The Lucid Dreamer

@Leo Gura I hear you. I don’t like vaping things either, especially when it takes several hits and several seconds of holding your breath to get a breakthrough dose. I have a strange breathing problem where I almost constantly feel like I’m suffocating and have the constant urge to take a deep breath, exacerbated by anxiety(Not pulmonary; the doctor said it’s most likely a nerve injury in neck/upper vertebrae with a also a psychological element) so having to hold my breath for several seconds while coming up on something as intense as DMT is very very difficult. I wish you could just go to a psychedelic clinic to get it injected intravenously. *sigh* Maybe someday.

You might, if you saw your foot as a separate entity that is somehow a threat to your survival. Which, hey, sometimes your own foot can be a threat to your survival.

@Member Awakening transcends pragmatism. The purpose is Love, to remember your true identity as God and to bask in the full beauty of existence. A metaphysics of materialism will never give you that.

Sorry, I forgot to respond to this part. Consciousness being a “complex” system is a projection of the mind. Reality does not see anything as any more or less “complex” than anything else, and further, there isn’t even a cause and effect “system” or process that is taking place that could be complex to begin with. It is just infinity being itself, and the human brain is part of it. The only one who is deciding it is any more complex than anything else is you.

Then you don’t understand what Infinity means, and neither does Max Tegmark. There are no numbers crunching behind the scenes of reality. The mathematics that he believes is inherent to reality is projected post-hoc, and the reason he projects them is simply because he’s a mathematician. All problems look like a nail to a hammer, and all reality looks like a mathematical equation to a mathematician. It’s the way he sees the world. Really think about what a number is. Look around the room, and count how many separate objects you see. Is there anything in the universe, outside of your mind that decided that the actual number of separate objects in your room is X? Or did you draw the lines between these separate objects? How did you decide they were separate? Numbers are concepts. Period. Reality does not make any judgments about how many there is of anything within itself. It just is, and no symbols can ever encapsulate what “It” is. Infinity cannot be pinned down, because it’s Infinite! How can a finite equation ever encompass Infinity?

This is nonsense. Mathematics has no intrinsic meaning outside the conceptual egoic mind. Numbers and math were constructed by humans to help map out our world to aid in our survival, but all they can ever do is approximate, and this is simply because reality is Infinite. Mathematical equations are sets of symbols that we project onto reality. They are not objective things. Symbols can never fully encapsulate or directly represent Infinity. If you need me to explain why reality is infinite, I will gladly do so.

Donald Hoffman is an example of a stage orange/green materialist starting to see the writing on the wall, but who is still clinging to certain scientific dogma. He claims he thinks that consciousness is fundamental, but then turns around and says in order to confirm that, he should be able to create a mathematical model of consciousness. This is laughably naive. Is consciousness fundamental, or is mathematics? You can’t have it both ways. He doesn’t understand that mathematics arises out of consciousness. Consciousness does not arise out of mathematics.

Watch Dr. Steven Greer’s new documentary: Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind. It just came out in April and it will blow your mind.

Well I started Lucid dreaming spontaneously almost immediately after I began my formal meditation practice 5 years ago. I would have a lucid dream about 2 to 3 times a month just due to getting in the habit of mindfulness. It wasn’t until 2 years ago that I really started to get serious about trying to induce them purposefully. All I did was start a dream journal, and I started taking supplements. I basically started lucid dreaming 2-3 times a week almost immediately after starting to do those things. I would say that the supplements do about 70% of the work when it comes to inducing lucid dreams for me. Of course the technique is incredibly important too. The wake back to sleep method is pretty much the only way for me to do it. The biggest thing though I would say is to simply have the will to lucid dream. That alone will do wonders.

If you haven’t read this post already, here are some ideas. Though if you would enjoy these activities completely depends on whether or not you find it fascinating how well your sleeping brain can simulate waking reality. I personally find it to be mind blowing; it’s like virtual reality, but so much more mysterious. But perhaps most people might find these little types of experiments I do to be mundane.

You have some pretty intense meditation sessions, my dude! I’m jelly.

You’re too kind. It has been great discussing these things with you. Take your time; I ain’t goin’ anywhere.

The pleasure is all mine, @Inliytened1 . I’ve read many of your posts in the past even well before joining the forum and have always found your insights to be golden.

@Osaid Yes, I certainly do believe that your lucid dreams are a reflection of your subconscious and that you can learn things about yourself through them. I personally have only experienced sleep paralysis once in my life, so I can’t relate too much with this. I too have had dreams where I committed morally questionable acts. What I think this needs to teach us is that no matter how exceptionally moral we think we are, our mind is also capable of the atrocities that we hold in such contempt, if we had only had different conditioning as we were being brought up. So we should not judge other peoples actions so harshly. This definitely happens quite a bit to me, and it’s sort of annoying, haha. It’s like if I’m doing something in a dream, sometimes I’ll just have this thought come up in the back of my head that’s like “Hrm... what if something really scary happened just now.” And immediately just by thinking it, I bring it into manifestation. It’s like my mind will just sabotage itself just out of curiosity. I don’t understand it.

Wowy. Well it sounds like you’re a rare breed. To start that kind of questioning at age 11 is pretty remarkable. Hell, let’s be real, to have the degree of existential curiosity you have at all is entirely unusual, period. Seems the only place you can find people like that are on forums like this, and forums like this are incredibly scarce. Don’t know what kind of house hold you grew up in, but it doesn’t sound like there was too much stifling or demonization of existential curiosity and philosophy like in mine. Unlike you, I did not really start to inquire deeply into the nature of reality until I was 23, Up until that point, the notion of hell was so drilled into me, that I dared not question my faith. At least not too much. Growing up, I would have deep thoughts here and there and I would spot inconsistencies within my belief system, but if I ever raised a question to my parents, they would immediately shoot it down or would even become angry with me for asking. So I started to associate philosophical questioning with emotional punishment. Because of this, if anything I heard came into conflict with my belief system, I wouldn’t give it any credence; I would just immediately assume that that thing must be false, because it doesn’t line up with the “Word of GAWD.” It took being completely alone living in another state for a year in a half, away from any dogmatic influence from family or friends for me to finally be able to break free from that type of epistemological bondage. That was where I started studying all the science that I had been previously sheltered from. Ooh yeah, I’ve had dreams like that as well where I didn’t look the same. In fact, just the other night, I had a lucid dream where I looked in the mirror and I was a female. I woke up a little weirded out, haha. Ya know, I never did read his books. I know, shameful for someone who claims to be a lucid dreamer, haha. It’s on my to do list. I have done the experiment of looking at my hands though. In one dream, I was looked at my hand and I had like 7 fingers. I was like “Whoa, let me see if I can fix that.” So I flicked my hand, and it went down to 6 fingers. “Almost there.” I thought. I flicked my hand again to try to get to get it down to 5 but after I flicked it, I had like 10 fingers. All of which I could control individually. I was like “What in the actual Eff??” Haha Hoo boy! That’s a really complex topic that takes a bit of explaining. I’ll expound on some of it here, but I may have to save the rest for another thread. This is a thought experiment that can get you to start to fathom the immeasurability of reality: Okay, so imagine that you are facing a wall standing just a few feet away. Every second, you take a step towards the wall traversing half the distance of where you were standing and the wall. You keep doing this, taking a step half the distance, half the distance, half the distance. Forever getting closer to the wall, but never actually reaching it. The reason why this can happen is because distance and measurement are completely relative. The distance between your face and the screen you are looking at is the same as the distance between your face and the end of the universe. Another way to think about the immeasurability of reality is to think about the concept of shape. We have these concepts of shapes that we project onto the “Objects” we see in reality. For instance, we have a concept of a sphere that we use to make sense of the shape of the earth. Is the earth a sphere? Well sure, when you’re looking at it from outer space, it appears to be perfectly spherical. So from that vantage point, we say okay, this object lines up with our concept of a perfect sphere. But of course if you start to zoom in, you will start to see bumps on the surface, like mountains and valleys and canyons. So if we want to be more accurate, we have to come up with a new conceptual shape to correct for that change in perspective and account for all the slight details on the surface like mountains and such. But if you zoom in even more, you will start to see trees, and boulders and rocks and buildings and all these little finer details that further complicate the actual “shape” of the planet. We can then say, okay, now we have to come up with a new concept of a shape to make up for those details on the surface. But notice that you can just keep zooming in even more the find even finer details, like pebbles, grains of sand, molecules, atoms, quarks, and so on. At this point we should start to realize that this spherical “shape” that we originally thought was an inherent quality of the earth was not objective, but conceptual. There literally is no such thing as shape, outside of our conceptual framework. Further, there is no such thing as an “object” to even attach the concept of a shape to. Whenever you look at what you perceive to be a single object, you are looking at an apparent surface that has an unlimited amount of other surfaces that make it up. So is your hand a single object, or is it 5 fingers and a palm? Is it 5 fingers and a palm, or is it trillions of cells? Is it trillions of cells, or is it trillions upon trillions of molecules? Is it trillions upon trillions of molecules, or is it sextillions of atoms? Who’s to say how you’re supposed to conceptualize an “object?” So I do have these feelings sometimes, however, it feels like whenever I get these feelings that the universe immediately will try to do the exact opposite of what I’m anticipating. If I ever feel optimistic, I immediately become worried that something bad will happen just to slap down my expectations. I’m not saying that that’s actually what’s going on, it just feels that way. But because of this, I’ve kind of got in the habit of just trying to not have any expectations of the future at all and just take everything in stride. Just live in the moment and go with the flow, if you will. If I have no expectations, then I can’t be disappointed. That may sound a bit pessimistic, and maybe this has to do with something within me that I need to work on, but it’s just how I’ve been conditioned to conduct myself through my experiences. That’s great though that that happens for you in that way. Must be nice, haha.

No I meant lucid dreaming is more fun first hand, as opposed to hearing about it second hand. I think you might have misunderstood her comment, my guy.

What’s not allowed here?

Sounds like a plan to me, bro. I’ve done plenty of the talking to people experiments, I kinda want to try something a little more extravagant this time. I’ve not tried flying to the moon yet; something like that sounds cool. Could also try moving objects telekinesis style.

It’s far more fun to experience firsthand, I assure you.

Eh, it should be fine; Just throw in one of your lucid dreaming experiences in there just so we’re still technically on topic. Oh no, you’re good my guy; just wanted to make sure I understood the question. So the environment will keep going no matter how far I decide to go with new unique elements in each area. Not only that, but I will be able to go back to an area I had visited before(within the same dream)and everything will be the same as I had seen it when I was last there. So it feels like a preexisting, static environment, the way real life does. This is not always the case, mind you. Some dreams are more fluid and unstable than others, but most of them tend to have this quality of consistency.

It’s possible to some degree to tell how awake someone is based on what they say. Based on all the videos I’ve watched of Sadhguru, I gotta say I’m not really that impressed either. He’s a smart guy and all, but I definitely don’t think he has as deep of a grasp on the metaphysical nature of reality as Leo does. It doesn’t seem like he’s even as awake as Alan Watts. Then again, he doesn’t tend to get too metaphysical with his general audience. Maybe he could surprise me. Either way, it doesn’t matter. Caring about how awake Leo thinks someone is is just a distraction from doing the work. Just do the work if you want to see for yourself how awake it’s possible to become.

Expand the environment you mean? I’m sorry for the delay Galyna, My whole life has been a spiritual quest, but of course what you mean is when did I realize I was on the spiritual path. Well, like most US Americans, I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household where science and philosophy were demonized, and I was sheltered from any contradictory information. I eventually broke free from that dogma at the age of about 23 when I started to gain a deep fascination for science. I read dozens of science books and watched every science documentary I could find, which eventually led me to painfully give up my Christian beliefs. From there I was led into the religion of atheism and the “skeptic” community where I started listening to the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and of course: Sam Harris. For the next couple of years I was completely immersed in the topic of atheism vs religion and it led me to study the shit out of western philosophy. I read entire philosophy text books and listened to thousands of hours of lecture and debate. Eventually, Sam Harris finally managed to convince me to start a formal meditation practice. I really respected him, so I figured he must be on to something about it’s utility. I listened to his 26 minute guided meditation on his podcast, where he proceeded to blow my fucking mind. He got me to see that I had no real free will or agency underneath the phenomenal changes within my consciousness. He got me to realize that what I was, was not my ideas about myself, but that I was merely the thing that was observing my life play out. He got me to realize that I was Consciousness itself. This got me to start thinking about what consciousness was and how it could exist at all. So I started to become fascinated with consciousness at this point. Eventually I met someone who was able to get a hold of cannabis(dabs in this case). I finally decided to try cannabis at age 25. And when I did, my brain became supercharged into a philosophizing machine. My new insights about consciousness and the nature of the self mixed with my previous years of rigorous philosophical study made my mind go wild with existential insights while under the influence of this drug. This was when I started to realize that reality was something far more profound than I had ever previously thought, or had heard anyone else talk about. By this time, my mind was very philosophically charged, and philosophy was really all I thought about, so when I got Into these states induced by cannabis, I was able to deduce on my own that all of reality was made out of one substance in an infinite number of variations, that I was the universe conscious of itself(I called it ‘the universe’ at this point because I had a bias towards to term ‘God’), that reality must be absolutely infinite, and that I, as Consciousness, was going to live the life of every conscious creature that has existed does exist and will ever exist. I also had very deep insights about the relative nature of reality and that there could be no such thing as objective absolute measurement of anything. These, what I consider to be my first real mystical experiences, marked the beginning of my spiritual path 5 years ago. At this point, I had no idea that these truths had been known by humanity for well over 5000 years. I very naively thought I was on the edge of philosophy, and that no one had ever thought of these things before. Of course at this point I saw these insights as mere theories because I was so indoctrinated into believing that the scientific method as we know it today had a monopoly on truth. But at the same time I felt just about 100% certain that I was right, but I didn’t understand how I could know it so clearly without it being verified by science. I even got into really heated arguments with my best friend about these ideas(who was and still is a diehard atheist materialist) He would straight up yell at me “YOU CAN’T KNOW THAT” and I honestly didn’t know how to explain to him how I felt so certain about it. This put a lot of pressure on our friendship. Eventually I stumbled onto the likes of Alan Watts. I would listen to his lectures and hear him repeat back to me the very insights I had gained about the nature of reality, (albeit in a much more eloquent manner) and it absolutely blew my mind. I thought I was the only one! I felt so vindicated and validated. I was both ecstatic that I wasn’t alone and disappointed that I wasn’t the first to have these insights. This began my study into true spirituality, where I started to listen to many different spiritual teachers, opening up that string of recommended videos on YouTube that eventually led me to finding Leo. The rest is history. Since then I’ve had well over 100 psychedelic trips and several deep awakenings, which eventually led me to renounce my Atheist title. Sorry for the novel. When asked questions like that, I tend to want to go way in depth. That’s incredible. It’s insane how the mind can generate such complex and beautiful environments like that, it never ceases to blow my mind. Yes, tell me about as many dreams as you wish. And you can tell me how you began your spiritual quest as well if you like.

This personally has never happened to me, so I am no authority on the issue. The closest to that I’ve experienced is waking up from a dream and then going back to sleep and starting the dream where I had left off.

@Javfly33 It sounds like you yourself had an awakening in your dream, so it looks like it’s possible. Leo talks about an intense awakening experience that he had in a dream a few months ago. I think it’s on the blog. Well the trick is to start out the dream in control. Read my above comment to learn how to do that. I don’t really have any technique to gain control when you are inside a dream that you don’t already have control of. Now that you pose the question, I will be sure to experiment in the future.

The best method that I’ve found that works for me is what’s called the “wake back to sleep” method. The idea is to force yourself to wake up after around 6 or so hours of sleep, and stay awake for 30 minutes to an hour or just until you’re basically woken up. After you feel like you almost don’t want to sleep anymore, force yourself to go back to sleep. During the process of trying to get back to sleep, try to stay mindful of your visual field until you start to drift off. You should start to see images appear in your visual field as you enter into a hypnagogic state, and if all goes to plan, your mind should generate a physical environment right before your eyes and you should start to feel yourself being able to consciously control your body in the dream. The hard part after that is to not get too excited as to wake yourself up. Which can be very difficult, because the feeling of knowing that you are dreaming can feel so intriguing that it will overstimulate you. If you really want to get into lucid dreaming, something you have to start doing is keeping a dream journal. This is not optional. Whenever you wake up from a dream, lucid or not, right down what you can remember of the dream right away. This will exercise your minds ability to recall your dreams. I would also consider certain supplements. Melatonin, Huperzine-A, and Calea Zacatechichi extract are what I’ve found to be the most effective. Take Huperzine-A before you go to sleep at night, and then take the Melatonin and Calea Zacatechichi after you wake up after 6 hours and are getting ready to go back to sleep to attempt a Lucid dream. You can take the Calea Zacatechichi immediately after waking but I would say to take the melatonin 30 minutes before trying to go back to sleep. You need to give yourself time to wake up before taking the melatonin and then you need to give the melatonin time to kick in before attempting to go back to sleep. Another thing you need to start doing, (and I’m assuming or hoping that you already do this since you are on this forum,) is start practicing formal mindfulness meditation, and practicing simple mindfulness throughout the day. Get into the habit of being mindful throughout the day of the present moment and whatever you are sensing in your visual field. If you get into this habit in your waking life, this habit will carry over into your dreams, making you far more likely to go lucid while dreaming.