Greenspider's dream yoga

Sensory awareness--sounds:

I notice that sounds of things that are touching or near to my body (or expected to possibly touch my body) are perceived differently than background, far away, or mechanical sounds. I feel a physical response in my body and cannot always seperate the sensation from the sound...especially the close sounds...like my hair crinkling on the pillow. The sensation of slight pressure on my scalp is hard to discern from the sound of my hair shifting slightly.

I notice that my body likes multi-sensory experiences. It tries to link other sensations to the sounds that I'm hearing. The sounds of food prep from the kitchen cause me to notice the taste in my mouth.

When I close my eyes, the memory of the space around me affects my perception and expectations of the sounds that come from different areas and known sources. I decide to imagine that I am outdoors in a jungle instead of inside my house. I try to hear the sounds as just sounds...without the expectations of source and positioning.

Sensory Awareness--sounds:

I practice listening to sounds while I am in the shower. The sound of water falling is overwhelmingly loud and too fast for me to focus on all at once...each drop makes a distinct sound depending on where it hits and what surface it is hitting. Most background noises are drowned out. I can hear intermittant thumps of someone moving across the floor above me and a constant whir of water running through the pipes. I try focussing on the sounds of water hitting various different locations in the shower stall and then remember that as a child and teen I used to like to plug my ears and listen internally to the different sounds that the water made as it hit various body parts. I plug my ears and move just my foot under the water and pay attention to the distant patter. I continue to move the spray around to hear the distinct sounds and move closer and closer to my head. As I reach my neck I feel a familiar tingly sensation that seems indistinguishable from the sound. The sounds around my head region are of coarse louder (being closer to my ears) and I can probably hear those internal vibrations to some extent even when my ears are not plugged, although I normally don't pay attention to them because the perception of external sounds is so much louder. I observe the connection between felt vibation and sound that is percieved by the ears and wonder if in some situation I could hear the internal vibrations of a distant part of my body (like my foot) even with my ears unplugged.

Sensory awareness--sounds:

I practiced listening at a doctor's office and in a park today. I tried to hold multiple sounds in my attention, but found I may have to let go of my usual way of focussing. I wonder about the true nature of hearing. I am not experiencing the sound itself...I'm experiencing my perception of it...and my perception feels delayed and unreal when I try to grasp it by intently focussing on it. It becomes more obvious as I try to focus on multiple sounds. I find my mind bouncing from one sound to another, unable to "hear" them until they are already over and then because I don't understand them for what they are, I try to name them. Sounds are suprising...they come and go without notice. Even sounds that are of a more continuous nature are in constant fluctuation and I don't know how to hold them in my awareness. My mind struggles with trying to contain things...to know them as something certain when they are not constant and not certain at all.

I tried another approach of "hearing everything" ...at least everything that I'm hearing in the present passing moment...all at once. I focussed on all the sounds that I could hear as though they were merged together into one sound. I then tried to look at the subtleties of sound within the one sound. It starts out as a diffuse, unfocussed sort of experience of sound (at least unfocussed on individual sounds...I try to make my entire focus on my whole experience of sound) and I hope that I will be able to deepen the experience of individual sounds with practice. It allows for more of a flow of the passing nature of sound, without me trying to grasp it.

Sensory awareness--sounds:

I sit on my couch and listen to multiple sounds. I sense that my brain is layering them. I no longer find myself having to separate them and label them in an attempt to understand them. I don't feel the need to contain them within a known time frame and am getting better at letting go of the need to know what to expect.

I put my earbuds in and try rubbing and tapping various parts of my body to see how the internal vibration that I feel may relate to the sounds that my ears percieve. I wonder how much of my sense of hearing is not of my physical ears at all.

I find myself enjoying the seemingly contrasting internal and external sounds that the earbuds enhance. The loudest sound is my breathing and next to that is the left earbud making a creeking sound in my ear every time there is a slight head movement with my breath. Those two sounds seem bound by the rhythm of my breathing movement and I get a strong visual of a ship at sea...my breath being the waves and the creeking being the boards of the ship as it rocks back and forth. This visual is very centering and from it I percieve other seeminly unrelated, more distant sounds come and go...just like waves.

I then decide to listen to a video recording of my family when the are being very loud. At first the sounds sound very different to me than the experience of sound really being around me. My body is not experiencing the vibrations that actual people talking and squealing and whistling make. My experience of it is not three dimensional and it seems to confirm that my brain closely ties body sensation with sound....but I close my eyes and listen to it again and again and begin to imagine that the events that I'm hearing are happening in three dimensional space around me. Before long my body starts to feel the vibrations and sensations that my brain associates with those sounds.

Lucid dream:

Last night I was listening to sounds before I went to sleep and I breifly found myself in a strange state of mind. I had started out focussing on my breathing and then added in additional sounds. Time seemed to slow down and the sounds were extremely clear. I had the sense of my mind expanding out to encompass those sounds. I also had a sense of evenness ....the sounds seemed somehow equal in my mind and all the spaces that they occupied seemed to merge. I suddenly heard several loud thumps and then became aware of my body which felt an even pressure all over it. I tried focussing my mind on having a visualization, but at this point I lost focus and came out of it. Then this morning I had this experience:

I'm dreaming that I'm with a man who I believe is named Jon (no one I really know). We are hanging out in the downstairs of a big old victorian style house and there are kids playing. We all go across the street to another big old house. I sit with him on a stairwell and he offers me a mint (I have not done the mint exercise yet). We close our eyes and begin to focus on the taste of the mint. I can really taste it. As I focus, I find myself in the same state of mind that I had been in before I went to sleep. Then I feel myself shooting upward as I recognize that it had all been a dream. At first I just see darkness, but as I start to focus, stars appear. I am flying through a dark night sky. I find myself near a structure that has a castle-like tower and red brick circular patterns on the ground. It is some sort of fort that over looks water and there are men with guns waiting. It is almost dawn and they know that they are about to be attacked. I see other men coming in by boat and they are poised to attack. Across the land many people are walking hurriedly to the site. They are speaking a language I don't know. I see several cars that look like they are from the 1920-30 era.

I fly through the fields and touch the leaves on trees as I pass them. Then I request to go somewhere else. I find myself in my grandmother's old house and she is there (she has passed). I feel the familiarity of the place and her presence in it.

Lucid dream 2:

I have woken up and fallen back to sleep this morning and at first have a dream about looking out the window of a factory building and seeing a tree that looks like it is going to fall. It does fall and I wonder why of all times it had fallen when I had looked at it and expected it to fall. I find myself in my childhood home and sense that I'm dreaming. I'm renting a room there from a married couple who are going to be having a baby in a few months and plan on moving out of state before the baby comes. There are other people renting rooms there too. We somehow all seem to be LDers and the man who owns the house is teaching us. He is sharp and funny. We all joke around and talk about politics. He refers to the room I'm staying in as "the green room" which I think is odd because growing up it had blue walls and we always called it "the blue room" (this may have been an invitation to change the color of the walls because when I started doing the color visualization exercises yesterday the easiest color for me to see was green and I struggled to turn it to blue--but in the dream I don't catch on). Someone sneezes and I go to get tissues. The woman takes two from me and I have one remaining in my hand. I decide to turn it into a piece of foam that I can then shape into something else. I stand at the top of the stairs, where the light from the landing window can shine on it and spin in a slow circle while focussing on it. I feel I'm trying to force it and am using too much will. I suddenly have a more subtle, relaxed thought that it could turn into foil...and it does! I show the man who owns the house and he turns it into a foam puzzle that can be taken apart and put back together in various ways. I begin playing around with it while we all continue chatting.

Sensory awareness--visualization:

I started practicing sensory awareness exercises and first saw a lot of what I would say is closest to green. I noticed that colors were not distinct in the way that I expect colors that I see with my physical eyes to be. I watched the visuals which were hazy, somewhat "colorless" (yet seeming distinctly more like some colors than others) and shapeless but somehow having transitory form. I paid attention to the separate and yet connected experience of seeing with my eyes and seeing with my imagination. My imagination could have a subtle influence on the visuals produced in my sight vision. I noticed a difference in the perception of space between that which seemed to be internal imagination and that which seemed to be external. My eyes, open in complete darkness, almost seemed like a two demensional screen (a green screen) that my imagination and focus could simultaniously project onto and observe. From the infinite possiblity of forms and colors, something distinct was observed. I noticed how when I see light I rely more on observation rather than imagination to create what I sense to be a three-demensional spacial reality. Imagination doesn't seem to exist in space in the same way.

I had a lucid dream two nights ago that helped me with being able to merge my usually separate inward and outward vision. I dreamt that I was holding my cupped hands together and watching as a bubble formed in them. Within the bubble was an entire ecosystem. I noticed how distinct and alive the plants and animals were, knowing that I was dreaming. In the center of the plantlife was a deep, round pond. I watched water droplets form in the air and fall one by one into the pond, sensing each one fully and deeply.
I did not consciously will myself to see a pond or the water droplets, but somehow my focus and projection of light and life into it made me feel like a co-creator of sorts.

Sensory awareness: visualization

I continue to practice the visualization techniques. The early morning when I have gotten up to let the dogs out and have difficulty getting back to sleep seems to be a good time to practice because I am alert enough to observe the shift in visuals as I transition toward sleep. Often times I see patterns out of one eye or the other, sometimes only out of a small portion of my visual field. Sometimes my eyes are half closed and I simultaneously observe different visuals from above and below my eyelids.
This morning I started feeling the sensations of sleep paralysis and decided to focus on the visuals. I was seeing lots of diffuse purple moving like mist across my vision. Over and over it would become more dense in across my right field of vision until it formed a small purple ball and then it would transform into what looked like purple electricity and disappear. It was very vivid. I began trying to transform the purple into blue. Thinking the word “blue” seemed silly because the word is not the color and it seemed to have no effect on what I was seeing. Also, trying to imagine blue in my mind seemed to call upon a different part of my brain than the part that was actually “seeing”. There is something more subtle that happens when I create my own vision and I can't quite grasp it yet. I was able to create a few small wisps of blue and then red. I then focused on forming the electric mist into something that resembled flower petals.