Thread: Day after day I realize that waking life is more of an illusion.

Eh... I'll admit, I kinda stopped taking you seriously after you said you and your dad were/are both psychics. No offense.

My main issue with what you're saying is that you refer to dreams as a separate plane of existence -- almost a sort of a Dragon Age-esque travelling-to-the-Fade type of thing -- whereas I believe they are little (if anything) more than vividly hallucinated thoughts.

Granted, I'm not you. I haven't experienced the things you say you have. I only believe in claims that have evidence backing them up, and a few anecdotes don't really count, in my book. I think differently than you, so of course I'll disagree.

I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks, though.

I do respect your opinion... and no offense... I know many people won't trust psychics because there are many fakes. You are free to not take me seriously.

However, a humble advice for you my friend, be a little more open minded, it will help you in life and it will help that "0 lucid dreams score" to go up and start experiencing lucid dreams... no offense either, just a friendly advice as a lucid dreamer teacher.

Originally Posted by TimeDragon97

Eh... I'll admit, I kinda stopped taking you seriously after you said you and your dad were/are both psychics. No offense.

My main issue with what you're saying is that you refer to dreams as a separate plane of existence -- almost a sort of a Dragon Age-esque travelling-to-the-Fade type of thing -- whereas I believe they are little (if anything) more than vividly hallucinated thoughts.

Granted, I'm not you. I haven't experienced the things you say you have. I only believe in claims that have evidence backing them up, and a few anecdotes don't really count, in my book. I think differently than you, so of course I'll disagree.

I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks, though.

I think this is a reasonable kind of skepticism. Its an honest and temperate judgment based on the information available, with a willingness to adjust as additional information becomes available. Can't do better than that in my view.

At the beginning of 2013 I would have said "Of course waking life is more real than dreams." Now I am not sure: I still think that it probably is more real than dreams are but I am more open to the possibility that it is not. In part this is because I had two dreams that I consider precognitive, where the similarity between dream and what then happened in reality was to high and I had no rational way to explain them, and was not willing to accept that it was just a coincidence - too much of a coincidence. In part it was because even in waking life the more attention I pay the weirder it seems to me. And also, on at least two occasions this year I was really not sure whether a memory of mine was a memory of something that happened in waking life or a memory of a dream. Overall, there are little things that make me less comfortable with reality than I used to be. As I said, they are little things, and it is quite possible that my understandings of probable coincidence or realistic weirdness are flawed, and that there is nothing wrong with reality just my perception of it that is flawed. However, as I said, I am less certain now that waking life is "real" as opposed to dreams than I used to be. This is just an intuitive gut reaction, and I am a very open minded person (sometimes too open minded), but my perception has changed this year, so that I am more likely to take you seriously than I was in 2012.

Originally Posted by PercyLucid

I look a tree, the sea, the streets... sure I see them there, and sure I can touch everything, but it does feel fake, prefabricated... In a lucid dream, a tree can be much more vivid and more real that waking life itself... I am coming to a conclusion that living in the third dimension is getting more and more unreal.

I'm not doubting that you have psychic ability, but I think you're making a mistake about your perceptions. Yes when you 'see' a tree it seems fake, but that's because what you see is an internally generated representation of the tree, which is essentially a dream. But its the representation that's fake, which tells you almost nothing about the actual tree, which you do not experience directly except in a very limited way. What you've actually discovered is that your waking life perceptions are a simulation, then you're equating the simulation with the external reality. They are connected, but they are not the same. Granted the external world is also a type of projection, its on a whole different order than a dream projection, or than the sensate projection that we use to represent the physical world to ourselves. If you were experiencing the external reality directly, you would have fantastically strong psychic abilities, not the limited and clouded abilities of the best psychics. And before that you would recognize that the external world is very significantly real in a way that the dream world is not, and that strength or clarity of sensate experiences do not measure this.

Well, it has nothing to do with Psychic abilities, I just shared that as part of my profile, but more of a thought, a feeling and a perception. And I am going beyond a dream about these feelings. but more at an Astral level. Sure it is true that is our perception that is wrong, since it is what we are taught after we are born and it is even encrypted within our DNA. But your point says that is our perception what is wrong, which I agree with, but then again, that can prove that there is a tree because we believe it is. The "external reality" as you mention, what it is then? I bet it is a void of nothingness or just a sliver of a greater consciousness that we are not even aware of. Probably no Soul who is having a human experience is capable to have a complete perception of the "real external reality as you well mentioned:

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

If you were experiencing the external reality directly, you would have fantastically strong psychic abilities, not the limited and clouded abilities of the best psychics.

No human being is capable of this, not even the best psychics (as we all are clouded at some degree.) But what sits behind the real consciousness and reality?

Everything is a simulation, everything has a purpose for a much greater consciousness, but how about that much greater consciousness? Maybe it is just a being in a much bigger world and yet just a sliver of a spec from something even greater... and rinse and repeat an infinite amount of times. What is the purpose of all of this?

I can only resonate with the reality of being in a void of nothingness in my astral body, when not even time matters...

I applaud you for boldly stating what seems to me to be the obvious for quite sometime now. Based on your previous post, and dream journaling my experience with ap and lucid dreaming pales in comparison to yours. However I do feel like I've seen enough evidence through practition of obe's, ap's, and ld's to say that we are not seeing everything there is to see the way it's meant to be seen. How is it possible to walk away from these dream vehicles and say wow that was more real then what I experience when I'm awake. Let me illustrate a somewhat vague example of what Im trying to point out. Lately I've been looking at these new Ultra High definition tv's their rolling out. I remember looking at wide shot landscape images (a city, valley, forest etc.) and thinking wow I would much rather watch these images on the ultra high definition TV set rather then observe them in person. Because I know the TV set is pointing out more detail in colors and lighting etc. then I normally would if I saw the images in person. Different vehicle different perception. Waking perception vs. Dreaming vehicle perception. :-)

Originally Posted by PercyLucid

The "external reality" as you mention, what it is then? I bet it is a void of nothingness or just a sliver of a greater consciousness that we are not even aware of.

Its definitely not a void of nothingness, its has a subtle and very complex structure which I think we are only very partially aware of. Its conscious, but I doubt that consciousness exists by itself independent of everything else. It can seem to, but it seems to me that this is only if your meditation is on consciousness and not on its relationship with other things.

Originally Posted by PercyLucid

I can only resonate with the reality of being in a void of nothingness in my astral body, when not even time matters...

I don't understand how you can be in a void of nothingness in any kind of body. If it were really a void of nothingness, it seems to me there would be no astral body either.

I think that timelessness is an important reality, but time has a place also, and if one or the other seems to disappear that seems to me to be a matter of where one's attention is. I think that trying to maintain an awareness of one at the exclusion of the other would be like trying to stay stoned all the time, it doesn't seem healthy to me.

Probably I misunderstand what you meant, so my response isn't quite appropriate. I'm just guessing what you mean and trust you'll try to clarify if you want to.

Trying to relate more to what you said about waking life being an illusion....One of the themes of my experience in the past year or so has been the underlying unity of everything. I don't mean that reality is ultimately featureless and uniform, I mean that everything is deeply interrelated. I used to have fairly distinct dream and waking life experiences. Now they're still distinct in the sense that I don't dream about physical objects and events for the most part. But the objects and events and the dreams still seem to be describing the same deeper realities, so to speak. Also most of the 'parable' aspect of my dreams has moved into my waking life experience. What's left seems to be more of a residue of spiritual impressions that I don't get as clearly when I'm awake since I'm occupied with what is coming through my senses. I can imagine that could change too though.

Its definitely not a void of nothingness, its has a subtle and very complex structure which I think we are only very partially aware of. Its conscious, but I doubt that consciousness exists by itself independent of everything else. It can seem to, but it seems to me that this is only if your meditation is on consciousness and not on its relationship with other things.

I very much agree with this.

I have been in a void though, and if there was anything there...it was either too big or too small for me to see. There was no sound, no light, but I did have a body and sensations of movement in that body. I was astrally traveling, I think, but unfortunately when I reached my destination nothing showed up. So perhaps I didn't get there...and just stopped in the void. I'm not sure because I was brought back to waking life at that moment

Personally, I don't believe that waking life is any less real than what we experience in dreams, and vice versa. It's all "real". It's just on different levels. Different planes? Different dimensions? I dunno. I do know that there is crossover from dreams to reality and back. Life on Earth is slowed down as compared to what I experience in dreams. Matter is very slowly vibrating, so I kind of think of planes of existence as different frequencies. Waking life is on a lower ferquency.

Until science can explain it...that's the basic idea I have of how it works

I know there are religions who believe waking life is the dream, and dreaming is reality. Somehow though, they are able to exist in both and find the balance. Perhaps that is your task to learn while here? I mean, being psychic and practicing dreaming as you are, you spend a lot of time in altered states/realities. Are you grounded in this reality enough? The exciting thing I find about waking reality is that our perception of it is so limited as compared to what is actually there. The tree exists, and looks like a tree yes, but there are roots deep into the earth. There is water being drawn up to the highest tips of the tree's branches, there is sunlight turning into food for the tree. The tree is producing oxygen for our human bodies. These are things science knows, and some have experienced and believe there is so much more. The energy field of the tree interacts with ours. If you close your eyes and walk by it, you can feel it interacting with you. Were you ever able to tell when a person entered your room as a kid without seeing them...perhaps you bolted awake from a deep sleep? Or that sense that someone is watching you? There is an energy exchange that happens. This exchange happens in dreams and in waking life, it's just harder to feel it in waking life because we're bombarded by our 5 senses and not taught how to develop our sixth. But you, being psychic, have developed skills in that area.

I didn't expect to write that much and I feel like I'm rambling so I'll stop for now

One more thing Interestingly, yesterday I had pulled up an article (http reallifespirituality dot com/soul-and-higher-self ...sorry my account can't post real links yet) that compared waking life to virtual reality and remembered it said this, which reminded me of your post:

...this analogy of life as a virtual reality game played by our Higher Selves using the souls as avatars seem to work too well. Maybe it’s not just an analogy but is very close to truth?

Does the idea that this life, this “reality” that we perceive on a daily basis, is just a virtual reality game blow your mind? Well, quite a few of us are starting to notice it, though. Here is a post by Hunter Nuttall “Everything’s an Illusion” From the article:

"In 1931, Austrian logician Kurt Gödel proved his two incompleteness theorems . . . What Gödel proved is that every formal system of sufficient complexity is either inconsistent or incomplete (or both). That is, it’s either too weak to prove everything it should, or it’s strong enough to prove something it shouldn’t. In other words, there’s a glitch in every matrix. . . If there’s a glitch in every matrix, then what is real? How do you define real?"

I highly recommend reading it especially if you are inclined to technical analytical thinking.

It seems that book may be of interest to you.

Originally Posted by Hishtar

I have been in a void though, and if there was anything there...it was either too big or too small for me to see.

I had interpreted the word void more in a zen sense, but your use of the word is good too.

Originally Posted by Hishtar

Matter is very slowly vibrating, so I kind of think of planes of existence as different frequencies. Waking life is on a lower frequency.

I don't understand this. Vibrating how? Atoms knocking into each other, as in sound? Some people talk about vibrations of fundamental particles, but those aren't "slow", they're so fast they'd be quite impossible to interpret as vibrations on normal scales. There are slow electromagnetic vibrations in our brains, and that can plausibly cause slow vibrations in our sensate experience of our surroundings. But those vibrations aren't actually in our surroundings, they're in the image of our surroundings. Its a huge difference.

So far I'm unable to make any sense of higher vibrations corresponding to higher planes. People keep saying it, but so far when I ask they never seem to be able to describe what they mean beyond those initial words. If you can describe what you mean, I think there's a fairly good chance I can repeat something like it for myself, then I'll know. If its more than words being repeated, it seems to me that you should be able to describe it in more detail. Although the words don't capture the experience, they do point in the right direction for someone who follows along and looks past the words.

This question interests me because I think if I had a better answer it would open up a lot of new possibilities for me. And if we can develop a slightly better understanding, that will make a difference for a lot of other people also.

Hey shadow.

Not vibrating as in sound. Although at some sub-sonic level I'd guess there's a sound emitted. Each particle that's moving has a frequency. A frequency isn't sound or light or matter, but sound, light and matter have measurable frequencies. Frequency is just the number of oscillations measured over time. All energy has a frequency (it wouldn't necessarily be a static number). Solid matter at the particle level is moving very quickly, sure, but relative to liquid or gas, it is slow. Matter we can stand or sit on is vibrating/moving more slowly than the air we breath. Like you said, there are also vibrations (measured as a frequency) in our brains. The particles of our body are vibrating as well. The Earth has a frequency, called the Schumman Resonnance (side note: which interestingly is around 7.3 Hz, and that falls in the Theta brainwave range of meditation, dreams, etc).

So... I don't find it a jump to extend all of this to seeing our thoughts, body, emotions, world, spiritual experiences, beings we encounter, "planes" we "travel" to, etc etc as being on a faster or slower frequency. A higher or lower plane. I'm not sure I totally believe in the other "planes" of existence. I haven't seen/experienced/read enough to really prove it to me. But I like to use it as an operating model for some of the experiences I have had. It's the language that has developed around spiritual experiences, and I find it convenient to use it.

Watching physicists talk about theories on dimensions, like Thad Roberts' "Visualizing 11 Dimensions" at TEDx, gives me some interesting science to ponder and see how my experiences fit into the emerging scientific theories. Replace "planes" with "dimensions" in my post above after watching that talk

Thanks for the info!

Originally Posted by Hishtar

Frequency is just the number of oscillations measured over time. All energy has a frequency (it wouldn't necessarily be a static number). Solid matter at the particle level is moving very quickly, sure, but relative to liquid or gas, it is slow. Matter we can stand or sit on is vibrating/moving more slowly than the air we breath.

Generally speaking, dense media vibrate at a much higher frequency than less dense media, so matter we stand or sit on is vibrating at a much higher frequency than the air we breathe. Make something more solid and the frequency goes up, not down.

Motion and vibration are different concepts, something can be moving very rapidly relative to something else and still have zero frequency, or it can be moving slowly at a high frequency. But the motion of gas isn't higher than that of a solid either, except as a description of how disorganized the motion is. A gas has more entropy than a solid of the same substance, but motion is not meaningful for individual particles.

So vibrational frequency goes down, not up for "finer phases" of matter, and although motion has some meaning in relation to how organized the matter is, its in the same space irrespective of that. Rearranging it doesn't put it in a higher plane or different dimension, or change it into a different kind of matter that doesn't interact in the usual way with other matter.

There are also the very different kinds of vibrations of subatomic particles, but as I've described elsewhere, the frequencies involved there are incomprehensibly high for most people, and can't plausibly correspond to the vibrations that people associate with their spiritual or astral experiences.

The Schumann Resonance is electromagnetic, which is completely unrelated to the solid, liquid or gaseous behavior of groups of particles. But changes in electromagnetic frequency also don't change matter to exotic matter or move it to another plane or dimension.

I usually don't use the word dimension in this context by the say, since its scientific meaning is a single spatial degree of freedom, which is rarely what the word is used for in science fiction or when describing dream experiences. The word 'plane' also has a mathematical meaning also of course, but I guess its clear to everyone that this isn't what people mean when they talk about a dream plane.

I think the 'higher vibrational frequency' meme dates in large part from a time when radio was a new and exciting technology, so radio tuning was a compelling metaphor. And 'higher' seems 'better'. A person could argue that love, insofar as its like warmth, is 'more energetic'. But anger can be pretty energetic too, and its terrible for spiritual well being. I do think that frequency, as in song, does have some deeper meaning, but trying to equate spiritual progress with increasing frequency doesn't make any sense to me.

The idea of 'higher frequencies' is also connected to the idea of the Greek elements, with 'fire' being more energetic than 'air' which is more energetic than 'water' which is more energetic than 'earth'. And those elements are used metaphorically for spiritual realities. But as I indicated, the hierarchical states of matter thought seems to me to break down as a person better understands how stuff works, and it fits poorly with the 'vibrational frequency' idea, since more solid substances vibrate at a higher frequency.

At this point in the discussion, I've been asked, "If you don't think the ideas about vibrations make any sense, what is your explanation for supernatural experiences?" I don't have one. That's why I signed up to the site, to try to find an explanation. I can't say I've been very successful, though maybe that's understandable given the difficulty of the question.

A couple of years ago, when I tried to share a dream with WakingNomad, I experienced his "dream plane" as an actual airplane. I think our experiences of "higher planes" are in general about that far off from reality. The dreams aren't really an experience of higher realms so much as an attempt to metaphorically describe something that we don't know how to describe. If we understood more, our experiences would be radically different.

I'll try to summarize the ideas I am working with:

1. The objects that we experience or entangled with us, in a quantum mechanical sense. Let's define the 'astral realm' as being all potential objects and events that are not entangled with us. I guess this must include objects and events that aren't even possible, in any world, though those might be distinguished from objects and events that are potentially possible. Somehow, it is possible to have knowledge of that realm, and to prune or otherwise manipulate the possibilities in a way that affects outcomes in our physical world. As 'beings' in our world we're naturally limited in our ability to do that. But we're more than physical beings, and are interconnected with spirits, so to speak, that are not physical beings. I think my thought here would probably appear to me as nonsense if I knew more, but its the best I got.

2. The 'astral projection' and 'out of body' experiences that people have are for the most part a matter of consciously manipulating various aspects of their mental model of where their body is in their environment. That manipulation has a tenuous connection to our activity, so to speak, in the 'real' astral realm, but its not the same thing. Mostly the lucid 'astral' experience is a metaphor. Likewise for things like seeing auras or orbs. I think these are projected, even though some of the information projected might be real and might be acquired through supernatural means.

3. You can move your identity, you don't have to stay who you are completely. You can become other people a little bit, or become a part of something that is a little bit in a lot of people. Maybe this is a metaphor too, I don't know. It doesn't seem to be quite the same kind of thinking that other people who pursue shared dreaming, premonitions, or remote viewing are using, but its what I've gotten results from. Whether those results are of any practical use or value I don't know, but I now know objectively with a high degree of confidence that 'spiritual' stuff is real, and I guess that's worth something.

4. The spiritual realm, such as we interact with, is approximately as fucked up as humanity in the physical realm, and its fucked up in pretty much exactly the same ways. A lot of people reach for it in hopes that its better, but its not. If we want something better, we have to make something better. And that's pretty much a matter of honesty, compassion, and courage. 'Spiritual' people are not ahead of or better than 'materialist' people in this regard. In whatever world you live in, that's where you've got to make a difference.

I guess I'll leave it at that. I don't have very lucid or interesting dreams any more, but I do seem to retain a week ability to "share" dreams with people. Or it happens in any case, though I can't say that its me that's causing it. So if anyone is moderately skeptical but interested, they should feel welcome to send me a private message. If we ever get a chance to do a real scientific demonstration I would be up for that too. I think I've decided that its very difficult to make this happen, because of the way the world works, but that its possible and that its not a bad idea in principle. Its just like fighting for anything else that you want to do: you consider it worth the effort, or you don't. I proof wouldn't usher in a utopia though, the question of whether this sort of thing is real is almost orthogonal to what our real problems are.

^^ I wish this post -- especially the bit about vibrations -- were required reading for users of these forums.

At the end of the day, I just don't know. I am swept away by the process and/or the mystery...

The duality of illusion and reality don't stand the test of time...It is what it is, whatsoever this/that may be.