Lucid Quote

This is a whole chapter from "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
It's an autobiography of Prof. Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize winner for physics/quantum mechanics and the below is how he taught himself LDing without knowing that it exists, also how he got SP in waking from them. There's another part further in the book where he describes how he wanted to try out hallucinations and didn't dare take LSD, but (successfully, he's also got OBEs there) experimented with K and went into isolation-tanks at Dr. Lilly's. Insatiably curious man that he was...
Long read, but maybe somebody is interested.

Spoiler for beginning of chapter:

Now to the philosophy class. The course was taught by an old bearded professor named
Robinson, who always mumbled. I would go to the class, and he would mumble along, and I
couldn't understand a thing. The other people in the class seemed to understand him better, but they
didn't seem to pay any attention. I happened to have a small drill, about one-sixteenth-inch, and to
pass the time in that class, I would twist it between my fingers and drill holes in the sole of my shoe,
week after week.
Finally one day at the end of the class, Professor Robinson went "wugga mugga mugga wugga
wugga . . . and everybody got excited! They were all talking to each other and discussing, so I
figured he'd said something interesting, thank God! I wondered what it was?
I asked somebody, and they said, "We have to write a theme, and hand it in in four weeks."
"A theme on what?"
"On what he's been talking about all year."
I was stuck. The only thing that I had heard during that entire term that I could remember was a
moment when there came this upwelling, "muggawuggastreamofconsciousnessmugga wugga," and
phoom!--it sank back into chaos.
This "stream of consciousness" reminded me of a problem my father had given to me many
years before. He said, "Suppose some Martians were to come down to earth, and Martians never
slept, but instead were perpetually active. Suppose they didn't have this crazy phenomenon that we
have, called sleep. So they ask you the question: 'How does it feel to go to sleep? What happens
when you go to sleep? Do your thoughts suddenly stop, or do they move less aanndd lleeessss
rraaaaapppppiidddddllllllllyyyyyyyyyyy yyy? How does the mind actually turn off?"
I got interested.
Now I had to answer this question: How does the stream of consciousness end,
when you go to sleep?
So every afternoon for the next four weeks I would work on my theme, I would pull down the
shades in my room, turn off the lights, and go to sleep. And I'd watch what happened, when I went
to sleep.
Then at night, I'd go to sleep again, so I had two times each day when I could make
observations--it was very good!
At first I noticed a lot of subsidiary things that had little to do with falling asleep. I noticed, for
instance, that I did a lot of thinking by speaking to myself internally. I could also imagine things
visually.
Then, when I was getting tired, I noticed that I could think of two things at once. I discovered
this when I was talking internally to myself about something, and while I was doing this, I was idly
imagining two ropes connected to the end of my bed, going through some pulleys, and winding
around a turning cylinder, slowly lifting the bed. I wasn't aware that I was imagining these ropes
until I began to worry that one rope would catch on the other rope, and they wouldn't wind up
smoothly. But I said, internally, "Oh, the tension will take care of that," and this interrupted the first
thought I was having, and made me aware that I was thinking of two things at once.
I also noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas continue, but they become less and less logically
interconnected. You don't notice that they're not logically connected until you ask yourself, "What
made me think of that?" and you try to work your way back, and often you can't remember what the
hell did make you think of that!
So you get every illusion of logical connection, but the actual fact is that the thoughts become
more and more cockeyed until they're completely disjointed, and beyond that, you fall asleep.
After four weeks of sleeping all the time, I wrote my theme, and explained the observations I
had made. At the end of the theme I pointed out that all of these observations were made while I
was watching myself fall asleep, and I don't really know what it's like to fall asleep when I'm not
watching myself. I concluded the theme with a little verse I made up, which pointed out this
problem of introspection:
I wonder why. I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder!
We hand in our themes, and the next time our class meets, the professor reads one of them:
"Mum bum wugga mum bum . . ." I can't tell what the guy wrote.
He reads another theme: "Mugga wugga mum bum wugga wugga. . ." I don't know what that
guy wrote either, but at the end of it, he goes:
Uh wugga wuh. Uh wugga wuh
Uh wugga wugga wugga.
I wugga wuh uh wugga wuh
Uh wugga wugga wugga.
"Aha!" I say. "That's my theme!" I honestly didn't recognize it until the end.

After I had written the theme I continued to be curious, and I kept practicing this watching
myself as I went to sleep. One night, while I was having a dream, I realized I was observing myself
in the dream. I had gotten all the way down into the sleep itself!
In the first part of the dream I'm on top of a train and we're approaching a tunnel. I get scared,
pull myself down, and we go into the tunnel--whoosh! I say to myself, "So you can get the feeling
of fear, and you can hear the sound change when you go into the tunnel."
I also noticed that I could see colors. Some people had said that you dream in black and white,
but no, I was dreaming in color.
By this time I was inside one of the train cars, and I can feel the train lurching about. I say to
myself, "So you can get kinesthetic feelings in a dream." I walk with some difficulty down to the
end of the car, and I see a big window, like a store window. Behind it there are-not mannequins, but
three live girls in bathing suits, and they look pretty good!
I continue walking into the next car, hanging onto the straps overhead as I go, when I say to
myself, "Hey! It would be interesting to get excited--sexually--so I think I'll go back into the other
car." I discovered that I could turn around, and walk back through the train--I could control the
direction of my dream. I get back to the car with the special window, and I see three old guys
playing violins--but they turned back into girls! So I could modify the direction of my dream, but
not perfectly.
Well, I began to get excited, intellectually as well as sexually, saying things like, "Wow! It's
working!" and I woke up.
I made some other observations while dreaming. Apart from always asking myself, "Am I really
dreaming in color?" I wondered, "How accurately do you see something?"
The next time I had a dream, there was a girl lying in tall grass, and she had red hair. I tried to
see if I could see each hair. You know how there's a little area of color just where the sun is
reflecting--the diffraction effect, I could see that! I could see each hair as sharp as you want: perfect
vision!
Another time I had a dream in which a thumbtack was stuck in a doorframe. I see the tack, run
my fingers down the doorframe, and I feel the tack. So the "seeing department" and the "feeling
department" of the brain seem to be connected. Then I say to myself, Could it be that they don't
have to be connected? I look at the doorframe again, and there's no thumbtack. I run my finger
down the doorframe, and I feel the tack!
Another time I'm dreaming and I hear "knock-knock; knock-knock." Something was happening
in the dream that made this knocking fit, but not perfectly--it seemed sort of foreign. I thought:
"Absolutely guaranteed that this knocking is coming from outside my dream, and I've invented this
part of the dream to fit with it. I've got to wake up and find out what the hell it is."
The knocking is still going, I wake up, and . . . Dead silence. There was nothing. So it wasn't
connected to the outside.
Other people have told me that they have incorporated external noises into their dreams, but
when I had this experience, carefully "watching from below," and sure the noise was coming from
outside the dream, it wasn't.
During the time of making observations in my dreams, the process of waking up was a rather
fearful one. As you're beginning to wake up there's a moment when you feel rigid and tied down, or
underneath many layers of cotton batting. It's hard to explain, but there's a moment when you get
the feeling you can't get out; you're not sure you can wake up. So I would have to tell myself--after
I was awake--that that's ridiculous. There's no disease I know of where a person falls asleep
naturally and can't wake up. You can always wake up. And after talking to myself many times like
that, I became less and less afraid, and in fact I found the process of waking up rather thrilling--
something like a roller coaster: After a while you're not so scared, and you begin to enjoy it a little
bit.

Spoiler for rest of chapter:

You might like to know how this process of observing my dreams stopped (which it has for the
most part; it's happened just a few times since). I'm dreaming one night as usual, making
observations, and I see on the wall in front of me a pennant. I answer for the twenty-fifth time, "Yes,
I'm dreaming in color," and then I realize that I've been sleeping with the back of my head against a
brass rod. I put my hand behind my head and I feel that the back of my head is soft. I think, "Aha!
That's why I've been able to make all these observations in my dreams: the brass rod has disturbed
my visual cortex. All I have to do is sleep with a brass rod under my head, and I can make these
observations any time I want. So I think I'll stop making observations on this one, and go into
deeper sleep."
When I woke up later, there was no brass rod, nor was the back of my head soft. Somehow I had
become tired of making these observations, and my brain had invented some false reasons as to
why I shouldn't do it any more.
As a result of these observations I began to get a little theory. One of the reasons that I liked to
look at dreams was that I was curious as to how you can see an image, of a person, for example,
when your eyes are closed, and nothing's coming in. You say it might be random, irregular nerve
discharges, but you can't get the nerves to discharge in exactly the same delicate patterns when you
are sleeping as when you are awake, looking at something. Well then, how could I "see" in color,
and in better detail, when I was asleep?
I decided there must be an "interpretation department." When you are actually looking at
something--a man, a lamp, or a wall--you don't just see blotches of color. Something tells you what
it is; it has to be interpreted. When you're dreaming, this interpretation department is still operating,
but it's all slopped up. It's telling you that you're seeing a human hair in the greatest detail, when it
isn't true. It's interpreting the random junk entering the brain as a clear image.One other thing about dreams. I had a friend named Deutsch, whose wife was from a family of
psychoanalysts in Vienna. One evening, during a long discussion about dreams, he told me that
dreams have significance: there are symbols in dreams that can be interpreted psychoanalytically. I
didn't believe most of this stuff, but that night I had an interesting dream: We're playing a game on
a billiard table with three balls--a white ball, a green ball, and a gray ball--and the name of the
game is "titsies." There was something about trying to get the balls into the pocket: the white ball
and the green ball are easy to sink into the pocket, but the gray one, I can't get to it.
I wake up, and the dream is very easy to interpret: the name of the game gives it away, of
course-them's girls! The white ball was easy to figure out, because I was going out, sneakily, with a
married woman who worked at the time as a cashier in a cafeteria and wore a white uniform. The
green one was also easy, because I had gone out about two nights before to a drive-in movie with a
girl in a green dress. But the gray one-what the hell was the gray one? I knew it had to be somebody;
I felt it. It's like when you're trying to remember a name, and it's on the tip of your tongue, hut you
can't get it.
It took me half a day before I remembered that I had said goodbye to a girl I liked very much,
who had gone to Italy about two or three months before. She was a very nice girl, and I had decided
that when she came back I was going to see her again. I don't know if she wore a gray suit, but it
was perfectly clear, as soon as I thought of her, that she was the gray one.
I went back to my friend Deutsch, and I told him he must be right--there is something to
analyzing dreams. But when he heard about my interesting dream, he said, "No, that one was too
perfect--too cut and dried. Usually you have to do a bit more analysis."