Hector's dream exercise log

Hector L, modified 3 Years ago at 3/7/21 11:20 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 3/7/21 10:54 AM

Hector's dream exercise log

Posts: 139 Join Date: 5/9/20 Recent Posts
Started a log so that I don't futher hijack the Sleep and astral projection thread and further developments of Kasinas and Hypnagogia thread

Changes:
Added loving kindness / pleasure / joy / contentment body feelings

New modes of the murk discovered:
- it's actually kinda bright and has lots of lights of different kinds
- suggestible matter
- learning to interact with the autocomplete function

Practice:
Do different kinds of meditation while dreaming

Goals: learn how to go with the flow, how to do the mental move that disambiguates action from elegance and tell the difference
Hector L, modified 3 Years ago at 3/7/21 11:19 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 3/7/21 11:19 AM

RE: Hector's dream exercise log

Posts: 139 Join Date: 5/9/20 Recent Posts
3/7

Did 45 minutes of loving kindness, pleasure and contentment feelings. Lots of bright lights in the visual field.
Did noting on the darkness on morning hypnopompia.

Chris had posted a Lorentz attractor image and I thought I didn't see them but by experiment I said "butterfly"
and an electric blue butterfly appeared and quickly dissolved into a bird with outspread wings. Did it a couple of times and discovered that
this kind of dream stuff is different from both imagination and REM stuff.

Imagination stuff is controllable but slow to draw and coarse and crude
Suggestible stuff is suggestible but autocompletes to higher resolution, prettier and then self animates
Dream stuff is lower resolution
4th door stuff is clear and goes on forever

Suggestible and dream stuff also takes in a lot of subliminal cues I might not have paid attention to during a day like
skimming a text and not really ingesting.

No stereo vision forming noticed today.

Noticed mirror symmetry like rosarch blots when forming butterfly.
Noticed four fold rotational symmetry like an X.
Noticed six fold rotational symmetry like a hexagon.

Still trying to understand the connection between lights and feeling and sound.
The slow light waves now feel soothing and generate feeling, arrow reversed. Checkmark. light -> feel
Pleasure feelings generate high frequency dots. feel -> light
Hymns generates pleasure feelings. sound -> feel

Tim I like your definition of annata, but I don't resonante with the no-self language. If I re-cast it as stepping out of the flow of elegance and let
the elegance move along by itself then it is more appealing to me and I can go with that. My flow detector is still in training so I am
still unable to discriminate clearly between flow and self directed actions.
I haven't gotten to the stage of noticing
how sense of self forms yet, still figuring out how vision forms. Will try saying "consciousness" and see what autocomplete generates.
I don't see how dissatisfaction is connected to anything, self directed actions might be less elegant in the murk but
I have yet to clearly see the elegance elsewhere. I wouldn't say sub-optimal is suffering, it is just less elegant.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 3/8/21 4:15 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 3/8/21 3:41 AM

RE: Hector's dream exercise log

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
  Hector, yes, this is good, now I can quit hijacking the dream thread and start derailing this one, lol.

Tim I like your definition of annata, but I don't resonate with the no-self language. If I re-cast it as stepping out of the flow of elegance and let
the elegance move along by itself then it is more appealing to me and I can go with that.


My thing with anatta/no self/nothing-self is more like a rule of thumb thing, a sorter, so no problem with finding a more resonant common vocabulary. I love the notions of flow and elegance, a strong intuitive appeal there for me. So the meditative crux then translates for me to: awareness of the flow, and awareness of "stepping out" (dukkha?), and seeing if it is possible to feel the "stepping out" move as it is coming and . . . not-do it.

My flow detector is still in training so I am still unable to discriminate clearly between flow and self directed actions.

I think the flow detector is always getting more sophisticated, recalibrating as its discovers and tunes to new nuances and subtleties, wavelengths and vibes. For me, once there's a sense of flow, which the self cannot do, the self is seen in its disruptive effects, like finding a hidden planet or star by its gravitational effects on its neighbor. So a self-directed action is one that is revealed as a trying to do something it can't do, which is control and/or "improve" the flow. (This is samsara.)

I haven't gotten to the stage of noticing how sense of self forms yet, still figuring out how vision forms. Will try saying "consciousness" and see what autocomplete generates.

I'm not sure I can notice how self forms either. I guess what i'm trying to figure out is how to reliably spot it while the formation is in motion and slide past, subverting the autocomplete.

I don't see how dissatisfaction is connected to anything, self directed actions might be less elegant in the murk but I have yet to clearly see the elegance elsewhere. I wouldn't say sub-optimal is suffering, it is just less elegant.

Well, this is where I can easily enough let go of the dukkha/suffering language in this context, if it's an impediment. We've been mixing half a dozen vocabularies as we go here, at least, winging it, lol. The flow/elegance/sub-optimal terminology works just fine for me in most cases, as long as we find a way of talking about a feedback loop and optimality, tuning. Tactile/kinesthetically, sub-optimal elegant on flow can be literal pain, was part of what I meant in a previous context. And also, to go macro and irresolvable: take a family Thanksgiving, with the Farringtons, who, as my brother says, "Put the 'fun' in dysfunctional." Sub-optimal elegance in flow in that situation is pure fucking misery. The maha-optimal elegance of a Buddha would generally come up short, as far as I can tell from my state of the art. I think some guy was working on the matrix mechanics of it all, and another guy was coming at it from a wave formula angle, but I heard they both set their work on fire and killed themselves. Talk about the murk! So, state of the art elegance in family Thanksgiving situation? Sub-optimal at best, amounting to: Not killing myself. 

Goals: learn how to go with the flow, how to do the mental move that disambiguates action from elegance and tell the difference.

As always, your language hooks me! I'd love to hear more about the mental move that disambiguates action from elegance.

 [edit, afterthought p.s.] At the risk of inelegance, but for the sake of actual experience, the directing self is perfectly capable of identifying with the flow itself, and so at some point it can be the flow itself that is autocompleting and the self is more or less invisible, perfectly happy with that. So to subvert the autocomplete on the flow, to see the anticipation of flowing and "stop," a moment of unknowing, unflowing, unmoving, directionless, just plain cluelessness . . .  Uh, what was I saying? The fucking vocabulary collapses for a while. I wander around in a dispirited stupor for several years.  
Hector L, modified 3 Years ago at 3/8/21 10:20 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 3/8/21 10:20 AM

RE: Hector's dream exercise log

Posts: 139 Join Date: 5/9/20 Recent Posts
Thank you for your thoughtful reply! I have a lot to digest, but just before work I can reply to this one:

 I'd love to hear more about the mental move that disambiguates action from elegance.

I find when I do deep tissue massage and I disconnect thinking about what I am doing to just letting my hands do the work
people report that they feel better, like pains go away etc. When I try to choreograph what I am doing it doesn't seem to work as well.
I am guessing it is getting familiar with something like implicit memory or intuition rather than explicit  conscious activity.
I don't know if it will get easier to access implicit memory or intuition but with practice via meditation my hope is it will become
easier to tell the difference between elegant implicit actions vs adding some kind of conscious perturbation that makes it less elegant
or figure out how to best use conscious actions in harmony with implicit actions.

TLDR I am starting to learn how to ride a bike and if I think about it too much I might fall over a couple times emoticon
Hector L, modified 3 Years ago at 3/9/21 1:19 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 3/9/21 1:19 AM

RE: Hector's dream exercise log

Posts: 139 Join Date: 5/9/20 Recent Posts
Was lucky to get a guided tour of the arupa jhanas today, turns out that infinite consciousness might be the same thing
as realizing in REM state that the entire dream stage is made of consciousness. The dream stuff is consciousness,
fast or slow. Why didn't they just say that, it would have been a lot easier to understand.

Don't really get nothingness, since the there's always lights. But I think the light dots are on the way to
neither perception nor non perception, what do people do with it, note them so fast that they vanish?
Notice gone? Any tips in navigating this part would be apperciated. I'm just gonna try noting the spirally snowflake fractal
super fast and see what happens to that part of dream stuff.

Still not sure how autocomplete is related to this, it might be the feel of perceptions doing their binding moments thing
acording to that Viking Guru interview with Shinzen.
Hector L, modified 3 Years ago at 3/9/21 8:54 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 3/9/21 8:54 PM

RE: Hector's dream exercise log

Posts: 139 Join Date: 5/9/20 Recent Posts
Random thought of the day - I wonder if learning how to fly in lucid dreaming has to do with learning about infinite space.
I remember when learning  to fly during LD I used to be scared about heights and going too high for far from earth and my
meditation instructor had warned that infinite space can lead to a similar fear about self and infinity.

Similarly doing regular dream analysis and realizing in REM states that the entire setting is made of me stuff
I think might be good preparation for infinite consciousness.

Did some more infinite space today and my back area still feels weirdly bounded at the start.
I definitely have a preference for space in front of me. Did fast noticing of the light flickers.

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