Thread: OPEN BETA - Open beta TWOTLD - Day 6

The next section starts with an experience a lot of you will be familiar with. Then we go from there...

Chapter 6 - Leaden-body dreaming

"Slow down and enjoy life. It's not the scenery you miss by going too fast – you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.” – Eddie Cantor

People’s first lucid dreams are often short. Those first brilliant moments of awareness as the veil lifts and the whole world comes crashing to life are nothing short of miraculous. We often respond to those moments with excitement and delight. Feelings of success, joy, and thrill overwhelm us, our hearts stampede, and we end up waking ourselves up. It takes a few tries, but eventually we learn to control our excitement. We let lucidity happen. Like catching sight of a deer in the wild, we don’t go, “OMG, A DEEEEEEEER!!!!!” because the first time we did that the deer bounded away while our mouths were still open excitedly forming words. Instead, when we see the deer, we stop and pour all of our attention into the moment. Joy and thrill may still be present, but our focus isn’t on that, we don’t want to lose sight of the deer. After a few moments, we grow bold and start inching our way forward, wanting to see how close we can get. If we remain our normal selves, loudly tramping through the woods, we miss out on the beauty. It flees from us, and if we’re too caught up in our own story, we may not even know it had been there in the first place.

To really catch hold of the hidden wonders of the dream, another shift is required. We need a more careful, considered approach, not inclined to easy and sudden loss of lucidity. In the dream or in life, as long as we’re going full speed ahead, in our own worlds, talking on cell phones, daydreaming, and rushing through life, we know that we’re going to miss out on the magical moments that surround us.

“Slow down!” the proverbial Zen masters tell us. We’re missing out. We’re missing the sunrise, the song of the lark, the smells of fresh baked bread wafting down the street from the corner baker. If we start scanning across spiritual traditions, we will find this theme of slowing down echoed over and over. We are living our lives and dreaming our dreams at break-neck speeds, trapped in our own worlds. We’re so busy living inside the dream that we swear is real, we miss out on the lucid reality that surrounds us.
If we consider the oft-heard message of slowing down, of stopping and smelling the roses that so many traditions advise us to do, it should be of no surprise to find similar clues coming from the Dream. After your first few lucid dreams, once you’ve gotten some stability in that realm, certain outlier experiences begin to occur. One such experience is the leaden body.

In a leaden body dream, suddenly or gradually, you find it difficult to move. You could be walking or running like normal, when suddenly it feels as if the air has turned to molasses. If you’ve ever tried to run underwater or waist-deep in a swimming pool, you know the feeling. You struggle with all your might, straining, willing, grunting, and after a seeming eternity, you’ve only managed to take a step. The body has become leaden and slow, simple tasks become monumental efforts.
Leaden body dreams bear all the indications of an outlier experience. Some people confuse these dreams with sleep paralysis (a state in which your consciousness is awake in the real world, your eyes may even be open, but the body hasn’t quite come online yet and you are unable to move), but these are two distinct phenomenon.

I’ve never had a leaden body dream in a highly lucid state. Sometimes they occur towards the end of a lucid dream in which I’m being pulled back into the story, and usually, as soon as I’m experiencing difficulty in movement and start fighting it, I’ve already lost. The experience has become “real” and I’ve completely fallen asleep within the dream.

Despite having lost lucidity, if we continue to explore the leaden body experience, we begin to notice a few things. In my case, as I’m struggling to walk, straining against the air, I become very aware of my legs. I can feel my muscles burning, I can feel tendons stretching, I even become aware of the bones in my legs giving me structure and support. Movement in a leaden body dream is very intense. In order to move, we have to direct all of our attention and will into various parts of the body to get them to behave and move forward. Whatever dream story we were caught up in fades away and becomes unimportant as all our focus is being directed towards movement. We may no longer be in a lucid state, but paradoxically, a certain lucidity begins occurring within the body. The body and all its operations become vivid. We experience our movements fully. Usually, we’re running through the dream, oblivious to our body unless it somehow gets in the way. In the leaden body dream, we become almost oblivious to the dream, unless it somehow gets in the way. The body becomes complex, and if we don’t get frustrated, fascinating.

Our eyes now easily pick out the trail of crumbs scattered across the scene from a dream, and we follow that trail, moving deeper and deeper into strange realms. As we continue down our path, let us take inspiration from the alchemists of old, and when given lead, turn it into gold.

Exercise 6: Leaden-body dreaming
From a seated position, stand up. Now raise your hand.

Normally, these actions are done automatically with no real body awareness. Repeat the actions with as much awareness of movement as you can muster. In standing up, how many muscles were involved? Were you aware of them all? Standing requires many subtle movements, in the toes, the feet, the calves, the thighs, the core, the back, the arms, the neck, the head, the shoulders, and the cooperation of countless other tendons, ligaments, muscles, and systems. Repeat the action, and try to feel everything that happens. Try to feel every movement, every muscle. Repeat the action slower. Increase your awareness of what it takes to perform any simple movement. Experience the movement fully. As if you were in a leaden-body dream, move in extreme slow motion, pouring all of your attention and awareness into experiencing the movements of the body. If you get distracted from experiencing the slow-motion movement, or if any thoughts pop up or random emotions, simply redirect your attention back into experiencing your body move in slow motion. All distractions are unimportant. Once you can fully experience everything involved in simple movements, take a walk continuing to pour all of your attention into the body. Play with movements as you walk, fully experiencing everything in super slow-motion. Be big, have fun, and continue this exercise until a dramatic shift occurs.

I had almost come across this exercise years earlier while taking an acting class called The Alexander Technique. In the Alexander Technique, tensions in the body are discovered and released so that we can move with grace and ease. A common mantra practiced in the class was to “Stop. Feel. Act.”

When we slow down and start moving consciously and purposefully, we take on a different quality. In my Alexander exploration, I was finding tensions in the body and releasing them as I walked. At one point, I felt my whole body suddenly become weightless. I felt like I could fly. Walking had turned into an extraordinary, magical experience. From dull routine to lucid, vivid wonder, I was giddily walking, wondering what was going on.

“Just think, that’s what walking is supposed to feel like all the time,” my teacher said.

Just as the world becomes more vivid in a lucid dream, our bodies too can become more vivid and lucid. By becoming more present in the body, the body can pull us into becoming more present in the world. The dramatic shift mentioned at the end of this exercise has to do with this phenomenon. The shift happens naturally and automatically. Continue the exercise until the “aha!” moment occurs. A new aspect of lucidity is learned via the leaden body route that leads to higher levels of dream awareness than we’ve explored up until now.