Deliberate Dreaming Theory

Just woke up from a deep sleep in the middle of the night in the land of Pacific Standard Time. I was in the middle of a vivid dream which I can still see clearly (split infinitive intended), almost perfectly. It's an ability I have been working on for a long time. As long as I don't open my eyes I can almost always still see and recall whatever I was dreaming just before awaking and usually travel further back a few dreams into the past to recall and recite those as well. The key is to not open your eyes, and to keep your mind focused as much as possible on the dream and what you are still seeing and nothing else. It is a powerfully effective technique and gets easier with practice.

A few important details and caveats before the moral of the story: As my infinitely patient and saintly wife will attest, I have been actively studying and doing experiments on increasing both vivid and lucid dreaming for decades, along with exploring the various benefits and potentialities of these activities. It is a subject I have written about sincere occasion since the inception of these Diaries. It is one of the many obsessive compulsive idiosyncrasies she claims to have been entirely unprepared for and know nothing about before we got married. God bless the wives of the artistic and insane or both.

Together we have been collecting notebooks and digital audio tapes over the last four years filled with transcripts of nearly every dream I've had during countless nights and afternoons. I am big fan and proponent of the afternoon (or late morning) nap for a variety of reasons; it's numerous health and anti-aging benefits, its wondrous ability to maintain and increase mental acuity and emotional well being (there is still as of yet no more powerful and effortless human activity to partake in to help integrate everything the mind and feeling sensors take in each day than a short nap) and, as many will attest to, the amazing power and ease with which one can enter a state of vivid dreaming during napping.

For clarification there is a stark clinical difference between lucid and vivid dreaming though the terms are often misused interchangeably in modern pop cultural exchanges amongst friends, during casual conversation or in contemporary media. A vivid dream is one in which the dreamer can see hear taste smell or feel everything in the dream so clearly that they may believe it to be real and occasionally be able to remember numerous details about it once awake. Lucid dreaming is the ability to dream while still being slightly awake enough to be aware that one is dreaming. The theory being that the dreamer may be able to have more control over the events of the dream through having this semi-awake awareness. This theory though appealing rarely proves to be the case in practice, but I admit if one practices it enough over an extended period of time (and equally effective uses certain Avatar Course tools) it can become easier and easier to control in the moment of a lucid dream what we do, how we do it and what we experience. Flying is one area I have become very good at being able to control. More on that in another entry.

I first heard about lucid dream research through the study of Leonardo DaVinci, Albert Einstein and Nostradamus when I was very young and it stuck with me. I was fascinated by the legends of these great mens' elaborate schemes and efforts to gain secret knowledge and or prophetic visions through lucid dreaming by hooking bells to their hands connected by string so that whenever they fell asleep at their desk their hand which would be holding up their head would shift in place slightly thereby ringing the bell a little which would then wake them up and cause them to jot down everything they remembered from the dream they woke up from. Supposedly Nostradamus used this method throughout his life to enable him to foresee numerous events that were to transpire in the future.

(Again we are still caveating here): Like most people I have wasted hundreds of hours also studying the works of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud in regards to their psycho-analytic theories of the phenomenon of human dreams and find almost all of it pedantic and of little worth. The same applies to the writings of the Native Americans and various other indigenous people's throughout history and to the works of history's most famed practitioners of what is known as witchcraft or High Magic. Interesting to be sure, but not much else.

One conclusion I've come to as of late is that for the most part human dreams are almost entirely useless except in a utilitarian way -- as a vehicle to gain a better understanding of our most basic current subconscious fears resistances hopes and aspirations. In other words dreams tell us what is most actively and present on our mind, what our primal beingness as expressed through consciousness believes to be most important in that moment. Or perhaps just more present. (this in no way implies that the subject matter or details ARE important. Most often they are not. It just happens to be what our conscious or subconscious (if one believes in this seemingly arbitrary academic exercise of splitting the mind into two parts (which i don't. At all)) BELIEVES is important.

Without concern for safety or about the criticism of others or even our own moral judgments, the mind is free to play and free associate to its heart's content and does so using whatever is closest to it, our most present or current reference points. This is a useful activity. But surely not as exciting or of the mythic proportion or import as the stuff one reads about regarding any alleged ability to astral travel or develop clairvoyant abilities through the dream state. God knows we try. But I must confess that after filling said countless notebooks with direct transcripts of thousands of dreams that have come from this radically overactive mind that this conclusion is the best and most plausible I've been able to come up with in regards to any helpful abilities one might develop from dreams or dreaming. We have taken notes of dreams where I have seen human female legs appear to grow mysteriously and miraculously out of the earth as if it were a flower to reveal a generic and apersonal spiraling vagina which I've then proceeded to have intercourse with for no other reason than primal urge. Twisted? Sure. Deep? Probably not. Psychologically useful? Unlikely. Just the mind having its way without judgment or default course correction.

I've heard it said that dreaming keeps us from going insane. I would agree with that idea. Through effortless non-thought based and judgment-free organizing cataloging classifying and categorizing millions of datum, dreaming helps the mind integrate what it takes in each day to prepare for another day of it. Any potentially clairvoyant experiences are few and far between and can most often be chalked up to coincidence or far reaching assumptions based on strong desire. Though I have experienced more psychic phenomena and telekinetic moments with others and or regarding world events through dreaming than I can relay in one sitting or recall without referring to notes, they are still infrequent and not the usual stuff of dreams for most. Another entry is needed to explore this other aspect of the dream state.

One can posit though that this one benefit of dreaming, a deeper understanding of one's innermost and current hopes fears longings and resistances is still a helpful one in its ramifications.

To get back to our story. A few minutes ago I was dreaming that I was in the process of solving a murder mystery involving Dwight Schrute the character played by Rainn Wilson in the American version of the TV show The Office in order to win some big music contest. These seemingly disconnected features when taken as a whole actually make sense, for i've just spent the last four weeks partaking in a mind numbing Office marathon watching way too many episodes in a row on a daily basis (dont ask) AND the last thing I did before falling asleep last night was watch a few minutes of the latest take on the perennial favorite Sherlock Holmes in CBS's new show Elementary, one of the few things on network or cable television that is actually good without being offensive in any way (another topic for a future entry). (Here one could argue that the UK's intense and understated Johnny Lee Miller has made a better recent Sherlock Holmes than Hollywood's pompous fop Robert Downey Jr. But they'd be risking countless hours of cat-fighting with thousands of rabid middle aged women across America with nothing better to do than defend the honor of their favorite come back bad boy of the month. I would conjecture it not worth the effort.)

So.... As soon as I awoke and recognized that my mind had fused my profession, music, with The Office and Elementary in a dream -- these aspects unrelated to me personally and yet in my dreaming state of consciousness it all made perfect matter of fact sense, I realized that I might be on to something. I have been working on a theory for the last few weeks. Based on an observation that ever since I started soaking my mind during waking hours with repeated viewings of numerous episodes of The Office that the characters from the show now regularly appear in my dreams on a daily basis. They show up as my friends, family members, bandmates, strangers in random interactions necessary for a scene to fulfill, pretty much anyone.

What are the potential ramifications of this I've been asking lately. My dreaming mind, that part of my consciousness that comes awake when dreaming, has absorbed these characters so thoroughly now that they have become a routine part of my day to day dream state. As if they are real. Of course to my mind when asleep and dreaming they are real. Just as real as anyone I know personally in my waking world when dreaming of them respectively. I don't think there has been one night in three weeks that i have not remembered dreaming of or with one or more of these fictional characters. We've all experience this with something. Perhaps a job project or excessive school work. But why? How? And what is its potential?

It would appear that when stimulated with or reminded of a certain subject matter repeatedly to the point of conscious level saturation that the subject matter then leaks into what is commonly referred to as the subconscious -- i.e. the dream state of consciousness so much so that we become unable to recognize a difference between how real this subject matter is to us in reality versus other things that are entirely real -- such as our mother wife brother friends etc.

The same paradigm may also apply to other things besides people. If for instance one wanted to absorb more fully the mastery of a certain subject such as wealth creation or feeding the hungry of earth then it follows that saturating the waking mind with sounds and images of these subjects -- such as through repeated viewing of films or listening to audio -- would lead to an eventual leaking of them into the subconscious in the same casual matter of fact kind of way that enables one to begin dreaming about them on a regular basis. Just as has happened with my mind's acceptance of these Office characters so readily and vividly.

Of course there isn't much I can do personally with being able to dream about Jim Pam and Michael every night. But if I were instead to begin dreaming about world transformation in a positive direction on a daily basis I would guess that the implication is that it just might lead to certain insights or ideas never thought of before, a secret trap door into knowledge that can only be accessed through the open vessel the mind becomes when dreaming. It only takes one. Of course our problem is never not having enough ideas, but instead it is usually not being disciplined enough to follow the ideas through to their most effective or powerful end result. And yet therein even is a seemingly taken for granted problem with the human machine that might have a solution waiting for it just on the other side of the waking-dreaming event horizon...

That in essence is the nature of the thought so far. Next step is to test it by deliberate saturation of the waking mind for a few weeks with something strongly desired re a subject for mastery or a desired goal or outcome. Another foreign language can always be useful. Consciousness exploration or cosmology are both topics that could always use more data, going broad. Plenty of universal mysteries still exist waiting to be solved. Success and wealth are interesting. Solving the problem of hunger on earth is also a biggie.

Will continue to experiment and take notes. Standby.

Posted by The Ambassador using blogpress for the iPhone