Originally Posted by
shadowofwind
Hi floatinghead. I haven't had time to more than skim the recent additions to this thread, but here are a couple of comments, in hopes that they clarify some issues rather than confusing them more.
When I joined the forum two and a half years ago, about three months before Sageous, people were going gangbusters with 'dream plane' exploration, which I think is great. But for better or for worse there didn't seem to be much attempt to distinguish what is objectively and collectively real from what is personal and subjective. You touched on this point earlier, when you mentioned that there seems to be a distinction between 'The moon' and the moon of particular dreamers and groups of dreamers. To spin it positively, some people like WakingNomad recognized that if people try to hard to analyze this sort of thing to the end, that's interfering with their progress they're not actually out there doing it. Or to spin it negatively, some people wanted to be adepts of The Astral Plane or The Dream World, and were intolerant of other people that brought a different perspective because it undermined that position. Or they were proud of what they'd accomplished, and felt that it was being attacked. Or some combination of these and other motivations. There were a lot of people here that don't post anymore, and I've forgotten their screen names.
It has appeared to me that Sageous felt that he brought something a little bit different to the table, and that it was brushed away as wrong or irrelevant. I think that some of this also reflects some internal frustration, that he has felt he's on the cusp of something, but can't quite put together what comes next, and correctly perceives that what other people have been advocating isn't quite the ticket for him. To some extent I'm guessing because he posted a lot on other subforums that I don't read, but this has been my impression. So he's not really against shared dreaming, he's just trying to make a place for what he knows and perceives to be of value, while resisting ways of thinking that he sees as hostile to that. Principally, to whatever extent people make stuff up and believe its real, that's hostile to everything that's not included, particularly to the extent that people push their own perspective at the exclusion of other perspectives.
About three years ago I dreamed of some people who I could not see, but it felt sort of like they were pretending to be ninjas. In regards to me, they observed 'he can not perceive space'. Afterwards I thought maybe these were alien minds or something, and were commenting on some limitation of the way I experience reality. So I tried to think if I could be aware of 'space', independent of the characteristics and interrelations between objects in space. That may have been part of the meaning of the dream, but with retrospect, those 'ninjas' were a premonition of DreamViews people who were into dream plane fighting, for self defense and killing 'dream police' and whatnot, and their comment was simply that I'm mostly unaware of their visual environment when dreaming lucidly, which is true.
I think this is another facet of the criticisms of people like myself and Sageous - this astral kung fu stuff is largely projected, and a lot of it is unhealthy. If you can't tell what's yours from what's not yours, how can you deal effectively with what's unhealthy? Hence the value of recognizing what is collectively inherent in our dream plane, as distinct from what we're putting there ourselves that can be changed. I think there are valid arguments on the other side too. Just because I don't dream of fighting people or demons doesn't mean that I don't struggle with things or that I'm not threatened by things that take a less definite form. So I'd like to share what I can, while learning from people different than me, to form some kind of better synthesis of the different approaches. But its difficult, because its hard to share such perspectives without people feeling disrespected. Its pretty clear to me, for instance, that Sageous respected WakingNomad, and I respected WakingNomad also. But since we viewed him differently than he viewed himself, and viewed ourselves differently than he viewed us, it can be difficult for that respect to stand above the apparent disrespect that's unavoidable given our different perspectives. I guess we all have to be willing to accept a certain amount of derision also. And I'm not too proud to say that I think I deserve some of it, if only some of it.
Usually when I try to interject myself somewhere and fix things up by 'explaining' everything it just pisses everyone off even if they weren't pissed off before. But I guess I never stop trying, even though in a lot of ways I'm the most aggressive person on here, I also want everybody to be one big happy family. I think the different parts of the family need each other.
I realize that I've been talking as if people have been fighting, when in fact people haven't really been fighting. I'm just trying to highlight some of the conflict that underlies some of these debates, for the sake of understanding it, even though its not the sole or even the most important thing that's been going on.
Gotta go.