Thread: OPEN BETA - Open beta TWOTLD - Day 5

So far, everything has been building up to the technique presented here. This then becomes the foundation of the next 5 exercises, which become the foundation of the next 5... all the way to 20.

Chapter 5 - Dreaming

Lucid dreaming is most likely to occur “towards the end of sleep, in sober men and those gifted with strong imaginations.” – St. Thomas Aquinas

Do you remember what you were wearing in your last lucid dream? Probably not. Becoming lucid in a dream is often accompanied by a shift of focus. In a non-lucid dream, we tend to be very aware of our self, our body, our emotions, and our thoughts. When we wake up and become lucid, all of the attention that we had been placing on ourselves suddenly gets directed out into the world. The world becomes vivid and more intriguing. Our habitual thoughts that we repeat over and over throughout the day lose their grip on us and we truly experience our environment for the first time. We wake up.

In that moment of waking up, something interesting happens. We shift from reacting to the dream, to dreaming the dream. At first, everything is out of control. We’re running to and fro, avoiding monsters, fighting zombies, looking for a bathroom, or caught up in any number of bizarre situations. In these non-lucid dreams, everything is happening to us. We’re in fight or flight, and the dream is experienced as a thing outside of us. When we become lucid, when we shift, everything changes. A transformation takes place. As awareness and control and the nature of reality come flooding in, we realize that we are consciously dreaming it all.

There is a perceptual skill that we’ve been cultivating and developing in each exercise up until now. Each exercise has been training us in a skill that we’re going to call Dreaming. To Dream something is to allow it to be. If we revisit any of our “hilltop” moments from high level lucid dreams, we can get a feel for what Dreaming means. When you’re Dreaming, you know you’re creating it all. You see the true nature of everything, it’s all dream stuff. At our most lucid, we can make that dream stuff appear or disappear with ease. In a high level lucid dream, you feel connected to everything. That feeling, that connection, is a part of Dreaming. You can create anything you want. You can destroy anything you want. And the piece that is often overlooked is that you are maintaining it all. You’re allowing it to be, exactly as it is, which means you’re intrinsically connected to everything, exactly as it is occurring. To Dream something, you have to have chosen it in some realm of consciousness. Any perceived flaws or any perceived beauty are all added on after the act, after the choice. When you Dream an object, you choose that object exactly as it is, you allow it to be, and then you behold your creation. It is perfect. It is realer than real. It is being Dreamed.

In the previous exercises, as we learned to recreate experiences from the dream, we found ourselves perhaps employing our imagination. It can be difficult to see something (that we swear up and down is real) as part of a dream. To meet this difficulty, we imagine. Imagination opens the door. Imagination is the crack in consciousness through which Dreaming comes. We begin by imagining, but our aim is to See. After a few repetitions of the exercise, the veil is lifted and we shift from imagining to lucidly experiencing, to Dreaming. That shift is what we’re after. When we can truly See, when we can smoothly transition from reacting to the dream to Dreaming the dream, the whole thing opens up and we’re on our way.

Imagination in this case occurs in the head, but it occurs with an underlying vector pointed out. We’re burrowing through something, trying to break free of our old way of looking at things. We want to get to lucid reality, so we first imagine ourselves there. As that imagination is strengthened, we eventually start to experience the desired reality, but it is no longer occurring in our head. Our awareness breaks free and is released out into the world. We poke through the veil, and like in a lucid dream, all of the attention that we had been placing on ourselves suddenly gets directed into our surroundings. The world becomes vivid and bright.

In the dream, this lifting of the veil, this waking up, is accompanied by an almost disappearance of the body. It’s not that we no longer have a body or thoughts or feelings, it’s that they become unimportant. Everything is secondary to experiencing the Dream around us. In waking life, we’re quite the opposite. The body, mind, and thoughts are of the utmost importance, and we’re often oblivious to what’s going on around us.

It is becoming increasingly apparent then, that we need to shift our awareness out of ourselves and into the world. This would truly be a neat trick! People spend years in meditation trying to accomplish similar feats. Lucid dreamers, however, have a unique advantage. They do this all the time in the dream. They already know how, as this is precisely the skill of Dreaming. We just need to practice it in life, and once this practice becomes commonplace in life, it will also become commonplace in the dream.

So how do we as dreamers further develop this skill? We take our cues from lucid dreams and Dream everything around us. We Dream everything inside us. We Dream the inside, and we Dream the outside to create the shift. In a lucid dream, everything is Dreamed. The more practiced we are at Dreaming while awake, the more inevitable it becomes that we’ll Dream at night.

Exercise 5: Dreaming

Pick an object and Dream it. As if you were in a lucid dream, allow it to be and behold your creation. If you haven’t quite grasped the concept of Dreaming, you can imagine the object as being composed of “dream.” Instead of being made of matter, let it be made of dream. Just as if you were in a lucid dream, see the underlying essence and reality of what you are looking at as extraordinarily detailed dream. This takes some effort because you are imagining, but after a while, imagination will poke through and you’ll feel a shift from effort to effortlessness. In this switch, you go from imagining to Dreaming. Instead of imagining it as dream, you allow it to be and behold your creation. Your act of Dreaming causes it to be.

Now pick a part of your body and Dream it. Spend a few moments and experience it fully as something being Dreamed this very moment. Then switch to another object.

Alternate back and forth between Dreaming objects and Dreaming parts of the body. Each time after something is Dreamed, you will notice that it takes on the feeling of a lucid dream. It’s as if it’s shifted realities. Continue this way until you’ve Dreamed every part of the body. (As a suggestion, start with a foot and work your way up.) After you’ve alternated between objects and all the parts of the body, let yourself alternate between objects and the body as a whole. As a final step, Dream all of reality.

There’s a verse in the Gospel of Thomas, verse 22, which reads, “when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside… then you will enter the kingdom.” We are doing just that with this exercise. In our case, “the kingdom” is the doorway to a breakthrough in the art and science of lucid dreaming. Many spiritual traditions have similar processes. The various spiritual paths we mentioned earlier, the ones that have spontaneous lucid dreamers, they all have this same goal, though they may word it differently. When we strip those various traditions of their stories and just focus on the outlier experiences, we are left with this paradoxical task of making the inside like the outside. Fortunately for us, our dreams have shown us the way, and we can freely explore this curious state of consciousness.

When the inside is like the outside, when it’s all being Dreamed, we notice that our attention is pulled out into the world. The body and its thoughts and sensations become secondary to experiencing the world around us. We are actually very familiar with this state. When else do we forget our bodies and enjoy the world around us? When else do we get so fascinated and involved in the present moment that time and the self just seem to disappear? When we’re having fun!

So it is of no surprise then that in the same conversation in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus tells his disciples that they must enter the kingdom as children. So from the Dreaming exercise to the inside-outside process in the Gospel, to an underlying commonality of many spiritual traditions, to ourselves having fun, to entering the kingdom as children, and now perhaps to the stereotypical fun-loving Zen master… a pattern is beginning to emerge! No matter which tradition we look at, we must make the inside like the outside, we must learn to Dream while awake, we must become as children, we must live life with the spirit of a Zen master. We must become enlightened.

We must become buddhas.

Now if we stopped our reasoning here, we’d be in trouble. We can’t become buddhas! We don’t know how to become as children! We don’t know how to have fun…!

“Oh! Sh*t!” I said, slapping my forehead.

And the door began to open...

We don’t need to become buddhas, we don’t need to become enlightened, we already are. We just don’t know it. We fall asleep and forget ourselves. We get caught up in that dream we call life, and we believe that the monsters chasing us are real. But with any luck, something odd will catch our eye. We’ll see a pink elephant. We’ll remember to do a reality check, and we’ll wake up. We’ll remember our essential nature as lucid dreamers, and then the fun can begin again. We can bring awareness back to the dream. We can make choices from a clear place. We can see everything as the dream and Dream what we want to dream in life.

If we wish to dream like the Buddha, we must ourselves become buddhas. When we realize that we are already living and dreaming in section 6, when we realize that our very nature and existence is occurring right now in the outliers, all the doors open for us. Right now, many of us are lucidly dreaming that we can’t lucidly dream. When we truly understand that, we wake up.

The path is now clear. We set out to steal fire from the gods, but the real secret of consciousness that we must grasp is that we already are the gods. There is nothing to steal because we already have it. We only have to remember that we do.

For some, this knowledge alone is all that is needed to truly become Lucid. One has but to step into the realm of the buddhas and enjoy the dream, in this world or the dream world. Full lucidity in this realm causes spontaneous lucidity in other realms. We now know why our shamans and yogis and gurus and monks are so adept at lucid dreaming: lucid dreaming is a side-effect of enlightenment! Or more accurately put: lucid dreaming is a part of enlightenment.

Every lucid dreamer knows the experience of becoming enlightened. It is the exact experience of becoming lucid in a dream. We also know that we must recreate that experience in life. We have the exercises, learned from our dreams, and they allow us easy access to what we once thought was an impossible realm.

By continuing exercise 5, a full experience of enlightenment is possible, though some may find it hard to hold on to. Having become lucid and caught tastes of enlightenment throughout our lives, we find that like lucidity, it too is a slippery thing. We wake up, but we fall back asleep. Be it in our dreams or in life, it’s hard to stay awake. The Great Dream keeps trying to pull us back in. We get caught up in the story. We observe that a few glimpses of enlightenment throughout the day is not enough to boost our dreaming skill to godlike levels. We must journey further into the enlightened realms. Perhaps there’s more to the process of enlightenment than we initially believed. It’s not a moment, it’s the starting place. Enlightenment gets our foot in the door, but it’s no use if we immediately pull our foot right back out.

Our quest now takes its first major turn. We’re not interested in seeking enlightenment, we’ve already found it. The real mystery is, how do we hold on to it?

Originally Posted by cvdmehden

So far, everything has been building up to the technique presented here. This then becomes the foundation of the next 5 exercises, which become the foundation of the next 5... all the way to 20.

...the next 5... all the way to 20!!

Here's where you lose everybody that's looking for a shortcut to lucidity.

One question...
Do you consider the dream world and the waking world to be different realities?

Originally Posted by Nailler

...the next 5... all the way to 20!!

Here's where you lose everybody that's looking for a shortcut to lucidity.

Remember, the whole thing is about can we master a skill that takes people years or longer in a much shorter time? If so, how do we go about doing that? Everyone was expecting some magic words the first day, but there is work involved, there is a process. We're not after an intellectual idea, we're after an experiential thing, a transformational approach. That's what the exercises are for. My intent with the beta was to see how easily the first major puzzle piece clicks in place for people that are just reading the text, rather than the in-person groups we've been doing. If the as-read exercises work for everyone, then we can go from there. If not, we need to rework some of the foundational stuff. Has anyone tried day 5 yet? Experiences?

This is great! Very similar to what I have found out except I had never really made the connection of how we don't experience the body into those states. Fascinating. Didn't give the exercises a full try yet but it's similar to what I have always been doing and I have the same question of how do we hold onto that state. Have you found the answer to that question?

Well, well, well - if this goes to 20 - my interest rises again - I will keep my eyes on it!

Originally Posted by Rodrodrod

This is great! Very similar to what I have found out except I had never really made the connection of how we don't experience the body into those states. Fascinating. Didn't give the exercises a full try yet but it's similar to what I have always been doing and I have the same question of how do we hold onto that state. Have you found the answer to that question?

In the next chapters, we explore first WHY we don't hold on to that state, then we explore the how.

I believe we are paused while waiting for some people to post their feedback on exercise 5, so I will chime in. I have caught up with the previous exercises over the last several days, though I am late to the party. I am afraid Nailler might be right, but there are still plenty of people on DV that are willing to put in the work needed to LD and I am cautiously optimistic that these exercises will be worth our time! The reason I say that is that the 4 previous exercises clearly do lead up to #5 and many of the components of the exercises resonate with me so far and quite a few of them are similar to things that I have done in the past that seemed to be beneficial.

In exercise 5 I got a feeling of excitement while doing the exercise, though holding onto that feeling was the challenge as the author mentioned. That is a skill that anyone should recognize as useful for those dream and reality "mountaintop moments."

Brief feedback on previous exercises:

Exercise 1 - dream object - is like my waking practices when imagining what I will do in my next lucid I also look at nearby objects as if they were creations of my mind in an LD. I like it.

Exercise 2 - Super RC - I haven't done this before. It created some excitement similar to becoming lucid.

Exercise 3a - Reverse FA (imagining becoming lucid) - like I mention in exercise 1 this is part of one of my waking practices but repeating it multiple times in the same session was new for me.

Exercise 3b - True FA - I do the day review when I feel I need to boost my dream recall but never ended it with imagining that it was all a dream or that I am dreaming at the time. I like this and it ties in nicely with everything so far.

Exercise 4a/b - alternating objects/reality - I have done imagining the dream objects/imagining being lucid as mentioned above but never alternated back and forth with real objects/reality intentionally. Concept makes sense.

(My exercise 5 notes are above.)

Haven't had a chance to spend a lot of time on this, but I have done a couple quick practices. It's hard to hold on to the feeling afterwards but from what I've read of your responses it seems you go into that later in the book which will be nice to read (I thought it was only these 5 chapters the whole time ). It's a neat feeling thinking of everything I see as my own creation, and I've done stuff like that before to an extent but never done it while focusing on my body so I think that is definitely a good practice to include with it. Are you going to put up the other sections of the book eventually or just leave it at these 5?

Originally Posted by Fuzzman

Are you going to put up the other sections of the book eventually or just leave it at these 5?

I'm hoping for a little more feedback from everyone. I think we're averaging about 2 actual feedbacks per exercise so far. What I'm really looking for is people to try the exercises (as written) and report back on their findings. This is the test portion of the beta test. I'd love to keep playing, but it's less fun when I'm just playing with myself...

It does look like the feedback is starting to come in today , so hopefully we'll all keep this thing going.

Having tried all the exercises again I have noticed the following: For one, I'm not so keen in doing exercises under a period of time, as the exercises themselves bring me to a timeless state of the now and having to do a certain amount of time may drag me out of it and also I think takes the fun out of it. I prefer to just play with it. Also, I noticed that now when I become aware of my body I see it differently than how I used to because of the connection I had never made before.

Exercise 1 - I notice more the details of each objects and can find great pleasure just looking at them with curiosity. I actually got lost going through a bunch of stuff I found in a drawer I never open. Before I knew it 15 mins had passed.

Exercise 2 - I soon found myself with no more RC's to perform and so I begun to look at everything as if it were a RC where I started doubting everything and was amazed at how realistic it all were.

Exercise 3 - My awareness did indeed peak when I "became lucid" and I would quite soon lose myself in the task I was doing to suddenly remember I was dreaming. Going through everything I done during the day before that moment took a bit too much time, especially if I want to think of every detail, because as I went through I would suddenly recall things I hadn't included in my playback.

Exercise 4 - Interesting exercise that I'd never tried before. After going back and forth It all seemed to merge together and I couldn't really distinguish between the different points of view.

Exercise 5 - Dreaming up the body was a nice addition to what I usually do and made the feel of it different, I can see it as a dream =)

I'm looking forward to hearing what you have found concerning maintaining these states. It seems that the more I try the harder it is, so I try to just enjoy it when I do remember about it. =D

Originally Posted by Rodrodrod

I'm not so keen in doing exercises under a period of time, as the exercises themselves bring me to a timeless state of the now and having to do a certain amount of time may drag me out of it and also I think takes the fun out of it. I prefer to just play with it.

I also don't like adding in the time suggestion. Unfortunately, when I don't, I find that people tend to not do it long enough. They do it for a few minutes, but don't quite get to the peak experience that the exercise is designed to convey. In other words, they stop too soon. I'm not sure how to address this. Any thoughts? I also don't want to tell them what the end result will be because then they'll try to just imagine that and think they're there without really being there. Again, it's about having to do it long enough, but how do you get people to do that?

I've been trying out this dreaming exercise for the last couple of days now. From what I've experienced, my focus sort of softens once I bring my concentration to myself and imagine that I am my dream body. What results is a dream like mentality, and I've found that I can stretch the limits pretty far if I hold on to the state. It was easy to create the conscious shift if I actively practiced the exercise for an extended time, and I was in a way able to climb that ladder, like entering a dream while wide awake. From there I saw things in a more tranquil light, and my perspective was almost radically shifted. This helped take down several mental barriers which I consider as a burden to perception, and at last I felt light as air and carefree.

Though the dreaming exercise allowed me to view things from an altered perspective, it always lacked the quality of full immersion. However, I believe I may have took something from this exercise when I went to sleep, because I had an exceptional occurrence of vivid and elaborate dreams as well as good dream recall. The issue was I was only bordering on lucidity, being more of an observer than a participant.

Originally Posted by cvdmehden

I also don't like adding in the time suggestion. Unfortunately, when I don't, I find that people tend to not do it long enough. They do it for a few minutes, but don't quite get to the peak experience that the exercise is designed to convey. In other words, they stop too soon. I'm not sure how to address this. Any thoughts? I also don't want to tell them what the end result will be because then they'll try to just imagine that and think they're there without really being there. Again, it's about having to do it long enough, but how do you get people to do that?

I'm having trouble to set time apart where I know I will not be interrupted by someone while doing the exercises (I'm sharing home with relatives for a few weeks) but if I didn't know that a certain amount of time needs to be invested to get results, I'd go with 5 minutes and think the exercise does not work, so I prefer the author to be clear about the time requirements.

Originally Posted by cvdmehden

I also don't like adding in the time suggestion. Unfortunately, when I don't, I find that people tend to not do it long enough. They do it for a few minutes, but don't quite get to the peak experience that the exercise is designed to convey. In other words, they stop too soon. I'm not sure how to address this. Any thoughts? I also don't want to tell them what the end result will be because then they'll try to just imagine that and think they're there without really being there. Again, it's about having to do it long enough, but how do you get people to do that?

I understand completely. You are right in not telling the end result as it is the journey that will open the person to the experience. I guess sometimes we have to put in the work even when we don't necessarily want to in order to get the results.

Hi cvdmehden,
first of all thank you for all your work, its really helpful for me. What I don't understand is, with your new perspective: "everything is a dream" how do i differentiate between dream world and real world? When i'm always in a state of "not knowing" how do i know if i'm dreaming?Its a bit confusing for me.

There is absolutely a barrier between dreaming/non-dreaming. Not sure if anyone can refute that. Reality Checks work because you can decompose limits in dreams. You can not decompose material limits in non-dreams. So my humble advice to Unimatrix is to keep working on reality checks. And do cvdmedhen's style of contemplation/meditation on RCs mentioned in day 2. But keep trusting in your own contemplation method to assess dream/reality. My advise to myself and to you is to think of a reality check that does work in dreams. And set intent to remember it always.

Breathing through nose doesn't work that much for me, it has become a habit. And i have seen atleast one dream report (wakingnomad) who claimed a dream in which even that reality check failed him. So for me it is still a goal to think of a RC that works. And i believe the power of RC is slightly underestimated.

Originally Posted by Dthoughts

There is absolutely a barrier between dreaming/non-dreaming. Not sure if anyone can refute that. Reality Checks work because you can decompose limits in dreams.

Yes i agree with you, i am counting my fingers as a RC (works nearly all the time) but as far as i understand, cvdmehden doesn't need a reality check (anymore?).

I think what he is getting at is that he simply knows it is a dream. From what I understand (correct me if i'm wrong), these exercises are designed to train the mind that it knows it is dreaming at all times. Therefore, it will never mistake a dream for reality anymore.

Personally have had some results because I have had awesome dreams that are not my ordinary non-lucid dreams. Sadly, I do not remember much of the actual content. As a side-note, i think some people have non-lucid lucid dreams. They just dream (and i have had dreams) that are so far removed from ordinary reality which are still quite vvid that they might aswell have been lucid dreams. I think this is the state that we are looking for?

Except it would be nice if in the dream there was some kind of anchor which reminds us of our Non-dreaming selves, so we can remember goals and curiosities of our waking minds about dreaming. And fulfill those in that moment. Any words on that, cvd?
It certainly should become a hell of a lot easier to remember lucidity when you dream of shooting lasers at robots every night as opposed to dreaming of going to school/work at night.

Sorry. Been doing this lately (going though the different exercises). My dreams have lacked a certain sense of awareness, probably due to sleeping like 5-6 hours the last few nights. It is a level of awareness I have been at before, but they have been going like this:
I am in the middle of a city, I rush over to a house and start talking to the people about quidditch. They set up a game, I have full control of the dream and my.dream body, my mind is my own, but I feel like this was a task I wanted to do, but don't remember deciding to do it. I am handed a crappy broom that can barely fly. They release the snitch and I rush at it. I leave my broom behind, because I am dreaming, it takes me a while, and it breaks as I grab it. Everyone was kind of mad about that.

So I know that I am dreaming, I know what that means, but I kind of get all my awareness in the middle of a task, but know that it is a dream from beginning. It is almost every dream lately. Hard to figure out how many LDs i have at because of that. Sleep schedule will be better through the week.

Originally Posted by unimatrix

Hi cvdmehden,
first of all thank you for all your work, its really helpful for me. What I don't understand is, with your new perspective: "everything is a dream" how do i differentiate between dream world and real world? When i'm always in a state of "not knowing" how do i know if i'm dreaming?Its a bit confusing for me.

The goal of these exercises isn't to leave you in a state of not knowing, it's to get you to a truer perception of reality. In effect, a much deeper knowing. A knowing that doesn't rely on anything else. You know where you're awake. You know when you're dreaming. There is simply no question. You are fully lucid, and always aware of which reality you're in.

I know this'll get me in trouble, but:

Originally Posted by Dthoughts

Personally have had some results because I have had awesome dreams that are not my ordinary non-lucid dreams. Sadly, I do not remember much of the actual content. As a side-note, i think some people have non-lucid lucid dreams. They just dream (and i have had dreams) that are so far removed from ordinary reality which are still quite vivid that they might aswell have been lucid dreams. I think this is the state that we are looking for?

Lucidity does not equal vividness. Lucidity equals waking-life self-awareness. If your dream is vivid and you are not aware you are dreaming, it is not lucid, period. Again: there is nothing wrong with vivid dreams, but they are not lucid dreams if you are not aware you are dreaming.

Except it would be nice if in the dream there was some kind of anchor which reminds us of our Non-dreaming selves, so we can remember goals and curiosities of our waking minds about dreaming. And fulfill those in that moment.

That anchor is lucidity.

Originally Posted by cvdmehden

The goal of these exercises isn't to leave you in a state of not knowing, it's to get you to a truer perception of reality. In effect, a much deeper knowing. A knowing that doesn't rely on anything else. You know where you're awake. You know when you're dreaming. There is simply no question. You are fully lucid, and always aware of which reality you're in.

Thank you for your answer! It sounds almost too good to be true but i will continue to practise and experiment.

Originally Posted by unimatrix

Thank you for your answer! It sounds almost too good to be true but i will continue to practise and experiment.

Feel free to post your experiences with the exercises. We're nowhere near the end yet, so lots to come!

I practiced all the exercises in full over the weekend and overall had a good experience with them. I could get myself to the state of feeling like everything was a dream pretty easily and with more practice I could maintain it for a while. Exercise 3b left me feeling a bit drained of mental energy though when trying to recall the events of the day (and I was only halfway through the day by the time I did it) but I may have been trying too hard to remember as many details as I could, it took maybe 20 minutes at least. I really liked exercise 5 though and feel like I will do that one the most from now on, when alternating between dreaming objects around me and dreaming parts of my body I began to get a strong feeling like I was in a dream and after I had gone the whole way through I was able to hold onto that feeling for a long while. No lucid dreams yet though and my recall was poor last night, but I'm still hopeful and will keep trying these exercises.