Thread: Dream plane existance

We can stop here anyways, neither of us is going to change mind.

Well try to recreate the dream planes documented by others and no marshmallow planes have not been written about as spiritual planes astral, mental causal and buhdic have. Recreate that the next time u go lucid.
& Like I said Im not here to discount any of your beliefs, your the one discounting my experience. So I just want to hear you say dream yogi's belief in dream planes is just a imagination of their mind. I bet you just cant flat out say it can you??

Originally Posted by Whiskee

There are hundreds of claims in the so called spiritual world (because that's what we are talking about, this is out of boundaries of meditation).
I reply: strongly believe in anything and it will become true in your next dreams, this is a proven fact.
Yet you don't want to or can't give a reasonable explanation about why your experiences can't just be proper LDs...
It's a simple question, you answered with a perfectly normal dream about you floating in space with no limbs. Seriously?
Because I could visualize that too and create new random sensations with it... I expected a bit more, not a "I just feel it and it's enough"
How can anyone even argue against that? You are skeptical and can't disprove my marshmallow plane either, so it must be true.

Wait if the dream plane sould be real then why dont many people meet there ? Why is shared dreaming so random or hard ?

This again? I'm not discounting anything just for the sake of it.
I have no experience of dream yogi's beliefs, also my attempts would be unconclusive since I don't believe in that and suggestion/confidence is imprtant here.
That's why I repeatedly asked you to please write here what's so unexplainable about it, why all the confidence, expecting maybe some visions or shared dreaming.
I trust shadowofwind on page 1 where he writes about his premonitions.
I don't think he's a liar, I can't really explain those and I'm skeptic yet I don't rule them out completely.
Since your experiences are perfectly explainable (like your DJ entry), there isn't much to debate here really.
You just keep saying "you don't know what I know", which means a big fat nothing.

Originally Posted by SergSG

I don't mean to sound disrespectful, but could you explain how that happened?

Yes, that's a reasonable request. Also I should have qualified my statement a lot more strongly.

Among people who I knew well, two developed severe and debilitating problems with succubi or incubi. One of them got over it, one of them considered suicide, then got over it partially, then relapsed, and seemed to be in a bad spot the last I heard from them a few months ago. Another person got all paranoid and drowned themselves, though they had money troubles also. Three other people who dream intentionally have teetered on the edge of mental illness, including one who had problems keeping what they experience to be their 'inner bodies' together. In other words, they lost the ability to prevent themselves from astrally projecting when they don't want to, and became seriously ill, both physically and emotionally. Extending my pool of examples to friends or siblings of friends, at least two got paranoid and killed themselves, and several had to be institutionalized. In most of these cases, their problems developed slowly over a period of many years. Yes there's no proof here that any of their problems stemmed from their dream and meditative practices, though some of them believed them to. No hard conclusions are possible. But its a pervasive enough pattern that I think its at least worth mentioning or taking into consideration.

There's another reason for why I said what I said, relating to very disturbing dream premonitions of two deaths, but I don't want to get into that here.

Originally Posted by wana

Wait if the dream plane sould be real then why dont many people meet there ? Why is shared dreaming so random or hard ?

What your asking is not a question of validity anymore. For why is it so hard to access this void, think about it....you are asking multiple people to share one space based around the complete subconscience, or on a whole other plane if you argue astral projection. I totally believe in dream sharing but my theory is that in order to share one dream space all parties have to share the same subconscience idea, minus any variation. This is literally creating a new reality because you are trying to have one idea or scene to be perceived by more than one mind, by law you are making a new reality. To enter into ones dreams, I can imagine, would require a huge amount of brain and will power. I don't have all the facts or research as the others do but I think you are under the impression that while one is asleep a lucid dreamer can just pop inside their head and see and feel all that they see and feel. That lucid dreamer would be literally surrounding themselves with the reality of another's mind. In normal everyday reality you can't do that. The reality you see is the combined perception of all people, mainly of your own perception, the constructs of which were created before you were even thought of. Now you ask us to just simply provide evidence that one can go inside another mind into a reality which is created purely from that person and that person alone. This is why it is so rare and a huge task.

Woah

Did they know each other well, especially the first one who started developing those disturbs?
I guess knowing that your friends are having problems because of APs can easily lead you to the same path...

You shouldn't be discounting anyone's personal experience, you can only speak for yourself and no one else. Dream planes are not unexplainable they are written about by practioners like myself. Please do your research & also I just gave you a reliable source about lucid dreaming that explains dream yogi's position on dream planes for the sake of this discussion you need not go beyond that. Dream yogi's believe in dream planes do they not? You think they dont exist do you not? So if you cant confidently say that dream yogi's are inaccurate in their belief of dream planes then you do not firmly stand by dream planes being fiction do you. All i can do is share my experience i need not prove its validity to you. whats real is for me to decide not you. Do your home work recreate the planes written about that you try so hard to discount. experience things for your self you cant play the game sitting on the bench that makes you a cheer leader.

Originally Posted by Whiskee

This again? I'm not discounting anything just for the sake of it.
I have no experience of dream yogi's beliefs, also my attempts would be unconclusive since I don't believe in that and suggestion/confidence is imprtant here.
That's why I repeatedly asked you to please write here what's so unexplainable about it, why all the confidence, expecting maybe some visions or shared dreaming.
I trust shadowofwind on page 1 where he writes about his premonitions.
I don't think he's a liar, I can't really explain those and I'm skeptic yet I don't rule them out completely.
Since your experiences are perfectly explainable (like your DJ entry), there isn't much to debate here really.
You just keep saying "you don't know what I know", which means a big fat nothing.

A couple of other comments:

The first time I astrally projected, I thought I was actually out of my physical body. The next similar experience I thought was real. The third time, I had enough control over it to experiment a bit, and decided that it was not real, because of the way I could control it with my imagination. It took 15 years of further experiences and questioning before I was sure again that there is after all something 'real' there.

In the premonition experiences, the strongest content is emotional. This is natural, because the information that is most easily 'shared' paranormally is that kind. Yet skeptics tend to dismiss emotional information entirely, because it contains an element of subjectivity. If you want to learn more, you can and should skeptically qualify your thoughts about it, but you can't just dismiss it entirely on the grounds that its partially subjective.

Wiskee: If you're 100% sure that you can debunk anyone's claims, then that's where you stop. Relax that to 99%, and with persistence eventually you'll find something that can withstand all the tests you throw at it. I can describe dream experiences that I doubt you can reproduce.

Here's one: Dream of something that can't be embedded in euclidean 3-space. Klein bottles count only if you dream of them in the space they reside in, not if you project a broken caricature of them into euclidean 2-space or 3-space. Four dimensional euclidean objects count, but only if you dream of more than a series of 3-dimensional cross sections.

That particular example doesn't prove the existence of 'higher planes' of course.

The most important transcendent experiences are moral or spiritual, they change your heart and make you a better person. Whether or not the accompanying sight and sound image is impressive or reproducible doesn't amount to much.

I'm not 100% sure I can debunk anyone's claims and I've never said that, I'm not that arrogant.
Nope, not even 99% and I don't hold any absolute truth.

He just did NOT answer to my question, so I'm pretty sure he hasn't experienced anything that full LD vividness and control can't explain.
Just tell me: why should I believe in the astral plane instead of the marshmallow plane, if I can create both with their own rulesets?
The fact that a lot of people believe in something is irrelevant if you can't explain why you personally do.

"You should try this before you speak" is a weak argument, not that different from the "you need faith" religious weapon.
If your experience isn't related to shared dreaming, premonitions, pure knowledge, "sentient beings" (and I would accept that explanation, really)...
what makes it so special and different? Good stories and wishful thinking, because that's just a LD.

shadowofwind: I can't even imagine what those people must have gone through but maybe there is a lesson to be learned from their expiriences, we should all be more careful when treading the uncharted land that is our subconscious. Also, i am sorry if writing of their experiences made you feel uncomfortable in anyway.

you havn't answered my question about dream yogi's a simple yes or no. valid or not valid. You just threw them under a general umbrella of spiritual world claims. If you want to discount dream planes you better be able to do it on all fronts not just me but other cultures who visit them. You havn't created the mental planes or any other planes written for that matter you said you can;t recreate the planes because you dont believe in them. but you belive in marshmellows so that is a easier plane to to create lol your a theorist not a practioner that is all!

Originally Posted by Whiskee

I'm not 100% sure I can debunk anyone's claims and I've never said that, I'm not that arrogant.
Nope, not even 99% and I don't hold any absolute truth.

He just did NOT answer to my question, so I'm pretty sure he hasn't experienced anything that full LD vividness and control can't explain.
Just tell me: why should I believe in the astral plane instead of the marshmallow plane, if I can create both with their own rulesets?
The fact that a lot of people believe in something is irrelevant if you can't explain why you personally do.

"You should try this before you speak" is a weak argument, not that different from the "you need faith" religious weapon.
If your experience isn't related to shared dreaming, premonitions, pure knowledge, "sentient beings" (and I would accept that explanation, really)...
what makes it so special and different? Good stories and wishful thinking, because that's just a LD.

I've already answered that: I don't judge what I don't know well.
Also, many other cultures have lucid dreaming references with their fair amount of superstitions attached.

What I do know, is that your "omg astral plane!" entry was a simple LD experience... unless there's something more you forgot of course.
What I do know, is that convincing yourself about something has a great impact on your OBEs.
What I do know, is that our mind is scientifically able to create a wide array of unknown amazing feelings out of nowhere.
What I do know, is that you refused or failed to give the guy who started the thread one single reason to believe in the "astral plane".

Honestly, you can't complain if people eventually call you delusional when they ask you to explain yourself and you keep with the "I know better" mantra.
I'm not even sure what you're trying to do here if you lack the simple ability to explain what the fuck you see in your dreams.
Are we done here?

First off, sorry I was a bit rude about that 100%/99% thing. I didn't read your other conversation carefully, and probably should have made my point in a better way, if at all.

Originally Posted by Whiskee

You can't deny a lot of weird theories are presented and discussed here on DV as acknowledged truths... this is just wrong.

I agree, it is wrong.

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is wrong too. Most of these weird ideas have a couple thousand years of history at least, so even though they're plowed through with bullshit, there has been substantial testing and refinement of the ideas also, often by quite intelligent people.

Most people who throw around scientific truths are also appealing to historical authority, and don't really understand what they're talking about. The mystics just appeal to a different set of authorities. Its true that the scientific truths have a much more solid basis, but most of the people who argue about them don't actually know that for themselves.

In any case, I agree about the desirability of getting rid of the bullshit. And there's a lot of it.

Originally Posted by Whiskee

About colors: why should I need a model for my experiences?

I'm using the word model quite generally, for lack of a better word. The experience itself is a kind of model. Any image is a model that you organize information into. Without a model of some sort, you can't even have the experience.

Originally Posted by Whiskee

Have you ever seen a non-existant color in a dream? Hell, I did.
I spent something like 30 seconds trying to recognize it. I can't honestly describe it, because that was obviously fake and yet extremely convincing.

How can a color be 'fake'? Its just not one that you have mapped to visual stimula. Its the assignment of color to wavelengths of light that's fake, or contrived. Color isn't even a 1 dimensional spectrum, even though light frequency is 1 dimensional.

I commonly see color much more vividly when I dream compared to waking life, when I dream in images at all. I've seen deeper hues while asleep while awake, but nothing radically different that I recall. I believe you though.

Originally Posted by Whiskee

Anyways, your shared dreaming experiment sounds interesting

OK, we can try. A potential barrier on my end is that I haven't been dreaming vividly for about 8 months. Trying to understand this is a large part of why I came to this site. I still dream vividly compared to most people, but the overtly paranormal component is very much diminished. I asked my 'muse' about this, and just got back a metaphor about seasons, and how it would be bad eventually if it were summer all the time. The other difficulty is the nature of the muse. I don't understand it, and I don't control it. I ask questions, and it always answers, but I have no idea how it will respond to us here. 'Muse' isn't even the right word for it, I just don't have a better one. It has many times demonstrated an ability to influence other people's dreams though. It can also influence events in waking life, and do poltergeist-type tricks, though those are less common.

I suggest asking it for a glimpse of something that's in my mind, or for some other demonstration of its choosing. If you dream, you might want to pay special attention to emotional or abstract content, and not as much to images. I typically do not try to control dreams, so I'm not sure what effect that has on it. I suggest leaving at least part of a dream undefined, for it to do something with. You don't have to concentrate or meditate or anything. If you have a question, just ask it once in your mind while awake and it will hear you. I can't say what kind of question to ask, since it certainly won't be responsive in the same way to you as it is to me, since your mind is different. For me the best questions have some kind of philosophical or moral concern. I don't think that it can answer just any question, but if it can't it might at least give an indication of why. Also, if you're not already close to an answer, you might not understand the response, or even be able to form words or pictures from it. It would be like staring at that new color and not recognizing it because you're not prepared for it. If you ask for something from my mind, there probably has to be at least some intersection with something that's already on your mind also.

I'll give an example. A few months ago I was thinking about the Greek elements, fire, air, water, and earth, which many people use in their descriptions of 'astral' and other realms. It seems to me that an atom doesn't actually have kinetic energy except in relation to other atoms, and consequently it makes no sense to speak of a single atom or molecule as having a 'phase' or 'state'. So it doesn't make sense to describe higher 'planes' as if they are finer phases or states of matter. Furthermore, there's an idea of 'balance' in Vedic and other related teachings, where thoughts or desires can be balanced or imbalanced. This is often described metaphorically in terms of the four elements also, where 'earth' is passive-passive, water is passive-active, air is active-passive, and fire is active-active. That sort of makes sense in terms of whether motion or forces of attraction dominate. But it makes no sense to me for individual atoms or thoughts, for the reason I just mentioned. So it seemed to me that the whole system of thought is BS.

The day after I had that thought, a relative who I had not recently been in communication with e-mailed me about a dream they had that seemed foreign to them and didn't make any sense. In the dream, there were a couple of fairly specific images from a short story that I had just read. This was accompanied by an experience of it raining outside on account of the acidity being anisotrophic, with a feeling that this made no sense.

The point that I get from the dream is that the idea of 'imbalance' that I was critiquing was confounding phase with something that's really more akin to acidity. Although its true that heat energy isn't a meaningful concept for individual particles because its directional in a relative way, acidity is not like that. My background is physics rather than chemistry, so although the same point could have occurred to me in terms of valence electrons, it would have been slightly more difficult.

I guess that seems like a pretty confusing description. The reason I like this example, is a fairly concrete insight occurred that neither me nor the other person had by ourselves. That's a lot more interesting to me than anticipating a future event, or becoming aware of something remotely, even though its a lot harder to prove. As with my other examples, I'd blow it off as an unexplainable outlier if I didn't already have a lot of prior experience with a similar sort of thing.

One good possible question would be for the answer or reaction to something that I've been full of shit about but have been too dense to recognize. You'll be able to form pictures and words that I can't, since your imagination is different.

Shadowofwind... you really have a complex mind!
I'm joking, this is fascinating. I'm a bit confused though, I've never, uh... tried to get in touch with someone else's muse
Believing that it's possible (I do), how would that work?

Were done when you start respecting other people experience, we can tell you about them until your blue in the face and even if you do buy into a experience with dream planes guess what u still have to become a practioner not a theorist. I have given my reasons through my experience about dream planes where is your experience in searching for dream planes?? you have none you drew conclusions about something you have never sought out yourself. When u start making conclusive statements about something you never experienced thats called nieve.

Originally Posted by Whiskee

I've already answered that: I don't judge what I don't know well.
Also, many other cultures have lucid dreaming references with their fair amount of superstitions attached.

What I do know, is that your "omg astral plane!" entry was a simple LD experience... unless there's something more you forgot of course.
What I do know, is that convincing yourself about something has a great impact on your OBEs.
What I do know, is that our mind is scientifically able to create a wide array of unknown amazing feelings out of nowhere.
What I do know, is that you refused or failed to give the guy who started the thread one single reason to believe in the "astral plane".

Honestly, you can't complain if people eventually call you delusional when they ask you to explain yourself and you keep with the "I know better" mantra.
I'm not even sure what you're trying to do here if you lack the simple ability to explain what the fuck you see in your dreams.
Are we done here?

That was a rhetorical question, we really are done here.

Following up on 'shared dream' attempt....

Nothing very notable happened on my end last night. Like I said, my dreams lost most of their power about 8 months ago. I had a dream in a setting somewhat resembling a kitchen mashed with the horticulture part of a store. Roles were represented by two female characters from the TV show NCIS, along with some unknown actor in tights. The soundtrack for this dream was a Megadeth cover of an Alice Cooper song, followed later by another Megadeth song. (For me every dream has a soundtrack, usually with some relevance to the meaning of the dream.) My interpretation of this particular skit is that for a 'shared dream' to happen I'm going to have to take a more active role. I don't have much enthusiasm for pursuing that, but for about 10 minutes I tried projecting a feeling of a kind of emotional integrity or courage.

Later in the night I dreamed of visiting a former friend's house, someone I haven't seen for many years. He and his mom were criticizing me in a fairly obnoxious way for just throwing my coat down, thereby making a mess of their house. I acknowledged that a guest should respect their house, but also thought that a host should also respect their guest, so I got my coat and left, intending not to return.

A house is a mind, but otherwise I'm not sure of the relevance of that dream. When I woke up in the morning, I had a song Sweet Dreams in my head which goes "Sweet dreams are made of this / who am I to disagree / travel the world and the 7 seas / everybody's looking for something / some want to abuse you / some want to be abused by you..." Although I have a freakishly good memory for songs, I listen almost exclusively to hard rock/metal and classical, so this is a bit of an odd one for me to have in my head.

I guess that's it. If our experiment was going to succeed, I think it probably would have this first night, unless we put a lot more effort into it. As I've commented elsewhere, it seems to me to be a bit strange to put a ton of work into having a shared dream, when we're already in a sort of a really, really powerful shared dream that works impressively well. But let me know if anything interesting happened on your end.

This is funny... because I have NO dream memories at all from tonight
Since I use alarm timers, I usually write down 2 to 4 dreams everyday. It's been weeks since the last "blank" night!
My current sleep schedule isn't very flexible for WILDs/OBEs so I'll try something as soon as I manage to chain a DEILD

HEY GAIS
this thread caught my eye after just watching an episode of Through the Wormhole the other day; it was on the nature of consciousness with some quite interesting proposed theories.
Quantum consciousness. check it out - wikipedia.
I'm not a physics guy, but maybe shadowofwind will be able to make sense of this quantum babble.
I think some aspect of quantum mechanics (quantum entanglement or superposition or some crazy stuff like that) allows for the interaction of quantum information
then something about gamma wave synchronicity and consciousness
ANYWAYS - this theory of consciousness can allow for things like out of body experiences and shared dreaming, whether or not this "dream plane" exists
it's pretty cool shit

Originally Posted by wana

Can anyone give me proofs of the non existance of the dream plane and proff of its existance ?

No. It cannot be proven nor disproven.

Originally Posted by wana

Wait if the dream plane sould be real then why dont many people meet there ? Why is shared dreaming so random or hard ?

It's not. We do it all the time, but most people don't remember their dreams at all in the machine world.

Originally Posted by Whiskee

Everything takes place in our mind, APs (I'd rather call them with the non-esoteric term OBEs) are just a different kind of lucid dreams.
Auto-suggestion is extremely powerful and that's why most experiences described here are similar.
If anything, it's those who believe in the "dream plane" that need to prove their existence or at least explain why.
I asked multiple times in different threads and never had a decent answer though, so... yeah.

If you bring up obe's, then you need to show proof that those are real too lol. Some people believe in them and some people dont. I believe that they are just lucid dreams, because I have left my body in a lucid dream and went flying around and checked myself out. But it was just lucid dream.

It seems to me that any 'planes' or anything else that exist while we're dreaming also exist while we're awake, its just that while awake we've also got 'solid earth' sensing going on at the same time in the foreground. In general, once I become aware of something new while asleep, I try to integrate it into my waking life, rather than pursuing it further in dream. Also, some stuff I find it easier to become aware of while awake.

I think that if we seem to be cut off from each other in our dream worlds, this seems to be to reflect our isolation in waking life also. If I talk to someone and get a sense of the deeper things they are speaking of behind the words, that seems to me to be the same awareness I would share with them in a shared dream. For myself personally, those kinds of things aren't picture image sorts of things, so its not surprising that I haven't had a sight and sound sort of shared dream with anyone. To have sounds shared in a dream, that would seem to me to be like sharing that kind of word-forming intuition with someone while awake, which for me would be pretty hard. Our brains would have to be in step to that extent, which would be hard in part because people's brains and memories are so different. But with the deeper things, you can be different to a large degree, and still be aware of the overlap of what's shared.

We assume that sounds and images are shared in the waking world, so that if two people hear or witness an event inconsistently, at least one of them must be mistaken. I think this is almost always the case, and we depend on that, because an awful lot of things wouldn't work if that wasn't almost always the case. But I've seen it break down a couple of times, in such a way that two cameras could record the same scene and show something different. I think it would be very, very unfortunate for us if this sort of thing started happening a lot. Fortunately, it seems to me that our world is fairly healthy in that regard, and probably healthier than it has been at times in the past. This is the reason I'm not entirely comfortable with astral projection. It seems OK to me as an occasional thing, as a learning experience, but it seems to me that in general its good for all this inner world stuff to stay focused through our physical bodies so that it call comes together in one coherent shared experience in the physical world.

On a similar note, this is a criticism I have of some Vedic philosophies, where it seems that they want to withdraw a part of themselves from the world and experience Nirvana without continuing to feel empathy and responsibility in relation to material conditions. I think a lot of the suffering and cruelty that is evident in India is not entirely unrelated to that kind of attitude. (Not that anyone has a monopoly on that sort of thing.) I would like to fulfill the best part of those philosophies in terms of detachment and awareness of common identity, while maintaining a healthy relationship with physical things, and uplifting it all together. Of course I didn't come up with this idea either, its in the ancient teachings also in various forms, but its something that always resonated with me as being important.

Here's more of my take on being 'out of body'....Its true that its just a lucid dream in the sense that all you're doing is moving your internal map of where you are, so that its no longer in step with where your physical body is. For that reason, years ago I concluded that the experience wasn't "real". Now I think that however the conclusion I made doesn't actually logically follow the realization that what I'm doing is manipulating a map. The map itself has a kind of reality to it. Whether its made up of astral 'matter' I don't know, but its real in the sense that it does real stuff that matters to us, and lately I'm warming to the idea that there's really some kind of exotic matter there.

Sound is another similar kind of map. The immediate reason most of us seem to hear our thoughts in our heads is not that our brains are in our heads. Its that our heads are midway between our ears. And that's where you hear memories of sounds, because of the way the map is designed. You can mess around with the map though, and hear thoughts outside of your head. But that doesn't mean that the thoughts are actually going somewhere, its just a projection. For me, the easiest way to do this is to think of speaking a sound. When I do that, my experience of it moves towards my tongue, enough that its completely out of the cavity that my brain is in.