Dreaming While Awake - More Than Meets The Eye

A couple of weeks ago I pulled an all-nighter with my friend. At about 6 am, we were laying around talking. Suddenly I found myself in India, with my dream vision overlaid on my waking vision. I was able to continue speaking with my friend at this time, but was also quite immersed in my hallucination. This got me thinking, “Is it possible to create a full blown dream while totally conscious?”

The theory is this: It is possible to create a dream of some sorts on command, with enough mental training. This has implications that exceed simply being able to conjure up hallucinations for the sake of entertainment. With this ability one could alter emotional state, increase focus, enter a given mindset, have creative sparks, and do anything else that is possible within a lucid dream.

Each of the abilities I listed has very relevant uses for life in what we call reality. By wielding this power over the brain, one could escape depression, mentally prepare for a test, interview, or performance, write and compose creatively, or get in the zone for a sports competition. These are the things that make such a skill so worthwhile and relevant to waking life.

I have yet to discover a process for achieving this that I can easily share with the community. So far I am only able to do this after staying up for obscene amounts of time approaching 24 hours. This is not healthy and I cannot recommend doing this more than occasionally. I am pushing to achieve fluency in this skill such that I can perform it on command. By then I hope to have a method that can easily be explained to others. My desire is that this will open up your mind to some of the possibilities of lucid dreaming and mental control.

Please post any comments or questions. Collaboration is much appreciated.

Hmm, I've read that monks can meditate and enter trance which is similar to sleep. You can also get hallucinations from sleep deprivation and dreams are just that, hallucinations. I don't know, maybe it would work but I doubt it would be practical and easy to achieve.

Sorry Matty, I have to disagree with your opinion of Dreams simply being hallucinations. Hallucinations are out of your control and tend to occur while awake. They are also a by product of something being off with your brain chemistry, as with mental illness or drug abuse. While people can always argue that dreams are not real, I feel calling them a hallucination is misleading. We could get into semantics over this, but in the end Hallucinations are different.

Sometimes when I wake up, I drift into a half dream-half awake state. I reed before bed, and I when I wake up I sometimes think about what I read. Once and a while my mind makes a fake copy of the book and makes up the parts I haven't read. This happens when I'm awake. This morning I was reading a fake book, and when my mom came in to wake me up, it disappeared. I ate and had a shower then started typing this without waking up.

Hmm. Perhaps hallucination was not the correct term. Maybe more like a WILD, but because my eyes were open I could see what was going on around me. Could you elaborate on why it would lack benefits? At least for me, being high in a dream, conquering a fear, composing music, or an average nightmare all have a strong bearing on my mentality the following day. Under the pretense that it is something more akin to a WILD, wouldn't those effects still carry a certain amount of potency?

I call this functional schizophrenia. Often the word has negative connotations, though it actually translates to "split mind", not broken mind. From what I experience as a diagnosed schizophrenic is that my mind can contain multiple, even paradoxically opposing things at once. I often use it for creating parallel alternate realities with my imagination, the real trouble appears when there is culture shock between them. Believe it or not, this can happen to either the schizophrenic or the anti-schizophrenic, eg. If you spend too much time in your perfect world and are forced to face an opposing reality it can be quite the blow. On the other side your perfect world can be opposing to another, and some people don't like to be told the world isn't always what they think it is, possibly taking the offensive.

On the other hand it can be liberating, hence functional schizophrenia. To fully achieve this requires a very committed mind, as when it's your perspective there's only you to tell the difference between subconscious day-dreams and waking life.

Very interesting Finnegan. Have you experienced any of the abilities that I hope to gain? Do you have any pointers for me as I attempt this?

I use it for creating art most of the time, since I am also able to project imagination as a holographic insert into physical reality. It really helps to be able to perceive a quasi-existant object as vivid as I would a "real" one, and leads to some very intriguing subject matter.

if you're going to try it, I actually learned through excessive art in various media, writing, painting, sketching, improvisation, illusion, music. Eventually the thought process I used when creating the pieces became it's own skill altogether, and my imagination went into overdrive, which took years to get control of.

Writing increased the fluentness, where I was then able to make waking dreams that had structure to them -some sort of meaning or relation to the world around me. For visual art I excersized my minds eye with every detail I could imagine until my mind became faster than my body is capable of, and I could "forsee" my own art. Improvisation and Illusion (street magic) put the writing and drawing (respectively) Right into the moment, and forced them to interact with other people and the environment, like field training for shared dream and astral projection. Music in it's various forms can teach these things on an auditory level, and eventually you will be able to conduct imaginary orchestras with will power, or hear the waves of an ocean you've never seen.