I’ve done a lot of reading on dreams, “energy”, meditation, magic and more at various websites, particulairly this one and the Veritas Society. Combining this information, people’s testimonials and my personal experiance I’ve come to a few conclusions about dreams.
In general, dreams are perception turned inwards. That is, the parts of your brain that process physical sensory information, deconstruct it, interpret it and finally record it in memory (be it immediate, short or long term) work in reverse. Instead, your memories are dis-interpreted, reconstructed and deprocessed into (mostly) raw sensory information. Of course, this can’t just “disappear”, so it flows back in like it was real sensory information from your actual organs. This process allows for the literal perception of your memory.
Initially, it probably served to verify the accuracy of an organisms perceptive functions. Since if what you remembered did not return, more or less, the same then obviously something is the matter with your perception. Perhaps this is why young people tend to have far more nightmares, as their brain is still developing accurate perception. I know for myself, as I get older my perceptive abilities become stronger and I become more observant. Of course, in through eons of evolution it has become much more then that, a way to organise and interpret memories as we all know.
Now as for the practical applications of this. Well, if you know that dreaming is just the internalisation of perception, you can look at other similar things. Namely, we have meditiation and sythesis of perception (e.g. visualisation). I propose that one can use meditiation, and concentration in general, to induce a dream state while awake. Beyond this, one could develop the ability to overlay the dream state and real perception at any time. In other words, hallucinate at will, and after all isn’t visualisation a very weak form of this? I say it is.
Personally, I’ve tried to do this exact thing with respectable results. I believe one of the most promising uses of this techique will be in drawing and design. As such I’ve been trying to project circles and forms, then simply tracing them out. For example, I’ve managed to draw one circle thats about 18.5cm in diameter with no more then 3mm variation in any direction. This is an accuracy of 98.4%, and this was entirely freehand!
One thing I’ve noticed though, and perhaps this can be resolved with training, is in order to maintain the image (a glowing double lined red circle in this case) you can’t focus on where you are drawing. If you do this, you will focus on the act of drawing too much, losing the image. Rather, you must see the whole image and simply let the unconcious deal with the actual tracing. Just let it flow from the projected vision.
Of course, drawing is just one application of the waking dream state, I’m sure there are many more. For example, musicans can use it to compose pieces, designers can use it to choose fabrics, perfumers can use it to create new fragrances, chefs can use it to create new dishes, etc… These are all areas where such an ability is usually applied anyways, but the point here is to take advantage of the dream state and make it more realistic and powerful.
The practial training method should likely consist of training waking sensory sythesis in parallel to practicing lucid dreaming, then using intense meditation to bridge the two. After the connection is made, training should continue to reinforce it. Eventually, one should be able to imagine with good realism any sensory experiance they find useful.
I imagine there are dangers with such an ability as well. Perhaps if one develops it to great extent, then in old age it can go out of control inducing schizophenia. Then again, perhaps it will help prevent such loss of mental faculty. Personally, I think the perception of the many “energy” or “magic” forces, as so well documented by Veritas, is simply an example of such altered perception without the person realising it. Moreover, such self-deception could lead to criminal acts reminiscent of Charles Manson. Manson often spoke about how he created his own reality instead of conforming to this one. Of course, this is all speculation at this point, and like most things such an ability would be neither good nor bad, it’s all in how you use it.