At 11:19 1999-07-03 -0700, you wrote:
>> It's cool to see someone else on this list that does lucid dreaming. I do
>> this, but it's not wide-spread as far as I know. I have had major periods
>> of overwork where I literally worked full time except for sleep. By
>> controlling my dreams and simulating an hour on the beach or something, I
>> woke up more refreshed and ready to work again. When I don't dream (or
>> more accurately, when I don't remember dreaming) it seems like I just
went to
>> bed and its time to go to work again, and I'm not ready to go back to work.
Deep relaxation and meditation can also work as a substitute for sleep for extended periods of time. During my own experiments with sleep deprivation I found that after up to 36 hours without sleep I could meditate for an hour and then continue for another 12 hours feeling as if I had slept perhaps four or five hours. However, after a certain period of time without sleep I noticed that meditation did not refresh me any more and that I needed proper sleep to function.
>> I also have performed real design work in dreams. During the above week
>> of hell, I have gone to sleep, designed a solution to problems, and woke up
>> ready to implement the design the next morning. I presented the design
>> idea, and actually billed time for the design work.
If all one's work could be performed so easily!
I assume that most people on this list are working in technical
professions, as
opposed to artistic, but I wonder if it would be easier to preform artistic
work thru
lucid dreaming than technical?
>> This is not always reliable, however. Sometimes you don't dream or don't
>> become lucid while dreaming. Sometimes you don't maintain full lucidity.
>> You dream that you came up with a good design, and you wake up and realize
>> that it doesn't make sense. Sometimes dreams get weird and seem
>> reasonable until you wake up. Usually the consciousness achieved in lucid
>> dreaming prevents the random dream-generators from kicking in, but
occasionally
>> there is some overlap where the lucid dream still has some fictional
elements
>> thrown in.
>>
>> For those who don't know what we're talking about: Lucid dreaming is when
>> you realize that you are dreaming. You thereby become conscious inside
>> your dream. Once you realize its a dream, you can control it by
visualizing
>> what you want to see, and the dream-generating facilities of the
subconscious
>> take over and create what you visualized. Basically, it is a
>> super-realistic holodeck. Anything you can imagine seems to be real. You
>> get full sensory feedback, so you can do long division on paper, because
>> you see the paper and the writing holds constant and seems real. You can
>> think logically and generate a design or a check list in your head, and
when you
>> wake up you have accomplished real work/planning while sleeping.
>>
>> I have lucid dreamed a few times, but now I always wake up immediately
after
>> I become lucid. Does anyone happen to know how to stop this from
happening?
Try to 'go with the flow' of the dream. Don't get all exited and try to
think about the fact that you are dreaming too much. This will cause you to
become more and more aware of yourself and your sleeping body until you
wake up.
Instead, remain calm and study your surroundings, try to interact with them
or perhaps
create something. One other thing that works for me, if everything else
fails, is to refuse to wake up by sheer willpower. (I remember one time
when I was a child; I was dreaming lucidly when I became aware that I was
being forced awake, so I concentrated hard to keep on dreaming, but after
several minutes I couldn't maintain my dreaming any longer and woke up. I
found that my mother was shaking me hard and calling my name. She was
pretty shook up, and explained that she had been trying to shake me awake
for several minutes, but couldn't rouse me and thought I had fallen into a
coma during the night.)
>> I have heard that as soon as you become lucid, you become more aware of
>> outside stimula because you are more aware of your senses than in normal
>> dreaming, but if you spin while in the lucid dream, you can stay dreaming
>> because much of your sensory abilities are being used to simulate the
spinning and
>> to keep you balanced, basically distracting you from outside stimula...I
have not
>> tried this yet though....
The 'spinning' formula seems to work, and also such tricks as levitating/flying ect.
Peter Lakbar