Sadalsuud Beta Aquarii:
I have been experimenting with lucid dreaming, and found myself lucid (awake) when the body is in light sleep (basically I have meditated myself into sleep paralysis).
I heard that it's possible to be lucid, awake, while the mind and body are in deep sleep, has anyone done this?
A book I have by Charlie Morley (tibetan buddhist practitioner and lucid dream teacher) says it is doable by staying meditating for the 90 minutes it takes or so for the mind and body to go from sleep into deep sleep.
Has anyone done this in any way, maybe by accident? I heard it described as a total void of sensation....
Does being awake during deep sleep relate in any way to the arupa jhana - nothingness?
Does anyone have experience of both?
Yeah, I have done this by accident, years ago. I think I had been smoking called Blue Lotus (Nymphaea Caerulea) - a very very mild, harmless psychoactive (as in more psychoactive than a cup of tea, but less psychoactive than a cup of coffee - though not all like caffeine - at the time I used it occasionally as trailer wheels for quieting down old monkeymind and subtly vivifying awareness). I sat for an hour or two, smoked some more, went to bed and continued to practice as I 'drifted off'....
...and dissolved into an effervescent flow of transparent "energy" in a void-like space... dissipated... very lucid & clear - had no idea who/where/what I was (and no idea that I had no idea), it was just bright clear empty space with an occasional fine mist of "energy" like a very very fine wisp of cloud in a blue sky - although there certainly was no sense of objects in space or observers and observed, all very nondual-like eh. Quite pleasant. Pretty decent time-dilation - simultaneously seemed like "I" was only there for a few minutes, but also for untold years.
Woke up, two hours had passed. The whole experience seemed very very casual, ordinary and plain (but vastly pleasant and refreshing) - my identity had seamlessly, invisibly dissolved into that space and re-crystalised back into "me lying in bed".
One thing I was sure of was that there had been no break in my stream of consciousness, no gap of unconsciousness in either falling asleep or waking up - which is what I usually get when I have lucid dreams or sleep paralysis.
"Lucid Dreamless Sleep" is what Alan Wallace calls being awake in deep sleep. It is an area I would like to explore in more depth and really get down to a repeatable practice space - but I haven't gotten round to it, and on the few occasions I have attempted to recreate that accident I've either just fallen asleep, or I've woken up in sleep paralysis (which has its own uses), or if I'm lucky have a particularly vivid or lucid dream.