A Lucid Dream Control Community Experiment.

[Nerq]

Intro. Dear Community, My name is Zechariah J. Gumpfer, and I'd like to introduce to you an experiment that I'm eager to get started on, and eager for others to participate in. This experiment exploits the practice of Lucid Dream Control in attempts to reach information stored too far inside of our minds for us to bring to the surface. This experiment roots from my personal theories on the enigmatic and powerful workings of our mind's Subconscious Thought. The beginning theory goes something like this: Superficially speaking, there are two levels of conscious thought as I'm sure we've all heard of before. Those two dimensions are called Conscious Thought, and Subconscious Thought. Conscious thoughts would fall under the category of the words, images, emotions and senses that you are presently aware of. In contrast, the subconscious is a mass storage system of your memories, instincts, and underlying functions that aren't brought to mind in the present moment. I've recently postulated that the subconscious can be detailed by three unusual attributes. The first attribute being, that it has the ability to 'compress' every single fathomable thought into the simplest idea literally possible. Metaphorically, it could be compared to a black whole in space. A black whole can retain innumerable particle into the smallest singular space, defying the concept of 'overflow'. Our life's entire collection of data from the universe that is only available to our subconscious can be also thought of as a single tiny speck of idea, basically explaining that there is no size- no shape- no such thing as 'too many thoughts for this brain'. A nearly infinite storage system. The second attribute I'm proposing is that our subconscious mind from as early as we learned to speak, had already accomplished finding out how the universe works, why it works, why we exist, and how we exist. I believe the subconscious holds information that human kind only dreams of consciously understanding. And lastly, I propose that our subconscious mind is not only storing the information it has, but is actually adeptly applying every single bit of information we own into every given moment of our present life. So, if this theory were to be summed up in a statement- it would go something like this. The subconscious mind provides us with an always active singularity of every piece of data it has ever come across and if it weren't for the directed focus of conscious thought, the mind is virtually all knowing. (To whatever possible extents that can be) Experiment Details. With that being said, and because the dream-state is majorly built by the ingenuity of your subconscious, my experiment's question to be answered, is this: Can you extract information from your subconscious thought into your conscious thought by manipulating your dreaming-state into focusing your subconscious into dialog or understandable data? For this occasion I've decided to experiment with Mathmatics. My altogether goal in time if this begins to show progress, is to come up with a solution to one of my favorite enquiries. I want to know, how does the mind dreams. How does it make you see, feel, hear, and be enthralled by passing unconscious thoughts? But for now, I'm going to attempt to provoke my dream into working out any somewhat advanced mathmatical equasion. I've never been one to excell at math, so if I wake up with the correct solution to my dream's equasion, the experiment will have been a success. The process for this experiment is somewhat simple to say outloud, and is applicable to any person who has a rudimentary amount of knowledge about Lucid Dream Control (Althought for those of you who are new to the idea of controling your dreams I'll try to add some beginer's concepts in the explination). This experiment requires the dreamer to attempt to create a bridge, or focus point of their subconscious to match the focus of their consciousness- and from that point, extract any bit of information either having to do with my stated questions, or their own important questions. Session Goals: 1. Generate unbiased, unquestionable source of information. 2. Provoke information from this source being fully conscious of what it is, and what you want to know. 3. Wake up imediately and write down what happened. Generation Process: The first step of this process (after becoming lucid), is the act of generating any distinct, focused, and trustworthy source of data. A good thing to keep in mind is that the generation phase will most likely be the most sensitive for this reason. The generated source, will have appearances, and qualities that are absolutely subjective to your personal thoughts, feelings, and subconscious instinct. For those of you that aren't familiar with the practice of generating objects at will- in the lucid state of dreaming- consider yourself fore-warned that this is not an easy task. That can be said about most feats of 'Willing' change into a dream. The idea of a human flying up into the sky with no assistance from any airplane or scientific mechanism is absolutely absord to our mind- in it's waking state. But, as we all know- the dimensions of our dreams allow, literally the most unthinkable things to occur just by the thought of it happening. So flying in a dream sounds like it should be a walk in the park for a dreamer who realizes that they are in the dream-state, why wouldn't you just burst into a flying frenzy and float into the most incredible paradise that you never thought you would be able to see? The reason why so many conscious dreamers have a hard and usually strenuous time accomplishing simple goals (Like flying, learning, supernatural power-play) in their dreaming state- is because of the amount of empirical data your mind has compiled throughout your life about physics, philosophy, cause and effect, etc. The rational doubt that we can't help but incorporate into our own personal estimations of our ability, is our goal's greatest hindrance. I remember in my childhood dreams about flying, I would usually be vigorously attempting to fly through the air by flapping my arms and legs up and down (Similar to swimming). But I would end up hardly going anywhere, because my instinct told me that my arms and legs obviously didn't have enough wind resistance to propel me quickly. Do you get it? To accomplish any goal in these experiments, you will need to learn how to move around your doubts and your understandings of 'What should or shouldn't happen.' or 'What can or cannot happen.'. For those of you who have experience in conscious dreaming, let me throw you my method of spontaneously generating an object, whether it be a building, person, tool, place or anything. Hopefully this will make a bit of sense; I close my eyes in the dream while simultaneously picturing the vivid outline and essence of what I want to appear. Giving myself the feelings that I would have naturally if I saw that object in front of me. As I prepare to open my eyes back up, I pose the true statement in my mind- there is at least one direction I haven't looked at in this dream (Or haven't looked at in a while), that means it very well could be right there without me seeing it yet. I'd turn my head to that direction expecting the object that I desire to be there, only to find that it is there. Now that we've gotten a little bit of explanation out of the way, it's time that we focus in on what exactly it is that we need to generate, or even find in this experiment. For all intents and purposes, I'm going to simply refer the source of information I'm attempting to find, the Source. This Source, like the unnatural ability to fly previously mentioned- can not be doubted in the slightest. It has to be something that you have no reason to question, or no reason to be distracted from. My own personal method I've not yet had the chance to attempt will be something along the lines of going into my house, and finding myself as a dream character. A dream character that is equally as eager for my pursuit in knowledge as I am. Me, as a dream character (just like any dream character) is a composition of the subconscious, leading to the fact that my subconscious is being directly fed into that character who should... Hopefully be eager to share some things. For creative idea play, some other methods could be, finding your most appreciated book or authority on information, asking an iconic figure that you feel close to, some people even form 'Dream Guides' in their dreams, a dream character who's soul purpose is to guide you where you to wherever you need to be. Lastly, remember that information in the dreaming-state is not the same as information you witness while awake. It is sometimes absolutely random, but will push you to believe it isn't. Don't be fooled. Don't give up, this will not (repeat-will not) be accomplished on the first try. I'm expecting months, or years of attempts. Any lucid dreaming or psychology enthusiasts has an enormous welcome to keep in touch and share ideas, progress or critisizm. By the way, this is my first real posting in these forums. Any constructive idea-play, critisizm, or progress reporting would be not only highly appreciated, but invaluably helpful. Contact: [email protected]

[dutchraptor]

In my opinion you are making it seem as though the conscious and the subconscious are both separate entities. The fault in this is that people have no understanding of what exactly the conscious and subconscious are, and if they are really that separated. Also in what sense do you mean we understand the universe?

[Nerq]

Oh dear, that wasn't my intention. I view them as very different functioning processes, but they are most definitely one whole working. When I meantioned a virtually infinite understanding of the universe, I was refering to this; when we're in grade school, we learn of the concept of mathmatics. The idea I'm pursueing is, by understanding even the rudimentary concepts of a specific thing, like the quantity of One, two, three, four- our subconscious is already able to do extremely advanced mathmatics. The capability and information of extremely advanced mathmatics has possibly been in our minds all along, but our conscious thought has yet to have memorized the calculations. With that concept... I'm proposing that our mind has that same capability and data for disposal, in all fields- Physics, Mathmatics, Biology, Philosphy, and so on. My hope is that this information can be translated to us through dreams into our conscious thoughts by subjecting the subconscious into a pinpoint of data, and giving it a 'funnel' if you will, that can be the means of communication. Now that I look over this, I see that... it is a bit far fetched to ask the subconscious to explain the neuroscience of dreaming to me... so I've revised my plan to attempt to instead retrieve some type of accurate mathmatic calculation that I can test when I wake up. I've never been good at math, so if the subconscious can accurately function in this way it will be easy to monitor it's progress.

[fred15654]

I love your concept but from what I understand, I believe your goal may be self-contradicting. Your goal is to measure to what extend the subconsciousness is capable of knowing. To measure, you make use of math equations. Now I know that according to Sigmund Freud, we possess three different levels of consciousness: es, ich and uber-ich. In a nutshell, the most conscious one is the one that guides us in our manners, etiquette, ... in fact, any rational behaviour. Our deepest level of subconsciousness, on the contrary, doesn't care about this. It's creative, it's free of manners and ethics, why... to put it bluntly: it's completely irrational (hence it poses such difficulty for science to investigate). Math = rational Subconsciousness = irrational That would be trying to measure the rational by means of the irrational, something, I believe, cannot be bridged just like that. Correct me if I'm wrong though, I'd love to discuss this!

[Nerq]

Thank you for you're input Fred! And what I'd like to expound upon is how I'm detailing the term 'Subconscious' in this excersize. Frued's terminology for the word subconscious is... explaining a concept a bit different then how I was using the word. When I talk about the term Subconscious, I speak of all of the information our mind is presently processing that doesn't make itself known to our conscious thought. The 'Worker behind the stage' if you will. You don't see him, hear him or communicate with him, but he is making sure that the show goes on smoothly. For instance, say you're walking down the street in your neighborhood. At passing glance we won't be thinking about the way a house is architechually structured when we look at it, but our mind understand's what it's seeing. And often times, we have all sorts of feelings just by witnessing a specific thing, and we don't mechanically understand why. My terminology for the subconscious, is the section of your thoughts that is devoted to presently witnessing and responding the structure of things, without you directly thinking of them. So in fact, this terminology is speaking of the most logically functioning portion of the mind. Rationality and irrationality, and Frueds explination of the 'Subconscious' being the name for our repressed instincual humanity, might be in a seperate area of topic. Does that clear things up?

[fred15654]

Thanks for the explanation Nerq! I understand now, you're right in making that distinction. Speaking of this Source, I have an interesting little theory I once heard from an old physician: He told me that in our cells, we posses ALL information this existence holds. We possed EVERY answer to ANY question we can think of. This information, however, is highly compressed (like a .zip file on the computer!). To unravel this data, we can use experiences (learning from our mistakes, cause-effect, ...), education, meditation, ... He never mentioned lucid dreaming, as he wasn't into that, but I think it could work just the same! I'm still a beginner (just started yesterday!) so I won't be too much of a help on the practical side of your test, but the concept got me interested for sure. Do post your progress once you begin!

[dutchraptor]

I'd love to see how this experiment goes, keep us updated. On a side note: I seem to recall reading that we are closest to our subconscious when we are in the HI stage before an actual LD. It might be worth the look.