| | Xzanth: Interesting twig experience! I like stuff like that.
Unfortunately sleep paralysis gets a bad rap. It is only terrifying if you have never heard of it and you experience it unexpectedly. The fear of not being able to move colors the whole experience. The fear manifests as demons or witches or whatever we associate with malevolence and evil. Or if you have heard horror stories about it and it becomes "scripted". However, if you know that it happens every night to everybody but they are just unconscious and that fear is unnecessary, it is actually very pleasant. Now I don't even know if I am paralyzed because I don't try to move. I enjoy laying there all still. I have an affirmation that I say: "Even if I wanted to move, I am unable to." Also sleep paralysis is the best opportunity to have an OOBE. One should look forward to sleep paralysis.
Jigme: I have been lucid dreaming regularly since I was 12 but at times my practice slackened off. I am 39 now. It was my primary means of knowing the mind. I learned how to do all the fun things first. Then I read the six yogas of Naropa and regarding the dream yoga I realized "Hey I already do that." Then reading Namkhai Norbu's book about Dzogchen dream yoga brought my practice to a new level. I had never thought about ending a dream to see the true nature of the empty luminous mind. But I kept practicing and exploring. I had a lucid dreaming teacher who was very into the Kabala and western magick practices which he wanted to teach me. I learned some things but I prefer the Tibetan and Celtic flavors. I had a series of dreams where the Dalai Lama and I were in an apartment in a skyscraper and we were preparing for a ritual for dreaming that he was to lead. He gave me the job of sitting at the empty doorway to a room where the ritual was to be held. My job was to not let anybody in or out (but there was nobody in the room, but apparently somehow people were to appear in the room and I was not to let them out). While we were preparing for the event, he was teaching me verbally about how dreaming corresponds to the bardos. I don't remember what he was saying, but it felt like the knowledge became part of my being. One time I woke up because he farted and the smell was horrible. He just giggled. What a funny little man.
One time I had a dream I was hanging out at some tropical beach with George W Bush! He was wearing a suit and a tie and was seeming very stiff and awkward. He wanted to be accepted and validated. Many of my other friends were there as well. George W wanted to fit in. I said "Hey man, take off the suit and tie and get some sun." I passed him a joint. He loosened his tie, took a hit off the joint and said "Wow, so you guys just kind of take it easy and enjoy life? Wow, I never thought of that, you guys got it figured out!" hehe. I saw George Bush in a different light after that dream.
I would like to investigate the six realms in dreams and the bardos. I had a scary bardo experience when I wasn't lucid. All of space was filled with demonic gods. They weren't evil, just scary and they wanted to eat me. I was trying to get away but there was nowhere to go. They were growing and expanding and soon there was no room for me to be and they were pressing in on me from all directions. It was like if you find yourself between two elephants who are side by side and they don't know you are there and they come to lean against each other and you get squashed. I was being squashed and I was terrified. THEN I became lucid because I taught myself to question if I was dreaming whenever I became scared. Knowing that it was a dream, I gave myself up to be eaten by these gods. They broke my back and my neck, crushed my skull, smeared my brains and ate me up. But I was still there with no body, no self, nothing, just awareness. The dream dissolved into awareness. Pure smooth blissful awareness!
If you find yourself lucid and you don't know what to do now that you are lucid dreaming, that is your own fault! hehe. Always have a list of tasks you want to accomplish. Repeat the list mentally a few times before you go to sleep. For example: "Tonight I will realize lucidity in my dreams and go into the King's chamber of the great pyramid" "I also want to go see what is under the left paw of the Sphinx!" "I also want to explore the Great Barrier reef off the coast of Australia." "I want to dissolve the dream into pure awareness" etc. You can breath underwater in your dreams, you can be a merman. Have a list of things to do. Then when you realize lucidity you will ask yourself "Now what did I want to do? Oh yeah, I will go...." If I can't remember what to do I usually fly around and often end up in a sexual experience with some woman. even if I do remember my task it is easy to get distracted by things.
How to avoid distraction? Instead of walking to your destination or riding in a vehicle, fly like superman. When you are down on the ground in the streets or where ever, there are things happening around you which will suck you into their story. This is how rebirth happens. Rebirth=getting sucked into a story and losing lucidity. If you are flying high above the landscape, you will most likely be marveling at the amazing suchness of the dream.
If your dream is too boring or mundane, fly up. Straight up. See what happens. Keep going. Or fly down, through the ground, into the center of the Earth. Hehehe Look in a mirror! Better yet, walk through a mirror or visualize someone you want to summon in the mirror and have them step through it into your dream. I love suggesting tasks that can have great surprises.
If you are in a building, maybe a large dark dusty mansion full of cobwebs, rooms, staircases, etc... renovate it. Take out the walls. Clean it up. Get some light in there. Generally such buildings represent your psyche. You don't want your psyche to be all dusty and dark and neglected. Fill it with light, make it spacious. explore the basement, explore the attic. I had eagles living in my attic. Evict squatters. hehe. No actually I would not evict the squatters, I would make them work for me. They are aspects of my body/mind and evicting them might have undesirable consequences.
I use mirrors as portals in my dreams. But you can use doors, caves, trees, ponds or lakes, stone circles, etc.. I have a feeling that using portals is how you enter into someone else's dreams or have them enter yours. I once could not think of who to summon so I just said "The person who will appear in the mirror will be who I secretly want to meet." It was Albert Einstein! He wouldn't believe that this was a dream. He believed it intellectually, but he thought he was real and was trying to work it out mathematically how the physics of the world worked. He was frustrated because his equations weren't making sense and all the numbers kept changing into other numbers and symbols and moving around. It was totally obvious to me. "Einstein! This is not a theory! This is actually a dream, literally! Look and see and realize!" That brings up an interesting point: "How can I realize that I am dreaming but still think that Einstein is more than a dream character?" This is a symptom of incomplete lucidity. Maybe stream entry lucidity or A&P lucidity (analogy of the stages of insight applied to the stages of lucidity).
Dream characters say the darndest things. Just for fun, walk up to a random ghostly dream character that is just filler for your dream, walk up to him or her and ask him or her a question. Watch as they become more convincingly real. And they will answer you totally unexpectedly as if they have a mind of their own, but usually their answer is totally off the wall and funny. I woke myself up laughing at times.
Imagination is the limit, however, this being a dharma site, I have to encourage you to get your thrills out of your system then use dreams for meditation and insight. Woohoo! I am inspired.
Sorry for the essay but I am very passionate about dreaming. Hehehe |