holy reality, after reading more of your struggles, it seems appropriate to try and explain how I dealt with this. Before I let the following two (point-form) quotes out, let me share my thoughts on them. First, the context is totally missing, and second, the point of view should be taken into account, which is also missing without more background on the author, date of publication etc. With all that in mind, Rudolf Steiner says: p74 Dreamers and fantastic people are as unfit for the path as superstitious-Most dangerous enemies on knowledge to higher worlds lurk in such fantastical reveries and superstitions. How I understand: it won’t be easy nor necessary to find ‘answers’ to these problems unless one has a true interest or pleasure in following any real path or sets of practices, which themselves develop the skills needed to get there and to manage.
Read the book The Wheel of Time by Robert Jorden. In that book ther is a dream world that “lucid dreamers” can enter. other people can only enter the world by mistake but only a few sec…
“How I understand: it won’t be easy nor necessary to find ‘answers’ to these problems unless one has a true interest or pleasure in following any real path or sets of practices, which themselves develop the skills needed to get there and to manage.”
The problem is following a path set of practices takes all my thinking away, it tells me what is real, it tells me what isn’t real, it’s all black an dwhite.
Like Zen buddhists hate lucid dreaming and hate astral projection, their goal is complete nothingness, they dismiss visions as meaningless hallucinations.
Tibetan monks seem to have a thing for lucid dreams and OBEs and such, however.
I hate organized religion and will not, at least the way I am now, sit down and blindly follow one.
If I did it’d be easy to say “OH MY GOD A LUCID DREAM, JESUS LOVES ME!!!” and think it’s some ultra super real religiuos thing… or something… but I mean… it could just be a fancy hallucination, nothing more… there could be no meaning, there could be lots of meaning.
I won’t find answers by letting a set of practices tell me what to think and what to do.
I’m fine with following well reputated meditation techniques, but adapting their beliefs about everything is not something I’d want to do, I want to find my own answers, and use other people’s opinions and experiences as a guide.
Maybe this will make what I’ve said more clear. A path or a set of practices is like an athlete who wants to enter the olympics. If you’re not in the olympics, it doesn’t matter, it’s just practice and qualifying. When you do make it, then worry about what’s real, since you’ll either get disqualified, wait for next season, or win gold and move forward.
OH ok i get it, yeah
holy reality, you talk about a rollercoaster ride in which I am very familiar with in my dreams. The description you gave of your rollercoaster, is almost exactly the same thing as what I often dream Im riding. and I seem to remember three old ladies, who were often in my dreams when I was younger. So many of the things you wrote about seem to have occured in my dreams too. Reading through your post I got chills because of the similarity between the both of our dreams. I have to admit I’m a little freaked out right now.
i’m gonna send you a PM.
Do you remember what color(s) the coaster was?
oh okay, here’s something else.
I had this dream where I was riding in a car with my subconscious and I was talking to it about meditation, I wanted it to let me enter sleep/trance at will, but it didn’t really understand, it told me I needed to overcome my fears and that it was going to make me and… well… it was really freaky looking… in black, kind of old and ugly, much like the 3 ladies were…
now… well, spiders proceeded and were in my dreams off and on the rest of the night… really really… just… weird stuff at one point, the man who played David Palmer (on 24) randomly showed up and yelled at me, pointed, said I need to go into the other room, and he started moprhing into a spider… I woke myself up… it was freaky.
I haven’t had many spider problems since then, other than feeling them biting me while stumbling through blackness, it was SP that I was feeling but it felt spider shaped, it kind of sucked but I tried to overcome it and woke up against my will… REM must hae been over.
So… I guess… this sort of relates to the element of needing to over come my fears that the man in the booth talked about.
The thing is, I know i need to overcome my fears, my subconscious doesn’t need to tell me that.
So… I don’t know, maybe it’s helping me in some wierd but mean way…
Overcoming fear is important
I’m curious what practice there is for that, maybe this is good for a new topic
all this talk about dream worlds reminds me of the anime series yumeria. i have been meaning to go to that place when i get lucid, but ive only been lucid once. but i will go there. maybe i’l make Moera my own private dream world…
that would be cool.
but has there been any actual shared dreaming? if so, how does that tie in to these theories about bream worlds and such??? from what i remember, shared dreaming is something that occurs with people that are physically close to each other irl, so if anyone has had a shared dream with someone far away, that would make it more acceptable that a dream world exists, right???
im confused…
meh, whatev. let me know when u have figured something out…
I have a few theories about this clandestine extra dimensional dream world of yours, but first I should tell you that I have had a dream about elevators in a hotel and I am an asian, althought I had the dream when I was a child. I had several dreams about these magical elevators and I remember very vivid strong sharp images from those dreams. I don’t fully comprehend the significance of these elevator dreams, and I haven’t quite mastered lucid dreaming yet. I sort of have insomnia and I fall asleep at inappropriate times during the day.
Anywho, these are my theories:
According the metaphysics and the rationality talked about in nihilism, everything isn’t real. In other words, there is no material substance to anything we have always believed to be reality. If anything is “real” the only thing that would be is the consciousness and this entire illusory universe is indeed confined within our minds the same way dreams are. However, in the “real” world, everything that ever happens to us is governed my our subconscious (what i believe to be the definition of God) and are forever dictated by this chunk of hard wiring. Getting along, in a dream, or rather a lucid dream, the dream world we experience is governed by consciously memorized expectations, fears, social taboos, and general human rationality.
Touching back on the “real” world, if you understand these metaphysical fundamental truths then you must also know that everyone you know only exists in your head in the first place, although it doesn’t change anything or make them any less “real” or unbound by the limitations your subconscious applies to them, there are an infinite number of viewpoints that exists in this mentally projected universe.
With these points established I can say that lucid dream conferencing or shared lucid dreams are very much a possibility even though it can never be proven by physical science and probably be proven impossible by normal physical science, but in the end metaphysics assures me that shared lucid dreams is possible.
My theory of the permanent dream world is that since humans first began lucid dreaming (the matter of time where or when the first lucid dream was had is regardless since time isn‘t real either), they managed to network their sleep patterns around the globe to sustain a single shared dream realm for a long time. As members to this realm grew the network may have achieved a primitive omniscient consciousness of its own (pure speculation) and provides grounds of protection against arbitrary abuse like controlling what you would think are dream characters but are actually other people sharing the lucid dream within a massive community of what could be hundreds of thousands of people. In any case, even if you did apply physical expectations on other dreamers, the portion of your conscious that is not completely lucid (as it is my belief that 100 percent lucidity is impossible) creates a copy of that person as a dream character that you can control.
What may be the most fun to think about is that since the creation of the physical universe there may be corporeal sentient beings in this universe or others that also go into states of consciousness that are apart from reality like dreaming but not necessarily sleeping. It is my personal belief that all computational neural aggregates have to “soft boot” or dream out of necessity for it to function or attempt to function at 100 percent efficiency. These other dreamers in the universe may also have founded dream empires consisting of trillions of trillions of other consciousness’ popping in and out of the past or future. Of course this is all just more romantic speculation. Never the less, if I may make a suggestion to any cooperating conferencing lucid dream buddies, next time you have a lucid dream try to attempt to find this extra permanent dream crossroads of the universe and post about whatever findings you discover.
If you want to hear me dribble on more about my singular and delusional perspectives on the subject you can message me on my AIM screen name: deimossaturn.
I am not an advanced lucid dreamer and since I began practicing I’ve only had three Lds and a handful of borderlines.