How do you "passively" observe HI?

I get what you mean. I see objects sometimes. What is strange is that if i concentrate hard enough and focus my eyes forward i start to see little red circles with a white middle with then a little red dot in the middle of the white. And they start to multiply but then disappear once they get bigger. This is probably nothing extraordinary but thought i’d mention it.

HI can also be seemingly random images that flash in your minds eye (or as if they are with the blobs and dots going to sleep) Eventually the image (like a face, or for me, I always see a pair of eyes at the onset of HI) will grow into a scene, which will begin to move. I’ve been amazed at how clear I can see these scenes lately, which is why I wake up. I get too excited over them!!!

Does it then after fading together turn into a dream in which you are lucid?

Yup, if all goes well. Thats what a WILD is.

Ahh never seen that. :razz: Ill be happy with a nice bit of SP. That would make my month. Once i can hit SP i know HI will come soon. And if i have the Old hag…who cares it might be frightening but still its an experience.

In my experience, HI happens before SP, but it gets more vivid and changes to actual images instead of light and blobs as time goes by.

Ok thnx for telling me ill watch out for it.

SP is really weird for me. I seem to have a “gift” for it in that I can experience it almost at will, providing I’m relaxed enough. Last week I had it almost every morning if I woke up early enough to allow 2+ hours before having to get out of bed. I can tell when it’s coming because suddenly I’ll feel/hear blood rushing to my head, and it’ll start to wash over my like an oscillating wave. Eventually the “waves” get very powerful, the noise or rushing sound becomes very intense/chaotic, and that’s when I attempt to climb out of bed. I realized since my last two WILDs that everytime I tried to move/get out of bed (in sheer terror when I first started to experience it years ago) I technically had a brief WILD because I saw myself changing positions, felt like I was changing positions, but then I’d blink and be in the same paralysed position. I posted a lot of tips on here somewhere about the best way to bring on SP. I’ll see if I can dig it up for you!!

I’d welcome those :smile:
I’ve only been conscious during SP twice, and they were both spontanious.

The dots and blobs are called phosphenes or entoptics. Hypnagogic imagery are rather realistic images (faces, landscapes, etc.) which appear randomly, and generally disappear as soon as you notice them.

Do they seems to zoom across your vision and get hetic and you feel your eyes struggling to kepp up with them. And it can sometimes keep you awake and not allow you to relax?

I have experienced that one or two times… it made me wake up because I was really struggling and my eyes hurt because of that. Right now, I learned that you have to be passive… no matter what. Just ignore that and just keep going. :smile:I know it’s not easy, but that’s the best tip I can give you right now.

Are you talking about phosphenes or HI? And I suppose you mean “hectic” cause I haven’t found any definition nor translation for “hetic”? :shy:
If you talk about phosphenes (the blobs), yes, they can move, they sometimes repetitively appear, disappear, rotate, translate, etc. This is not good if you want to WILD while focusing on them… :bored:

I usually get heavy HI right after going to bed in the evening. Sometimes I even become lucid while inside of them. They sense véry differently than dreams, and I usually wake up if I participate too much in the action going on. So observation, even while lucid, is my best method to keep them going. Even the slightest movement you make can disturb them. I’d say, just enjoy the show :wink:

What i meant is, not blobs and coloured lines. I meant images of anything going past your vision and just random images that can be hectic (i did mean hectic before) and they seem to dart around your vision.

But the only real time i think i have fully experienced HI was when i was sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag. All of a sudden i was thinking of a bar, and then i was sliding across the bar and i could feel the sliding motion but it was still like an image. Im pretty sure that was HI. But this was when i was younger.

Haha, that sure sounds like HI. I’ll be doin’ /seein’ the craziest stuff in mine and then be like “Wait a sec, I’m still trying to fall asleep…” and then it’ll disappear!

I find if I focus on the phosphenes that I get really really tired fast. I usually don’t do that to WILD, 'though I’m sure it’s effective. I usually just space out my eyes (er… relax them) and daydream which eventually, I lose my thoughts and some HI scene fills its place. Soon after I’m zonked.

Pretty cool.

For me exactly this is the trick that prolongs hypnagogic pictures. My attention remains fixed in the middle of the pictures yet I try to see them as whole. Eyeballs are motionless.

The central and peripheral part of the visual field is processed by two entirely different system of the brain. These differences manifest even at the level of eye anatomy (distribution of rods and cones). Generally, the peripheral field of vision belongs to the unconscious.

I call it peripheral trakata. But rather just seeing one object, I try to be aware of the entire visual field, especially its utmost periphery. This switch off my talking mind.

It also stabilizes ongoing hypnagogic activity. If I look a hypnagog pictures this way, after it fades, I’m left with a couple of luminous blobs in the place of the most brighter parts of the original picture.

That’s a quite accurate description of the way I’m doing “fake OBEs.”

When I want to submerge into hypnagogics I’d better to concentrate on the center of my head than my forehead, because I see inner pictures from that point and not from my eyes. However, if I center myself at my forehead before that to have a more distinct focal point for the internalization, I more likely would have that feeling of sudden drop in concousness that used to make my mind still and observant, free from distraction of thoughts.

So it seems that being able to focus consciously on HI depends on how well you can prevent your “sleepy mind” from arousing. Or in other words, if you can manage to keep yourself in a (slight) trance while seeing HI, the connection you make with your subconscious isn’t broken and you can consciously watch the HI (I guess this is what happens when you WILD, before you step into the dream). It’s interesting to notice the fact that peripheral vision is connected to the unconscious, as Popov mentionned. From my personal experience, once I get pretty vivid HI and stay calm, the images do not drop away, and if I wish I can also control them to a certain extend. Perhaps this is due to a habbit of meditation, being able to calm the mind and focus without arousing yourself. It makes me wonder if there are others around here (exept probably Mystic and Popov :razz:) that have experience with meditating and controlling HI.

Last night I meditated simply for 12 minutes and then jumped right into bed. Let me tell you, it was one crazy night for activity. 3 LD’s, lots of dreams that I was on the verge of LDing (like I was talking to my sisters family about lucid dreaming, lots of reality checks failed, I altered the dream without realizing I was dreaming, and wondered how my mind would produce the anticipated explosion in one :sad: ) and 6+ cases of SP between 2:45 and 8:00 AM. Basically I woke up from my first LD at 2:45 and tried WILDing the rest of the night. The result was all the dreams described above. Many times I got close to stepping out of my bed, but I failed to open my eyes and I think that’s what halted me. I did see incredible HI though before each dream (I recorded 6 very large frags). One was “alien-lights” a large spherical light in the center of my vision with balls of light surrounding it. It would move around and change it’s perspective. Another was 16-bit color: brilliant colored shapes that faded in and out as it appeared something swept over my vision and blocked them momentarily. Other times there were very sharp, intricate patterns.

The thing is, I only see this incredible HI when I’m trying to WILD, and I’m already paralyzed. I keep my mind awake, think through what I need to do, then close my eyes or if they’re closed, let myself drift off to sleep. Then I see the HI once I’ve let go. I enjoy it for a bit and then attempt to get out of bed. When going to bed for the first time at night, I don’t see anything remotely close to the HI I see when I’m about to step into REM conciously.

Another interesting point I want to mention is that this morning I could actually focus on the dream or the HI overlaying it. It’s hard to describe. I turned lucid while I was near a pop machine in an underground parking area (I had TEN fingers on one hand!!!) and wanted to WILD from it, so I changed my focus (actually moving my eyes IRL?) and saw HI like described above while vibrating in my bed, ready to jump out. The dream was very faint behind it, so I focused on the background scene and was immersed back into the dream. I literally stepped in and out of my dream from dreaming to waking, and back. I’ve done this before too, once.

I think HI when you first go to bed is a lot more fragile than when you’re drifting back to sleep in the middle of the night since all the time I’m about to WILD and see it, I can go crazy and say “Holy crap that is amazing!” and it doesn’t affect it at all.