Originally Posted by LighrkVader
Idk. It would be semantic no?
Well, no. To me it would be no more a matter of semantics than saying that using the word "run" for when you move your body in a manner that makes it go faster than a walk or a jog would be a matter of semantics. There is nothing special about the word "transcendence." It is not a big word, or a special word, but just a word that does its job describing a fairly simple thing. I think attaching importance to the word itself has, over the years, made its concept less accessible (sort of what happened to the word "lucidity," BTW).
But here we are, wandering back into those weeds again!
So, DawnEye, Just to get back on track, I finally scrounged up a couple of dreams of transcendence that are a bit different from the usual "higher awareness" stuff... I picked these two because they came the closest to making any sense upon being written down... I hope they did! I also hope you'll give them a look, even though they do go on for a while:
First, here is an old, old LD that actually made it into my first book (which is from where I just stole the text, just to save time). At the time I had it, I was a fairly headstrong kid who thought he knew everything about dreams and was about ready for godhood… also at the time I thought that this dream was a very “high-level” LD, though I now know it was not. But what hadn’t occurred to me at the time was that I may have been having a transcendent moment, and a helpful one at that.
The dream had been going on for quite a while, chock full of adventure, but eventually I found myself lounging on the beach of a quiet lagoon, feeling quite powerful in my lucidity but also feeling very alone (now follows the book excerpt):
On an impulse from whose talons of self-deification I should have run, I decided that I would just have to make my own company. With little more than interest in doing so, I `caused' some sand to mix with water and air on the beach near the water, imagining instructions in unrepeatable flowery text. I then watched, fascinated, as lumps of the stuff quickly formed into discernible shapes. I rose from the lounge chair, probably because I felt a need to stand above my newest creations, and stepped closer to the shifting piles of sand. The sand had sculpted itself into three perfect human statues: two men and a woman. In a moment the statues acquired the flesh tones of white people tanned bronze by years of sunbathing (a part of me worried that I had only made people from one race, but I ignored it – I would not allow myself to be bogged down by such petty ethical disputes as skin color). I then took care to dress them in appropriate clothes (linen suits for the men, a sarong for the woman). Once dressed, I stepped back in awe. They were beautiful. Statues of people one might encounter on Fifth Avenue. They were beautiful, but they were also still lifeless sand casts that were no better company than photographs of strangers. I tapped the tall, blond woman's arm. Her soft skin dimpled under the pressure of my finger. I moved closer, amazed, but not surprised.
They were no longer sand. I bent the woman’s bare arm. It moved like a corpse, not a mannequin. I lifted one of her eyelids, gasping slightly when I discovered a dull, blue, perfect eye behind the soft curtain. I lifted the lid of her other eye next. Though she seemed to stare placidly into my own, I knew that those new eyes regarded nothing yet. I released her, stepped back. This is way too much, I thought, there’s no way I should, or even can be doing this. My new power tempted to overwhelm me with imagined potential. It felt like a static charge that I could not ground. For a single sane moment I feared it, desperately wishing to flee. Then I wanted more.
Feeling my chest swell in anticipation, I decided that it was time to breathe some life into my creations. The thought had barely, irrevocably, left the sanctuary of my fantasies when the men opened their eyes, wide. Those orbs were not blue and handsome, but rather red with the blood that filled them. The men screamed in agony, though there was no life defining their ghostly visages. They were horrendously invigorated for a fraction of a second, and then they began to decay. The dissolution from flesh back to sand was very fast, very violent, and possibly very painful. Their feet went first, changing from perfect flesh to bloody bones to swirling sand in a heartbeat. The legs crumbled, and the decay continued upward. Green mucous-blood formed a pool that the torsos fell into as they thrashed in pain. Finally, their empty heads gasped for breath after their necks were gone. In just a few seconds, my living beings were primordial ooze sans life.
I stood in silence over the green muck that remained of my creations, uncertain of my initial reaction. My first thought, after the mind-rattling tremors of terror and shame faded slightly, was that I might have stepped on some mighty toes. I was horrified that my mind still searched for some practical reason behind my failure. It should have been obvious that I was not spiritually equipped to supply souls to sand. I shuddered when I imagined what substitute for life I had tried to breath into my statues. It obviously could not have been the real thing, the true breath, or word that drives genuine creation. But it was something. Something else. I looked at the woman. She was still poised for life, unaware of the fate of her two brothers. She was beautiful: her tall, bountiful body swept with long, flowing flaxen hair. Her high-cheeked face lacked expression as she stared at my contemplation. She resembled no one I knew. I stroked her hair. It was soft, full. I grabbed a handful and pulled very hard, ripping that masterpiece of a head from sandy shoulders with unchecked violence. With my vision blurred by tears, I kicked the rest of her down without pause. After she had been reduced to a few piles of multicolored sand, I retreated a few paces, stumbling over a fallen log.
I numbly climbed onto the log, and raised the lagoon’s water level by a few feet with a gesture, burying my horrors beneath a blanket of liquid clarity. I stared at the spot where my “children” were born and died until the bottom was ground smooth by many tons of moving water.
This next dream is more recent; I think from a couple of years ago, and it definitely falls into the “You had to be there” category:
I became lucid during a dream that had me exploring a Victorian mansion. I was in its parlor, checking out a locked antique safe in the corner of the room. It seemed to glow a bit, and I was very curious about what was inside. My interest in getting it open spurred “full-on” lucidity. Now normally when I gain a moment of high-end lucidity, I usually abandon the dream and head off to whatever it was I was planning to do that day, but this time I really wanted to get into that safe, even though I “knew” now that it was just an image in my dream.
So, with the rest of the dream (and my dream body) long gone, I faced the safe and ordered it to open; assuming, oddly, that I would fail and would need to get creative to break into a construct that I expected to be securely locked. To my surprise, it opened right up, with its door not only swinging open but disappearing. I didn’t need to look into the safe to see what it contained, because whatever it was was coming out to me. And here is the “you had to be there” part:
The object in the safe was a sort of glowing blue wad of energy; like a gallon or so of loose plasma. It had no shape at all, or rather, it seemed to have every shape, constantly shifting from one to another. Yet somehow I felt that its shape was unchanging; the most stable thing I’d ever seen -- and yes, I felt this even as I watched it shifting before me. In this stability I sensed great power, power that was more invitation than threat. I tried to move toward it, conjuring a hand to reach out and touch it, but no matter what I did, the object remained as distant from me as it had been the moment I spotted it in the safe. So, since touching was out of the question, I decided to simply observe, to watch and listen with my mind as open as I could get it.
The object turned slightly yellow when my attention on it fully hardened, and then started making curious shapes in white within its body -- I would call them geometric for lack of a better word, because they really weren’t. This went on for a few seconds, I grew excited and deeply intrigued, and then it was suddenly back in the safe, the door returned and slammed shut, and I was back in the Victorian parlor, staring at the closed safe and feeling my body beginning to wake up.
Upon waking I quickly DEILD’ed back into the same scene, but the safe was wide open and empty, save for a small book that looked a lot like my current dream journal. I tried searching for the object, even recreating it, even opening the book to see if I had recorded its whereabouts within (it was blank) but it was gone.
Well, it wasn’t entirely gone: This had nothing to do with transcendence, but a few weeks later, during a far less lucid dream about a poker game with strangers, I suddenly, randomly, remembered the object, and then there it was, floating on a nearby bookshelf, glowing away and changing shape without ever changing form. Not being too lucid, and wondering (at the time) why I was remembering stuff from another dream, I kind of looked at the object as if it weren’t supposed to be there, and so it quickly wasn’t (this has happened a few times since I had that dream several years ago, with each reaction being about the same).
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