Thread: Tunnel experiences

Weird thing that nobody answered this thread in nearly a year... I thought this was a common experience! I'm quite familiar with tunnels.
Some years ago I had repeated dreams about slides that were like black tunnels. I always entered them but when I started to slide down my memory ends. I think I entered another dream at that moment. As I said, that was years ago... But last week it occured again, slightly changed. This time I was in a rollercoaster that drove through this black tunnel, but the feeling was quite the same.
I'm wondering if your tunnels are actually round? Because this is an even more common feature for me, of which the slides are just a variety. Quite often I enter a dream scenery through a round hole. It can be a well or a gap in the clouds or a slide... Does this maybe ring a bell?

Wow,I had forgotten about this. ( My email alerts me to new posts) Thanks for posting,there is an apparent disinterest in tunnel experiences it seems.

My tunnels have appeared to be round and dark with blue-white lights streaking by, all accompanied with a rushing wind. (this is not too common for me though)

Usually when I enter a new scene,while lucid,it either appears as a gradual transition from the previous scenery which has faded to blackness; or appears once I have gone through a ceiling or doorway. I experienced slides too as a child,and have been on roller coasters as an adult ; but tunnels have not been combined with these - your experiences sound very interesting.

When I first posted this I got a nice 'beyond dreaming' style link PMed to me which gives a spiritual perspective to tunnel experiences. I can shoot you the link if you are open to that kind of stuff. ( I am,but within reason)

I searched for posts containing the word "tunnel" and yours was the only one that kind of matched what I was looking for... I thought it was more common, because since I became aware of it, I notice references to the tunnels quite often, most of the time in artwork. One example is the picture on the cover of "The Varieties of Religious Experience" by William James (Penguin). (Unfortunately I'm not allowed to post links yet...) This is almost exactly what the entrance to my slides looks like. And recently I've been to kind of an artistic labyrinth, which had a slide EXACTLY like mine inside. I stood in front of it for about five minutes without being able to enter, because I was so exited to find a scenery of my dreams in real life! So, if someone builds this slide, there must be others that have experienced it...
I'm wondering, if this is the vortex that some people experience in trance or hypnagogic states?
And yes, please send me the link. As I consider myself a scientist, I find it very unscientific to exclude ideas generally from thinking about them.

Now you just have to have look at my avatar...

Hi jeffd, Fundevogel,

A few months ago I found myself in a lucid dream that was quickly collapsing and fading to black. For a moment I assumed I had woken, but after realizing that I was a speck of awareness (without a body) floating in endless black space, I concluded that I was still dreaming. This experience of "floating" lasted for perhaps 15 seconds, near the end of which I was growing quite impatient and began to will a new dream to form. What happened next was quite unexpected.

I saw blue and green specks of light form in my field of vision. These specks rapidly grew to be very numerous, and they began to swirl in a counterclockwise fashion around a central focal point. Within moments I was plunging forward and the field of lights became a circular tunnel. I hurtled through this twist-turvy tunnel at incredible speeds without the faintest clue what was going on.

After perhaps 6 or 7 seconds of this, however, my speed began to drop and I was able to catch glimpses of the blue and green specks of light around me that formed the tunnel walls. They were each and every one an image or scene of people and places. I only had a fraction of a second to notice this when, turning my attention forward, I saw that I was nearing the end of the tunnel. Before me was a dream scene: I was descending into some lady's living room from the ceiling!

Seamlessly I entered the scene, floated down to the floor, and found that I had a body. From here the experience continued on much like any other lucid dream. But the travel through the tunnel sticks with me as a rather remarkable and unusual experience.

-BR

well, I attempted a wild and went through the "tunnel to get to the dream".
I was floating down a moving tunnel of mild lights and saw little memory squares flying by, of me thinking of different things at one time.

BR and onyxfyre,
Very interesting ! The few times that I've been in the tunnel matches your visual descriptions. My lucids ,so far, have only ended after these experiences; it's very cool that you have entered LDs through these. Also,the apparent speed was too great to get a look at the individual streaks in my cases,so the memory squares,people,places and scenes are extremely interesting to me. ( could you describe them more ? )

There seems to be some common features with the tunnels reported by near death experiencers. (One of my tunnel flights was so long that I began to think that I did die !)

Yeah, I was surprised after that initial tunnel experience, because I had no precedent for it whatsoever, and yet I later read that other people have similar experiences. Unfortunately I was going so fast that--like you said--the lights on the tunnel walls were just a streaky blur. It wasn't until just fractions of a second before I exited the tunnel that--because I was slowing down--I caught a very brief and momentary glimpse of the "lights" on the tunnel walls. Like I said they were images of people and places. When I think back to how I was feeling and what my intuitions were, my best guess is that those images represented possible locations or realities where I could access via wormhole (I considered this tunnel to be a wormhole).

WakingNomad has written elsewhere on this forum about wormholes. In his experience travel through them is so rapid as to seem instantaneous. I'm wondering, however, if perhaps there are other factors. For instance, if the physical distance the wormhole must travel is exceedingly large, will travel through it take longer? As I mentioned, my wormhole experience seemed to last for about 6 or 7 seconds. Though indeed I was traveling at incredible velocities.

Anyway, the LD that followed was interesting in its own right. I landed in a lady's living room. I didn't recognize her, but she was super excited to see me. Because this was actually my first induced LD (I had had them as a child and would still occasionally get them; this one occurred after weeks of effort of rebuilding dream recall and incubating lucid dreams), I was too excited to pay any attention to what she was saying. In retrospect I wish I could have asked her "What planet am I on!?" Perhaps I'll get a chance to visit her again one evening.

I'd like to hear more about your tunnel experiences. It seems that there is quite a bit of commonality in our experiences; and the more we can learn, perhaps the more we can learn how to navigate them.

BR,
Very cool. I can relate big time about wishing that I had talked more to certain "DCs" in some of my experiences.

As for my tunnels:
1) Became lucid on a street in a seaside town and began to fly. As I took off to survey the landscape a bit,a sort of wind or force seemed to take hold of me.

When this happens I always feel that I can fight it;but some of my most profound experiences came from surrendering to this "guidance" ,so I just let it lead the way this time.

I was carried out along a shoreline ,then out over a vast body of water.I was excelerated faster and faster until the scenery blurred and collapsed into darkeness. Then I was in the tunnel as described above-for a very long time.(thought maybe I died) I began to think about trying to stop ,or turn into a side when the earth appeared in front of me and I was stopped. Then and I starred at it in surprise as I watched spherical,white-yellow beams of light zip around it ,then I was slammed into my body and sat up awake without any break in consciousness.

2) Just like above,only it began as an OBE from my parent's house.( I have my own home) I was carried off into apparent space after touching the nonphysical version of a tree dedicated to my father's heart donor.It is planted in their front yard. After floating over a complex,futuristic city and into space,a dark mist formed. Then I was in a room with a tall ceiling and peculiar asian decorations.Suddenly the room tilted sideways and gravity acted strange because I remained against the floor. A guy with tatoos and a blueish tinted faux hawk shook my hand- I believed it was my father's heart donor,but proving this would be difficult because his family wished to remain anonymous. Then back to the tunnel exactly as I described before.

Wormholes do seem to fit with this stuff,I agree. I have alot of OBEs and LDs but the tunnels haven't been too common;the more I can learn the better. When so many people have similar experiences I think something objective must be going on-something that requires a broader view of reality.Something definitely beyond just electrochemical brain impulses-I have personal proof of this from other experiences.

Awesome, yeah I definitely agree; the similarity in all these experiences suggests a structured layer or layers of reality that physical science has yet to discover or accept.

You may have seen these already, but I found these articles interesting in their descriptions of the tunnel/wormhole/vortex phenomena.

Experimentation With The Vortex Phenomenon in Lucid Dreams, Kenneth Moss
Exploring the Void in Lucid Dreaming | The Dream Studies Portal

I haven't seen these,I'll check 'em out. I agree again,layers of reality is a good description. There are alot of good (non mainstream)reality theories out there that have broad enough explanatory power to address altered states of consciousness .Here are a few of my favorites:
Thomas Campbell's "My Big Toe"
The Way From Science to Soul - Integrating Physics, the Brain, and the Spiritual Journey
The Campaign for Philosophical Freedom

Awesome article by Ryan Hurd,thanks for that. I have been in the "cosmic snow" myself at least 3-4 times -I call it the static zone. Same with the Void-darkness-which is much more common.

I actually had a dreambody in the times that I spent in the static zone. The 1st time I was startled by it and felt for my body in bed to wake up. About a year later I was stuck there again and tested it's responsiveness to commands. I was unsuccessful,nothing appeared. Finally several months later it appeared in a LD again.This time I was able to find an edge and pop in and out of my LD scene-it acted like a barrier or border.

No problem. Yeah after re-reading Hurd's article I want to try intentionally "finding" the void by stepping through a mirror. I usually use mirrors as portals to teleport to new scenery, but I imagine with a little intention I can teleport to the void instead.

Thanks for the links, by the way. I haven't had a chance to go through the last one, but I really like what I'm seeing in Casey Blood's interpretation. I recently did a lot of reading on Indic religious philosophy dating back nearly two millennia. These guys knew (from experience) without doubt that the mind is separate from the body and ultimately unrelated. According to them, we merely conflate the two as the same, and this ignorance is the cause of suffering. When you slowly begin to realize (through serious meditative practice) that the mind and body are indeed separate, all sorts of siddhis (supernatural powers and/or phenomena) are observed. I think it's really cool how we've come to a point in modern science where the only way to explain certain things like the "probabilistic" perception of the wave function is through postulating the existence of a mind separate from the physical body. It would seem, then, that siddhis are merely the ability of one to consciously perceive whichever manifestation of the wave function they desire, thereby explaining otherwise unnatural or supernatural occurrences.

Yes,I can relate. I've read quite a bit of Buddhism and I've taken in alot from some Indic philosophy- Pantanjali ,Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj,etc. I think direct experience is important.

About mind-body:Yes I like Casey Blood's interpretation too. As I understand,mind acting on matter poses problems for energy conservation laws- foundational laws of science. By placing mind as an observer-chooser of a wave function branch this problem is avoided. Only wave function branches exist with particles being a sort of effect I guess. ( I was surprised to read on his site ,and in his book, that there is no real evidence for particles ! )

Casey Blood,Henry Stapp and others propose that QM effects are relevant in the brain at the synaptic level. If there are Ca^2+ Ion superpositions at the presynaptic terminals and ion channels for example,some speculate that intent applied here would determine whether a neuron fires or not. Repeated choice of a wavefunction branch would make use of the zeno effect. Others propose that quantum coherence or entanglement possibly explains the 'binding problem'.

When addressing the problem of how an immaterial awareness could read or operate such complex brain states ,CB speculates that we may do this by reading a brain state as one whole thing at a given time increment- much like we read entire words or sentences without focusing on the individual letters.

I like to imagine that some brain states resonate with other realities that act like 'attractors' in Chaos. Maybe thats why LD supplements,DMT,etc work, by allowing the brain to 'tune in' ,and our subsets of consciousness to experience-choose ? If our awareness becomes operational in other systems of reality with different rules of interaction,then siddhis would be very natural.

Who knows for sure,it's just fun speculation.

Here's a couple more cool papers:
http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/QID.pdf

http://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/fms/C...Facie_Case.pdf

Again, nothing but agreement here. Thanks for the new references, too. You might like to check out the Deep Dreaming subforum in the Beyond Dreaming section of DreamViews. You'll have to "apply" to be admitted in ("skeptics aren't allowed"), but there's a lot of really interesting discussions going on in there.

Originally Posted by jeffd

Have you had any interesting experiences with tunnels in your Lucid dreams?

Please post here if so.

For myself,I have been Lucid a couple of times while my dreambody was being hurtled at high speed through dark tunnels just before waking up.

Other times,I may be riding in the back of a car with DCs or in a train going through a tunnel while I become Lucid. The other night I became Lucid in a train tunnel and stood up to fly away.A DC next to me grabbed my hand and said "don't do that here" These tunnels are very interesting to me.


BTW,I don't ride in cars too much and there are no passenger trains where I live.

I just stumbled into this forum as I searched for tunnels in dreams. After reading a blog earlier i believe the tunnel dream experience to be related to the end of "existence" or death in that world and entering a new one.
I have only dreamed once going into a tunnel, but the memory i have of it its so strong it has stayed with me. I seemed to be walking around in a forest? lots of green and thick vegetation. As i am walking i suddenly get sucked into this whole. At first i was afraid, but as i went through it i felt better and better about it and actually started enjoying the experience. The whole was draped in vines mimicking the forest i had just been at. As i traveled it started changing texture and i believe it eventually turned black. I arrived in a "new" world where i could see a red river. Otherwise everything was green, but not thick forest. as i started walking I noticed cows were giving birth ... the river had turned red from all the blood flowing into it.

I actually had a similar experience this night! In my dream I was standing in my hallway and it was very very dark...I felt scared and suddenly this dark entity comes rushing down from the stairs! Maybe this is weird for some people but in situations like this, I always run towards the thing that tries to hurt me. Because then I experience the 'short pain' and the bad experience is over. While I ran towards it I closed my eyes like I usually do and it grabbed me by my arm and whirled me away.

After this I experienced the tunnel experience. Everything was dark and I made myself fall at this really high speed! I could control it but it was hard to maintain it. I suddenly saw this really small light beneath me and it looked like a street lamp. I slowed down for a bit but I kept falling and the light passed by me and a second later I was awake. I think I was already in the state between dreaming and awake when this thing happened because I had similar experiences where it's really hard to focus on something, like for example creating a new dream scape, where most of the time I wake up like I did now.

I am reading a book by Robert Waggoner "lucid dreaming". He believes that it's better to confront the dream images. By confronting them you address your fears and troubles from your waking life. So, i guess you have no problem dealing with your issues!