Do you know anything about lucid dreaming?

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Any input welcome.

[hcsvader 1]

What do you know about DMT?

Have you seen my pants?
it"s a rough life, Livin' the dream
>:)

[quade 4]

You mean attempting to control your own dreams while dreaming?

I'm aware of it...techniques are another thing...

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

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Any input welcome.

i do it and oft times have fun controlling them

You are not now, nor will you ever be, good enough to not die in this sport (Sparky)
My Life ROCKS!
How's yours doing?

[SlackBeef 0]

I have only been able to control one dream I have had. I actually would like to know how to control them. When I did that one and only time it was alot of fun! I woke up feeling really good.

GO BIG OR GO HOME!

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What do you know about DMT?

I might know a little bit, but I would prefer to leave the Mantis People out of this thread. My question here is related to non-drug-induced lucid (awake) dreaming.

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You mean attempting to control your own dreams while dreaming?

Yes. Well, mostly being aware that you're dreaming. But of course, it naturally follows that you would then want to control the dream (for most people?).

[airtwardo 7]

Never experienced it...but did have an OBE once when REALLY tired. Scared the heck outta me!

~ If you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn? ~

[MikeJD 0]

I've looked into it, including some of the techniques used to induce it. It's certainly a fascinating idea for us - witness the popularity of movies like Inception.

Would be a wonderful gift to be able to do it at will, but I don't really have time in my day to keep asking myself at regular intervals 'am I dreaming right now?' and all the other stuff that's supposed to train you for it.

[shropshire 0]

You're in one now ...... and I'm at the helm .. Bwhhhaaaa[/manic laughter]

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[Marinus 0]

I've always had spontaneous lucid dreams, but I usually wake up after I realize that I dream. Sometimes, especially when I have a lucid nightmare, I have a false awakening. I never tried to induce a LD, and the way I deduct I'm dreaming is usually only marginally rational. I ignore the giant spiders that are about to eat me, and I draw the conclusion from some rather insignificant detail. I.e. there's a ring on one of my fingers, while I never wear jewellery.

[JohnMitchell 16]

The night before an exciting, intense day, I've dreamed I needed to sleep but just couldn't. That's when you know you'll be tired in the morning.

[Marinus 0]

I'm a part-time insomniac, ans that's 100% positively f-ed up.


But seriously it's almost a non-scary nightmare to me.

[zoobrothertom 5]

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Never experienced it...but did have an OBE once when REALLY tired. Scared the heck outta me!

Me, too. Sitting on all night CQ in the army. Drowsy as hell. Suddenly, found myself looking straight down at the roof of HQ directly over my position and at about 100' up! Scared the shit out of myself. Zippppped right through and back into myself in a flash.

No sleep that night!!

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I'm back in the USA!!

[riddler 0]

Self Hypnosis. You can get there.

Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

[riddler 0]

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but did have an OBE once when REALLY tired

Hitting the Special K a little hard?

Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

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Never experienced it...but did have an OBE once when REALLY tired. Scared the heck outta me!

OK just got that
Was thinking Why the hell would a yank be dreaming of an Order of the British Empire

it was the other pot that got me onto out of body experience

You are not now, nor will you ever be, good enough to not die in this sport (Sparky)
My Life ROCKS!
How's yours doing?

[Zenister 0]

all my life (since 8-9)

it interferes with waking life often.. dreamland is more interesting.. and when waking life approaches the same level, I fear waking up...

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Those who fail to learn from the past are simply Doomed.

[1969912 0]

It happens to me a couple times a month. Basically fully aware that I'm directing the dream, but it IS a dream, and I know it at the time. Really like it. Very trippy and difficult to explain. I have no idea how long it lasts - seems like hours, but I really doubt it. They usually involve cool technical stuff like doing a high altitude balloon jump, climbing something big, space flight, or flying a plane I'll never really get to fly. The dream is VERY detailed. When I wake up in the morning, memories of the dream are quite vivid but go away very quickly (within minutes), leaving very little detail.

"Once we got to the point where twenty/something's needed a place on the corner that changed the oil in their cars we were doomed . . ."
-NickDG

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all my life (since 8-9)

it interferes with waking life often.. dreamland is more interesting.. and when waking life approaches the same level, I fear waking up...

I was thinking about you when I started this thread, because I remember talking about this with you on here some years ago.

I've gotten pretty good at lucid dreaming in the last couple of years. I've had some very cool experiences, though many of them are hard to describe. I never really set out to learn how to do it, but I guess being able to do it is my reward for a lifetime of sleeping problems.

It's interesting to hear others' experiences on here.

The reason I started the thread was because I found myself trying to write a short story that involves lucid dreaming (possibly for a fiction contest), and I started wondering how subtle I could be about it. But since MikeJD reminded me of the movie "Inception," I think most people are probably aware of the idea of lucid dreaming, even if they've never heard it called that.

[riddler 0]

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But since MikeJD reminded me of the movie "Inception," I think most people are probably aware of the idea of lucid dreaming, even if they've never heard it called that.

Waking Life is another good movie that has elements of Lucid Dreaming. I'm guessing you've already seen that one

Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

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Waking Life is another good movie that has elements of Lucid Dreaming. I'm guessing you've already seen that one

Yes, I have the DVD.

[Zenister 0]

Inception was both amazing and disappointing... sooooo many things they got completely wrong about the dream experience...but the idea was lovely, it was nice to see lucid dreaming get some mainstream exposure (even as silly as some of the explanation of the 'tech' were) and it was a decent action movie regardless

As far as fiction no one does dreaming as well as lovecraft, even if his style is somewhat passe

what nearly everything fictional seems to get completely wrong is the continual ties to "reality". Where is the real imagination? You can do, be, go anything anywhere in dreamtime. Why would you only wander in the fields you know?

wall of text follows, some of the more inspired text of the 20th century...(IMO)

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When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon him he felt these liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether. No more could his galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, or his elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled, where forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon.

He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him his simple fancies were inane and childish, and he believed it because he could see that they might easily be so. What he failed to recall was that the deeds of reality are just as inane and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.

They had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained the workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world. When he complained, and longed to escape into twilight realms where magic moulded all the little vivid fragments and prized associations of his mind into vistas of breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight, they turned him instead toward the new-found prodigies of science, bidding him find wonder in the atom’s vortex and mystery in the sky’s dimensions. And when he had failed to find these boons in things whose laws are known and measurable, they told him he lacked imagination, and was immature because he preferred dream-illusions to the illusions of our physical creation.

So Carter had tried to do as others did, and pretended that the common events and emotions of earthy minds were more important than the fantasies of rare and delicate souls. He did not dissent when they told him that the animal pain of a stuck pig or dyspeptic ploughman in real life is a greater thing than the peerless beauty of Narath with its hundred carven gates and domes of chalcedony, which he dimly remembered from his dreams; and under their guidance he cultivated a painstaking sense of pity and tragedy.

Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold. Then he would have recourse to the polite laughter they had taught him to use against the extravagance and artificiality of dreams; for he saw that the daily life of our world is every inch as extravagant and artificial, and far less worthy of respect because of its poverty in beauty and its silly reluctance to admit its own lack of reason and purpose. In this way he became a kind of humorist, for he did not see that even humour is empty in a mindless universe devoid of any true standard of consistency or inconsistency.

In the first days of his bondage he had turned to the gentle churchly faith endeared to him by the naive trust of his fathers, for thence stretched mystic avenues which seemed to promise escape from life. Only on closer view did he mark the starved fancy and beauty, the stale and prosy triteness, and the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of solid truth which reigned boresomely and overwhelmingly among most of its professors; or feel to the full the awkwardness with which it sought to keep alive as literal fact the outgrown fears and guesses of a primal race confronting the unknown. It wearied Carter to see how solemnly people tried to make earthly reality out of old myths which every step of their boasted science confuted, and this misplaced seriousness killed the attachment he might have kept for the ancient creeds had they been content to offer the sonorous rites and emotional outlets in their true guise of ethereal fantasy.

But when he came to study those who had thrown off the old myths, he found them even more ugly than those who had not. They did not know that beauty lies in harmony, and that loveliness of life has no standard amidst an aimless cosmos save only its harmony with the dreams and the feelings which have gone before and blindly moulded our little spheres out of the rest of chaos. They did not see that good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture. Instead, they either denied these things altogether or transferred them to the crude, vague instincts which they shared with the beasts and peasants; so that their lives were dragged malodorously out in pain, ugliness, and disproportion, yet filled with a ludicrous pride at having escaped from something no more unsound than that which still held them. They had traded the false gods of fear and blind piety for those of licence and anarchy.

Carter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for their cheapness and squalor sickened a spirit loving beauty alone, while his reason rebelled at the flimsy logic with which their champions tried to gild brute impulse with a sacredness stripped from the idols they had discarded. He saw that most of them, in common with their cast-off priestcraft, could not escape from the delusion that life has a meaning apart from that which men dream into it; and could not lay aside the crude notion of ethics and obligations beyond those of beauty, even when all Nature shrieked of its unconsciousness and impersonal unmorality in the light of their scientific discoveries. Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of justice, freedom, and consistency, they cast off the old lore and the old ways with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that that lore and those ways were the sole makers of their present thoughts and judgments, and the sole guides and standards in a meaningless universe without fixed aims or stable points of reference. Having lost these artificial settings, their lives grew void of direction and dramatic interest; till at length they strove to drown their ennui in bustle and pretended usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric display and animal sensation. When these things palled, disappointed, or grew nauseous through revulsion, they cultivated irony and bitterness, and found fault with the social order. Never could they realise that their brute foundations were as shifting and contradictory as the gods of their elders, and that the satisfaction of one moment is the bane of the next. Calm, lasting beauty comes only in dream, and this solace the world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence.

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/sk.asp

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Those who fail to learn from the past are simply Doomed.

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They did not know that beauty lies in harmony, and that loveliness of life has no standard amidst an aimless cosmos save only its harmony with the dreams and the feelings which have gone before and blindly moulded our little spheres out of the rest of chaos. They did not see that good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture.

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what nearly everything fictional seems to get completely wrong is the continual ties to "reality". Where is the real imagination? You can do, be, go anything anywhere in dreamtime. Why would you only wander in the fields you know?

I want to reply to this, but..... I don't know! It seems impossible to imagine beyond "reality." Anything that I can come up with, no matter how fanciful it is, is rooted in reality - in something I have heard of before. I can write words and words and words, but they are all limited by the limits of human language. Human language is a limitation in expressing reality!