Thread: Splitting your conciousness challenge!

I also think it should be possible Sounds like you'd need some skill to pull it off though.. I'll give a sticker to anyone who achieves it!



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I read a lucid entry some time ago by Hukif (I think), and he sorta did this. With three bodies. He kept moving his consciousness from one of the three bodies to another while in a battle. It sounded pretty amazing. And yeah, this is a challenge indeed!

Hmm... he didn't control them simultaneously though? Still impressive.

Originally Posted by MemeViews

So you've all heard of the "meet your clone" challenge right...
Now, I was wondering if it would be possible to clone yourself, but split your consciousness aswell in the process?
In a way that you experience the consciousness of both you and your clone at the same time! That'd be pretty insane.
It should be possible in theory right?

You mean in a dream, right?

This seems like a real possibility to me, if very difficult goal to fully achieve.

It's possible because all the DC's/clones/whatever in your dream are "You," so in a very real sense your consciousness is already split among everyone and everything in your dream. This means that the metaphysical bit has already been taken care of for you, and so all you need to do is tap the consciousness that already exists everywhere in the dream (or at least in a couple other DC's). Simple, right? Well, not so much, because there's a pretty big catch:

This exercise would be very difficult, and well worthy of Challenge of the Decade status, because we are very firmly wired to perceive our experience, our reality, from a single perspective, and that perspective carries over into dreams. So, in dreams, we are innately bound to view our dreamworld with a sense of duality -- like waking-life, a dreamer's world exists as something "outside" her dreaming self, while she exists "inside" her dreaming self, even though everything in the dream, unlike waking-life, exists within her self as well.

This dual perspective is very difficult to shake. It can take many years to develop a truly non-dual perspective in dreams where you not only understand intellectually that everything in your dream is "You," (which is relatively easy, once lucid), but you know, in a virtually innate sense, that "You" are spread evenly among every character and image in your dream. Once you finally gain that non-dual perspective -- and fully dismiss the perspective that nature gave you -- splitting your waking-live consciousness among several DC's ought to be a snap.

So: This seems like an excellent practice or goal to help work toward a non-dual perspective in dreams -- and certainly a doable one... just don't expect to achieve it right away!

I've experienced two dreams simultaneously a couple of times, so I think this is possible for sure. To give an example, In one dream I was trying to kill a sea monster that was growing and healing very rapidly. Flying at light speed and making millions of cuts with a sword did nothing, the beast instantly healed from those. So I focused intensely on setting every cell of this monster on fire. My vision split, I saw myself in empty dreamspace just channeling fire to the other dream. In the other dream I was holding my hands up and screaming from the top of my lungs. The flames engulfed everything and I managed to kill the monster.

Other times when my vision is split, I'm often chatting on IRC in one dream. I've been lucid once when my vision was split. In the lucid dream I was about to be hit by a nuclear bomb and simultaneously in the other dream I was lying in bed, holding an eye mask I was wearing. I didn't realize the other dream was a FA. I wasn't actually wearing an eye mask in waking life. So...I saw the nuclear bomb detonating in a tower high above me. I tried to wake up by pulling the eye mask in the other dream. I didn't wake up and that FA disappeared (my vision was no longer split). Instead I had to experience suffocating in a radioactive ash cloud.

Back in like 2009 when I was really big into visualization and still put a big effort into LDing I was able to visualize two different scenes happening simultaneously, walking around two different floors of the same house. It included the visuals of it all, the tactile sensations you'd get with walking and everything, and I tried to incorporate sound and smell but I was never much good at that. I've never had a particularly easy time when it comes to visualization, but after putting in a lot of practice I was beginning to achieve some results I found impressive for me. I've always considered myself very weak at visualizing, and the few times I've tried to visualize recently, it's a challenge to even coherently get the visuals and tactile sensations together alone.

When it comes to dreaming, I think pulling it off would require significantly more skill and practice (considering visualizing something happening and doing things is kind of like simulating life and it can't load any higher than 240p). I definitely think it's possible though. I was surprised to find I was ever able to pull off visualizing to different scenes where I did separate things (although to make it easier most of my actions were pretty much in sync, I just imagined myself as two different people, and like I said, on two different floors of the same building, but otherwise I took a shortcut to reduce the cognitive load), so I'm reasonably certain that this is possible.

I have an idea on how to go about pulling something like this off as an initial go on the challenge. If you have enough dream control to affect the dreamscape you're in, set things up where you are in a large area with a sizable wall that's entirely a mirror/reflective (or, alternatively, you are in a somewhat large room where each wall is a mirror). This is working off of my idea of making most of my movements be in sync when doing the dual visualization. Basically, the fact that you are walking toward a large wall that's a mirror, with some room to move around while looking at the mirror, there isn't technically any difference between what each separate consciousness would be experiencing (so long as any fixtures, landscape markers, or anything else are in a symmetrical arrangement, and your body isn't really asymmetrical or anything). It isn't the same thing as experiencing the same thing twice at the same time, but it might act as a sort of springboard/get some footing on how to get something like splitting your consciousness in two to work. From there you can experiment.

Something else that might get your unconscious mind to take part and do some of the work is to imagine that the mirror is something like the paintings in Super Mario 64. When you move through it, it reacts like a liquid of sorts and it can allow you to move through to the other side into the mirrored realm of the dreamscape you were just in. If you've played the game, the fact that you've had experiences before where something like a mirror or painting reacts like a liquid when you run through it and you are transported somewhere else would greatly help with having a reliable result because you already expect it to happen (or at least there is a lot less doubt that it'll not work). If you can successfully get through the mirror, it's a matter of creative problem solving. You could try being half way in and half way out of the mirror, see what that results in. By some exploit of expectation, you could have it so that, while moving through the mirror, your consciousness is duplicated... or standing half way in and out separates the left and the right brain. Even though the ideas about left brain being logical and right brain being creative and all that is pretty much a myth, it is possible to have a significant portion of one of the left or right brain to be removed and you still function and are conscious like normal (well, not quite like normal, but you are definitely functional and aware). Knowing that, it shouldn't be too hard to successfully believe enough in the idea that it happens when you expect it.

Maybe we can collectively generate some more ideas to help break down and more easily manage such a difficult task. Just thinking about what you could do to get this to work is pretty fun really, good thread.