From:
david.j.worrell@gmail.com
Before leaving the topic of dreaming again,
I realize there's one more important thing I could add.
It has to do with the actual nature of "awareness"
within lucid dreaming. I have said many times that
when I'm fully lucid inside a dream my self-awareness
feels basically the same as that of my waking self.
That's true, but not the entire truth. Something needs
to be added. When I would go lucid in dreaming there was,
especially in the beginning, also an element of extreme
excitement, an intensity, a feeling of being alertly engaged
in whatever scene was unfolding around me.
Lucid dreaming came with a sense of "what I am now doing is
incredible", so I must carefully pay attention to everything.
Keeping that in mind and revisiting my original statement,
my awareness when fully lucid in dreaming was usually more like
that of my waking self when intensely excited and deeply engaged.
My sense of self-awareness is lucid dreaming has most
often been more like my consciousness when I'm walking
around in a place like THIS:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/c5rdiszai1r2j2l/This.jpg?dl=0
There was often a feeling like I might need to pinch myself once
in a while to make sure I am not dreaming (which corresponds to
the sense while inside a dream of continually monitoring the
awareness that I AM cognizant of dreaming). It feels especially
strong when I come to some amazing place I do not know for the
very first time (it was the first time I'd been to the place
linked above), because then I have have to continually decide
exactly where I want to go amongst unfamiliar surroundings.
I have choices to make, and must stay alert to make them.
(I don't always make all the best choices. I discover this
sometimes after the fact by seeing photos of different areas
I neglected to explore while in a given location, and sometimes
I have to go back to the same general area again to cover
phenomena I missed before. But I always do the best I can to
make the best choices in the moment. And every time you go
back to a real place in the real world, while some things stay
the same, other things always change...)
At a minimum, in lucid dreaming, there was usually a strong
sense that I was doing something... unusual, and to some extent
that feeling remained even after doing LD hundreds of times,
because... that's really not all that many times compared to
how many times I've been fully awake in the waking world
(many thousands of times for 16 hours or more at a time).
Another factor is... when I first learned lucid dreaming,
I actually believed I was following the instructions of a
"man of power", who was teaching me the steps for
acquiring "power", and in the beginning I was following
his instructions as closely as possible. This imparted a
sense of mystery and excitement to lucid dreaming that
very well may have been above and beyond anything
the activity really warrants. It put me in hyper-vigilance.
So to say that I was merely in a heightened state of my
ordinary waking consciousness doesn't really do it justice.
Most of the time, in my earliest days of lucid dreaming
I was in a state of complete wide-eyed wonder, watching
everything around me like a hawk at all times, while at
the same time being careful to continually perform according
to the instructions I received.
I was on my toes to the extreme most of the time. So the feelings
often went well beyond those inherent in ordinary waking awareness.
Especially when you throw in that I WAS encountering some
pretty amazing dreaming scenes on a regular basis, and was
often intentionally doing things in them that are impossible in the
real world. The first few times I intentionally took off and flew
like Neo in the Matrix felt just as amazing and fun as the movie
makes it look. And the fact that you just look like some skinny,
bald-headed intellectual in the real world only makes it better,
because you realize no one will ever suspect that you are Neo.
Being fully aware that you are dreaming is one thing, but while
doing so to intentionally fly to Mars and fling yourself into a
volcano far larger than any on earth just for the sheer fun is another.
I regularly engaged in activities in dreaming such as diving off of
200 foot waterfalls. Many things I wouldn't and/or couldn't do in real life. The sense of self-awareness I had while doing these things wasn't
quite like my daily sense of self-awareness. Similar, yet... different,
because many of things I was doing CAN'T be done in the daily world.
Doing such things in full awareness in dreaming regularly imparts
a feeling of genuine awe. I experience similar feelings in real life
when I am in places like the one I linked above. So... much of the
time in dreaming, the 'awareness of daily world' which was always simultaneously present was also usually ramped up some by the
excitement and the novelty available in dreaming, and that's a
more accurate description of what my "awareness" is like within
lucid dreaming.
Unfortunately, a lot of people - people who haven't ever done
lucid dreaming - do not really get the difference between having
ordinary dreams that are fantastic and have lucid dreams that
are fantastic. And it is actually quite difficult to explain.
They seldom get that there's a HUGE difference between having an
ordinary dream that you're flying, and... while in a state of full
lucidity to DECIDE you are going to take off into the sky and
fly away like Superman, and then... intentionally, with
full volition to actively DO THAT. Those two things sound highly
similar, and yet in terms of experience they are totally different.
Completely different.
It is very difficult to explain the psychological import of acting
inside a dream with "awareness" and "volition" to people who
have not experienced lucid dreaming. However hard they try
to conceptually understand it, until they experience it and
perhaps even become somewhat good at it, they just will not
and cannot really fully get it.
Similarly, it is almost impossible to convey what it is like,
while dreaming with "awareness" and "volition", to at the same
time believe you are in the process of learning real "sorcery".
How weird that can get is virtually impossible to make other
people understand. I find that however carefully I explain it,
most simply cannot conceive of how deep that trip can go,
and how hard it is to come back and live in the real world
after taking such a trip. :)
Another way of saying that is: most people have no idea at all
how deep and far it's possible to take one's own DELUSIONS
in worlds of lucid dreaming, where one is limited only by one's
own imagination. Frankly, the scenes they created on Star Trek's
holodeck were usually somewhat unimaginative by comparison.
And anyone who just read all that who has NOT actually done lucid
dreaming many times themselves really still has no true concept
of what I just said. :) Sorry. You just don't.
The potential dangers psychological of lucid dreaming are just
as great, or possibly for many even greater, than its potential
benefits, in my opinion.
Another factor is that I didn't learn to do lucid dreaming until I
was an adult 28-29 years old. If I'd learned to do it when I was 10,
it might have seemed like something more normal to do.
But learning to do it only in adulthood, and in the context of
something like "sorcery" to boot gave it a sense of the unbelievable,
a feeling like WOW, this is beyond incredible. That feeling gradually
wore off over the decades, and yet even now, even though I know
better, a tiny bit of that feeling still remains every time I go lucid
in dreaming.
So why don't I still like doing it if it was so intense? Well, first off,
it wasn't ALL so intense; those are like... a few of the highlights.
Second, I did do this stuff like... hundreds of times before starting
to become... a little tired of it.
Third, dreaming was indeed somewhat tainted when I discovered
that the person who had taught me how to do it was to a large extent
simply a clever con artist.
And of course, the kicker: it just isn't real. It's like going to the movies. I don't want to go see Star Wars every day. Once every few years
is plenty. Or like going into the Star Trek holodeck. Sure, it can be programmed to simulate thousands of fantastic events, or... you can
just walk in there and see the bare walls before any program is run.
But you can't spend your whole life in the holodeck, because...
sticking with the Star Trek analogy, there's still a fucking REAL
universe out there to explore and THAT needs to be your focus
most of the time.
There are no consequences in dreaming. If you "die" you can just
wake up with another life, just like in a video game. The flip side is:
nothing you do in dreaming is OF CONSEQUENCE in reality.
You can be lord of time and space in lucid dreaming, but
when you wake up you're still a poor schmuck who barely
makes a living. In dreaming, nothing is real.
In the end that's the overriding factor, just as in Star Trek.
There's a real world out there to be explored, so large you are
lucky to see a fraction of it in your short life, and that needs
to be your focus, most of the time.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)
