Foundational Dreamwork Practices (Video Transcript)
10.9.2011
Hi, my name is Jeremy Crow. In this video I'd just like to share a few tips regarding lucid dreaming. So if you don't know what lucid dreaming is, it's simply the act of being in a dream and knowing that it's a dream, and being able to exert a level of conscious control over that dream because you know the true nature of the reality that you're experiencing, or at least knowing it better than you did before.
So typically this will happen after a dream is already started. Something odd will happen and you'll realize, "Oh! I must be dreaming!" but sometimes you just enter a dream and find yourself knowing right away that it's a dream. Some people are lucky enough to always know that they're dreaming and they're able to exert a high level of control over their dreams. The rest of us can actually do things to make it happen more often though.
A few of these things... the most important one is to keep a dream journal. Every time you write down your dream or record it you're telling your brain or your subconscious mind that remembering dreams is important. So it's a good practice to get into. The other reason it's really good is because you can always go back and read it and if you can detect certain patterns, certain locations that you normally go to and dreams... certain types of phenomenon the experience for me... one of my dream signs that I've been able to discover is strange things in the sky. Usually moving stars, UFOs or fireworks. I see those types of things and dreams relatively frequently and it's one of those things that if I see something really crazy in the sky I've trained myself to test to see whether I'm dreaming or not because you have to be able to convince yourself that you could be dreaming at any given time.
The reason for this is because when you're in a dream you're convinced that it's real; that you're awake. And this is because we just believe the reality that were presented with. And there's no reason to question it, usually. And even when we experience some really bizarre things in dreams we'll try and find an excuse for it. Or sometimes we'll be amazed but we still won't question the reality of it. And I think that this is because what we experience when we're awake is a mental representation of what we're getting from our senses. So it takes all that data and it compiles it into.. kind of a holographic projection that extends outside of ourselves.
In our own personal experience, really it's all happening in our mind but we experience it as a fully three-dimensional reality. It's like a map of what's actually out there based on the information we can gather about it from our sense organs and logic and things like that. If you're familiar with computer terminology it's like a GUI (graphical user interface) so that it's more easy to interact with the actual bits and bytes. When we're dreaming, that same experience generator is functioning but instead of generating an experience based off of sensory perception, it's taking the data it's using its internal data. So this would be memories, nerve pathways that we've developed through physical activity, all these different types of things. Internal data... internally stored data is being compiled and manipulated and processed in dreams but we experience it fully, like a fully three-dimensional reality.
So when we are able to have a lucid dream and we're able to consciously experience that reality generator, the hologram based off of internal data. It gives us a very unique opportunity to interact with the various aspects of our own psyche. And an interesting insight that I gained from lucid dreaming practice is that the Dreaming Self (the dream character that you play in your dreams) is actually just one aspect of the entire spectrum of aspects that the Complete Self is made out of. It's a part that you feel comfortable saying is you. Everything else has a certain level of distance to it and not fully one hundred percent integrated in every case. And especially if you experience an aspect of yourself that's being malevolent toward you in a dream, this is an aspect of yourself that you are not harmonizing with in your sense of self. It's a part of yourself that you've denied or repressed or just didn't really understand what happened and have never revisited it.
So lucid dreaming can be a great practice for reconciling your own internal psyche and harmonizing the various aspects of your psyche which is the main aspect of The Great Work. So the other thing, in Tibetan Buddhism they believe that lucid dreaming is like practicing for what happens when you die. So we can get into that more in a different video but I just wanted to kind of introduce a lot of these concepts and some things you can actually start practicing or thinking about that will help you have lucid dreams. So if you like this video I hope you subscribe to my channel and hope you leave some comments and we can interact. Thanks!
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