I read, with interest, Tom COSM's account of a lucid dreaming experience that he had last night. Lucid dreaming is something I always had an interest in... I even investigated building a lucid dreaming machine at one point, but I'm not sure how effective it would be as I very rarely remember dreams now. It still annoys me but for some reason, around 2000/2001, I gradually lost the ability to remember dreams like I used to. Before that my dreams were always very vivid but now I'm lucky if I can even remember a segment in a kind of fuzzy cloudy "low-definition" memory. What gives me hope though is something that happened to me just over a year ago. I was doing some experiments on my mind (as you do). I have always had quite a hyperactive imagination before falling asleep. It's not quite hypnagogia as I don't hallucinate, but I do get a lot of random imagery in my mind. They just pop into my head by their own, like hyperactive bunnies. It's a bit like my brain is flipping through tv channels. Anyway, I decided I'd just try take account of what I was "seeing", just to mentally make a comment on everything that was going on. Then I got the thought, would it be possible to catch myself falling asleep. It didn't work the first night, but the second proved quite interesting.
All I did the following night, was to repeatedly question myself, "Am I awake?". It went on for a few minutes, and then... then came "the great red cliff". A menacing blade of a crimson diviing the blackness above from the blackness below. The image only lasted a second, I watched myself leaping from it into the blackness, and that was it, I was gone; asleep, but aware of what had just had happened. Anyway, that's the closest I've ever gotten to lucid dreaming. I guess it means I could easily lucid dream if I tried but I really have to start sleeping properly first. I pretty much stay awake until exhaustion every night so I rarely get time to think between sleeping and the time my head hits the pillow.
Oh I almost forgot, I've had great success with achieving hallucinations and profound thoughts, from my experimenting with left hand path mastrubation magick, but I'll save that for another post :)
2 comments:
Cool report man.
With my experience attempting to go into a lucid dream from a waking state, or just watching myself as I drift to sleep, I have put myself in a few strange states which I don't think are related to dreaming, including one similar to what you describe.
It goes along the lines of not focusing on the dark, clearing your head, getting rid of any thoughts of blackness until you are sort of blind, but then the red comes... my eyes strain and look up (sometimes this is uncomfortable) and the black comes back, but in this wicked 3d (4d?) landscape of nothing, yet i know it has lots of depth.... I can't go beyond this as my whole body kind of tense up.... sometimes there is vague white three dimensional patterns in this new black but they don't resemble anything neat.
This state has never helped me go into la la land, it just keeps me away and often tires me out.
Thanks for the comment, Tom :) Your post inspired me to start going bad to bed earlier this, just to get the brain fizzing again.
I sometimes see white pulsating geometric patterns when I'm heading off to sleep... not sure it's related to what you describes, I always assumed mine were more to do with physical circumstances, pressure on the eyeball or something.
The big problem with sleep experimentation is (like you alluded to in the last line to your comment) that you really mess with your sleeping pattern and it doesn't work so well if you have a 9-5 job :)
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