As the year of 2007 is coming to a close, I thought I’d jump on the blogging bandwagon and do a post about what I consider my best content in the past year. Here’s what I deem the “Best of Dreaming to Infinity” for 2007:

A Beginner’s Introduction to Lucid Dreaming
Why You Need to Learn Lucid Dreaming
Supplement Aided Lucid Dream: SALD
How to Cure Insomnia
REM Graph with Explanation
Boxed Nirvana + Spiral Sweep
Schumann Resonance + Omniversal

So if you missed any of those, I’d recommend reading those particular posts out of any on the blog. In conclusion for the year of 2007:
I would like to thank everybody who’s visited the blog in the past year, especially those who have commented and shared their unique take on dreaming, the people who have tipped me off to new cool stuff, and all the people who continue to make dreaming as interesting as it is.

Here’s to a great upcoming year.

-Hatter

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A few days ago I was up late, and without any real clear idea of where it would lead, I took a picture of my hand with my cell phone. I set it as the background, and now whenever I open my phone, I remember to look at my hand to make sure they match. Over the past two nights (about 5 days after I first set it) this simple action has given me two low level lucid dreams. (Not by looking at my hands, simply by realizing it’s a dream) I have tried reality checks before, but never with this quick of success or even of effects. Given this could be coincidence, but it seems like a big one.

I believe the reason this worked is because I hit the sweet spot between strength of intention and attention to intention. I’ve done reality checks for months on end, with better and more thorough checks, more checks, as well as more frequently. I got results, but not nearly as quickly as this. I was too focused on the goal in the first instance, and in this one, it was just enough willpower to set it, but little enough to let it sit in my subconscious and grow.

This is all assuming it’s no coincidence of course. Either way, I think that using your cell phone’s background as a reminder for a reality check is a fairly good reminder.

-Hatter

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I found a very interesting site today, called Dream Bank. This is a site with an indexed, searchable, database of over 22000 dream reports. (6000 of which are written in German)

I am blown away by this site. The sheer amount of information at your fingertips is astounding. Want to research trends in dreamers over a certain age? Easy. Search for all of the dreams with a certain word? No Problem. With so many different categories to search through, one could really extract some interesting trends by analyzing it.

I’m going to play around with it, maybe I’ll uncover an interesting trend.

-Hatter

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I went through another round of shared dreaming attempts recently, with my high level lucid dreaming friend I mentioned in my previous article. While success eludes us for now, our attempts did produce some rather interesting results. Before I get into that though, here’s our “techniques” for sharing dreams:
Both picture the same environment and try to meet there.
Try to meet in the dream counterpart of our real world place of residence.
Stepping through a mirror with the intention of being where the other person is
Googling where the other person was to locate them.
That last one was my friend’s idea, I thought it was rather funny. While I failed to become lucid during the week or so of attempts we did, she was lucid every night, so we got to see potential issues and troubleshoot rather quickly. Here’s a brief synopsis of the interesting events:


In one of my non-lucid dreams, I was trying to board a train to get to my friend’s apartment. I was at a different location then where my house should be, and I was waiting for the train. However, whenever a train got close, something stopped me from boarding it. Lacking a ticket, a last minute change of destination, and the most blatant dream-fighting-my-intention block: The platform spinning around when I would get to the end where the train was.


My friend tried to google me. She said that it kept changing and she eventually lost me before she could leave to get me. I guess I was having a particularly turbulent dream that night. She also tried stepping through a mirror, but that she said that had the same result. She would lose me.


The closest we got to success was a dream in which I remembered getting up in my friends apartment. The physical place was unaltered, except there were two cots in the kitchen, one of which I was sleeping on, the other was also occupied. I remembered doing a few things in the apartment. My friend had a dream that night of me and another person waking in her apartment, and then walking to campus. It was a very interesting coincidence, the disappointing (or perhaps not, depending) problem was that our descriptions of the third person weren’t very similar.


I won’t go into the different conclusions you could draw about the person showing up differently to each of us. Your view on the source and reality of dreams will influence the various interpretations you draw. There are many, many, interpretations. The simplest, which is what I’m sticking with, is that we weren’t sharing a dream, and that it was coincidence. If I err on the side of failure, any success will stand out all the more.


The most interesting effect of these attempts was that my friend found that the more she tried to find me and to connect to my dream, the less and less control she had. This effect continued to increase over the week of our attempts, until she decided to quit after we both decided the experiment was having a negative impact on her own personal dreams as well as our shared attempts.


This result has big ramifications! It suggest that if you were to mix the dream consciousness of two people, you would get a kind of average of their awarenesses, instead of two separate consciousnesses in a shared environment. It also helps to outline what might be necessary for two people to share a dream: a like mind and a sort of connection (to avoid a jarringly different joined conscious) as well as relatively equal and high levels of lucidity.


I am looking forward to our next experiment.

-Hatter

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A little while ago I had a long conversation with one of my friends about lucid dreaming. She has what I termed “Transcendent Lucidity,” or complete awareness in every dream, as well as high levels of control. Enough lucidity to essentially life your life in dreams, and abandon waking reality. Upon my discussion with her however, I noticed a completely different point of view then the one I held and still somewhat hold. She thought it was selfish and sad to live your life in dreams. I argued that there’s nothing selfish nor sad about it, you can still live your normal life, as a normal person, or that even if you didn’t really function in daily life, who cares? It’s an intermission in between a lifetime of unlimited potential and another lifetime of the same.

How would being able to be completely lucid every night for as long as you want change the way you lived your life? Here’s a few that came up in that conversation:

Positives:

-It would give you anything you wanted every night
-it lasts as long as you want
-You wouldn’t have to worry about the normal waking life.
-You wouldn’t want expensive luxuries nearly as much, because you already have everything every night.

Negatives:

-Daily life becomes a drag after having achieved everything you ever wanted.
-You would be dysfunctional in waking life, as it would just be an interruption to dreams.
-It may feel like however long, but in reality it’s just like normal memory when you wake up. (The only thing is, there’s nobody to remind you of it, so it fades away until something does, or unless you write it down. I doubt anybody is going to write a lifetime down in a day)

Questions to ponder and discuss:

When you’re spending more conscious time in your dreams then your waking conscious, which one is your reality?
Is it selfish to spend your life dreaming?
Could you somehow spend that time in the dream with another person from waking reality? (effectively achieving a lifetime with another person)
(This sharing would allow you to discuss what happened with another person, improving your recall)

What’s your opinion on Transcendent Lucidity? I’d like to have a discussion with my readers on this topic, as more points of view will bring new avenues of thought and discussion. Leave a comment and let me know what you think!

-Hatter

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