Lucid Dreams: Rant And Rave

I wont link any of the sites, you can google "sleep paralysis" or "lucid dreaming" etc if you want to find the ones I'm talking about, but why, oh why, oh why? There are "support groups" out there for people who suffer this condition! These are, I assume, perfectly normal, reasonable, intelligent people who experience lucid dreams and their related phenomena, yet somehow think this is a problem that must be solved. Welcome to the dark ages... if we don't understand it, it must be evil and abolished!

Their message forums are repleat with youngsters, still children or young teenagers trying to comprehend what is happening to them when they go to bed at night. Their families think them strange for not sharing (or more accurately perhaps, not remembering...) their experiences and, well, as if the between of childhood and adulthood is not confusing enough as it is!

During the Easter break from work today I had the opportunity for some recreational sleep, and recreational sleep permits recreational dreaming. The 'presence' that grabs your ankles and tries to drag you off the bed in sleep paralysis visited. It lay upon me, pressing me to the mattress, trying to oppress me with its weight. We grappled, it clawed at me, as for me it so often does. I applied 'Aikido' - "the compliant way"... I know I am dreaming, who are you and what are you trying to achieve? What harm can come to me, this is a dream! The entity had no answer but to cower foetally - "I don't know why I'm here".

It is a creation of my own imagination, demonstrably perhaps an effect of a particular part of the brain receiving stimulation - but still a dream, not real. The lucid dream and it's associated phenomena are tackled with the intellect and not medieval superstition. To know the boundaries in the betweens, to recognise their transitions, to embrace them.

My beautiful niece Lucy, 6 years old, has reported to her mother, my sister, that she can do whatever she chooses in her dreams. My sister is deeply experienced in the practice of dream control and so I am certain that my niece will have an ideal guide through her nocturnal adventures. But where does one turn when their family has shunned this experience for fear of phantoms?

Progress...?

I've been about changing my nicotine addiction for six months or so now, time to take stock.

Around Christmas / New Year I couldn't much be bothered with the fight, having the whole world taste like mint, the constant jaw-aching chewing. I was smoking more, but still less than before.

Around January I took a new tact, and started buying lighter cigarettes, half strength 8mg, although I was still using the gum too. This turned out to be a little pointless as more often than not I just cut the filter off so I could take a decent drag without doing myself an internal injury.

Now I use three-quarter strength, 12mg, which is just acceptable but the taste is lacking on a real cigarette. A packet will last two days so I suppose we can calculate the outcome as a reduction of 1/2 * 3/4 = 3/8 of what I used to smoke before all this began.

The 3/4 is a bit misleading, I stand by what I've said earlier that lighter cigarettes aren't less bad for you (please do not misconstrue anything I say as medical advice!). It's the smoldering plant matter that's carcinogenic, whether the cigarette is 1mg or a yummy 16mg.

The last couple of weeks I've been having a couple of smokes at work again, still not so many as before but it's a backward trend. This week I've been sure to be well stocked with gum, but I dislike walking around the place all night 'chewing my cud'.

The best motivation for smoking cessation (again, this is not a medical opinion...) is concern for one's own health, and cold turkey is the most effective method. I have noticed some minor detremental effects of smoking and felt improved health within a week of constant chewing - but it is not to the point of 'concern'.

Physically, it seems I've succeeded in restabilised the addiction at a somewhat lower level. Psychologically, if I were trying to "quit", I failed some months ago and would have simply returned to my old habits. I ain't no quitter. The Kampf continues...

Lucid Dreams: A Note On False Awakenings

There's a lot to be said about false awakenings, which are most commonly associated with the pre-lucid state; as I'm jotting these notes on lucidity as they occur to me for now I just want to mention this...

When a lucid dream ends in waking up, you should do a lucidity check. It often happens (to me in any case) that a lucid dream ends with a false awakening and a new one can be begun if this is identified.

Which perhaps should lead to thinking about "lucid consciousness" in terms of a bell curve for the purposes of applying the rating scale previously discussed, or maybe some sort of twisted bell curve with respect to the previous post.

Lucid Dreams: The Lucid Dream Within A Dream

Sometimes I have a lucid dream within a dream, which is a bit different from a lucid dream per se.

Last night I dreamt lying in bed - not my real-world bed, but 'my' bed in the dream - watching a tape of some episodes of a documentary. More correctly, I was listening to the documentary as other things happened within the dream. Because some things being said didn't make sense without seeing the TV I tried to turn towards the screen but couldn't, which is where the dream lucidity within a dream began.

A common pre-lucid state is when you attempt to move your body, and when you think it is in it's new position you find it back where it started. This is a 'confusion' between the real, physical position of the body and the psychological model of it which normal separate during dreaming. In this case, aware now that I was within a normal dream, it's the same confusion but between the 'physical' position of the dream-body and it's psychological representation.

In fact, I was able to move my dream body around just not my head, leading me to fall out of my dream bed as though in a drunken stupour - in a (pre-) lucid dream proper I am unlikely to be able to move any part of my body, a stage of so-called 'sleep paralysis'. I even attempted to hold my head with my hands and move it around to no avail, something I couldn't normally do in a lucid dream. My head was simply anchored to the floor like a rock sitting there.

After a short period experimenting to see if I could do anything about it, I decided to return to the dream and had another longish dream after that, both of which were more 'present' than a normal dream but not lucid. When I awoke I had been sleeping for about 4 hours.

Two tell-tale signs that some sort of lucidity was coming; I was able to switch back and forth between my conscious thoughts and hypnogogic imagery at will, re-entering either at the point I left off several times, and hearing conversations in the background during the hypnogogic state.

The talking sounds like muffled voices in the next room, or the background hum of a cocktail party with odd phrases discernable here and there. When I focus in on it the speech can become quite coherent although tonight it was in French. I only know very little French so I should say "had the structure of French", but as I concentrated on it the voice transitioned to German. I can sometimes pick up at least the gist of what's being talked about in German, but as I caught the switch I went into the dream.

It's a little difficult to place this one on the lucidity scale; as a lucid dream it would be around 25%, but as a dream within a dream it's around 5%. Taking dream control of a lucid dream, or becoming lucid within a dream? Hard to say due to the extent to which the normal dream continued through the lucidity.

EDIT: The nice thing about blogging is that you can bash out your thoughts as they happen and have them there to reflect upon until a better way of expressing them occurs. Here's a little clarification (or maybe reambiguation...) of what this post is about.

It is quite common, almost the 'usual' way of having a lucid dream to be dreaming normally, become aware you are dreaming, and thus take conscious control of the dream - become lucid.

What I am trying to describe here however is dreaming about having a lucid dream, so the consciousness that occurs is within the normal dream, not strictly the 'waking consciousness' that is dream lucidity. By analogy, you might dream about being drunk and so within the dream you are drunk, but this is not quite the same as being drunk in waking reality.

Sick Boy

I know several people now who've stopped smoking cold-turkey since I started this blog. "The new baby's coming.". "I was smoking my self broke.". They make me sick! What weak excuses!

They leave me thinking of one of the great anti-heros of cinema in the last 15 years, Renton, the smackhead - thief - scam-artist from Trainspotting (I guess it helps to have your character portrayed by Ewen MGregor), and his... "known associate"... called Sick Boy.

"...Take Sick Boy, for instance, he came off junk at the same time as me, not because he wanted too, you understand, but just to annoy me, just to show me how easily he could do it...".

This is easier than 'coming off junk'.

"Relinquishing junk. Stage One: preparation. For this you will need: one room which you will not leave; one mattress; tomato soup, ten tins of; mushroom soup, eight tins of, for consumption cold; ice cream, vanilla, one large tub of; Magnesia, Milk of, one bottle; paracetamol; mouth wash; vitamins; mineral water; Lucozade; pornography; one bucket for urine, one for feces, and one for vomitus; one television; and one bottle of Valium, which I have already procured, from my mother, who is, in her own domestic and socially acceptable way, also a drug addict.".

And me with my lovely freshmint chewing-gum and my tasty menthol inhaler.

"This was to be my final hit. But let's be clear about this: there's final hits and final hits. What kind was this to be? Some final hits are actually terminal one way or another, while others are merely transit points as you travel from station to station on the junky journey through junky life.".

==~

Lucid Dreams: Pre-Lucidity

I've mentioned the pre-lucid stage a few times and it probably sounds a little oxymoronic. Surely you're either conscious you're dreaming or you're not, right? The simple answer to this is that consciousness is about thresholds and in-betweens, not black-and white, digital, 'you are or you aren't'.

With the pre-lucid stage that doesn't progress to full lucidity, you might awaken and think "I suspected I was dreaming but wasn't sure", or "I seemed to have control over something there but I thought it was just part of my day, didn't imagine I was dreaming".

There are tests you can do when you suspect you are dreaming but aren't sure, with the caveat that they can be a double-edged sword. The classic one from the literature is 'the light-bulb test'. The idea is that to test if you're dreaming, try turning on a light. In a dream it won't work and so you'll know you're dreaming and gain full lucid control.

My problem with this is that I never had a problem with lights in dreams until I read about this test! Since then, whenever I try to turn a light on in a dream the light-bulb blows and I'm left in darkness. In the pre-lucid state, I can try several lights with the same result and just think "Oh damn, the lights keep blowing" and not realise I'm dreaming. I've frequently (ie. once a year or two) had the experience of having 3-4 light-bulbs blow when I try to switch them on within a 24 hour period while really awake. Highly coincidental but probably due to a glitch in the power-supply or that they were previously replaced at the same time and have approximately the same use and life-expectancy. This means however that it's not unusual to me for a light to fail and therefore not evidence one way or another that I'm dreaming.

I've since learned how to control the 'failing lights' phenomena in full lucid dreams, but it can take a lot of concentration and often isn't worth the trouble. It's usually easiest just to get on with the dream and let the light return in it's own natural course.

The most reliable pre-lucid test for me is the ability to defy the laws of physics. If I can jump and remain suspended in the air for an unnatural length of time, or take extra long strides where I can take a couple of steps in the air before touching the ground again I can confirm that I'm dreaming and become fully lucid.

I've woken a couple of times in the the last few days and realised I was pre-lucid without becoming fully lucid. I'll rate those experiences at about 3% on our lucidity scale.

Sucking Stale Minties

The inhaler works quite well. If I'd known before I bought it that it's flavoured with menthol, it might have put me off - the point was to avoid interfering with the natural beery goodness of beer flavoured beer.

Fortunately the menthol is very subtle, almost unnoticeable. The main problem is that you have to suck quite hard on it, it would be much more pleasant to use if you could draw on it... like a cigarette. It does at least have that 'something to hold in your lips' oral gratification besides delivering a decent drug hit, once you find a satisfactory way to suck at it.

Lucid Dreams: Recording Cycles

I started a natural lucid dream cycle this week, that is, one that wasn't precipitated by anything different happening in my life (2mg gum was after), one that's just going to happen because that's what they do. So I want to start recording things like their frequency and intensity and so on.

Let's devise a scale on which 0% is a normal, non-lucid dream and 100% is the most complete lucid experience I can concieve.

We'll make a record of the induction. There's a few ways this can happen. And the Good Vibrations, there are different types and intensities, some just in the ear, some the head, some throughout the whole body.

Monday night went like this. Go to bed. Start thinking about the things you think about when you go to bed. Not getting to sleep. Turn over. Repeat.

The cat starts annoying me. I haven't recognised it yet, but this is the pre-lucid stage. When he really sleeps on the bed, he comes in quietly and nestles down around my legs. He has other ways to draw my attention to the fact that the cat-food fairy has waved her wand and magically emptied his food bowl. When I've slipped into dreamscape but still think I'm awake and trying to get to sleep, I sometimes dream that he's pawing at my head, or sitting on it (often a sign of sheet-suffocation).

This time was slightly new in that he'd actually sunk his teeth into my index finger. He doesn't do that, so I have recognition that I've slipped into sleep. The Good Vibrations start. Short, jolting pulses. 1 -2 - 3 - rest. 1 - 2 - 3 - rest. Each pulse about a second long. A second or two of low buzz rest, then more pulses. My body awakens to the point where I regain control of it, and I roll onto my back. The duration of each pulse lengthens until they merge and become a continuous wave of oscillating low to medium intensity vibration throughout my whole body.

There's a short sensation of levitation. When the vibration reaches my legs, they lose the feeling of mass and begin to float. Until I was a teenager, I would experience the sensation of full body levitation for prolonged periods, or often wake up to the feeling of my body falling with a crash back to the mattress. Probably the psychological model and the physical body disconnecting and reconnecting as it does in normal sleep and dreaming. Normally, we're not consciously aware of it happening.

I'm re-entering sleep, with psychological consciousness. Beyond the buzz of the vibrations, I can hear noises, voices chattering. Possibly auditory halucinations from my own dreaming mind, possibly penetrating from the outside world. As a shift worker I go to bed when the world is waking up, I sometimes hear my neighbour in his garden talking to his clients on the phone as I go to sleep. I am in the hypnagogic state, in the between of the waking world and the dream world.

After a few minutes of this the vibrations have subsided and I am lying in my bed wide awake. Except I'm not. I'm in a full lucid dream. Someone I knew well in the past comes into my room, sits on the bed, and we begin to talk. I make no attempt to excercise control over the dream because I want to talk to this person, hear what they have to say. I chose to control only a few small aspects of this dream because I was interested to explore the scenario my non-conscious had brought up. I could have changed much more, but this time not the whole dream as I sometimes can. There is a sense of 'anchoring' to a scenario, the strength of which determines how much can change. Let's describe this dream as having a weak to medium strength anchor.

We go into one of those dream-rooms which has always been part of my house but in reality doesn't exist or belongs to someone else's house. There are people I've never seen before sitting in there, but I understand who they are intended to represent. One of them shows me written on paper, and tells me "Your time is 3-16-25.". This is interesting - I expect I shall talk about dream interpretation another time - I don't think it's a date (16th March 2025) because I wouldn't use American date format. There was no foreboding about it, just a matter of fact statement.

Another tells me "Evan has his own room in the garden". I don't personally know anyone called Evan, but I have an idea about the origin of the use of this name. I break from the flow of the dream (ie. take lucid control) and go to my garden to see what's there. There's an animal hutch in the corner that doesn't really exist. Evan is a tiger kitten snoozing in it. I greet him "Hello Evan", but sleeping cats don't like being disturbed! He lifts his head, turns to me and snarls, then closes his eyes again.

I wake up. The more strongly anchored a dream is, the more likely I will either wake up or be snapped back into the scenario if I take control of it's natural flow. Sometimes it is very difficult to wake up from a lucid dream even if I want to, becoming trapped in the dream or having many 'false awakenings'. It's been about 3 hours since I first went to bed. I soon fall asleep again and have some normal non-lucid dreams which fade from memory soon after waking.

I'll start the scoring by putting this down as a 50% lucid dream on the above scale. The weather changed, it's noticably hotter this week. I want to keep note of that to see if a pattern of correlation develops between change in atmospheric pressure and the air pressure in my eustachian tubes (the audiologist suggestion) acting as some sort of organic barometer.

I'll need to define some terms more carefully - 'scenario anchor' etc - and work on the scales of measurement for lucidity, types and strengths of vibration and so on... work in progress...

Where's Me Bloody Drugs Yer Bastard?

Well... it wasn't quite that bad.

The inferrence of having said last time that I've routed the habit of smoking from the working week is that I don't have that 'pure indulgent pleasure' of a cigarette with morning coffee. I don't remember when I last did and in retrospect I'm suprised at how easily it slipped away. Being English by birth I was, naturally, weened onto black leaf tea. Perhaps the caffeine hit is more powerful? Been addicted since the age of 4... let's not even start on that one!

I bought a box of 2mg gum and a nicotine inhaler on the way to work today. The inhaler is so I can get a hit (and I mean a wallop that slow release patches don't provide) of nicotine without smoke and without the unspeakable evil of minty beer should I happen to have a drink this weekend. The gum I started on right away, 14 pieces today. I'm not so concerned about that, it will naturally reduce like it did with the 4mg.

After lunch I started noticing some strange (in the sense of unusual) thought patterns occuring. Thinking about conflict situations. Some that are years in the past. Taking an aggressive tone toward them in my internal dialogue. Why am I thinking about these dead issues in this way now?

Spit out gum. Start new piece of gum. Wait a minute! Start new piece of 2mg gum.

The addiction had cottoned on to the fact it wasn't getting it's full dose and was kicking back. This is a manifestation of the irritability of withdrawl mentioned in the previous post.

I've often seen mentioned that other stresses and anxieties in life should be addressed before removing the crutch of addiction and this illustrates why. Although I imagine that for some types of people the additional stresses could actually help fighting the addiction - "Yeah! Bring it all on!" - this would require a very different strategical approach. I've managed to remove those unnecessary stresses from life that were present a few years ago. These thought patterns rise endogenously. Give me drugs or I make you think about THIS! But life is comfortable. As soon as I recognise it I can laugh it off.

The Natural Mind

Something I read about years ago that I must dig out sometime and re-read (how often I find myself saying that!) was to do with the way drug habits stabilise. Pretty much any drug; smokers are junkies as much as the smackhead or the prescription valium addict ("She goes running for the Shelter \ of her Mother's little helper...").

I'm sure it was in a book called "The Natural Mind" by Dr Andrew Weil. I've not read any of Dr Weil's later books, judging by their covers and his public appearances he cashed-in on the New-Age epidemic in the 80's. But I haven't read them so I can't be sure.

"The Natural Mind" was written in the early 70's (append 'iirc' to all statements made in this post) when as a young post-graduate student he faced opposition to the 'scientific investigation' of altering consciousness, both chemically and naturally. It is a well-balanced treatise on the whys and wherefores , the benefits and the pitfalls, and I would suggest one of the essential pre-requisit readings for anyone wishing to embark on a journey into their own internal states by whatever means.

Drug addiction goes something like this. You start taking a drug. It either mimics a chemical the body produces naturally so the body stops producing that chemical itself (why bother when there's a ready external source available) and / or the body starts producing more 'pleasure receptors' for the drug. Either way, the dosage needs to increase to satisfy the deficit and to accomodate the new receptors until a saturation point is reached. At that level the addiction stabilises... a pack a day, two caps of Hammer, a bottle of scotch, everything is happy.

Coming off a drug, the opposite happens; you reduce the dose, and until the body re-learns how to produce that chemical again, until the extra receptors die off, the body craves with a persistent, gnawing, longing to be dosed up again. The irritability. The sweaty sleeplessness. The purging from all orifices. The DT's. The pain of withdrawl.

I've succeeded in eliminating the habit of smoking from the working week. When I began, this took up to 20 pieces of nicotine gum a day. That has now reduced to 6. Weekends are a combination of cigarettes and gum - beer that is anything but beer flavoured is simply evil. One packet for the weekend, I'll cop to two if you like. It's been that way for 6-8 weeks now (an important part of the game is not to count time too accurately), so the addiction is currently re-stabilised at a lower level.

'Lighter' cigarettes don't work (for me), I just pull out the filter and smoke more of them. Soon it will be time to see if lighter gum (2mg instead of 4mg) does. It's difficult to know how much less (if at all) nicotine I'm ingesting since where you get 4mg of nicotine from 4mg gum, you absorb far less than 16mg from a 16mg cigarette. Interrupting the habituation has gone well. Soon we shall see what impact we've had on the addiction.

New Socks, Please!

Now where were we? I've not had much time for writing about nicotine/dreaming the past couple of weeks while I've been preparing for the imminent test of my other favourite addiction.

Until this week, I've maintained a pack-a-week habit and been (often more than) content to chew gum in the meantime. This week, at the end of a month of working extra-long (12 hour) shifts I find my resilience a little weakened, and enjoyed a few more cigarettes. "Aaargghhh! the whole world tastes like 'freshmint'! Bugger that for a joke!". There are 9 left in this packet, and though I can't quite remember when I bought it, we'll call it two packs this week.

This is a crux situation where 'quitting' fails. If I was quitting cigarettes, this week I've blown it and would say "ah well, that didn't work, back to smoking full time. Obviously the gum doesn't work.".

But I Ain't No Quitter! I'm a smoker now, and always will be. If I smoke a couple of packets in a week, that's because I'm a smoker! But next week, when mind and body are rested and rejuvenated, the gum and it's perpetual-bloody-minty taste won't seem so bad again.

The mint kick satisfies something for me that 'original flavour' and 'fruity' can't touch. Reminds me of an old advert when I was a lad... "Extra Strong Mints, they'll blow your socks off!".

Lucid Dreams: Consciousness

I am awake, I am conscious. I am asleep, I am unconscious.

But that it were so simple. Consciousness is analogue, not digital. Consciousness is a threshold.

Awake, your threshold to consciously process external stimulus is lower, asleep it is higher. But there is always some consciousness for everyone when they sleep. If this is not true, we should form a class-action to sue all alarm-clock manufacturing companies for false advertising.

So what happens when a lucid dream dawns? First the threshold of consiousness lowers. Psychologically you become more aware of both your internal and external state. Physiologically you remain in the same sleep state (well... not quite, we'll look at that another time).

So there is consciousness; that is you, now, sitting there reading your computer screen. A 'normal' dream happens to you, you are the 'I' character within it, and you remember it on waking as a dream. In a lucid dream, you have the same mental faculties as you do now.

But that is not the same as the threshold of control. In the pre-lucid state, you believe you are awake. You rise from bed, go about your morning ablutions, eat breakfast, catch the train to work, then suddenly realise... this is a dream! And find yourself back in bed. This is a 'false awakening', and it can repeat, over and over again, the Groundhog Day torment.

When the full lucid state occurs, the consciousness comes with a threshold of control. You are asleep. You know It. You are dreaming. You know it. Will you have total control over the dreamscape? Sometimes, yes. But it depends (I believe) on what your subconscious is trying to tell you.

I don't like the term 'subconscious', it connotes 'lesser'. I think the non-conscious part of mind (the complement to the conscious part) is both larger and more powerful than the conscious part. Non-conscious is the 'thought', the now, directed by the 'thinker' the part that will determine what we will do next. The conscious is the 'observer', which can program the thinker, and to which the nonconscious will subordinate itself; but how often do we invoke this observer, which will manage the direction of the proactive thinker to produce the reactive thought?