Experimenting with holding onto objects after the dream ends

Okay so, that title is a little click-baity I'll admit, as it makes it seem like I'm trying to bring dream objects out into the real world, which for obvious reasons isn't my goal since I firmly believe the dream world is just imaginary.

So what do I mean, what have I been trying to do? Well if you take a look at the guide linked in my signature you'll see I've been playing with a method that allows me to enter a dream before my body is paralysed - causing me to feel and control both my real body and dream body simultaneously briefly until sleep paralysis occurs and I can only feel myself in a dream.

So it got me wondering, if I can be in a dream while still feeling my real body - can I do the reverse, and return to my body while still feeling my dream body? I'm not sure what, if any, use there would be to this, but I'm the kind of person who just likes to experiment for the sake of it - so why not? ;)

Last night I decided to experiment with this. My method: The moment I was lucid in a dream, I decided to pick up an object and begin interacting with it. In this case it was a phone I found on the floor in my dream. I decided at this point to wake myself up while interacting with it. My idea was, if I kept interacting with the phone constantly my brain would still hold on to those sensations even after I awoke.

So I open my eyes in bed, but I continue interacting with the phone. It worked, I could still feel the phone in my hand, the texture of the buttons. What was interesting too was I could like move my arm up in front of my face, but my real arm didn't move and just stayed loosely at my side. I played around with the buttons on the phone some more, and I was able to get it to make some noise.

Here's where it gets weird. So I tried to move my other arm, and I was expecting that arm to keep moving in the dream.. but that arm moved normally and I was able to move it up in front of my face, while the other arm remained paralysed and continued to only be active inside the dream that I could no longer see - just feel/hear/etc. If I moved both arms at the same time, I could feel them both move, but only my left arm moved on my real body, while my right arm continued to move in dream space. What was interesting too was I was able to keep this going as long as I kept touching the phone. When I stopped interacting with the dream phone, I eventually regained sensation in my real arm and that started moving instead of the dream one - which I no longer had contact with.

So I went back to sleep and tried to perform it again, had a couple more lucid dreams but got distracted in them and so didn't remember to test it out again. I'm going to try play around with this over the next week each time I get lucid. Anyway I thought I'd share it with you guys in case any of you found it interesting.

I wonder if this has anything to do with phantom limbs and the ability for people to seemingly feel their arm even after it's missing etc? It's like the brain was able to create fully really signals as if I was moving my real arm when it was in fact my dream arm that I was continuing to move.

Anyone else ever done this, and if so, what are your thoughts? Do you think there's anything useful dream control wise that could be taken away from this? One thing that immediately sprung was pain relief. If you were able to allow yourself to feel part of your dream body after awakening, and could somehow maintain that feeling, then if you for example had pain in a certain part of your body you could maybe hold onto to the pain-free version of sensation you were getting from your dream. Although I'm not sure how that'd work because at least in my case my actual limb was paralysed until I stopped the effect.

Thoughts?

I suspect you were having a false awakening.

Easy way to check in the future: just have an infrared camera recording while you sleep. : ) Then just check it in the morning, and see if you did a given signal at the time you thought you did. (eg 3 quick blinks)

Anyway, if in fact you were awake, the above is very interesting as I've never had dream sensations linger into the real world for more than a few short seconds.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Venryx

I suspect you were having a false awakening.

Easy way to check in the future: just have an infrared camera recording while you sleep. : ) Then just check it in the morning, and see if you did a given signal at the time you thought you did. (eg 3 quick blinks)

Anyway, if in fact you were awake, the above is very interesting as I've never had dream sensations linger into the real world for more than a few short seconds.

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Indeed, that's a distinct possibility. There were was one pretty major thing that set it apart from a false awakening for me - namely the blurry vision until I put my glasses on (In my dreams I can always see perfectly and don't wear glasses - but in the real world I'm blind as a bat without them). I also checked my phone before going back to bed, and I noticed a notification asking me to update my Google login details - that notification is still there now.

That said I'm not going to make any assumptions until I've experimented with it a little more - going to keep trying to repeat the experiment several times over the next week or two and see what happens!

I have only experienced the reverse, while falling asleep I enter sometimes into Hypnagogic hallucinations. I am fully awake but see images, if I move in the slightest the illusion is broken and the image fades instantly. Once I was lying there and I could see a flip book of a hand drawn ink crosshatched image of a girl. It was incredible but I could only see just the edge of her as one hallucinatory hand was flipping from the corner. Suddenly I managed to bring up the other hand, and snap the book wide open, now flipping whole pages at a time seamlessly. I could see the girl full frame. Somehow I just willed the hallucinatory hand to move as my real hands lay at my sides in bed and did not move at all.

I've never purposely experimented with this extensively, and I don't think I've really figured out exactly how to distinguish “dream body” vs. “physical body” movement in LDs yet. But I've had a few somewhat similar experiences in the past where I would find myself in a state like REM atonia or sleep paralysis and unable to move. It was often confusing because when I tried to get up or move, I'd sometimes physically feel like I did, only to then discover myself still lying in my starting position. These could have actually been dreams of false awakenings (some of them obviously were, in fact), though I suspect at least a few of them could have happened during actual awakenings; but it can often be hard to tell for sure. This was something I used to encounter and even experiment with from time to time around a decade ago, but for whatever reason I don't really seem to encounter them anymore these days.

Regarding what cooleymd said, I remember one occasion, around that time years ago, where I actually experienced a brief HH upon awakening from a dream (as opposed to briefly while falling asleep, which happens on rare occasions): It felt like I was holding something like my handheld computing device in my hand, and then I saw an odd, shadowy outline of that object in front of me, even though I knew it couldn't really be there. Then I blinked, and it vanished. (As it turned out, I happened to fall asleep with my head resting on my hand, causing a feeling of holding something.) I then reached for the real device to jot down notes of this and the dream I had before it, and those notes remained the following morning, ruling out this particular experience as a mere false awakening.

Holding onto dream objects after the dream ends ... can be a rather weird experience.
I did have a few similar excursions... and even one full blown awake vision (or halucination if someone prefers to call it so). I was sitting and writing and all of a sudden I saw (with my inner eye, or the eye of my dreaming-body or whatever) one HI (both visual and audio). As it came so it went. I dediced to not get all pumped-up with the experience since I wanted to finish what I was writing and when I did, I decided to turn back to what I experienced (that HI). Now things get even weirder. I recalled the image (still sitting in my chair) and audio and gave it now due attention, and suddenly in relation with the HI I had a kinestetic sensation in my belly... and things here went really really weird since I entered a kind of what I might call a "lucid-nightmare" which lasted several days in completely awake state. Why awake? Because I could not fall asleep during the whole experience (a week, to be exact).

Now, not to frighten anyone (it was just me and associations in my brain at the time) with this, as I came to realize, HIs are in any case a kind of dorways into dreams (or might be), so holding onto that image in the awake seems a lot similar to holding onto a dream object (let's say, what I saw was a rather strange DC, yes, human(like) bit strange anyway). With this I can concur with you Royaltramp - there can be experienced rather weird things either with the body or within it.

On another occasion, I held onto a "dream(ing) consciuosness" for quite some time during the day (till afternoon) and I had given a name to that day: the weirdest day in my life. Strange situations arose, as if I was still dreaming but I was out and about.

The thing is, things really start to get strange and weird when one tries (or it happens to one all by itself) to hold onto things of dreams and if they somehow persist into the awake. At least, it was so for me.

Dreams might be illusions or imaginary things, but whatever they are there is a kind of energy in them, there is something there, even in our own imaginations (being "ability" itself, means that it is able to produce some kind of effects, most people would agree that even imaginary feelings (or emotions) are real as reality itself for the one experiencing them). So, it would not be too much of a strech of wishfull thinking to crawl into the direction of a conclusion that dream-objects (holding onto them) can have some effect here after we wake up and hold onto them for some time. Be it healing or sudden inspirations for creative solutions or something else...

Even remembering dreams can be sometimes viewed as a weirdo in itself: relatively recently I had a conversation with a friend who confermed that it was same for him. Namely, remembering dreams is a kind of bringing out and holding for a time onto objects or scenes or whatever of a dream and both he and I have felt the same or similar effects "within" the body, while the dreaming-you (or dreaming double, as it is called by some) is wriggling out of slumber... especially when more dream-memories pop up into awareness at the same time.

On few occasions while I was working with remembered dreams, location in the dream started to mingle in my consciousness with (its supposed) thought of real location in the city itself and for a few moments I was in both places at once, my awareness was as if split between (and at the same time merged with) both awake consciousness and dream consciousness (while at the same time I was sitting in my room, but was not aware of my body, but was concentrated on those two locations, one from dream, another from real world corresponding to it)... It was, a strange experience in itself... since for a few bried moments I was not sure where I actually am?

The point of all this being: one could move in the real world and continue being in the dream at the same time. Or as if in a kind of both there and here but somehow not completely neither there nor here... Completely another question would be could we put all that into some good and productive use each and every time we manage to experience it? Or does it remain simply a weirdo in itself...

I am not sure if these are all on the subject of this thread... but seems to me rather close in some ways.