Thread: Age and Lucidity

Originally Posted by lenscaper

A few days ago, after posting here, I suddenly realized that the key was right there in front of me. I needed to concentrate on those very real dream characters. I spent the last two days treating everybody who came into my office as a dream character. Remembering to do that was extremely difficult at first but yesterday I began to have success.

Can you give examples of how you interacted with the people who came into your office? I am assuming this was during waking life.

Originally Posted by fogelbise

Can you give examples of how you interacted with the people who came into your office? I am assuming this was during waking life.

These are the same people that I see every day, for the most part, and our interactions tend to be pretty similar from day to day. They will mostly be somewhat brief one on one interactions with us standing in close proximity. I have been having these friendly interactions for years and they are a well worn path that I travel throughout my day. These conversations are friendly interludes to the business of the day.

My interactions with my dream characters, I realized, often follow exactly the same path. When I realized that, I saw it as a potentially very powerful opportunity to further my understanding and true acceptance of the dream-like nature of my waking life. When waking life phenomena are truly perceived as a dream I believe one can slip gently out of their grasp and, in that moment, change the way we engage with them.

So I set a very strong intention to recognize my colleagues as dream characters as soon as I saw them. I wanted it to happen at that first moment so that I could continue to engage with them properly but on a subtly different level. I told myself over and over that the next person who came into my office would be a dream character. But......one would walk in and I would find myself immediately on that well worn path......every time. Then they would leave and I would give myself a classic dope slap! I couldn't make it happen. Those neural pathways of social interaction are just too strong after all these years.

Finally, on the second day, I was able to make the transition during a conversation. I tend to do more listening in these interactions and in the middle of listening to a story about an upcoming weekend camping trip I suddenly thought.......wait.....she is a dream character....this is a dream. The conversation continued and as I continued to listen and smile, I let my inner self soak in the dream-like quality of the moment. I felt it and I truly accepted it as such.

The day got busy after that and there was only one other opportunity to try this.....and that opportunity resulted in another mental dope slap. Still.....it was enough, it seems, to establish a tiny new path because that night I had the strong lucid event with a dream character that I described above.

I am still chuckling about how my subconscious seems to have fought back by presenting me with NO dream characters the next night. I intend to continue working on this but last night I decided to just sleep....I had some pleasantly samsaric dreams and slept very well.