Thread: Dream Yoga Intermediate Skill #1: Visualization Training

There are many ways to go about this and I encourage you to come up with a few that suite you through experimentation. I will share my two favorites with you so you can get started.
This will make WILDing and DILDing much, much easier, I am actually suprised it does not get talked about on this forum too much. What it will do is give you an active way to develop the part of your brain that controls dreams. An activity you can do while awake to furthur your goal other than endless reality checks.
Here is the idea. Take sight for instance. In waking life, light energy in various wave lengths hit the rods and cones in your eye. That causes neurons to fire and the message goes to the brain creating your visual perception. In a dream there is no light energy. Something must stimulate the neurons, but what? You are going to learn how to stimulate the visual perception with out light energy. The untrained mind has only the limited random ability to do this, like in a random dream. You can hone in on the something that fires the neurons and develop it like a muscle, through repeated use. Every sense can be harnessed the same way. The sense of touch in waking life is from a object or heat/cold exciting a receptor that then sends a nerve inpulse. In a dream no object is needed. What then is the source of the nerve impulse? Again you can learn to hone in on that something, and develop it. The end result is that the parts of the brain used in dreaming become highly developed.

1) Visual. Lay in bed in the dark while fully awake and aware. Close your eyes. It is not really black is it? If you only see black, be patient, most people will start to see tiny specks of color or even blurs and dots of color. Perfectly normal at this point. I have only met one person who could not see some tiny flecks moving around. Step one: Just watch them for a couple nights. Become more aware that the colors are there. Step two: Try to cause one color to be more prevelant. Some colors will be more natural for you. If the most common random color is blue, start with blue, and so on. While watching the normal flecks, start thinking about things of that color. For blue maybe day dream about looking into the ocean. For red maybe day dream about looking into a glass of red wine. Watch the visual field as you do this. You should notice that the amount of that color will increase, maybe even appearing as whole sections of the visual field having that color of light shone on them. This may take awhile, or be very easy. Step three: Get to where you can increase the amount of two more colors, and try switching back and forth between them. Now more red, switch to visualizing blue and so on. Step four: Try to cover the entire visual field with mostly one color. Step five: Now picture common geometric shapes. For instance, two crossing lines, or a circle. At first any color randomly, then when you get that, the color you choose. Step six: Get to where you can create a shape of a chosen color on a back ground of a chosen color. After that make up more steps on your own.

2) Tactile (touch) Lay in bed fully awake. Step one: Try to feel your fingers without touching them. You are recieving impulses from every part of your body, but filter out most of it. Get to where you can preceive each of the fingers of you right hand with out moving them. Step two: Slowly open and close your right hand. Really pay attention to how it feels. Try to experience it in fine detail. Now stop actually doing the movement. Try to remember how it felt. Go back and forth between doing the movement and trying to recreate the feeling of doing it. Step three: after you can actually clearly picture how the motion should feel, try visualizing each finger moving one at a time. Go back and forth between really moving it and trying to recreate the feeling of moving it. Step four: Now do the same thing, but move your whole arm and hand. A simple waving motion or something like that. Go back and forth between actually making the motion, and trying to recreate the feeling. After you get that far, make up other similar moves on your own.

Be patient, some people will be able to do these things in as little as a week, while others may struggle with it for much longer. You are trying to exercise the portion of your brain that creates dreams. No matter how long it takes to get through the two exercises I just listed the whole process is actively developing the needed portion
If you don't see colors, but you can see something like light, start there. The concept is of course to develop these internalized dream senses. I assume every person will start with being better at one thing than another. If seeing color is difficult, but seeing light is easier you could skip color for now and work on making the lights form a circle and so on. When that portion of your brain is sitmulated to develop its self, all other imagery manipulations will be easier. Maybe you work on it for a week and can make some basic shapes or whatever, then go back to color and see if you have developed enough skill to easily start that trick.

When you get good at this stuff it can be practiced anywhere, when you have a queit moment.
When you first start you need to try to make up mental tricks that help you picture in your minds eye or imagination the color or shape. I used tricks like day dreaming about
colorful scenes or objects. If I wanted green I may picture emeralds of a field of mown grass. Then when I was ready for shapes I would daydream, while passively watching for anything to appear, I would daydream I was looking at a clock face or a ball or the moon, while expecting the shape of a circle to appear. At first the circle would just be a blob but the sides would try to round out, then eventually a round blob, later a image of a circle but so vague I thought maybe it is not really there,,,and eventually, after a few weeks for your brain to remodel and expand in the dream portion, a perfect round image of light floating and trying to swirl and dissolve.
Now for exercise you can try to get a specific shape of a specific color. A green triangle, day dream about a christmas tree. A yellow circle, day dream about the sun,, and so on.
This exercise should be given no less than 3 weeks of time, because when you exercise a new part of the brain it takes at least two weeks for the brain to re-wire the neurons. Make up your own methods as you go. You are developing a new skill and as you practice your brain becomes wired for this. In the end you will not need to daydream or try at all, your brain will have learned to show any basic image you desire.
Here is an example of how vivid and controlled you can become once the re-wiring is done. After about 2 years or however long it takes, you can close your eye in a classroom or at work, and in less than 1 minute create a clear glowing triangle or circle of yellow on a red background and switch back and forth with other shapes and colors. This takes time, at that point three or four combinations will be pretty easy, but not everything will work without much effort.
In the end, say 10 years of practice, you can close your eyes and instanly create a clear glowing image of a yellow triangle point down, over a blue triangle point up, on a red background, with vivid colors and well defined images. After 20+ years I can do even weirder stuff with little to no effort. You may get frustrated if nothing happens the first week, but after the second week it should start becoming pretty intense.

How to use Visualization to Help You WILD:
Every one should attempt to initiate the dream. The WILD procedures may end up causing you to not know you are in a lucid dream. If you focus on the WILD process after you reach SP you may hit a lucid state and not realize it.When you have reached a place, where you would have to focus to move your hand you are in the first state of SP; you could move but not with out mental effort.
Don't worry about SP after that. Begin at that point just start pretending you are in a lucid dream. You need to initiate the dream! Not just hope for it to happen.
You may have been all the way to a begining of a LD, but not realized it because you are waiting for something visual to happen.
I use these tricks to enter WILDs. After I reach SP I start to create the beginning of a dream whether my brain is ready or not. Commonly I hit SP then uses my tactile sense to create a feeling of my arm moving. Then I use visual skills to create two intersecting glowing lines with a thick end to represent looking down at my arm and hand. I try to synchronize both senses, so that I get a low grade lucid dream of my moving my arm and watching it. After that is easy, I develop the hand a little and recreate the experience of moving my hand and making basic jestures and can see this in low definition and really feel like I am in a weak LD. If I do this as a WBTB with at least 5 hours sleep, I have amazing luck with my WILDs. Usually at this point I relax and watch for a minute and my brain is happy enough to start a basic LD such as vague images of a room or forest and me having a poorly defined dream body I can explore with. Then you can walk write into the first stages of REM as soon as it starts. You must keep thinking about this being a dream. Build up your imagination, try to see something basic, like your hands. If you then get blurs and shadows to move around when you try to look at your hands, you are doing it right.
You are probably in a lucid dream by this state, just a very very mild one. Now, nurse it along slow. Feel yourself walking and look at anything you can picture you may see in a dream. You will now start to see images arising.
Don't break it by getting excited. WILDs take patients. You are hopefully less aware of your body now, but may still be thinking rationally. Just keep up a simple simulated feeling of walking and any other motion you want while causualy watching the field of vision go in the first stages of HH. As soon as you really feel like you are doing an action and are seeing blurs, you have actually entered a weak LD. Just gently picturing what you should be seeing, like a forest trail.
At this point you may suddenly realize you are in an actual dream! Then do all the things you have learned about like your RC and stabilizing. Have fun.

I will be awarding Hall Points for good or insightful posts in student's work books. Each 'Gold Star' is now worth 50 Hall Points!

I am having a contest with this lesson. If anyone wins, they will get 100-300 Hall Points. Here is what I want. Each student should spend about 2 weeks getting the feel for the two versions I listed. Then, I want some of you to type up a formal and interesting Visualization practice. The new material does not have to be something you can actually do! Just something that you think should be a logical way to develop the ability to do it. I do not think the sense of smell is a good one for this level of training, as it has some extra problems involved. You may choose from visual or tactile, but if you do they need to be different in content from mine. Other suggestions are sound, motion, or hot/cold. If you come up with anything else that people can learn to truely visualize go ahead and try to use it if you want.
Submit the lessons (visualization training) in your note book, after you have tried my versions for a couple weeks.
1st place gets 300 Hall Points, 2nd place gets 150 Hall Points and 3rd place gets 100 Hall Points. The winning entries will be pasted into this lesson thread for every one to see.

This thread will not be open to those with out note books for at least 3 weeks, due to the difficulty and time involved with learning this one. It should be re-opened for question and comment from all members, after I have pasted in the best student posts from the workbooks, around the 3rd week of July.

This lesson is very difficult and may take months to develop. As a result, the students have not had too much to say so far. I will leave the thread closed for now and give an extra month for you all to develop it a little more.

Here are a few entries I am giving 50 hall points for.

Originally Posted by Beefer

Ok so now I am able to fill my entire vision field with blue ,but it is quite hard to make the blue go away or to summon other colors instead....

Also some days ago (maybe even a week) I have sat down and tried to visualize blue instead of doing it before sleep and I encountered some odd experience. I was looking at the colors I created and then quite randomly I thought of them as a snake. So this so called blue 'snake' was looking at me and moving around a bit. The thing is that I actually thought of it as the real thing , quite similar to the way it happens in dreams. I even had to calm myself down and tell myself that the snake is my friend so I will not panic. I tried later to induce such a thing before I went to sleep and after I caught on to some yellow shapes I tried to transform them into a golden dragon I just remembered from the book that was beside my bed. I could see how the yellow shapes reacted to the dragon I pictured in my mind ,but my control over it wasn't that good and it wasn't vivid like the snake... I also tried that out a third time when I tried to picture a red squirrel ,but that was a total failure and the red shapes haven't even resembled a snake. It is not that I clearly saw those things ,it was more like the shapes adopted significance of their own. It was quite a weird ,but cool experience .

Originally Posted by fOrceez

Lucid two nights ago due to WILD (however, no recall) and a lucid last night. It was supposed to be WILD, but I must have lost awareness... ended up in a DILD. Though, I did induce the dream scene. I'm laying in bed, stimulating my sense of touch, opening and closing my dream hand. I don't feel the transition and I'm suddenly in the dream, within a car, driving my friend home. I realize that I must have driven down into the wrong street or something and then come to the conclusion that I have absolutely no idea where this is.
I wonder that if it's a dream and then check my hands for extra fingers - about 20. Nice. The dream scene changes and I'm standing infront of a huge tree. It's rather dark, within the sky are two moons surrounded by darkness and even a sun surrounded by darkness. The dream is also somewhat unstable so I attempt to make it rain
Hyu has said that darkness is often a factor that suggests instability within his lucids and that the feeling of raindrops can be really helpful. I expect to feel raindrops upon my skin and sure enough, there are raindrops. I then realise I'm wearing a hooded jumper, so I'm not quite sure how the raindrops are hitting my skin- whatever.
My sight clears up from having colours blurred to reasonably blur-free. I then decide to get rid of the darkness. I pull back my hood to get a clear sight of my surroundings and it proves to present some difficulty. For the first couple of times, my attempts to pull the hood back result in nothing. I pull it back but it's still there. Fortunately, it works the third time.
I then focus my attention to the darkness. Kinda like the Bruce Almighty way of clearing clouds, I push the darkness together. It's slow progress but gets the job done. Once the darkness is (compact?), I can no longer push it together. Who knew, darkness can be compact. Lol!
I decide to make use of my surroundings and pull the darkness into the tree. With a few fancy waves of my arms, I 'grab' the darkness and send it into the tree.
Rumbling.
Rumbling and tremors.
Oh cool, earthquake. The tree is shaking violently and I suspect that it may explode. Maybe trees weren't supposed to seal darkness... Hmm.. RUN!
With little sense of direction, I bolt away from the tree, finding metal seats in my way. I jump over them, only to find my school friends sitting at a nearby picnic table. I run over to warn them of the exploding tree and that they should get ready to flee in case something bad does happen. (Loss of lucidity?) I relay some messages between the group and wake up..


I will probably write this up better, later in the day.

Originally Posted by whitedreams

July 11th: Step 1 "visualize colors"

I had my first experience with this last night. I saw more moving shapes than colors. I have always noticed weird shapes and colors when i close my eyes and I have a limited ability to control these lights and shapes. It was strange and i saw a lot of moving and swaying colors. It was also difficult for me to be mindful of these colors and shapes because my mind wandered and i get lost in thought and forget what i am doing. I had just finished hooking up with a girl friend of mine and i was in an intense emotinoal state. Perhaps that had something to do with it. Still i felt more relaxed after being with hailey and found it easier to seee the colors and shapes than on previous nights

Originally Posted by Beefer

Ok so for some nights I haven't been able to get that red screen again so today I decided I am going to get it. So at first I tried to pull it of slowly ,but the red wasn't really reddish , more like blackish . So then the blue shapes and dots which always appears there suddenly took the form of a 3D rhino. Then I wondered how did that just happened since it was just an association. Then I thought that maybe in order to get the red screen I need to try and get an association of it. So I tried to ,by just thinking suddenly ".....red!" (More like imagining suddenly ,but not really as you just imagine something , more like seeing it). Well it worked for a moment since I saw a red screen which after a second disappeared. Then I also tried to associate the red screen by imagining things related to red like you suggested and saw that it works in the same way.
Then I just decided to move or something and with my eyes closed saw my hand moving . I was completely sure my eyes were closed , so I tried once again and I saw quite a dark version of my hand and when I opened my eyes it was placed almost exactly (at most cases) at the location of the fabricated hand I saw which was made of black & blue shapes. Then it got quite interesting. After moving my hand around and seeing the effect on the shapes and dots I used the tactical skill in order to try and create an imaginary hand which would touch my face and see how it would affect the shapes and dots. The results were very exciting since i was able to see dark , 5 long & round sticks on my face which looked like the imaginary hand which copied the real hand of mine. I think that because that because of the expectation of the fact that that my hand is there and the association that my hand is there since I can feel it (In this case expectation and association seem to me as the same thing) made me 'see' a fabricated hand which adjusted it's location to the original hand or the hand I created with the tactical skill.

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Originally Posted by hermine_hesse

The past few nights I have been experimenting with the visualization training. At first when watching for colors, I experimented with finding what the difference is between actually seeing a color with my eyes closed and visualizing a color in my imagination. I would switch between imagining a blue circle as vividly as possible, then observing what I was actually seeing. It would be hard for me to describe the difference, but I know it is there and is a very subtle one.

Over the next few nights, as I watched for colors, I realized that I may be one of the few who don't see colors when observing this. However, I do so light and patterns. The light appears uniformly as a slight greenish hue (the same as I observed in auras), but fluctuates in repeated or random patterns or shapes. I decided to focus on manipulating light and pattern instead of color. I would imagine something that would contain a pattern or change of light, and see what I was observing was affected. On the first night I imagined waves, but didn't see any noticeable difference. Last night, I imagined fireworks (which would be a change of light and pattern), suddenly, white fireworks exploded on the dark background before my eyes. It was so intense and vivid that it actually startled me and I opened my eyes.

Here are a couple more student entries that are worth sharing. Good job every one!

OK! Time to open the thread to non-students questions and comments. I know everyone will still need many months of practice at this one, but get ready for a new skill to be added. Remember I can teach skills much faster than they can be learned. This is hard stuff, so go ahead and work on them over many months. The class may take over a year for most students. No one is progressing extra slowly! Keep a good mind set, you do not live in a monistary and you have the distractions of daily life, so cut your selves some slack and enjoy the training, even if it takes you many many months.

Originally Posted by sivason

.../What it will do is give you an active way to develop the part of your brain that controls dreams/...

It was interesting for me when I learned that the neuronal distribution along the brain for both sensory and motion neurons, shared the same areas. It explained a lot to me about how we can recreate the motion with our dreaming mind. I didn't know that I was training my dreaming brain when I played to feel my arm or legs moving when they actually were motionless. Now I can do that with not much effort, and after reading this thread, I know that it wasn't useless at all. About visualization, definitively I will go on with this 'boring stuff' I used to do from time to time, although now, I will be more consequent due to I know it is a very useful exercise.

I was wondering about the sense of hearing and smell, and after reading all of this, I'm figuring out about how could I adjust my self made now known exercises.

Thanks a lot!

Originally Posted by Box77

It was interesting for me when I learned that the neuronal distribution along the brain for both sensory and motion neurons, shared the same areas. It explained a lot to me about how we can recreate the motion with our dreaming mind. I didn't know that I was training my dreaming brain when I played to feel my arm or legs moving when they actually were motionless. Now I can do that with not much effort, and after reading this thread, I know that it wasn't useless at all. About visualization, definitively I will go on with this 'boring stuff' I used to do from time to time, although now, I will be more consequent due to I know it is a very useful exercise.

I was wondering about the sense of hearing and smell, and after reading all of this, I'm figuring out about how could I adjust my self made now known exercises.

Thanks a lot!

No problem, I like to spread knowledge where ever I can. The sense of smell is a real challenge for me. I do better while awake than in dreams. Sageous offers this conclusion, the sense of smell from waking life does not get shut off in sleep, because of a primal defensive mechanism. So, he congectures, that while I am attempting to simulate a smell in an LD, it is mixing with the normal smells present where I am sleeping. Hearing is a fun one to play with, you can get to a point in deep meditation, where you can almost perfectly recreate favorite music.

Originally Posted by sivason

.../you can almost perfectly recreate favorite music.

Usually I'm kind of playing back in my head some segments of my favorite music along the day. I think this play back could be useful as an exercise too.

I've started to exercise more on visualization and touch, and then I remembered I used to do something when I was sleepless, and it was feeling my arms or legs vanished for a while and then 'reload' their sensation but in a different position without moving them. I think it could be somehow used as an exercise too.

This is amazing and valuable stuff. Thanks for sharing!
I am glad I am back around these lands

Originally Posted by sivason

Hi everyone, Many of you have read this material before. If so, then you have a head start. Some of you are probably suprised I called the basic skills basic! I know this stuff can take months or more to get good at. Here is your first mega-challenge! Visualization training. Do not become frustrated if you seem to stall at even the very first steps involved. The intermediate skills take months of work. I hope everyone, whether posting in work books or just studying on the side, will be able to accept that this is an art and will take a long time to develop. It is an amazing skill, that really makes you start to question.

Hi sivason, you wrote all these articles on yoga which is full of information, in these articles various techniques are explained in good way, nice post!

This material has opened many doors for my meditation practice. I didn't have many places to look for guidance on lucid dreams and meditation, and I'm thankful that you have helped to set me on a path, Sivason. I may begin a workbook in the future, but for now I'm just studying and developing a root for practice.

Hey Sivason! A great way to practice visualization is to stare at a gif of noise [http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lp...7ovlo1_500.gif] while meditating. You can work on making shapes/colors/scenes in the noise and even work on moving/rotating chunks of the noise. Try it out, it actually works really well!

Hey Sivason, Thank you for this visualization tutorial, I am actually going to take advantage of the fact that I don't go to sleep as soon as I go to bed to actually try this out every night in that time. I will possibly post results of it later.

Sivason,

This is a fascinating thread that I've stumbled across.

Amazingly (for me) just a few weeks ago I was lying in bed staring at those colourful dots and wondering whether I can move/change them. To be honest I didn't really 'try' to hard as I'd never come across any sort of info on this kind of thing.

Reading this I immediately went back and for the last 2 days I've been trying to experiment with the visualisation technique you describe above.

To my amazement I think I can summon colours much like you describe - albeit it at far less intensity. Now I'm trying not to get ahead of myself because the brain is a mysterious thing but using your suggestions I can crudely alter to 'background colour' in this visualisation field.

Green, blue and purple are quite easily for me to generate I find. Red is trickier and yellow not so bad.

The hard part is getting them to be strong and vivid. I must admit that whilst I truly sense the colour I have yet to succeed (no where near really) in generating a uniform colour across the background. It's mainly blotchy around the centre. I also find that I fatigue a bit and after a while summoning a colour becomes hard or not possible, which can be disappointing so I stop.

In terms of shapes these are tricker again. I find I can creat a shape that I can 'see' but getting a clean sharp defined edge to it is hard (haven't been able to), it is moulded into the field. This is especially true for circles.

I'm fascinated by this and would love to keep developing it, particularly if it can help increase the clarity and vividness of my dreams which is an area I would like to improve.

For what it's worth I am a novice LDer just getting started, and at the moment dream recall is my main focus.

I would truly value your thoughts/suggestions/feedback

Thanks!

That is wonderful! Give it time, as in months. You can develop that region of the brain this way, and IMHO that is one of the secrets to very high end dream skills. Have fun!

I actually read this thread many months ago but dismissed the exercises within as I had always considered myself to be a great visualizer. Recently, however, I decided to read through it carefully again and I stopped to think about the section where you describe different modalities of visualization. It made me realize that I am only good at a few modalities (touch, taste, proprioperception, aural) but actually quite terrible at visual visualization. I will describe how and why I think I had this deluded impression of my own skills so that other people might evaluate themselves similarly...

I noticed that the modalities I'm good at stem from specific activities I do a lot: my sense of touch and proprioperception is quite good because I train martial arts and a few different musical insruments, both of which include training to do physical motions without looking or with your eyes closed, blindfolded, etc. This makes you focus on what it feels like to do various things, so you become intimately familiar with recreating those sensations mentally.

Training in music helps the aural visualization skills similarly, and cooking a lot/being a foodie helps with the sense of taste just as much.

I don't do anything that would especially improve my visual skills, however. Some activities I imagine might help would be creative writing, drawing or painting, etc.

I was actually confronted with how bad I was at visualizing items when I tried the color/shape exercise. I realized that when I visualized things I would get snapshots that would disappear immediately, like an object being lit up by a camera flash in a dark room. Sitting down for half an hour and applying consistent effort, I realized that I was actually generating a "conceptual" image of these colors or shapes, but not actually seeing them in my mind's eye. It's difficult to describe the difference, but it's kind of like how an engineer might think of a blueprint for an object rather than the actual object itself. I can generate things in terms of vectors and physical coordinates/relationships but can't really see the colors, shapes, and depth very well. If you have no experience of "seeing" things in your mind's eye, this conceptual visualization can seem like a good, detailed, complete skill set adequate for lucid dreaming, and if I hadn't tried the exercises I wouldn't have noticed the deficiencies.

Anyway, I ride the subway for an hour each day on my work commute, and for the last three days I have been spending this time with my eyes closed and working my way through the exercises, starting with a field of color, then a colorless shape, then attempting to make a colorful shape. Today I was able to generate, for example, a pink circle on a blue background with a yellow triangle in the middle, and they were clearly defined and stable. This is light-years ahead of where I was last week (I couldn't even generate a single spot of color, let alone a shape. Circles were impossible!)

To see if this had an effect on practical visualizations, I tried to visualize myself fishing on a lake, something I do a lot in the summer time. Amazingly, I could hold the entire scene in my head quite easily and with a great deal of stability.I had to start with the reel, then the rod, then the rocks and water, and then everything else, but eventually it was all there and it didn't disappear! Before I would just be able to generate flashes of perception or snippets of individual objects, not an entire scene incorporating all my senses. I credit Sivason and his exercises entirely.


Sorry for the long post and infodump, I am just really chuffed about these new skills I am developing that I didn't even know I was missing! I am going to continue practicing on my commute: this might explain why I have been completely failing at instigating lucid dreams before now...

Hey guys this happened before I read this post i only just discovered this great forum. Before I describe what I saw I wanted to say I wasn't ever aware of these colours and i did not see them or notice them at all before I read about them. I was trying to force myself to see them for a few nights in bed but the best i could see was a faint light, kind of like a dull torch on a black wall, and then I was there focusing and trying to imagine when all of a sudden a Fluor green orb appeared in my mind rotating around around and my heart started to beat really fast and I could feel I was getting excited but before I got too excited this amazing read circle appeared under it. This spun around for a while and i just got way too excited and then they dissapeared and I snapped out of my trance. Just wanted to post for the the people who have doubts that they can't see the colours because I had never seen them at all. I'll be following everyone's posts here from now on.. Thanks a lot

Originally Posted by sivason

When you have reached a place, where you would have to focus to move your hand you are in the first state of SP; you could move but not with out mental effort.

I've been here! On several occasions! I don't recall this particular stage being discussed anywhere. On many WILD attempts I "feel" like I may be in a lucid state, only there's no dream there waiting for me. I will take up these visualization exercises over the months this year and see where they lead!

I took notes & will start working this into my individual study program I've made for myself. I do wish you still had the classes available though, darn.