i know each one of my posts is really long but this is part of my passion! i love this, i can only talk about it with enthusiasm! and i have a lot to say about it =D

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Ironically, you are speaking to someone that for the longest time was thoroughly convinced that these things i experienced were indeed alternate realities, or different levels of this one, and not just a part of my imagination. On some level I suppose I still do, but on another… This kind of control tends to make you question that belief… Unless I am some form of omnitransient transcendental god, I’m not so keen on the idea of that possibility any more.

This is called hypnogogia. And I believe everyone experiences the “black-out” state naturally, though I know it’s possible to see through it all the way into sleep. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the method called “WILD” or not. dB was talking about it. You may wish to research it, as it does what you’re talking about. A form of remaining conscious between being awake all the way into the dream-state nearly voidant of that black-out moment.

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Yes it’s hypnagogia generally when we talk about this experiences but this is strictly for before the dream but when you experience this mostly the same hallucinations after the dream it’s called hypnapompic state but it’s practically the same thing.

I have nothing against it, but if you are referring to dB those are my initials and FTS stands for f*uck the system :tongue:
I’m glad you are enjoying our talk :content:

I was too as many dreamers still do, neglecting this hypnagogic/hypnapompic state because as was looking at it just as a road that need’s to be crossed in order to get to the destination which was lucid dream but sometimes a road/trip is more important then the destination.

This in between state, somewhere I was writing this already is a place I use also for practice. To me it’s easy to achieve this state even when I lay in my bed at 10 or 11pm and just because of that I’m trying to learn more about it because to me it’s more achievable then the lucid dream itself. But when doing this later on I have better dream recall and it’s easier to achieve lucid dreams that way, it’s a way of preparing yourself before the lucid dream can occur.

Well, once when I woke up let’s say after 6 hours of sleep I consider that state wakeful state because I was awake so yes I did perform WILD from complete wakeful state but if you ask if I did it as first thing when laying in bed then no because that’s painful thing to do and time consuming thing to do and again very painful thing to do in a sense that biologically looking your brain goes through REM and NREM stages which I think you know about and that’s why you have so much more potential to become lucid later on because you are skipping some NREM cycles and REM cycle becomes longer and longer each our you sleep longer.

If you don’t have a complete picture about this REM thing go to wikipedia and search there, it’s very easy to understand and when you start living your nightly life by those rules of REM cycles then lucid dreaming becomes a lot easier.

I just wanna say few more words about hypnagogia and the POINT where we lose awareness and the next second become lucid. What I’ve experienced is that I was aware of myself completely until that point. Every time when I was approaching this point I would start to experience more and more intense body sensations, surely they were part of hypnagogic hallucinations but they are always very similar and that’s how I know that I will lose awareness in a short time and become lucid. I simply can not imagine how to go aware through that point. I believe that point is a point in time and space when we do what we call “fall asleep”. It must be that because it’s like you are literally shutting off and rebooting again in a dream or in waking life, depending in which reality you “grab” your awareness again…

You did very good here. Every fear you experiencing is in your mind, as I see it. I did have beautiful and horrifying experiences while being lucid but only because I wanted them to experience them as such. There is nothing good in running away from your fears, definitely not while in a dream, in place where as my signature says:

[center]"I’m the king of my own land.

Facing tempests of dust, I’ll fight until the end.

Creatures of my dreams raise up and dance with me!

Now and forever, I’m your king!"[/center]

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lumessence.
i’ve read your initial post at the link you provided. i want to read the rest of the replies before i say anything, but i already have a few points that might intrigue you.
just clarify a point for me, do you always have lucid dreams? every time you have a dream you have full control of it?

its a funny thing about what is “real”. this is why i dont believe in hallucinations, at least not in its negative sense. you see, society labeled the word “real” to that which is physical, if your seeing stuff that no one else cant see, then your hallucinating - thats not real, if you hear things that no one else can hear - hallucinating, not real. dreams are not real by that explanation as well, you go to sleep and come back to reality, the dream isnt real because it doesnt make sense, its rules are different from physical reality. THIS is the real life, not what goes in your head when you sleep.
this view is just untrue.
Tibetan teachings, sleep and dream yoga, has recognized for years that the physical life, physical reality is not so different from the dream, thus they understood there are but two, the sleeping dream and the waking dream (which is physical reality) - NOW lets go back to the definition of real.
if physical reality is just but a dream of a different nature, then what is real? society has based its explanation of real on to what is familiar to it, what if in reality we are multidimensional beings?
this is not a question i have the answer to, but its something you should consider, think over.
dreams are our thoughts visualized through the mind, but in fact i believe there is more to it, other realities?

one fact remains. The EXPERIENCE IS REAL!
whether we ride from one dream to another, the sleeping to waking, or not, the experience we have is what sticks with us.
there is an article on this very site about the potential of lucid dreaming with athletes, how training in the dream helped them preform in the waking, there is a surgeon i read of who would practice his surgeries in a lucid dream before preforming them in the waking dream to perfect them. the experience sticks, that is very much real.

yes i first came about the hypnagogia and hypnapompic terms in this site, i think i understand them since i had experiences of them but i might as well read more about them.

i might have not explained myself completely? yes, everyone goes through the blackout stage/ in between stage, and yes i have preformed WILD, which by successfully preforming WILD you go through the in-between state with awareness of it.
by saying you undergone a WILD you explicitly mean you went through the in-between stage with some awareness at least.
this is why i got a little confused by what you said dragon ball ( xD )

are you talking about the hypnagogia here? because the in-between is not just that, the hypnagogia is a part of it, yes, but it is not all that it is.
if you can get into the in-between state then going into a dream ( thus performing a WILD ) should be no problem. unless you mean you can get to the beginning of it perhaps? but not deep enough to its core?
cause first you say the quote above sounding like you can preform a WILD from just lying in bed (as in, not while waking up in the middle of the night), and then you say:

im going to need some clarification on this please

i wouldnt call it painful but i can see what you are talking about, when you experience your body shutting down?
it can be very uncomfortable, but if you can find it in yourself to be relaxed enough you would stop feeling this sort of “pain”. as for time consuming, this can also happen very quickly, enough to say, this takes practice and meditation, and is still not something i achieved myself. not the time part at least.

i also know about REM. i done quite “believe” in it. that is the part they say you have your dreams only in REM. i was able to have dreams not in REM stage, it was also laboratory proven that you do have dreams not in REM stage (they woke up the patients before they reached REM and asked them if they dreamed).
about having longer and much more detailed dreams in that stage… that can be true, but can also be countered by achieving WILD from point zero (;

but you see! the “fall asleep” point is the blackout point, which is the in-between state!
every time you WILD you reach a that point, blackout, then have a lucid dream?
if so then you probably havent went through the whole process yet. to me a WILD is when there is no stop, you fluidly go from the waking to the sleeping.
you can however find yourself in the in-between and fall asleep afterwards.

keep in mind the sensations you feel are probably energy fluctuations.

i experienced something on the same line. for a time i would wake up in the middle of the night and turn to my back (a position i usually dont fall asleep in) i would visualize myself in a dream aware that im lucid. i would know when to stop the visualization when i felt this “silent drop”, not literally as a movement, its hard to describe but it feels as if i experienced the actual change of my mind’s frequency. when i felt this i would turn my body and go to sleep knowing i will have a lucid dream because of this.

True, thank you. my tales of fears in dreams go a long way, something i will open a new topic about, suffice to say at a certain point i longed for nightmares…
there is no reason to live life in fear.

no Doubt no Fear, ever Conscious ever AWAKE

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BTW how much can you maintain your lucid dreams?

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Always lucid? no. Always have control? yes.

I’ve been naturally lucid dreaming my entire life. It comes and goes, and on average i have about 4 a month. They used to be quite extensive in length and maintanance, but nowadays I tend to just let it slip away without concern when it happens. I’ve not been that interested in maintaining simply because I find no need to, i guess…

You also do not need to explain/preech to me what is “real” and what is not, as apparently we share the same view on that regard. I don’t consider the physical world “the only real”. Real to me is experiences that affect you. Those that have an impact. That is all that matters.

I used to have strange frequent waking nightmares. During these times, there always seemed to be some strange creature crawling around on my bed, or trying to get in under my blankets. There have been times when it’s woken me and I’ve quickly smothered it with my blanket… Now… a hallucination in this situation - the blanket would simply fall to the bed unhindered… however… During these “hallucinations”, I would indeed smother something, and catch it inside my blanket. It would let out a strange weep as I crushed it, and it felt similar to deflating a basketball by force… How can you explain that phenomenon? As much as my own perceptions can be influenced to even touch via hallucinations, my own perceptions could not by any means prevent that blanket from just simply going straight to the ground. I was literrally pressing on it as it slowly crushed/deflated something under it, and it certainly was not air.

Additionally… I wanted to say that there definately is something within those moments between waking and sleep. Those are the times I am most sensitive and vulnerable. During my waking and sleeping moments i seem unaffected by anything. Fear, worry, etc. But during those specific times is when catastrophe seems to strike, such as these bizarre hallucinations that take on a physical form in the material world. But when i’m fully woken up and that state has faded, they too are gone.

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For me in between state in hypnagogic state but as I see it you are seeing then differently, the hypnagogic state and in between state but to me they are the same.

When it comes to performing the WILD I really believe by my experience that it’s useless to perform the WILD at the beginning of bed time because biologically we are not ready to enter REM sleep and yes I agree that we do dream in NREM sleep and yes I agree that we can have lucid dream in NREM sleep but I guess that can do people with a lot of practice, like lifetime of practice like buddhist monks and people on that road.

What I meant by painful here is this process of laying in bed waiting for something to happen when nothing happens, like when you are doing WILD at the beginning of bed time and you lay there for hour or even more and nothing happens, that I consider to be painful but the transition from waking state to dream state, the body shutting down I consider this to be very relaxing and really beautiful state to be in.

So I’m talking about knowing the process that your body goes through each and every night and using that information to your own advantage…

Like I said above I agree with you on this but it’s really useless unless you have the knowledge and the ability to do so, if not you are bound to use “REM logic” behind sleep cycles…

From my own experience I don’t believe that it’s possible to go from waking to dreaming state without loosing consciousness at any point. As I see it is that being conscious/aware as I was or as you were which helped us to notice that point of losing awareness, being aware of that point where we lose awareness is exactly the point of WILD technique, because again, as I see it we - brain needs to make some kind of transition from waking to dreaming state, something has to happen, it can’t just go fluidly without us noticing it, the fact is as I see it that we were lucid/aware/conscious enough exactly to see that we reached that point where brain makes the transition from waking to dreaming state.

It’s hard to explain my thoughts to be honest. I believe that there is more to dreams then we see, but I also believe that we are bound to some rules because of the body we are in and sleep cycles are one of those rules generally looking and actually that helps us. There is some kind of dynamic in all of this.

In all of my which I consider successful attempts of WILD I had to loose consciousness in that point, deliberately, because if I would hold on to this awareness that I had then I couldn’t fall asleep, that for me means lose consciousness in that point which means having lucid dreams. If I would hold on to awareness I would just find myself awake and not able to sleep any longer…

The logic behind this is that you go to sleep, fall asleep and have dreams. Right?! And that point I see as falling asleep.

We can discuss this on and on but keep in mind that this is very subjective topic and really things might work for me very differently then work for you, I’ve come to conclusion by reading a lot that there is a little bit of a general truth when it comes to dreams.

Depends, but to be honest, the longest lucid dreams weren’t the best ones… There are a lot of variables that makes a lucid dream a good or meaningful lucid dream…
And to be even more honest :tongue: the best dream I had wasn’t the lucid one…

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It is possible. Actually… Though it’s not a normal transition, and at times I don’t even consider it actual sleep, so you may still be right.

All I know is that from my own experiences, I can do just this. I can lie down, and pull myself into a dream world without even going through the hypnogogic state. Voidant of the blackout period aswell. It isn’t a WILD. It’s something else, and may not even be classified as a type of method.

I’ve talked about this long ago on here, both on the forum and in chat i believe.
I have not done this for a very long time though. In the past, the way it would happen though, is that I would lie down, get comfortable, close my eyes, and flashes of images would immidately start appearing. They are very dark, black, and do not seem to have much definition. But through some concentration, I can begin making out these images into clear pictures, and I can almost see through the darkness within them. A bit more concentration and I can freeze one of these images, and actually “dive” into it. What follows is a place I can only describe as being a dream scene. It doesn’t play out like a dream, but it is an environment, and a world around me. This all happens in the matter of minutes, and at no time do i lose consciousness.

The interesting thing about this though, is that it is a very solid vivid dream world, but I’m also in a very very light sleep. Meaning if someone were to say my name from the other room I would still hear it, and it could wake me. There are times however that if i’m undisturbed, this strange projection leads into normal dreams, where instead of there being any blackout, the awareness just starts to fade, and in comes a normal sleep.

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Well it definitely isn’t the typical lucid dreaming experience, it seems as intense hypnagogic experience or the dreams that happen in NREM sleep but I don’t know honestly.

It’s just my experience and I’m not ignorant enough to say that this is how this work, that’s why I said:

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I am aware. I wasn’t shooting down what you said, as i recognize you were saying your experience. I was just adding my own experience aswell :content:

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:beer: