"Why" you ask "have you stopped lucid dreaming if it's so freakin' amazing?"
Well, as I briefly mentioned in the previous part I had a somewhat traumatic experience and since I set out to simply prove the existence of this state for myself I felt I had achieved my goal for the time being, and so I stopped pursuing the lucid dreaming state until I felt called again.
I'm sure you are curious to hear what that traumatic experience was...
"Is it dangerous?"
Naturally, with any endeavour like lucid dreaming, meditation, deep breathing, psychedelics and other mind-altering methods there will be people who are scared and fearful of these modes of awareness.
"Do you really think controlling your dreams is healthy in the long run? What if you need to have certain dreams and you can't have them now because you always go flying? What if you mess up your unconscious mind by not allowing your brain to process dreams as it wants to?"
While these questions were asked of me by people trying to find a reason to not look into lucid dreaming at all, they did have a point. After all, here I was starting to dabble in my dream space and subconscious mind with my conscious focus, and since nobody in the official science establishments even purports to know with certainty WHY we sleep or WHY we dream, these questions are painful but necessary.
I really didn't know how dangerous lucid dreaming potentially is, and I still don't. Many lucid dreamers out there will tell you that they have been doing it for decades, and are healthy and happy. They look healthy and happy as well, no reason to doubt their statements, in my view.
And while I had these questions in the back of my mind as I kept chasing the lucid state for the next weeks, I felt I wanted to take the risk until I stumbled upon firsthand feedback that this lucid dreaming thing might be harmful to me in some way before I stopped. That feedback came way sooner than I had expected, on my third lucid run.
Clouds of bliss
Playing live at a festival was awesome but I missed being able to fly as I could still not achieve the lucid state every night. I often got close but most of the times I did not recognize that I was dreaming until I woke up.
However, in my fourth week of my aware-dreaming endeavors I did become lucid one more time before I quit chasing the state altogether.
I had wanted to fly around some more as that seemed to be such a liberating experience and I actually missed the feeling deeply. You know the feeling as well - it's completely like you imagine it ahahaha!
So, what happened?
I found myself in a grass field out in nature and I somehow picked up on the cues that "this doesn't feel right". I don't remember what exactly prompted me to realize I was dreaming but the experience that ensued might have overridden these unimportant details in my memory considering what happened next.
I realized my dreaming state and I DECIDED to fly up there like I did the first time. This time it worked well without any verbal command, the decision coupled with the awareness of being in a dream is quite enough if you have been lucid before - you can work with it instantly.
I BLASTED through the sky for moments, this time going faster and faster through clouds and into the next batch of clouds. It was MAD and so awesome of an experience. I was immersed with joy and I really didn't care about curbing my enthusiasm now, I just got carried away by this epic experience and I didn't care about anything else ahahaha. You could say I got drunk with the state of bliss.
I have no way of knowing but I must have blazed through the sky at a thousand miles per hour or something insane like that.
However, all of that changed moments later.
Shot down
I really don't know what exactly happened but if I had to guess it seemed like my excitement turned my body on and my... mind was in a freakin hurry to try and shoot back to where my body was lying in bed. Something about that reset seemed WAY TOO FAST! It was ROUGH, like I imagine an airplane being shot down from the sky and falling to the ground without any resistance, in an instant.
I suddenly noticed something majorly interfering with my ability to fly and all I could do was to stare down my dream body in stunned amazement at its sudden inability to keep me going. A sense of fear crept in, I almost want to say "panic" started to spread. I started falling with HIGH VELOCITY but it was only for a split second or so as I woke up in my bed with a sudden shock!
I was sweaty, desoriented and still "up there in the clouds with my mind", it took me like a minute or so to realize where I was and that this was my waking consciousness now. But the thing about that minute is: I could still feel the wind on my face. If you have ever put your head out of a driving car for a while, and then put it back in the car there is this odd sensation of having a cooled face that almost "remembers" the wind as the new normal, before you get used to being in the car again where there is no wind.
That feeling times 100.
It seemed as if I had LITERALLY fallen out of the sky just now, my hair had a similar sensation - as if wind just blazed through it and now had suddenly seized. The odd thing to my rational mind: Dude - you have been lying in bed here for hours - it's impossible. This couldn't have been a physical sensation, but here I was feeling the lingering effects of an actual physical sensation. Mind blown!
But not only that... as if that wasn't crazy enough.
I had a mindnumbing beeping on my ears that caught my attention. Like having gone to a loud concert without putting in ear plugs. I had noticed it only after the wind-sensation on my face, but it started to kind of worry me as it had apparently been there from the moment I was "back", but was only now being noticed by my concious mind trying to catch up to where I was. Normally this beeping never occurs to such a degree unless I listen to too much loud music for hours on end at a concert.
The pitch was high and the volume seemed too loud to be healthy.
"What the fuck?!" My rational mind was totally stunned at this sensation and the utter improbability of it all. Like getting the bends from travelling through different pressure zones too fast, but I had to remind myself: My body has never left here. It was "only" in the mind. Feeling the physical sensation though made the word "only"" seem ridiculous and naive, especially in light of the ringing ears.
Something was definitely happening here, it was undeniable.
"Did I come back... too fast?" I asked myself carefully. I had no idea.
I tried my best to keep calm and wait it out and to see if this was going to be a problem or would solve itself. After five minutes or so (which seemed like an eternity) the beeping noise on my ears started to subside very slowly. A good half hour later I could not tell that anything had happened, and I was freaking glad.
"Boy oh boy, I am NOT SURE this is how it's supposed to be."
I have thought about this experience for many years now and I still tend to believe that... my mind was forced to come back to the body TOO quickly. Something that Ayahuasca shamans often talk about - how far you can move away in spirit from your body without severing the connection permanently, or becoming unable to find the way back...
Needless to say, at the time I was glad everything turned back to normal and I had been enriched with a mindblowing experience that could be right out of a movie - but the thing is: I experienced it first hand and I don't need to believe anybody else that this is even possible.
Don't believe me either.
If you find yourself doubting about these things I invite you to look into lucid dreaming and find a way to approach it that suits you, with care. And if you must fly (which is awesome) please consider that we might have opened a mind discipline here that is to be met with responsibility and discipline, small incremental steps to new heights, not irresponsible leaps of recklessness in getting carried away.
The experience was enough to make me want to stop the lucid dreaming pursuit for the time being, and I vowed to revisit in a few years when life called me to it once more. But my original task of proving or disproving it through firsthand experience had turned out to be highly successful, and I gladly left it at that for the time being.
I recommend looking into this field to anyone, no matter what your preferred cosmology, beliefs or metaphysics are. Be prepared to face a psychedelic experience of the highest caliber and then maybe we can come up with better models of the universe we are living in that take into account all these experiences that have the explosive potential to blast the materialistic mindset apart.
Pt. 1 - An Unlikely Proposition
Pt. 2 - Basic Techniques for Achieving Lucidity
Pt. 3 - Implications & Test Flight
Pt. 4 - A Novel Approach for Learning Skills
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Much love to all of ya <3
I have had more unpleasant experiences than anything with lucid dreaming. I wrote about that a while back but I feel like the unconscious mind actively tries to wrestle control back from the lucid dreamer. I notice that things tend to go wrong with the things, actions, or settings that I would try to manifest, as though something was throwing up obstacles to prevent me from taking control. If I tried to dream about a nice place, it would be inhabited by some adversary who meant me harm. I conjure up a rifle to shoot the enemy with and it fails to function when I try to use it. I try to flee or fly and, like yourself, I am shot down.
I remember one instance in which I was traveling along a road in the desert and I came to a building with what looked like a loading dock (this was not where I wanted to go) and there was a presence there who meant me harm. As I mentioned above, I imagined a rifle and tried to fire it at the thing (which had taken the form of a thin man in a dark tattered suit) but it would not function. Suddenly, I had a companion, who seemed to appear from nothing and that person told me to use a spear and the rifle became a spear. I jabbed it into the chest of the tattered man but there was still no effect. It said something about "not the heart" so I thrust the spear into its throat and it screamed and released light from its wound.
At that point, I had lost control and I had slipped from a lucid state to a normal dream. I had forgotten that this was not "real." I woke up shortly after that with a rather vivid memory of the event which has faded very little over time.
Some people would attach some kind of "supernatural" significance to all that and I won't tell them they are wrong but I can see how a lot of comes out of the struggle between the conscious and unconscious. The broken rifle, for example makes perfect sense. When you fire one, your part of the act is aiming and depressing the trigger. My mind did those things but because it was in my mind, there was no noise or concussion for me to feel so it seemed not to work. The adversarial, encounters seem to work well here too. The unconscious mind whats me to stop meddling in it's business so it sends something to stop me. That being said, It would be way cooler to go around thinking that I slew some non-corporeal predator in ethereal combat lol.
Love your detailed description, it reads like a thriller.
I don't know, I have this feeling that any and everything in a dream always spawns from me, and my level of awareness will decide whether I get to play it cool (lucid) or whether to get caught up in the dream, being afraid of things that ultimately can't hurt me and never have.
In that way it's like a trip - facing fears consciously seems way more satisfying to me in the long run than battling the ghosts on a bad trip out of falling for the illusion I conjured up for myself.
But ye, I have no idea either about the whole thing. The experience just carried over into the waking state to such a physical degree, the view of "that's all pure imagination" started to lose a lot of weight and it never quite recovered for me since then.
But then, other factors also helped me look for new paradigms other than the one I had learned about in earlier years of my life - it all seemed suddenly insufficient in light of the experience.
Thinking about it I am kinda glad we have no idea what dreams are. ahahaha.
I hope people will build in near future the paradigm uniting both materialistic and spiritual knowledge that will eliminate any antagonism between people whose ways of cognition are different by rational and irrational approach.
Thank you for your interesting posts! :)
Thank you for your input and all the love. Took me 4 months to find your commetn and it's still highly appreciated!