Phion - EPLD

[Phion]

Exhaustion Precipitated Lucid Dream Theory By finding a balance and personal threshold of physical exertion and cognitive arousal, one can effectively enter a more conditioned state of lucidity, and gain better retroactive insight into their own dreams. There is a correlation between psychosis and overexertion/over-exhaustion that must be attended to in order achieve this type of lucidity, and set the 'tone' or 'color' the subsequent dream-scape resulting from a successful transition from the waking, conscious-tired, awareness to the inspired, conditioned form of lucidity. Concerns The main concern here centers around the method with which one decides to exhaust themselves, and to the extent one deems reasonable in order to begin their, what should be abruptly apparent, phasic transition into dreaming. The approaches one may take are wide and varied and could be as simple as keeping yourself awake for a very long time, rigorous physical exercise, or extensive, mentally taxing work. The next concern would involve becoming relaxed after physical or mental exertion, and allowing your body to calmly shift into a new stage before sleep, ideally without the use of drugs and anything that may directly affect one's heart rate inorganically. Primarily, what we're trying to veer away from is pulling away from reality, while exhausted, yet without taking any direct real world negative experience into the lucid dream. The goal should be control over the circumstances which surround the exhaustive phase. I believe that here are a couple excerpts to clarify the meaning of my concern: "I was slightly indisposed and was lying in my room; my mother was near my bed. I am dreaming of the Terror. I am present at scenes of massacre; I appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal; I see Robespierre, Marat, Fouquier-Tinville, all the most villainous figures of this terrible epoch; I argue with them; at last, after many events which I remember only vaguely, I am judged, condemned to death, taken in a cart, amidst an enormous crowd, to the Square of the Revolution; I ascend the scaffold; the executioner binds me to the fatal board, he pushes it, the knife falls; I feel my head being severed from my body; 1 awake seized by the most violent terror, and I feel on my neck the rod of my bed which had become suddenly detached and had fallen on my neck as would the knife of the guillotine. This happened in one instant, as my mother confirmed to me.’ Maury (1861, pp.133-4); quoted in Mavromatis (1987, p.24)." This quote was taken from a woman (Maury's guillotine dream) whom had taken from her external stimuli and incorporated it into her delusory dream world. As an exaggerated example, it nonetheless serves as a precautionary tale of a delusory experience, and leads one to question how exactly a false awakening occurs. The following is an interesting example of a soldier falling asleep as a reaction to the stress of trench warfare: "Feeling is frozen. As the firing gets louder and never ceases, it blends with an objective sense of fatalistic calm. The threatened man becomes numb, cool, objective - the sensesslowly grow enveloped with a merciful stupefaction, become clouded and conceal theworst from him ... the monotony of uninterrupted droning noise narcotises him ... theeyes slowly close and right in the middle of the deadly uproar he falls asleep. (Jaspers,1923, p. 369)." As you can see where the concern may rise during such an event, the event must be highly controlled, but intentionally induced to oneself. What I'm trying to develop is a connection and indication that exhaustive precipitation directly affects dream state. Application Capture.PNG Capture2.jpg What these diagrams represent is the relationship between cognitive activity (arousal) and going to sleep. It is my intention here to create a new flow, whereby causing an inverse relationship between mental exertion (coupled, perhaps, with healthy physical exertion) and becoming uniquely lucid. "However, for some people, and in certain circumstances, sleep can be a state of high arousal, higher even than waking life. Nightmares, which seem to occur in conjunction with REM sleep, are the obvious examples of this. But there is also the phenomenon of the night terror, which is associated with slow wave sleep (Parkes, 1985)." Nightmares maybe correlated to both mental illness and stress resulting from prolonged exhaustive behavior. So what are the benefits of EPLD? "It is also interesting to note that nightmares seem to be particularly prevalent in people with a predisposition to psychotic breakdown. For example, Hartmann et al (1981), in a study of 38 subjects who reported frequent nightmares (at least once a week), found a strikingly raised incidence of psychopathology, both among the subjects themselves and their relatives. Four of the subjects met the DSM-III criteria for schizophrenia, nine for borderline personality and six for schizotypal personality;8 and 22 of them had a close relative who had been institutionalized for mental illness or had had a serious ‘nervous breakdown'." Intuitively, "none" you might think at first, or at best a good indicator that your are either sane or insane. I would beg to differ, and would again stress the desire to find a optimum threshold during the exhaustive, precipitation phase of the technique. The goal of EPLD should be to positively induce the lucid dreaming state without physical or mental over-exertions/over-exhaustion. A prolonged, healthy, practiced, and learned rhythm of the body should be found; however, the goal is to stress the mind and body within a optimum, personal threshold. I have found evidence which suggests that lucidity may be attained more truthfully during the day, or "off hour" sleep schedules -- not to be confused with psychosis, mania or hyperarousal -- the ratio of exhaustion must not supersede a personal threshold, whereby allowing transition into the dream world to not be inaccessible, rather surprisingly effortless. Supplementation may act as a catalyst, but is ideally by no means necessary alongside the technique. In support of the notion that over stimulation may result in a psychotic state before dreaming is attempted, one may experience hypnogogic/OBE-like experiences, and be confused with what is real and what is not, here is an excerpt taken from An Application of the Model to a Particular Sort of Hallucinatory Episode in the Sane: "As Irwin (1985) points out, these experiences seem to occur in conditions either of extremely low or extremely high cortical arousal. Green (1968b), for example, found that threequarters of a group of 176 subjects who reported a single such experience were lying down at the time it occurred, and 12% of these considered they had been asleep at the time it started. A common form of the experience is in fact for the subject to seemingly wake and find him- or herself apparently up near the ceiling of the bedroom looking down at themselves lying in the bed." The following is an example of a case which occurred during conditions of low arousal, and in which the out-of-the-body experience may well have occurred during a brief sleep, taken from the same excerpt. "The second time was two years ago. I was meditating. I used to sit with a group of friends once a week... I suddenly found myself standing at the side of my chair watching myself meditating. It was only for a minute or so and then I went back." Even still, I presuppose that the higher the cognitive arousal before dreaming may color the tone of the lucid experience negatively if one is prone to agitated depression. That is, the manner of exhaustion effectively determines the distinctive nature of the subsequent lucid dream. Neutral Conditions Those attempting EPLD may be susceptible to micro-sleeps, which may interrupt, heighten or decrease the ability to descend into a lucid state. A pre-lucid dream would be a normal occurrence before slipping into a full-fledged EPLD. "It is also worth drawing attention to the phenomenon of what Green (1968) has called the ‘pre-lucid dream', in which the sleeping subject considers the question of whether he or she is asleep. Sometimes this leads into a lucid dream, but the subject may equally well come to the wrong conclusion and decide that he or she is awake (Green and McCreery, 1994)." Conclusions I would like to advance with these quotations: "Also of possible relevance in the present context is the report of Foulkes and Fleisher (1975) that normal subjects can under certain conditions report mental activity very similar phenomenologically to that of dreams during states that the EEG defined as merely that of relaxed wakefulness. This may be an indication of how close ‘beneath the surface’ of normal waking consciousness are the dreaming processes which I am suggesting underlie the phenomenology of psychosis." "... Oswald (1962) cites anecdotal evidence of soldiers sleeping while on themarch, for example, suggesting that quite complex perceptual-motor skills may be executed in the sleeping state, especially if they are highly practised or habitual ones... ... It is worth noting that out-of-the-body experiences appear prima facie to be compatible with continuing motor function. For example, one of my own subjects, a professional fluteplayer, describes continuing to perform at a public concert while undergoing such an experience. She believed her motor skill was actually enhanced, though the performance was ‘mechanical’ and lacked any layer of interpretation." In conclusion, EPLD gives the dreamer the added access to RC in potentia by participating in the activity one wishes to see once entering a state of dream, the mind becomes conditioned to the habit and expects to see this as reality, combating dereistic thinking characterized by sleep.