Chapter 7 - Walking in the bizarre
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it, and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed." – Albert Einstein
Having explored lucidity both in the body and in the world, we have been steadily preparing ourselves for lengthier excursions into the outlier realms. We’ve stuck our toes in lucid waters and found them to be warm and inviting. As we now prepare for full immersion into the Dream, we once again consider those that have blazed the trail before us. Einstein knew the power of perception. His power to see things differently, to journey into the outliers, transformed our understanding of the physical world. To him, his access to the outliers was in conjuring the mysterious. Rather than seeing things as knowns, he viewed them as unknowns. The gateway to lucid realms is conjured in much the same way. Though rather than calling it mysterious, dreamers tend to call it the Bizarre.
What is it about flying pink elephants that causes us to wake up? Dreamers often believe that it’s the absurdity or impossibility of the event that triggers lucidity, but there are subtler things happening. The elephant events first hook our attention. We stop what we’re doing and do a double-take. They pull us in. If we slow down the event, before we get to, “Hey, I must be dreaming!” we first have a moment of just seeing the elephant with an internal attitude of “That’s bizarre…” It’s only after we’ve gone through bizarre that we start piecing things together and exclaim that we must dreaming. Bizarre is the starting place. Bizarre calls forth a realm of mystery and undims the eyes. Bizarre pulls us into lucidity.
So let us take our cues from Einstein and elephants. What happens if we remain in the state of “that’s bizarre…”? In normal lucid dreams, becoming very interested in the dream is one technique for prolonging lucidity. This redirection of attention from ourselves and our stories (where we tend to get trapped) back into the dream, allows us to remain in the lucid state. The mind tends to get bored with reality because it thinks it already understands the world. Rather than participating in the vivid world out there, if it thinks there’s nothing new, the mind goes back to rehashing the same old thoughts over and over. It’s only when the mind comes across something bizarre that it stops generating its false mentally constructed world and allows us to look at the world as it really is. A bizarre exterior lifts the veil. The mind wants to know what’s going on. It finally wants to SEE.
The best way to direct our attention out into the dream is to become infinitely fascinated by the dream, and the best way to do that is to see everything as bizarre. Don’t just view pink elephants as bizarre, view the whole brilliant thing as bizarre. The more feeling of bizarre that we can conjure, the more lucid our dreams and our lives can become. Conjuring the bizarre is the quickest way out of our mentally constructed worlds. When something is bizarre, we immediately become lucid.
Exercise 7: Walking in the Bizarre
Pick an object and look at it as if it were the most bizarre thing you’ve ever come across. Be intrigued by it, desire to see every detail, leave no part of it unexplored. You are beholding an impossibility, a great mystery!
Continuing with this level of fascination, go for a walk and explore your surroundings. Let every aspect of the world seem Bizarre. Walk in the Bizarre like Alice when she first entered Wonderland. Let the sky be bizarre, let your body be bizarre. Feel like a stranger in a strange body walking in a strange and marvelous land. If at any point you feel yourself being pulled back into normal consciousness, simply start the process over again. Focus again on everything being bizarre. Continue your walk until you effortlessly feel like you’re in a lucid dream.
Any of the previous exercises can be revisited adding in this element of lucidity.
Frequently in spiritual texts we are told to become as children. Teachers from the Dalai Lama to Jesus Christ encourage us to love, trust, and be exactly as a child would love, trust, and be. We know that children have an innate sense of innocence and wonder through which they view the world, but what is it really like to see the world through their eyes? We’ve grown used to the way things are. The way we move, the way we act, the way we drive, everything is normal to us. Would we feel the same if we were from another place or another time? Our world would seem truly bizarre to someone from 500 years ago, just as their world would seem equally bizarre to us. Their thoughts, beliefs, and ways of life would be absolutely confounding; similarly, as they viewed the way we live our lives, they would think we’d all gone mad. Imagine how bizarre this all must be to children! Growing up is a process of becoming accustomed to the bizarre. As the world goes from bizarre to normal, our eyes slowly dim. We get sucked into the dream and fall asleep. Enlightenment fades. We must journey back into the bizarre if we are to recover that light.
Some beginning lucid dreamers recall being able to lucid dream when they were children. They believe that somewhere along the way, they lost their talent. We understand now that it’s not that they lost something, it’s that they fell deeper and deeper into sleep. By taking walks in the bizarre, we are strengthening our Dreaming skill and finding our back to lucid dreaming with the ease of a child. By using our various Dreaming exercises, we immediately see through our mental constructs and begin to view reality as we do in a lucid dream. The longer we spend Dreaming throughout the day, the quicker our progress on this path becomes. We can now conjure the bizarre to disrupt our mental construct any time we choose, but where does this mental construct keep coming from? Why can’t we just use an exercise to wake up and then be lucid for the rest of our lives?
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