Choi's Journey of the Conscious Mind

This night I was really close!!!

I had spent a half an hour trying out different sleep postures. Haha might seem geeky but it's sooooo important, because if you lay still for hours and just have a little tiny feeling of that you are unfomfortable in some bodypart, you are eventually going to have to move.

I was laying on my stomach forming my arms to become a pillow and it felt comfortable at first, but after some time the elbow started to hurt...
Anyway I started out with focusing on my breathing and rising my awareness every now and then by looking up with my eyes on the spot in my forehead. I started to fall asleep and wake up as I eventually always starts to do.
I lay there for two hours and I know that because I heard my mom shutting off the tv in the other room and got to her room and she goes to bed the same time each night. I went to bed 22.00

I told myself "I am aware of when I fall asleep and I am aware of my dreams" then i started meditating.
After some awakenings I realised that my mind was perfectly clear and that I wasn't as aware of my body as usual.
But I could still feel it, but I could imagine myself standing up and almost feeling it, but then hell broke loose.
The tip of my nose started to itch really crazy and my right elbow was in an uncomfortable position, even though it was in the same position as I started in, but it started to hurt. I told myself that this was just my body testing me and that I had to endure! But eventually I gave up, even though the itches faded away, my elbow was still uncomfortable.
I turned over to my side and I still had closed eyes, and I fell asleep unconsciously. Although I remember the dream in perfect detail and I even heard a song that I had never heard before and I still remember the lyics!
It's a really bad song though, but still :)

I think that I was minutes away from dreaming, considering that I was so aware of the dream.

This night I am going to lay on my back and hopefully I don't feel pain this time.

And here is the Don Juan quote of the day:

- "What does it mean to pass the first gate of dreaming?"
- "We reach the first gate of dreaming by becoming aware of falling asleep, or by having, like you did, a gigantically real dream. Once we reach the gate, we must cross it by being able to sustain the sight of any item of our dreams."

- "I can almost look steadily at the items of my dreams, but they dissipate too quickly."

- "This is precisely what I am trying to tell you. In order to offset the evanescent quality of dreams, sorcerers have devised the use of the starting point item. Every time you isolate it and look at it, you gett a surge of energy, so at the beggining don't look at too many things in your dreams. For items will suffice. Later on, you may enlarge the scope until you can cover all you want, but as soon as the images begin to shift and you feel you are losing control, go back to your starting point item and start all over again."

- "Do you believe that I really reached the first gate of dreaming, Don Juan?"

- "You did, and that's a lot. You'll find out as you go along, how easy it'll be to do dreaming now."

So now you know :) The first gate of dreaming is crossed when you have a lucid dream!