DarkestDarkness

This is the DJ entry I’ve been wanting to make for a while. Though I forgot to mention it in xcv I did try to incubate the dream about my clouds painting last night too.

Lately I feel that I’ve made some progress in regards to dreaming overall but at the moment my biggest impediment feels wholly out of my control, and that’s the issue I have of taking between 60 to 90 minutes to fall asleep, regardless of the time of day/night.

Falling asleep does feel easier when H is in bed at the same time but likewise I seem to lose focus of any thoughts about dream techniques much more easily. Even so, trying to incubate this dream about my painting has been helpful in that regard too since it’s helping me practice to stay in that focus even when H is in bed too.

The dream incubation visualisations aren’t particularly imaginative but do go into all the minimum details I think I’d need to have in the dream anyway. I also try to insert personal dream signs into the visualisations.

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About a week ago, I tried that thing of half-dreaming while listening to a full soundtrack again; and what I’ve noticed combined with my previous attempt is that generally it takes half an hour to start getting into that state (half the soundtrack roughly). This last attempt’s first half was preoccupied with those self doubting trivial thoughts that show up sometimes, but eventually I got over it.

Though the half-dream state didn’t go as far as last time (poorer visuals and weaker sensations this time), it did work. Unfortunately, because of how it was a weaker immersion, it did take more conscious effort to stay focused on the sensations and so it felt a bit forced.

The loudness or intensity of the music paired with the isolating nature of this particular set of headphones feels extremely important for achieving this, since it forces whole-body sensation while “disconnecting”, in a sense, from external input. My view on this is that the disconnect facilitates the half-dream state because it’s more like being asleep already even while still awake and semi-focused.

The other factor of note was that this time I was more preoccupied about the outside world too; since I was home alone this time I ended up feeling very vulnerable while doing this (in a tense way). As well as that, the previous time I also did this when I was already starting to get sleepy at night time, but this time it was done during the afternoon. Overall I attribute the smaller success to these various factors and the fact that I was simply more distracted from what I was trying to do anyway.

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The last note I think I’ll make is that my pain and tiredness have been bad for months, even on waking up, so a lot of times when I want to make note of dreams I really do feel incapable of it because of how tiring it feels. Still, this is all the more reason that I feel I’ve been fairly diligent and like I’m making progress about dreaming since I started being more active about the DJ again.