Hello!

I started dream logging recently, but it was leaving me feeling even more untethered to tangible stuff than when I was permanently stoned, so I thought maybe writing a bit about that might be useful.

Recall returned faster than I had expected, but maybe I had just enforced distance from that for too long. And some of them have a mildly lucid or yogic sort of feel, which is sometimes nice but also seems like a distraction. Most notably, dream specters that seize my reactionary tendencies in a moment and disappear upon interaction, only to pop up again seem to be the real obstacle to more fluidity or depth of my dream experience/recall. Ironic, since in waking I often suffer from stoic inaction and a will to just fade away. Yet they seem oddly linked, as though stonewalling were its own reactionary stance that just happens to stretch moments out rather than syncopating them a bit too rapidly for staying on-beat.

Before giving up smoking, I had a sense of being haunted by people I used to be but had sought to will away like a silly occultic child. I had experienced them in the past year not so much in dreams, or at least I could barely ever remember, but more in liminal moments between the momentums that carry me through the days. Cultivating a will to confront them in dreamspace seems to just make more specters though, at least for now. But there are 2 of them (at least, or they used to be, and the frame of reference grew sticky with time), and they tend to communicate by staring rather than speaking. As silent types, they often like to steal faces and appear as someone else. Sometimes very specifically as people who evoke emotional reactions, but that's an old jam for them.

Doubling down on dreams seems like a terrible way to get out of myself and meet like-minded people (well, real fleshy ones at any rate). But it also seems more grounding than seeking ever more neutral language for perceptual weirdness, or indulging in "just moments" where everything is always on the one because there's never an opportunity afforded for more distinctly extended meters. Regardless, I can't bring myself to join sitting groups, and am surprised that I've found a will to post anything in an online space at all. I guess it's a start...

Out of curiousity, what would success look like to you with your dream practice?

EDIT: Percy this is Shargrol --- I'm very sorry, I accidently deleted your post. Perhaps other moderators can retrieve the original post. Again. I'm very sorry.

There were two sentences this was the first line in your reply...

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"Hello!"

​​​​​​​Hello! I just wanted to say that I like the name Percy and welcome to DhO! Looking forward to read you more! 

I don't know if a deleted post is easy to recover or if that's even possible. The best course of action is for Percy to re-post what was deleted, especially if it's a short post.

Sorry

Chris M
DhO Moderator

Ugh, again I'm very sorry. Thanks for checking Chris.

I did say on many occasions "do not drink and drive!" And this is even more important during a festive season as this one!  

Fasten your seatbelts folks! This dream seems unfolding on and on! Yohoooooooo!!! 

No worries, I had a good laugh!

I think the second sentence was just to say that something like dream yoga as a more results-oriented direction of focus would seem fitting.

Thank you Papa for the kind words.

This experience is in such a flux! 

"Be careful what you wish for"

I was reminded last night that intent, whether in dreams, life, or other magical works, is often an adventure in dimensional reduction bordering on absurdity.

It sounds like you have been through a lot, and I wish you well

Thank you kind sir

I read a thing this evening and it left me feeling many ways.

https://jewschool.com/on-finding-our-temple-covered-in-blood-174355

Perhaps my first thought was rather selfish, insular. "How long will I have to stay awake to keep this out of my dreams"

And of how often my married life left me feeling spiritually alienated and far away...

But then it kept bringing me back to the weird way in which I've felt more Buddhist than I ever expected or think I really deserve since I decided to give up formal practice almost 10 years ago now (about which I hope to unpack further). Sure, I've practiced and read and practiced some more, but the origin of that was staring sideways at perceptual weirdness and just happening to find better vehicles for that journey in the methods and words of quite a few Buddhists, old and new. And I often felt alienated in that as well, with so much weight given to language and attitudes about things like enlightenment as an absolute end-goal rather than aspirational next-miling.

I don't know. I feel sad and angry for and about things beyond myself. What could I possibly do in the face of a momentum that's seemed inevitable throughout my entire adult life? What good is tradition anyway, when the end-goal proves itself to be in-grouping for militant selfishness?

At any rate, reading it left me feeling less alone in my sense of alienation, somehow.

Dreams generally don't seem to have sound, or touch or taste for that matter (and surely not just for me?). Words usually convey by intuition, visual recognition, or some other ever-present sort of felt vice. For the most part dreaming seems to be just a comingling of visual and emotional experience.

And it doesn't even seem weird in the dream. Kind of like how touch is often not experienced, and if so, all other details wind down to a bare minimum, as though observing a still frame imbued with deeper meaning than the image alone could convey.

But also thinking about primitivity of senses, and how audio experience tends to a more immediate and less mutable sort of jam.

Also, the notion that thoughts are essentially feelings in self-special wrapping.

The fabric of dreams, in this regard at least, seems to be woven of the higher order bits of sense that inform perceptual experience. More deeply layered than iterating over the senses in isolation. Not exactly sorting, not explicitly anyway, but more akin to recursive graph traversal... Well, maybe.

Strange upon recall when dreams blend or criss-cross, but in the dream often it feels quite fluid and natural. Seems to happen most often when returning to sleep, as though the bodily need to pee was dream-consistency's arch nemesis. But also maybe sometimes when dreams first begin and lack their own distinct inertia, scanning for the most appropriate scene to match the mood. Very much a feel of traversing for some higher order filtering or alignment, and the deeper the momentum of immersion, the easier it is to rediscover.

"Radiant light serenely illuminates the sands of the Ganges. The ordinary and sages, beings with spirits, are equally my home. A single moment is beyond birth, actualizing the undivided. A subtle movement of the six sense roots shelters the clouds. Removing delusions increases sickness. Going toward true thusness is also wrong. Follow the worldly conditions with no hindrance. Nirvana and birth-and-death are both flowers in the sky."

A quote from Dogen's Flowers in the Sky, attributed to Zhang Zhou

'Is this that fear & terror coming?' Then the thought occurred to me: 'Why do I just keep waiting for fear?

What if I, in whatever state I'm in when fear & terror come to me, were to subdue that fear & terror in that very state?' So when fear & terror came to me while I was walking back & forth, I would not stand or sit or lie down. I would keep walking back & forth until I had subdued that fear & terror. When fear & terror came to me while I was standing, I would not walk or sit or lie down. I would keep standing until I had subdued that fear & terror. When fear & terror came to me while I was sitting, I would not lie down or stand up or walk. I would keep sitting until I had subdued that fear & terror. When fear & terror came to me while I was lying down, I would not sit up or stand or walk. I would keep lying down until I had subdued that fear & terror.

'A being not subject to delusion has appeared in the world for the benefit & happiness of many, out of sympathy for the world, for the welfare, benefit, & happiness of human & divine beings,' he would rightly be speaking of me.

"When the mind was thus concentrated, purified, bright, unblemished, rid of defilement, pliant, malleable, steady, & attained to imperturbability, I directed it to the knowledge of recollecting my past lives.
I directed it to the knowledge of the passing away & reappearance of beings. I saw — by means of the divine eye, purified & surpassing the human — beings passing away & re-appearing, and I discerned how they are inferior & superior, beautiful & ugly, fortunate & unfortunate in accordance with their kamma: 'These beings — who were endowed with bad conduct of body, speech & mind, who reviled noble ones, held wrong views and undertook actions under the influence of wrong views — with the break-up of the body, after death, have re-appeared in the plane of deprivation, the bad destination, the lower realms, in hell. But these beings — who were endowed with good conduct of body, speech, & mind, who did not revile noble ones, who held right views and undertook actions under the influence of right views — with the break-up of the body, after death, have re-appeared in the good destinations, in the heavenly world.' Thus — by means of the divine eye, purified & surpassing the human — I saw beings passing away & re-appearing, and I discerned how they are inferior & superior, beautiful & ugly, fortunate & unfortunate in accordance with their kamma.

'Released.' I discerned that 'Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.'

Bhaya-bherava Sutta: Fear & Terror

Check your messages

Clarity and consistency. I seem to use them interchangeably. Maybe a bit lazy of me, or unclear as it were...

And yet, what's more clear than a consistent frame? In contrast, a brief moment of clarity that quickly washes away in a glimpse sounds more like a little death lusted after with the full passion and foolishness of youth.

But moments are all I've got... Well, sure, but some moments stretch out, suspending the will to run away with the momentousness of felt experience. And some moments fall off only to circle back with an almost fractal-like periodicity, a bit like a dreamscape that's easy to return to but similarly impossible to sustain against the inevitability of eventual waking. Just cascading some silly sense of self through the moments like a relatively scale-free hierarchy of associative presence.

Sounds magical, I'm wishing you well. Ive really enjoyed reading your logs, and the self reflection that's been causing me on my end. Welcome to DhO!

"You can be in my dream if I can be in yours" - Bob Dylan, Talkin' World War 3 Blues

Was reminded last night that, in the absence of preparing my disposition and/or focus, I easily find myself back where I started. Not so much wrt recall as embodying unpleasant states and temperments, the likes of which led me to turn it off so to speak in the first place.

Perhaps I need to rethink my practice goals and return to just sitting. And getting out more...

Really, in the back of my mind, there's been a sense that this was almost diversionary, if rather soothing. This has been good for getting me to write more, and I hope to continue. But I think I had found the clarity I was seeking already, and was just sort of seeking to reject its conclusions.

Conveniently timed for a ny resolution I guess, but I thoroughly dislike goal-orientation, not least of which for its tendency to narrow all the things into permutations of "are we there yet?"

It sounds like your practice is going well, keep going!

Did you end up making a good new years wish/resolution?

Nope. What I did do: feel ill and talk to the ex. Fun day!

"And getting out more..."

+1

"What I did do: feel ill and talk to the ex."

​​​​​​​Oh shit! I know how that feels! 

Damn but I just want to trance out on perceptual weirdness. Getting out and enjoying the sun, while nice, still serves to bring the noise. Intent for nightly dreaming also seems to increasingly go there. The consistency is something, I guess.

funny how altering simple conditions of sleep can make their way into dream themes

Sometimes reality hits hard.

When dealing with maybes, it can be useful to work with multiple perspectives. In the absence of conclusive/first hand evidence, a 50/50 or even-odds stance is a safe fallback. Alongside that, accumulated plausible evidence can also be useful for contingency planning. Emotions often lead us to expect an immediate conclusion, reactionary responses are easy and the sense of closure they provide can be comforting. Sitting with maybes can be really tough.

fun times when the stress dream feels better than waking conditions

Even in the face of disaster, I thought to reevaluate things but keep coming back to the same conclusions.

Fuck

Things are too crazy to do much logging right now, but a few quick notes.

Sleeping in a different place seems to take a day or two to get back to recall.

When life is relatively chill, emotions can still feel overwhelming and practice can seem like a way to distill emotional response, holding everything far away. But when chaos ensues, that same bit of repose seems to enable a greater realization of the felt experience of being there.

Uncofortably, when I'm able to recall lately, I see an angry face of myself that I had hoped to leave behind long ago. Sometimes I lose control and am all anger and rage, but at others I'm more measured. Sitting with the angry face until it gave way to something less reactive is much of what all this dream logging stuff was about, I think. Not sure how to size this up as progress or just shades of the thing.

Well, practice is a gradual training. I think what happens is as we work through suffering, we are on the whole more happy, productive, and content. This seems to have an interesting effect that the mind gets better at detecting suffering, but basically it needs to be stronger to detect it, so it becomes more sensitive to it, which reveals deeper hidden suffering. So while things get better, it can definately feel like running in circles sometimes. But keep going, keep practicing, youre doing great.

I can sense a prep talk here ugh, I cant wait for the development!  

You in LA? Best wishes! Hope that gets under control soon! 

Thanks!

What good are linear metaphors when engaging with radial dimensionality?

Multi-linear reductions are themselves non-linear and yet deeply so. Like with graphs.

Linearity is most often just a con of dimensional reduction, an obscuration of inconvenient details. And yet, so damn useful in sufficiently narrow contexts...

I tend to think of goal-orientation and progress like this, a shamelessly convenient over-narrowing of things as they are, in the name of feel-goodism or something similar.

---

And the twins, they seem more radial than anything. Though I seem to only engage with them as a linear reference to the past, a marker of orientation or doorway of sorts. But the momentum of now, it reflects back so easily, in spite of momentum wanting to be like a linear arrow of time as a simple little thing, just a sideshow dimension.

In a liminal moment, sometime last week, I saw them lingering in full figure-ground flip-flop for quite a while. There seems to be nothing like progress to do with them, only seeing, engaging, sharing time. Not bad, just different than convenient language might lead to believe.

The most amazing aspect of sleeping & dreaming is that they're experienced fully awake.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful"

Considering how entropic language tends to be, what does that mean for the utilty of prior models over time?

---

Relatedly, thinking without words can be a wonderful thing but can also become quite alienating, at least outside of very specific contexts (like a jam band or sports team).

If you own pets, do you speak to them with human words? Are the words more for them or for you? Sometimes snorting at my dogs, waving my hands, or casting a deliberate gaze is more effective than anything else. But I still blab on at them most of the time...

What kind of dog do you have? 
mine is an Icelandic Sheep Dog but the black and white variety. Before that I've had a lovely Lagotto Romagnolo. 

Impermanence can be so freeing and such a bummer at the same damn time.

As dreams go, I'm not logging the blow-by-blow details so much lately but momentum of recall & engagement seems to be carrying on well. In general, just following where the contexts take me and not worrying so much about projecting into this or that state or situation.

Oh try these out and let me know what you think!

https://archive.org/details/principa (lots of heavy duty math and art)

https://archive.org/details/phantasmorgia/phantasmorgia/mode/2up (more philosophy and essays, but still has math and stuff about AI)

This thread feels increasingly like running around with a fiction suit on backwards, at least since figure-ground flip-flop. Gotta think a bit about what comes next.

https://open.spotify.com/track/70uZXOG2KTAHwcAgp4QyYr?si=spfpst1lTbS4uFC8Y_HunQ&context=spotify%3Aplaylist%3A6dM52nO9CypZwsrldm4ddn

https://open.spotify.com/track/28UMEtwyUUy5u0UWOVHwiI?si=uKsROGB6Q4OK8TxYeL5ClQ

https://open.spotify.com/track/0EG9tDhr5rd931Ebj213nO?si=w08hU1EHQ8-L6EmHunGFaw

https://open.spotify.com/track/7IraahshdHSsNaJH1wM41a?si=6NjrH3fYR2yCLXVXgjaXxQ

A bit of grounding to close this one out. Really, looking to the past for future clarity was a silly indulgence to begin with, and maybe I knew that already, but momentum was gonna have its way regardless...

Dreaming has been good if a bit dull. Not so angry at least.

Dreams seem to be consistently suggesting that I want to pursue relationship again, but waking me is entirely too low-trust. Gotta start somewhere though I guess. Advice I once gave to someone uncomfortable with clinical setting seems apt; that trust doesn't need to be an all-in thing, that you can pick a single thing, a tiny dimension, a place of relative comfort out in the open, and build upon that bit by bit. Boundaries are ok so long as they aren't all-encompassing.

Catharsis would have me just delete the thread, but it seems useful to remind myself of some silly habits, at least for now. Maybe I'll stick around a bit.

Hey, how are you doing? 

​​​​​​​Lately I've been dreaming about the gods but the gods are shaped like Chinese dragons but they've got the features and like biology of humans with massive genitalia and they're all wound together into a single entity. They have something to do with plasma and they keep trying to tell me something but I can never bloody remember it. 

Hi!

That sounds wild. The imagery you describe reminds me of several things: tribal art I've seen depicting cosmic deities with phalluses at least as large as their bodies, a Miyazaki film I once saw about a water spirit, and a weird dream I had long long ago about something like a vagina dentata.

Those dream whispers that I couldn't quite recall after waking always frustrated me but also seem deeply romantic. A sort of intimacy only to be engaged while wrapped up in the bedsheets of dreamland.

I'm curious, do you find the words or imagery or perhaps some other context to be more meaningful, or maybe to carry the essence of the dream, if that makes more sense for you?

I have to say it was a funny one, I had a series of dreams like that and they weren't overtly sexual but there were sexual undertones and I distinctly recall being there with multiple people, all of whom, me included, were children. 

A particular piece of the dream stands out where a female entity was addressing us kids as though we were being prepared for something, like a succession and she was strangely, very strangely, two dimensional as though she was a two dimensional plane stretching in every direction and her hair sort of flowed out in a mess of golden tangles, human bodies spiralling around like chinese dragons. 

Somebody was supposed to be the ruler of something, a friend of mine in child form, but I think he didn't want to do it so one of us other kids had to.

And this was all part of some great meta physical thing that needed to happen which they explained to us in great detail. 

What's more they were very beautiful and bright but their brightness was somewhat tainted, their brightness was somehow a little dark, it wasn't pure radiance. 

It reminded me a lot of a number of moments in Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle. Which is one of the most amazing things I've ever read, just fyi, anybody who sees this. Also the mythology of Elden Ring.

​​​​​​​Might I ask, what do you mean by dream tethering?

​​​​​​​Did you ever have a shared dream?

I love how dreams can have a sense of context without specific memories or other associations to bind them.

no shared dreams, not really.

Tethering here means many things but mostly about people I used to be but sought to do away with (mainly a soft/weak child and the angry face that replaced him), only to find them ever more deeply entwined in dreams. And then, when I sought to forget dreams (amongst other things), after many years, those same dreams were still there, with those specific dreams and visions of past selves I had most hoped to evade serving as a sort of portal for remembering so many other things that time had swept away. When I started this thread, I thought that I might conjure them up to confront them and reclaim some sense of self left behind. What I found, which is maybe unsurprising, is that I could sort of invoke them as aspects of my adult self exaggerated in dreamscapades, but that mostly those felt frail and strained compared to just letting myself go along with being whatever the context of the moment suggested.

Vertigo sucks.

The long tail of ear disease used to feel instructional, like an ever-present opportunity to shine a light on some base level perceptual consciousness thing or other. But increasingly it just feels like a wall that keeps engagement at arms length. Not that I was doing great at getting out before chronic funtime ramped up again but fuck what to do when this shit is always waiting to jump out and gobble up livelihood and vaporize will? At least the floor is there to be my friend I guess.

Feeling nostalgic.

Missing the time when formalisms of sitting seemed exciting, meaningful, useful.

Longing for a sense of adventure, awe, getting lost in spaciousness.

Everything feels like just going through the motions for a nostalgic glimpse of the way things used to be at some point or other. Not just regarding meditative type stuff but in general. Maybe I'm just sad.

Thinking of the moment when I decided to stop practicing in a structured / intentional way. Embarrassing excess of breathwork for dissolution led to passing out and I decided in that moment that I was ok with failure, whatever that meant, and tried to refocus on just showing up for moments and people as the need seemed to arise. Weirdly though that time after giving up found me feeling more connected to Buddhist type stuff than I had realized or planned on before. A few times since then I've enjoyed trancing out on perceptual weirdness, which sometimes was nice, but never really in a focused or dedicated way. It was good until it wasn't I guess, I don't know.

And now I'm here. Reading other people talking about sitting and reflecting and feeling nostalgic that much more because of it. Maybe there's something left for me to do, but returning to past cycles doesn't seem to be it. Not sure what I'm doing any more. Health issues were instructive in the past in dealing with the way that shit happens as it does regardless of how I conceive of or systemize them. This doesn't feel like that though, but maybe I'm just missing something there, just forever stubbornly lost in one way or another. I don't know, maybe.

Dreams are good though, but I just want to go back and stay there. I was engaging with them as a guide post of sorts, not a forever hideaway. Momentum though, I'm there now, doing that. Maybe once I can go back to a normal style and cadence of living, I don't know...

I think Shargrol's structured practice could benefit here! It sure did help me out and kept stuff moving on. 

Its great to be in the spot of feeling underwhelmed by the cycles just going on and on and on and on and on and on ... Its a bit like walking around in the fog and having a sense of direction just to realize that one was walking in a circle this whole time Oh shit! What now?!

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