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A few days ago, I was lying in bed before school, hitting snooze on my alarm as I always do. It just so happened that I was in the middle of a REM cycle as well. I was still pretty tired, and I figured that I might as well try to do a WILD. What happened next was a great realization for me and I hope that the power of it can help you as well.
I laid down, and started to do the typical relaxation exercises before WILD. I wasn’t getting very far because of how unfocused I was, so I decided to try another form of WILD. I told myself that I would get up in 5 minutes and do a reality check. I laid there, waited, then got up and looked at the clock. It said 7:26. Disappointed, I decided to get up. I went to laundry room, and there was a giant pile of socks, about three feet tall. I was happy because I had been running short of socks. I went over and picked a pair up, and then started getting ready for the rest of the day.
Then I woke up for real. I looked at the clock, and it said 7:28. I realized that I had just effortlessly performed a successful transfer of consciousness from my normal waking state to the dream state. The reason I hadn’t realized it was a dream was due to what I have now realized to be my main stumbling block:
I never truly realized that dreams are as real as reality while you’re dreaming them. I always figured that I would know a dream from reality in the back of my mind, even though I told myself that I knew that idea.
I now realize the true point of reality checks. Sure they filter into your dreams, and raise your level of awareness, but without the crucial component of not knowing whether or not this is truly reality, they fail. Without the awareness of reality’s subjective nature, the point of reality checks is completely wasted!
Another lesson that this experience taught me was that even if you tell yourself something, you might still have doubts. I thought that I had internalized the idea that dreams are your reality while dreaming, but this experience obviously says otherwise. Extending this to the rest of my dreaming practice has some interesting implications:
My subconscious still doesn’t believe what I do.
What then can you do to get your subconscious to agree with your beliefs?
Obtain personal experiences, and not just book knowledge. The subconscious is rather hard to convince unless you seriously brainwash it with lots of hypnosis and affirmations. The subconscious likes to use personal experiences for forming beliefs. In my case, I’ve read many books and other material about lucid dreaming and related topics, but I still need to personally experience something to really “know” it. As Monroe said, before you experience something, the best you have is faith. After you try it for yourself, you have knowledge.
I guess that experience is still the best teacher.
-Hatter
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"Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life?"- Havelock Ellis:-)~Sean
It <i>is</a> a hard-hitting realization- and I mean that in a literal sense…to truly <i>realize</i> this and take it in is breathtaking. It makes me ask, How can this be? Why does the mind operate like this? And what implications does this have for the "other reality" I experience?
Sean, that quote is completely appropriate. It does make you wonder about life doesn't it. If I remember correctly, one of the main points of tibetan dream yoga was to realize when you're dead so that you can break the cycle of death/rebirth, and they accomplish this through meditation in lucid dreams.
Ben, it certainly is. I've always tried to grapple with it, but now it just hit me flat on. Life is certainly very awe inspiring, not to mention very comlpex…
-Hatter
Hatter, you're right about Tibetan dream yoga. There's a book called "The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep" that describes the meditation and dreaming techniques they use. The author talks about how the purpose of learning lucid dreaming is to teach ourselves how to "wake up to the illusion" in waking life the same way we learn to become conscious within our dreams.I'm enjoying your blog very much. I just found it recently and added it to my Links page because it's a great resource for people who want to learn more about the power of the mind.
Hey Kris,
I think I have the book you're referring to. If the author is Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche then I do. I found it very interesting, and I am currently reading a book about Yoga Nidra, which is the same idea, but specifically for sleep and achieving samadhi.
-Hatter
That's exactly the Tibetan dream book I was thinking of. :-) It's not my favorite lucid dreaming book but the Tibetan perspective and the level of technical detail was intriguing. There is a very good book called "Dreaming While Awake" by Arnold Mindell. He talks about awareness and how we need to move beyond the overlay of waking life to perceive what's beyond it, which he calls the Dreaming. It's quite a fascinating read for anyone interested in consciousness and/or lucid dreaming.
I have that one as well. The aboriginal perspective of reality is interesting, as the dreaming is supposedly the source of the reality that we live in, and our dreams are actually more real then our waking life. That's the mind twisting part.