As it seems I share some of Arne's views.
P.S. I just now read the whole thread. And my reply probably doesn't fit in here as much as I thought, nevertheless I'll leave it below. About Cynthia, I'm not sure what this is about, but I guess I'll follow this a bit. I don't understand what Arne is aiming at, but maybe he's going to explain that another time. It wasn't a smart move though to claim that most here who say they have LDs are liars, that's for sure and explains some of the reactions. Well, you might find my statements below interesting nevertheless. Just try to read it with an open mind.
Here is what I wrote on another forum:
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And you can have meta-physical reactions such as playing a prank on someone while having an OBE!?
Well, yeah, you can float around invisibly, pass solid objects and things like that. If you want, you can grab onto objects though. That sometimes helps if movement's gotten out of control again. Once I wanted to move beyond a group of people so I grabbed their heads and pulled myself forwards. Movement is a lot different without body, a little like a space ship in zero gravity but controlled by your will instead of thrust.
You may also find yourself at a completely different place the next moment. Once I was floatwalking down a street, the next moment I found myself in the ocean under water. Everything is a bit different than plain old waking reality, especially the light. It's hard to explain, one just has to experience it.
I can also manipulate people when out of body. I helped a woman once that got attacked by reaching the head of the attacker. He dropped to his knees unable to move on. But whatever I'm doing, I'm trying to apply the same moral standards I have in life. I don't know if it matters or not, but that way not much can go wrong and after all it matters to me. Sometimes you meet others that can perceive you. I don't know what they are though.
The exit is pretty awkward. When I'm leaving my body, it feels like I'm stretched and twisted. This is a very physical sensation. It can also feel like shockwaves that crawl up from the feet to the head, very intense. After a while, I either just get up, roll sidewards or am catapulted out. Sometimes I directly wake up into a dream (false awakening), doing a reality check to become aware of that or I float away avidly. I don't like closed rooms when out of body so I go outside quickly and see what interesting things I can find. There's always something special happening and if not, you can just ask for it. Oh yes, most of the time my "body" consists of a white immaterial substance that looks like fire. It has a rough humanoid shape but instead of flesh, bones and the other stuff it's made out of white flames, like a plasma. Just recently I started trying to see auras. Those look quite similar, the colors are said to become visible with practice.
But actually there is no way to know if an OBE is more or less real than a dream. It may be just a special kind of dream. On the other hand, what makes reality more real anyway. Just because it is more consistent? No, it's all part of reality and all just a dream. Whatever it is, we have to deal with it one way or another.
What I'm currently interested in are dream characters. Most of them seem plain dumb, but some are rather smart and they are playing with you when you're not lucid. They put you in emotionally stressful situations. Think back, who of you can recall a dream where you have been just relaxing? No one I asked so far can. This may sound a bit crazy, but I have the suspicion, they are harvesting emotional energy from dreamers. That's why "normal" dreams are sequences of scenes that stimulate rather strong emotional reactions in you. In one dream I learned that this doesn't harm us though, we have access to an endless supply of energy. Probably they haven't, so they behave like attention whores. Everytime I get lucid while already dreaming (DILD) I can see their expression grow more and more worried. They don't like it when I become lucid and they even do things to make me lose focus so I become unaware again. The dumb ones do nothing though, I guess they're not much more than scenery objects.
It's the smarter ones that create those scenes and they can access your memory as I have learned. Once I wanted to be polite and asked a dream character for its name. It just looked at me until some name that I thought might fit came into my mind. Guess what, the next moment the DC spoke exactly that name. I laughed and said that was really shallow, the DC smiled sheepishly as if cought in the act. Maybe the smart ones use your own memory to create scenes they want you to become involved with. Yet most of the time, they just don't get it right. I have no other explanation for it, because even things you can recall perfectly may be strangely distorted in dreams. Given the case you are of the opinion that dreams are completely created by your mind in standby mode, it simply makes no sense that memory is distorted in such strange ways if the memory is clear. Realizing that differences is one way to become lucid though, so thanks for it!
Someone I talked to who has been LDing for 30 years told me that there are even various factions (races? cultures?) of dream characters with different names and agendas. Most don't give information freely though, at least not the ones I met.
Of course nothing's for sure, but one has to start somewhere to get somewhere, right?
There are a lot of other things that make it hard to believe that dreams are a product of the mind (unless "mind" is used in a much broader sense). Actually you can even write program code on a dream computer that you can execute and which behaves like on a "real" computer (including bugs). Someone I read about even uses that regularly for prototyping. Once I installed some really cool new game on my dream computer. Instead of me having to configure it, it just let me play and configured itself by studying my behavior. It installed all sorts of ingame content that reflected the way I wanted to play it. The graphics were nice, but it was in bird's eye view like an old rpg... until I found out how to turn the camera. The view I got on my dream monitor then was simply amazing. There was so much detail in it but still perspective shifted perfectly with my mouse movements. Doing things like that you'll probably have to throw out your old view of the world... more than once.
Several artists - some very famous ones - transfer dream content into waking reality. I do not mean they are making art about dreaming, I mean they reproduce paintings they have seen in dreams or make music they have heard in dreams. A few scientists even use(d) the dream environment to precheck experiments before doing them in waking reality. Of course I'm not talking about the blurry show you normal dreamers get.
Face it, most people can't even visualize a rotating peanut at will if their life depends on it. I see a lot standing against the common opinion that dreams are some kind of nightly mind fart. Currently I believe that the mind is disconnected from the body (and its limitations) when the latter sleeps. The mind (spirit) is not created by the brain, but it can dock to it. There are also other ways than sleep to allow or force a disconnection - yes, sure, death is one, but I wasn't thinking of that.
Well, I guess that's some chunk to swallow for you. Most people don't know that lucid dreaming is possible at all - in fact it has been scientifically proven, only very few people care about dreams at all and most dreams are forgotten instantly. How many dreams can you recall per night? How much detail can you recall? Can you recall a dream you had yesterday or a week ago? See, if you're not a lucid dreamer, your nights are probably black holes. Everyone believes to know what dreaming is... yet no one does.
One regular misconception I often hear is that in dreams everything is possible. My personal experience is a bit different. In dreams you have other kinds of freedom to act than in waking reality, but that is not unlimited. There are "tricks" to manifest things, but it's often hard to execute direct control. You may also find dead end situations that virtually render you powerless even though you are lucid. Some more experienced oneironauts claim that they can really do anything, but I have my doubts.
Experiencing is believing. If the stuff I'm writing sounds totally crazy to you, that is because you have had no such experience. It's like a cat watching TV. It does see the funny blurry lights on the 2D screen, but it can't make any sense out of it. The information is there, but no scheme to access it. Either that or I'm totally nuts. Find out yourself. You can learn to lucid dream and to have OBEs. Others did and there's no reason you couldn't. It's actually a lot easier than you think it is. Nevertheless it still takes patience, devotion and motivation.
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And this:
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What is it about Lucid Dreaming, exactly, that convinces you it's not just your own mind playing tricks on you - that it's actually an experience you have the ability to influence?
It's the question if the world is in the mind or the mind is in the world. Yet it makes no difference. Even if the world (including dreams) only exists in the mind, it still exists and is as real or unreal as ever. You can chose to deal with what it shows you or you can chose to ignore it, thinking it's just illusion anyway. But what is not and who could tell? So I'm chosing to deal with it at face-value because I believe this will help me develop. Besides it's much more exciting.
The first says that, even in this Lucid Dream environment, elements from your memory are being pulled to the fore of your conciousness (however distorted). Given that your memories are still influencing Lucid Dreams, is it not possible that you are simply remembering, in your dreams, what you read about other people's LD experiences, and then your memory is recreating that sort of environment for you?
Many things are possible. The question is what is more likely. I find it much more likely that we are able to exist in various dimensions than owning some kind of supercomputer called "brain" that is capable of creating whole bizarre but meaningless worlds with unlimited detail containing a vast number of complex personalities just because it is bored when the body sleeps. If you get deeper into the matter, the commonly accepted explanations - if they exist at all - become harder and harder to believe.
Nevertheless, the officially taught explanations do not make you reconsider being a productive member of society by deciding that pursuing "spirituality" may be more important than consumption of material goods. Our society needs consumers, not monks so it proclaims materialistic religions: The sciences. The scientific method is a materialistic method and leaves out everything it cannot comprehend, which currently is about 99.95 % of the universe (raw estimation ). And just remember that freudian psycho-BS you probably learned at school. That's not even science. Have you ever measured a subconsciousness? It can neither be proven, nor disproven.
I don't say science has no use, it's a tool to create technology, yet it is unable to explain the world, it can only describe it. The method of science has other, much more fatal flaws though. Enough rambling about that. My point is, "science" seems to reflect our zeitgeist but objectively it has no entitlement to be better (more true) than other opinions. Yes, I know, saying such things will trigger hot discussions. That's what memes do (see "memetics").
The second quote, though, shows an awareness of the possible illusion of the whole deal... So i'm really wondering, if you recognise the difficulties of verifying the experience, what is it that is powerful enough about the experience to keep you involved in it?
What is it about waking life that keeps you involved in it? You think it's more real? You think it's not an illusion? We believe to know a lot, that is all.
Does my question make sense? I'm wondering about the spiritual effects this has on you, and about what element it is that gives you faith in it's veracity.
My "faith" is my disbelief in what is commonly accepted. I have had quite a few experiences during the last few years I can't even talk about. Lucid dreaming is just part of it. The pieces simply don't fit into the view of the world I was indoctrinated with before.
Our "knowledge" is not a result of the reality we live in, as I see it, our reality is determined by what we "know". Change the knowledge, change reality. To us, the universe consists of nothing but information. There is no substantial matter in this world. It's an illusion that we call reality. Reality and illusion are one and the same thing. What we call real and what not is simply a reflection of our culture or in other words: What we believe in, we call real, what we don't believe in, we call illusion. Of course that varies with culture and individual and more often than not leads to serious conflicts. Is God real? Is the New World Order conspiracy real?
The term "veracity" is just a construct of the language and as such it can only be verified by the rules of language. There is no value of veracity (true, false, etc.) outside the constraints of language. That does not stop people from claiming to have the only truth though, trying to convince others of it.
I guess that's some chunk of stuff to think about.
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