Advanced Lucid Dreaming

In my experience, there’s nothing wrong with working to keep myself in the dream, as long as I go about it the right way. I have to focus on things in the dream world, keep my attention on them through sight or touch.

It’s when I stop paying attention to the dream world or I get too inner-monologuey that the dream begins to fade out. Keeping calm also helps me stay in the dream, since I sometimes wake up if I am not breathing normally or if my heart rate is too fast.

Well that is actually the problem. When you meditate you become disconnected from your surroundings. When I do this in a LD I wake up. Many people have talked about doing meditation in a LD which takes you to and even deeper level of consciousness. Then jeff talks about a level even deeper than that where you have can safely (I hope :confused: ) have a NDE. Both jeff and Dm7 report doing this and have found it to be an amazing experience.

Anyway no LD’s last night at all so there is nothing new to report on this experiment. Hopefully, I will get a chance tonight.

sorry i’m so late in responding, a lot’s been going on

anyway, i forgot where i read this (and as always, someone correct me if i’m wrong), but i read it somewhere that the tibetan dream yogis viewed lucid dreaming as a more sensible way of going about meditation.

the premise is that in meditation you are trying to achieve a state where your mind is awake and your body is asleep. and the dream yogis felt that it was easier to achieve that state from a dream (where your body is already asleep and what’s needed is to wake up your mind) than the other way around

this idea made lucid dreaming appealing to me, because i’m pretty terrible at quiet meditation (my mind won’t shut up) so that sounded like a good solution for people like me

anyway, you want to meditate in a dream so you can get an NDE ??? couldn’t you just walk through a mirror and say “on the other side will be the astral plane” (personally i believe that sometimes the dream plane and astral planes overlap, but it’s just an inkling, don’t have anything to back it up)

there’s a book on OBEs that i highly recommend Out-of-body Experiences: How to have them and what to Expect by robert peterson. he says that an LD is the easiest place to get an OBE from (which is what got me interested in LDing to begin w/ 'cause i wasn’t have any success with other techniques of getting an OBE)

anyway, i’ve only done it twice and not recently, i should really try again in my next LD. but there were two times that i became lucid, and remembered that i wanted to try to OBE, so i bellyflopped onto the ground and rose up into my physical body (a really cool experience, kinda hard to describe) anyway, i ended up in my sleep paralyized physical body with HEAVY vibrations going on. the vibrations were kinda scary… (well… not really scary, but i’m too tired to think of a better word) i tried to ignore them and wiggle out of my physical body, but i eventually fell back into an ND both times.

anyway, hope this post was helpful… if not, at least it kept me awake for 15 minutes (i’m at my graveyard shift at the computer lab i work at right now) :yinyang:

You can get to the astral plane through LD’s? COOL!! :cool_laugh:

oneiromancer wrote:

You have reminded me of my own advice which is to keep things simple.

There are a few things I am hopeing to accomplish with this.

=> ( as you guessed) have a OBE. I mostly practice WILD but, have not had a OBE yet. I have had SP and vibrations and felt myself being pulled out of my body but, I always ended up in a lucid dream. (Not that I am complaining) It is a awesome feeling.

=> I want to learn to stay conscious throught the sleep cycle. This would allow me to be lucid in every dream every night if I want. So far I only encountered the void once and only briefly before waking up.

=> As for the NDE that jeff talks about- I may want to do that at some point but, when I am confidant that it will be safe for me. It is most likely perfectly safe but, you never know. For all we know at this point it may just be another level of dreaming in which case I will only see what I expect to see.

=> Further exploration of my self and the possibility of exploring different states of consciousness.

I have seen that book but, I have not purchased it yet. Perhaps I’ll make a trip to the book store tomorrow and check it out.

I read that probably about half a week before this happened, actually… I didn’t consciously enter this state, it was like I was in this dream, and I was in a different mind (which was in control) while the dream went on (basically I was unconscious) and then I got lucid and jolted “awake” only I wasn’t awake, I was in the tunnel… though I could feel my sleeping body and had awareness of it.

I have done this, but only when I was close to being asleep, or already within a dream… I know exactly what you mean though, there are definitely different layers in your closed eye visions, the little colors, they will pop up on various different “layers” and on “top” , at least, as far up as I can manage to “see” there are thousands of grainy spots everywhere… or that could be the bottom, I’m not sure…

I can’t isolate the layers though so that I could hold onto one of the colors, but I remember on another forum along time ago some guy said one of his friends had “great success” in looking at the different layers, much like it sounded you did.

I think you need to be able to focus VERY STRONGLY right before you lose all awareness and briefly drift out of consciousness on the border of awake/asleep… or you know, you can do it pretty easy in the morning probably, sometimes…

I’m going to double reply for the sake of coherence as there are some things I want to mention.

Meditation within LD:

I have done it a few times but I always want superficial things… the one time I did it seriously was, I think, from within paralysis… I wanted to stay in paralysis all night… what happened was I did various “things” with my “chakras” and I would see various visions with them…

(i was not attempting a sort of “no mind” meditation, more of a “i want cool stuff to happen now!” meditation)

anyway… I did not want to enter lucid dream… unfortunately, i would eventually feel myself drifting, and I’d be in another body, within a lucid dream… at first it caught me off guard, I went with the plot for a while, if I do recall, i was in some sort of playhouse like discovery zone type thing… I remember gaining hold of lucidity again and I’m not sure what I did with it.

anyway… accessing the astral from the dream world… I don’t know about that, last night I adamantly asked (and commanded) to go to the RTZ (real time zone / physical plane) over and over again, it failed miserably and I wandered into a house, willed a woman into a shower, and had sex with her. I also once tried the “i am entering the physical plane” self hypnosis meditatoin in a dream and it didn’t work either…

Prior to that I was in a low level stupid lucidity state and tried to AP within a dream (not knowing it was a dream) I got tunnel like results but they felt, to me, very disappointing, very cheesy and fake… that dwarf from LOTR gave me an axe, there were “bad things” in the tunnels, and I wanted to explore but I was afraid I’d run into spiders…

everything seemed totally 100% played out by my unconscious and my expectations… for example as I drifted off I thought “I’m going into ‘the void’” and I did… it was white this time, it felt weird, it lasted 3 seconds, it wasn’t a holy or eternal feeling like being in the white void is supposed to be… it was “cool…” feeling…

the tunnels were cloudy… they randomly lead to me playing tunnel like video games…stuff just sucked… I then “OBEd” into my grandmas house (not questiong WHY MY ENTIRE FAMILY WAS THERE) and spoke through the television, to get my families attention, I then went into the television, which felt all electircal and weird, and the characters were all around me, and didn’t stay too long (oddly enough the way this felt electrical and the way my body felt, this may have possibly been an entry to the “astral” or something, who knows)

at any rate… it all sucked, I woke up angry at the time I had wasted in pointless and largely UN FUN activities (aside from the sex which was okay) I could have done much better and more fun things.

That’s low level lucidity for you I guess.

Right now I believe you CANNOT OBE or AP from REM sleep… I think the brainwaves need to be in a different state, but that you can certainly (and in my case sometimes accidentally) enter that state FROM REM…

Oh yeah and I opened my throat chakra whiel trying to pseudo-AP from within a dream, it sure felt open, but nothing notable happened.

Maybe it’s all in the analytical mindset I have, but I don’t know, the best experiences I’ve had had this “real” feel to them, even if they had stupid nonsensical dream content… maybe because they took me by surprise… being analytical and scientific about this kind of stuff really does kill the wonder in it…

I bet if I were raised in a tribe or something I’d be thrilled with these experiences, rather than nitpicky, but I can fairly safely say most of them probably aren’t real… and like… I don’t know…

I did have a fun pointless LD with my friends at school briefly today too, which I was satisfied with… I’m not sure I thought they were real though I was in a child like goofing off mindset, so it didn’t matter.

now then… this experience, this happened a while ago… and it was interesting… especially the electricity… this tunnel like place is weird…

Jun 1.
[color=orange]I wake up at 5 a.m. and waste hours in beds not sleeping… so eventually I decide to try and WILD… well, what I did was I counted from 50 to 1 then 40 to 1 then 30 to 1 and so on… after that I was close enough to be able to pick up on sounds, conversations, etc, so I used them to my advantage to get in/out of light sleep a few times, then I told myself to “let go”

well, I dont’ know how I did, but I did… so I have this dream that I’m at wal-mart, I’m looking at toys, my friend Sam picks one up and says “yeah, this is the one with the metallica ring, you need to buy it, there are only 700 left…” and then I was confused and didn’t understand… I “woke up” partially and that’s when I got “conscious” and saw myself in front of dream scenes.

So what would happen is when a dream scene appeared, I’d feel myself involuntarily walk into it, then I’d try and stabilize it… what happened was I was at this store with these checkered floors and I felt really weird and drugged… I flipped my feet out from under me and hit the ground lying on my back (which was a forceful fall and “hurt”) and then I tried to stabilize things, BUT I “felt” myself in my BED lying on my back, so I was like oh no I’d better roll over so I don’t wake up, so I rolled over to my stomach and stared at the floor… then I started floating, sliding, etc, I kept shifting so that I was NOT staring at the floor, my vision went out, I knew I was waking up… I thought there was nothing to do but I startd moving my hands, hoping they were in the dream, they were…

The dream came partially back, then I faded out into awakeness… but I could still see the floor… so… it was like, hidden under the normal eyelid look but it was still there somehow, semi transparent, yet permanent, I made it slide back and forth but couldn’t get to it and eventually it was gone.

I induced sleep again, and again came to to find myself in front of dream scenes, I was out by a traffic light I think… then… I noticed I could see my room up in the very top of my left eye, and I focused upon that and pushed it to center and entered… I was in my brothers upstairs room, and it LOOKED REAL… I was very confused and unsure if it WAS real or not, but my body (i think) it was like, screwed up, it was wavery and “ghosty” and it felt like it was sort of fallen apart and disorganized, I couldn’t really move…

I woke up…

I did this stuff again, and was in the hallway, I felt my nose suddenly clog up and I could not breathe, I partially woke up enough to open my mouth to breathe and then was back, and I went down the stairs, crawling, using the rails to drag me forward, walking was hard, I felt drugged, I opened the door, went out, closed it (thinking I might be in the physical) and…

I was outside… I woke up… I decided maybe these are NREM dreams and are meant to be remote viewing like, not interactive, so I saw my house in my left eye again and focused upon it, at first everything was 2D, but then it turned 3D, and I was in it, while simultaneously NOT in it… I floatd around, and I saw the neighbors house, I wanted to float inside but could not go through the door, then someone opened it up… I went in and this little girl grabebd my arm, and the dad was like “oh, they were wrong about this place, it’s not haunted by that grandpa” and I was like “how can they see me?” and she was like “you are a ghost” (somehow I doubt this REALLY happened)

I left… and I was having hard times re-entering things, I found myself flying way way way up, then falling down, and I used this to enduce stability and get back to the dream…

One of the times while outside I could see this really trippy alex grey like thing transposed upon my normal vision, like, these really small colrful eyes on the left and right side (symmetrical) and then on the tops and bottoms these golden and I think blue colored swirl things…

I knew that I needed to fall to go deeper to stabilize a lucid dream… and I remember once somewhere along the course of the way I did deep breathing which brought me into paralysis, I could feel myself paralyzing more while dreaming…

at any rate, somehow I was on a log ride, and I was directing how it worked, I made myself go down drops to go deeper into a trance, but let me tell you this was horribly scary this log ride… it felt… bad… it was out of control, I like rides, but I was afraid to make it drop, but i knew that I needed to to make myself go deeper… so I dropped a small drop, went around a circle, dropped a bigger drop, went around a circle and came upon a tunnel (i was thinking of the cool tunnel drop in splash mountain) at this point the rapids got insanely violent and fast, and I was about to go into absolute blackness… I tried to make myself drop but I couldn’t really will myself to do it…

at any rate, I found myself in limbo between dream and waking worlds again, and I felt myself “flying” very fast… I started to voluntarily direct this motion, backwards I think, and I ended up rushing through this tunnel

it was a dark tunnel, the walls had dark grey splotches on them, as I picked up speed I saw Bush’s Golden State album randomly placed along the walls, and I wanted to enter it but couldn’t really control myself anymore (i may have been thinking about album walpapers in the Sims before I fell asleep, or that may have been after I woke up) at any rate… I remembered the purple tunnel I was in and thought of green, the tunnel turned green, then I thought of blue, the tunnel turned blue… then I thought of purple, etc…

but the tunnel WANTED to be white or dark grey… I started drawing energy into my chakras, which somewhat influenced how the tunnel looked… I drew energy into the crown chakra and I entered this circular whiteish room (made of the tunnel walls) and in the middle was what I could only imagine to represent my brain… it was in this tube and there was this atom looking thing in it, and energy was running up and down it… I involuntarily slammed into it and ZAP I felt this huge electric painful surge in my head and my thigh started twitching really strongly…

I didn’t want to pursue that and I focused on my third eye… I began to see this tear drop thing appear in front of me, and it looked like it was starting to open, there were these little “tear” looking swirly things around it, and I was getting a bit nervous, as I wasn’t sure what it was like to open my third eye… I wasn’t sure if I was ready.

Then I woke up.

As amazing as this all might sound I felt rather indifferent and whatnot while experiencing it… when I woke up my head felt funny, like it sometimes does if I stay in a lucid dream too long… not a particularly good feeling… not a bad one either… I tried to WILD again but wasn’t motivated enough, so when I finally got up, it just happened to be 11:11

I look forward to experimenting with this stuff more, even though it’s absolutely insane, mainly the split body sensations of druggings and paralysis while trying to move and stay inside dream…

I guess maybe I wasn’t in REM but rather NREM or something… if I had played with hypnagogics while staying detached from them but letting them do their thing, I probably would have eventually had a stable LD.

this was more interesting than any LD though. [/color]

knowing how absent minded I am I have already posted that one in here before, lets see.

tried an experiment this morning and I truly can say, I’m shocked! I never have experienced something like that before.

I had an LD this morning and decided to try the falling asleep within a Dream thing. So, I laid down on the floor (inside the dream) and withdraw my senses from the dream body, what then happened was absolutely scary!
I felt like 10000 Volt thru my body, very intense vibrations and then I got very powerfully ejected from my Body. Thats simply the best word I can find to describe it. I had a couple of OBE’s before but this was different. I would guess that a NDE would feel like that and I can not imagine that it can feel more real then that! I simply know that I was OUT of my BODY completely, It felt very different to my normal OBE’s or any LD’s I ever had. Normally I kind of feel protected, like I know, Hey, I’m still laying in Bed and can end the experience any time, sometimes I might even feel my Body breathing or something, but not this time. I got very scared and tried to reach my Body immediately. usually when I focus on my Body I snap back to it very quickly but this time it took at least 15 sec. it was like my mind couldn’t find my Body. I was whirling in some Blackness (Fz) for quite some time before I fortunately started to feel my Body again. I has several false awakenings after that. I’m still confused.
Chances that I just dreamed it are remote cause it felt more real then any dream I can remember. It actually felt more real then I feel now

has anybody experienced something like that? Is it dangerous? :eek:

Hey Tombo.

I have done that, and it isnt dangerous as far as I can tell. Going to sleep in a LD means that you go into a deeper layer of consciousness, into deep sleep. Being lucid in this stage is also called “lucid sleep”. It can actually be a freightening experience, which it was first time to me also because like you, I had extreme trouble trying to wake up. This is because in deep sleep you are (obviously, as the name says) so deep into sleep that it takes a while for your body to “turn on” again. If you do this again, try to remain calm and experience this state of consicousness. If you are really totally in deep sleep (delta brainwaves), there will be nothing left but your consciousness (no pictures, sounds, no external senses whatsoever). It is said that from deep delta sleep it is only a small (but pretty hard and probably scary?) step to inducing a NDE. To do this you have to sink even further and deeper, but I have never gone this far yet so I cant really tell much about it. Seems that if your get really close, you should be able to take a peek outside through your solar plexus (that’s what someone told me who has done this on occasion).

Xetrov

How do you manage to do this successfully. Every time I try to meditate, sleep or relax from within the dream I lose the dream and sometimes enter the void. More often than not I just wake up. I don’t want to sound immodest here but, I am fairly good at meditation, self-hypnosis and not bad at lucid dreaming either. Yet I just can’t seem to get over this one barrier.

I’ll definitely try to repete the experience stay calm and report back! If I dont; that should be a bad sign for others! This is no joke!
Tom

It seems to be normal. When you meditate, energy is no more invested in creating images, thus the dream disappears. Just a theorical opinion though, I never experienced it. :sad:

Yes, I think you are right. My problem is that I somehow loose consciousness once the visuals fade. Perhaps that is the problem. It is not how I do meditation in the dream (which is what I thought) but, maintaining awareness afterwards.

I will tell how I did this, it is a method I got from our old friend Jeff :content: … Once you are lucid, stop going with the flow and try to be as lucid as possible. Then either sit down, or lay down, and relax, and imagine yourself sinking away deeper into consciousness. You really have to focus on that thought. Each time I did this, it starts with a falling sensation, falling downwards, which is a metaphor of going deeper into deep sleep. You dont see anything, just feel like falling down. At a certain moment, you either stop it, or it stops by itself. I have not gone so deep as to approach NDE, but I imagine it would be possible to reach this (so be careful, its also the way Jeff induced his NDE’s).

If it goes ok, you will loose all visuals, and enter the dreamless black void that starts with onset of delta stage. If it goes bad, you will also loose all visuals, and you enter a stage between dreaming and waking (also called grey void, since here, with effort, you can create a new dream). If this happens, try to get back into the LD, or if you have bad luck you wake up. I guess it is just a matter of trying. When all goes well, you will know you are (at least partly) into delta because you have a very hard time waking up (toke me 30 seconds or so my first time, I got tired and wanted out, but I got a bit freigthened), and there is no way you can visualise anything dreamwise (only on the onset of deep sleep, where some theta resides, you can have “reduced” dreams, some say these are black and white, but I never experienced this). Jeff had an EEG machine once, and he measured his brainwaves and clearly got delta readings at this stage.

Indeed it is not, but you could try not to go too deep first few times you try this, just try to float down into delta a bit and see what happens with your consciousness, if you get uncomfortable, focus hard on waking up and dont panic, you should wake up max in a few minutes (but keep trying). Good luck! :smile:

Thanks Xetrov

I will keep practicing with this. The way jeff and others have described it sounds like an amazing experience.

At least I know I am doing it partly right as I do get into the void (briefly). As you know, it is very easy to lose consciousness there. It sounds like I need to be more focused and perhaps take my time. I tend to rush the process which might also be part of the problem.

Milod789

About the meditation: What exactly are you doing when meditating? I look at a certain spot, I used to wake up as you describe but last night I observed something interesting, I do not know if it works for you. Give it a try and let me know.

Here’s what I observed: I started to gaze upon a spot about 1-2 feet in front of me and noted how I started to wake up, I stopped stabilized the dream and did it again. gazing at a spot about 5 feet in front of me, this time it worked! the dream remained stable. Have only tried it once.

Cheers Tom

BTW: I did the falling asleep thing again, this time nothing crazy happened. I ended up in the blackness.

BTW Where is Jeff?! Is he still alive :shy:

Hes on extended leave due to unfortunate circumstances. Dont ask. :neutral:

Since 1999, I’ve been using this “sleeping within a dream” trick, for having OBEs, stabilizing projections and triggering weird experiences. Now it’s part of my dreaming practice.

I mostly try to have a WILD in a WILD by taking the exact position of my sleeping body (twin position as called by Castaneda).

Since I learned a trick to detect this position from inside a dreaming I’m not really using other positions. But Tombo’s somehow careless approach made me think about it again.

My method is simply inducing a mental falling sensation within the twin position. A weird twist in consciosuness like going from outside to inside accompained by a feeling of rotation or something is also involved, very difficult to describe. It’s a great trick for having OBE like dreams. Believe me, it’s worth a try, or even a couple.

I’ve found when I try to have a WILD in the dream version of my bedroom, laying in a position that just the opposite of my sleeping body I often got into dreams about alternate realities or have a very stable and long lucid dream. But no bright lights so far…

So, I think it’s basically a WILD induced LD, or WILDILD if you want. But it could be a DILDILD, too lol. (I know you like this)

Would you mind sharing your trick as how to detect the position of the physical body inside a dream?