My Theory on Dreams

So I awoke from a dream the other day and everything connected for me. I've always been a dreamer and have almost always had lucid dreams. I compiled an 8 page paper on my theory of dreams and techniques. It is still a work in progress but I think people on this forum will appreciate it more than others. I was wondering should I post the 8 pages or how should I go about this.

Some of the topics I will discuss are:
Limitations
Matrix Complex
Believing is seeing
Influences
The Fence
Mind Tricks (false awakenings)
Strong Emotions
Awareness

Post the paper, I for one will give it a read :)

Is this theory based on any scientific experiments and statistics? Or is it just a thesis you have come up with over your years of experience?

I'm just curious to know the type of content. I will be reading it either way, and commenting :)

The paper, its always good to have a good read.

Quote:

Originally Posted by John Locke

So I awoke from a dream the other day and everything connected for me. I've always been a dreamer and have almost always had lucid dreams. I compiled an 8 page paper on my theory of dreams and techniques. It is still a work in progress but I think people on this forum will appreciate it more than others. I was wondering should I post the 8 pages or how should I go about this.

Some of the topics I will discuss are:
Limitations
Matrix Complex
Believing is seeing
Influences
The Fence
Mind Tricks (false awakenings)
Strong Emotions
Awareness

Why post it? .zip all your files. And I if no one else will put it on a server. Present it as you worked on it, do not convert it yet?

I am serious. And most interesting in seeing what you gut thus far.. :)

Also this might be helpfull..

http://docs.google.com/?hl=en#

I'll definitely read it if you post it, putting it on google docs or zipping it are both good ideas.

Quote:

Originally Posted by John Locke

Limitations
...
Strong Emotions

There better not be any bullshit about limitations like "sex to orgasm is difficult" or "reading is impossible/difficult" or "you cant close your eyes in dreams" or "strong emotion will destabilize dreams". If any false information like that is included, I'm gonna have to give it the "BULLSHIT" stamp.

Quote:

Originally Posted by pojmaster17q

There better not be any bullshit about limitations like "sex to orgasm is difficult" or "reading is impossible/difficult" or "you cant close your eyes in dreams" or "strong emotion will destabilize dreams". If any false information like that is included, I'm gonna have to give it the "BULLSHIT" stamp.

And you're an expert on how dreams are for the majority of people other than yourself why?

Personally at least a few of the things you mentioned are consistent truths of my dreaming life.
Those being: reading is impossible/difficult AND strong emotion will destabilize dreams. Although in the second i would swap will for can.

Quote:

Originally Posted by spaceexplorer

And you're an expert on how dreams are for the majority of people other than yourself why?

Personally at least a few of the things you mentioned are consistent truths of my dreaming life.
Those being: reading is impossible/difficult AND strong emotion will destabilize dreams. Although in the second i would swap will for can.

True, but those are because you expect them to be true (probably, because I can do them, so why cant anyone else? Our minds are pretty much the same). I mean, they applied to me before I realized they make no sense. Like the "don't close your eyes" rule. When I believed it would wake me up, I did. Now, I've held my eyes closed for 10 seconds with nothing happening.

Quote:

Originally Posted by pojmaster17q

True, but those are because you expect them to be true (probably, because I can do them, so why cant anyone else? Our minds are pretty much the same). I mean, they applied to me before I realized they make no sense. Like the "don't close your eyes" rule. When I believed it would wake me up, I did. Now, I've held my eyes closed for 10 seconds with nothing happening.

I agree that dreaming is heavily influenced by suggestion and placebo.
Yet, I also think there are almost certainly biological and psychological restraints inherent in the dreaming process.
I've overcome a great deal of false assumptions that were taught in the early lucid dreaming books i've read, yet the instability of text and digital clocks remains a constant (and a very useful constant too.)
I think that this is a biological limitation of dreaming, where in the physical world stability is inherent, the dreaming world is not based on a objecive stable set of sensory stimuli. Instead, it is based on our very thoughts.

I think it is too easy to assume that all limitations of dreaming are due to expectation.

We all have slightly different brain chemistry and structure. Perhaps for you, the parts of your brain that are responsible for text are less effected in dreaming that the average person? Maybe even you have a particually strong short term memory, that in the dreaming world manifests as a more stable environment.

Actually i'd never considered that last point before, I wonder if a persons short term memory strength can be directly correlated to how unstable and bizzare their dreams are?

Can we get back on topic spaceexplorer and pojmaster17q?

I, for one, would read your paper, and would like to see it posted.

There's not much of a topic other than "I'm gonna post a paper"

Either way, I am am looking forward to it even though some of the categories you listed gave it the possibility to contain facts that don't apply to everyone.

Is the paper even done, or is it just an idea you have? It seems a good amount of people here (myself included) are eager to give it a look.

I'd like to read the paper. It seems like it'd be interesting.

on first glance:

john locke is a loser character who bears no resemblance to his namesake, a stalwart, groundbreaking empiric.

no offense to you, mr. dreamviews man who chose this crackpot for his avatar, just callin it like i see it.

now i'll read the post.

yeah. post the paper. then we'll know what you're actually talking about.

I think posting the paper somewhere else would be better because it will spark off conflict here. So we go and read it there and that's it.

IMJ

i think you should submit it to the Dream Views Book Project

The forum is the Education Team forum

im sure it will contribute quite a bit

It would be awesome if you could post the paper.

I apologize

I'm sorry for all of you that have been wanting to read it. I have been so busy lately, I neglected this forum. But recently I had a VERY lucid dream and it reminded me. So here I am. I shall post it. Feel free to comment or message me :)

I can do it; I can completely control my dreams. I want to make note of this while it is still fresh in my mind. I know a little about the stages of sleep and I know that REM sleep is when you dream, but usually you get your REM sleep deep in the night and do not remember it. Well I have figured a way to remember your dreams and even control them. It is all about awareness.
I awoke this morning to a phone call from my fiancée and then proceeded to fall back to sleep. The key point was that the blankets around me were already body temperature and I was sleeping on my back in the most relaxing position. It is important; I believe to keep your body in the place it was while you slept previously. I believe that maintaining the bodies comfort allows the mind to play and not regulate.
As soon as I drifted back into sleep, I was completely aware of my dreaming. I knew I had control and I knew it was all in my mind. I am a bit sketchy about the very beginning of my dream but the part I started to mental record began with me meeting Kendra from the girls next door. (I’ll address why I knew this was coming in a bit.) I met her in a house that I was cooking at and I told her I could control the world. She didn’t believe me so I told her to test me. I told her to pick any time period and I would take her back to that day and age. She picked the 1950s. I closed my eyes (in the dream) and pictured something as close as I knew to be the 50s. As soon as I opened them, there we were standing outside an old hotel in the 1950s and it was pouring down rain. I did not recognize the place yet. She told me to make it stop raining. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the landscape that was before me without rain, but it was to distracting and I had never been there so I couldn’t do it. I told her my problem and she understood.
We began to walk down the road and the rain eventually stopped as we came to an older part of the city that reminded me of old Spanish apartments. There were people drinking in bars and going about there business. We continued by.
She wanted to rest or I did, I can’t remember. So I walked into the nearest house and came to a man at a table. I simply reached in my pocket and believed I had money. I pulled out three 10 dollar bills. I laid it on his desk. I reached back in my pocket and this time made an effort to be specific on what I pulled out next, I wanted large bills, I pictured 50s. I pulled out 2 50s and some 1s and laid them on his desk and then walked past him.
I came to an old fire place and this is where my mental awareness really picked up. I wanted more to this house, more to my dream, so I believed that there was a secret passage behind the fireplace and I pressed the bricks as if it would open it, it did. The bricks parted and I could see deep into a dark mossy room that was cluttered and scattered with bricks. I closed my eyes and believed there was metal plating on every wall including the ceiling and floor and that there was lighting in the room. My belief made it a reality. I stepped thru the brick passage onto the metal flooring, with Kendra right behind me. I walked for a ways and came to the end of the hallway. I decided I wanted a room for comfort on the other side.
I pictured a bath, sinks, and tiling. The metal doors parted and I came into a room with tiles that were metal and interlocked. The weird thing was, they were hovering off the floor below. (Later I realized my mind had manipulated what I saw on the show Lost with a move called Levitate in Pokemon, the game I had been playing, and created a levitating floor.) There were many ceiling lights of all types and a nice deep tub. Kendra came in and went somewhere in the room. My dream progressed and she became non-existent.
The man I had previously given money too in order to enter his house was now curious or angry that I had taken over his house, typical human emotion. I clicked the floor with my finger and believed that there was a button that closed the doors of my secret fortress, and it did. Then I could see the man breaking through my first entrance where the fireplace was and I clicked another button that released attack dogs into his house. (There were no dogs prior to this but because I believed there were hidden ones, they existed. The whole idea of sending dogs to attack this man had spurred from watching the movie Quarantine and the scene where a man was trapped in an elevator with a dog that had rabies and it attacked and killed him.)
He died but he released an android type machine that began to attack my base. (I don’t know where this came from but I recognized my dream was progressing from a Kendra focus to a survival focus.) I believed there were repair bots fixing my work, and they began fixing my door. I didn’t for see that they would also attack the android and the android was destroying them so I continued to send more. This is the part where I began to slip from the deep dreaming to waking up. As I left the dream world I felt myself grasping for more as I took on a third person perspective in my base and began to believe it was completely sealed with metal and it became impregnable. This would have been beneficial if I was to immediately go back to sleep in that dream but otherwise it was last minute additions.
Then I awoke and had complete memory of what I had done. The dream itself lasted about 32 real time minutes, but in the dream it felt like maybe 2 hours or so. (June 26, 2009)
Now I want to give my thesis on how dreams work and how one can manipulate them.
I will start with dreams that I still recall to this day from my early childhood, I feel they are important to take note of. The first ever dream I remember having and still remember was of a green tractor in a large field just driving along and I was in the driver’s seat. This probably reflected whatever I was into at a young age. The next dream is very important; it allowed me to realize the control I had. I’m not sure how old I was at the time but if I had to guess I would say around 5 or 6. I was running down a long hallway and I came to the end of it in a dark room. On the wall there were 9 mantles of various creatures: witch, werewolf, goblin, demon, devil, Minotaur, etc. I heard a noise that scared me and I turned and ran back down the hall. It was chasing me. At this point out of fear or whatever I focused all my mental capacity on getting away. I suddenly realized this was a dream and I woke myself up. I have had the power to do that ever since. I find it the most important tool in the dream world because it allows me to get out of nightmares before they get bad and it allows me to hit the reset button on my good REM dreams I get in the morning hours.
I later developed the awareness of reality in my head. If I die in a dream, I wake up. It’s that simple, although killing yourself in a dream is a bit more traumatic than just waking yourself up, but if you can’t wake yourself up from a nightmare etc. just kill yourself or be killed. The dream that brought upon this realization was one were I was walking along a cliff with my mother and sister and I remember being truly bored so I ran to the edge of the cliff and jumped off. That was that.
During my prepubescent years (sexually explicit warning) and thru the beginning of my pubescent years I discovered how to seduce and satisfy my sexual desires via dreams. I had many dreams about people I knew and some about people I didn’t know. The key was awareness. As soon as I realized that I was dreaming I was able to focus on my goal. I would pick out one girl and try and seduce her and it would usually work out. As soon as the consummation was over I would awake like a usual dream. If it didn’t work out, I was sometimes able to manipulate the people by focusing and believing they were without clothes and continue with my sexual desires. A few things I took notes on during these occasions: the women in the dreams function on the same basic emotions and mindset as woman in the real world. If they reject you, they reject you and you have to turn to alternative ways. People around you also react accordingly to your sexual actions. This means that if you try and coerce a girl into something she doesn’t want to do or you attempt to do things in public area people will try and stop you and I’ve even had the police called on me during dreams, which created a great deal of fear in me. The biggest problem in achieving these situations is conception of reality and awareness. Since normally you would never attempt these things it seems to be extra difficult in understanding you are dreaming beforehand. I have had many experience were I am about to proceed with something and then I stop myself because I’m not sure if it is reality or dreaming. I have to think and test the environment to discover it is a dream before I proceed. Nocturnal emissions are also a problem as puberty hit. Since then it has always been a mess to try and satisfy myself in these dreams so I gave up that focus many years ago.
Now I want to talk about the limitations of dreams. From my experiences and all my dreaming I can firmly say that our mind is a product of our reality. The same laws that are active in reality apply in dreams. With the exceptions of Superman type dreams and other superhero dreams that are just products of what we have watched and then reflected in our mental actions most dreams are bound by principles. (But if you want to fly and you haven’t recently watched a movie like it there are ways to bend the nature of dreams.) I believe that these superhero dreams are rarely lucid (you don’t have specific control over them, more of a movie in your head) and rarely remembered. Walls behave as walls and cars behave as cars. But something is different, these walls and cars are just imagined, they aren’t real!
This brings us to what I call the Matrix Complex. Dreams are basically like living in the Matrix except without all the drama and Smiths. Some rules in your mind can be bent and some can be broken. A quote from the matrix puts it perfectly: “Do not try to bend the spoon; that's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth: There is no spoon.” It is all about awareness, once you realize that your mind is your playground and that you can do almost anything you want, it is a manner of understanding how you trick your mind into accomplishing such amazing feats as flying or running thru walls.
I will talk firstly about how I learned that I can go thru walls. I was in a dream with my friend and was aware that I was dreaming. He was riding a motorcycle up at our high school and came to one of the outer walls and went around it. I walked up to the wall and wanted to go thru it into the school. I tried knocking the wall down or just running thru it, neither worked. Then I thought what if the wall didn’t exist or had a hole in it that I could climb thru. That’s what made me think that if I believe that there was a hole in the wall right in front of me but I didn’t look at it to confirm my belief then I could walk thru it. So I focused and believed there was a hole or gap in the wall and I took a step thru it. I was now on the inside of the school and I turned and looked at the wall, it was whole. The concept I had created was not “seeing is believing” but “believing is seeing”. First you have to believe there is a hole in the wall but you can’t see it then you have to step thru that hole. You have to believe there is fifty dollar bills in your pocket and then you just pull it out. Believing something is real in your dreams, makes it real. The only difficulty is your sight. Your sight in a dream always regulates reality, at least for me. So if you want to accomplish something that is impossible you must not look before you jump.
Now I will address what I perceive as the influence on dreams. I will try and answer the questions of why are certain people or things in dreams and how can we manipulate it for the better. From my experiences people or things in my dream are always sub-conscious thoughts. These things or people aren’t usually what you have been actively thinking about, they are what you haven’t been thinking about but are still there as dormant memories. Exceptions to this include things that may be huge in your life at the time such as a job, school, or significant other. Also if you have suppressed sexual desires that haven’t been relieved lately, especially for boys, your body will manipulate the mind to produce nocturnal emission related dreams in order to maintain body functions. Now let me give you an example of the sub-conscious interaction; in the first dream I mentioned I said that I expected Kendra to be there after the dream. About 3 months ago I watched The Girls Next Door quite often and just recently stopped watching the show about 3 weeks ago. So I had about 3 months of memory related to Kendra getting stacked up in my mind. In the last 3 weeks I had forgot about it completely, I believe my mind digs up things that are dormant and plays with them as to keep the memories fresh and not completely forgotten.
It’s been awhile since I wrote my dreams down, but I decided to start up again as I had an interesting dream this previous morning. I watched ‘Alien Resurrection’ last night and that was the platform for my dream. I was in a space ship running around evading aliens when I recognized that I was dreaming. I then proceeded to pause my dream as if it were the movie. I could effectively stop time in my dream and move about doing as I please. I was with a few other people and we slowly moved through the ship, every time we heard a noise, I would pause the dream and kill the alien. All I had to do was say “freeze” and the dream would come to a halt and I would alter my environment to the degree I saw fit. As I now had the power to pause time I wanted to try other powers out. First I wanted to shoot ice out of my fingers. I focused and nothing happened. I focused again and still nothing. Finally I stopped and then just raised my hand and ice shot out.
There was another person in my dream who seem to recognize what I was doing. He asked, “Are you controlling your dreams like me?” I said yeah, I’m trying to shoot ice. He said well it looks like its temporary and gestured at my hand. The ice had turned to water and was still shooting out. All in all I figure this was a productive dream, I had figured out how to stop time. I shall test it the next time I’m aware I’m dreaming. (November 22, 2009)