Lucid Dreaming & Consciousness

Posted on June 24, 2016 by marcia

Lucid Dreaming as a Gateway to Spiritual Awakening

24th June 2016

Allow me to draw your attention to an apparently surprising thing. If I told you that now, when you are reading these lines, you are in fact asleep, you would certainly believe that I have gone mad.

You are awake, you are concentrating your attention to reading, and you are aware of your environment as well. You can see the furniture of your room, you can hear the call of the birds from the nearby forest. You are also aware of your thoughts and emotions. How can anyone claim that you are asleep at this very moment?

Naturally, you – just like everyone else – sleeps at night. Yes, sometimes you see dreams while you sleep, but right now it is daytime, you are awake. So how could you see dreams?

You Imagine a Whole World Around Yourself

I believe that you do not only sleep at night, but also during the daytime. I believe that in your present state of consciousness, your greatest illusion is that you think you are awake. I believe that in your present existence, your greatest illusion is when you think that you are alert. What I see is that in your present state of consciousness you are asleep, and at present you are dreaming, and what you see and hear are all parts of your dream.

Your nighttime sleep is only different from your daytime sleep in that in the night your dreams are less active. During the day, you imagine a whole world around you, and you play an active role in that dream. Your personal history takes place in that world, and identifying with that world shapes your personal identity.

At present, you are dreaming that as a part of your personal history you are reading these lines while identifying with the role of the spiritual seeker, and you are outraged by what you are actually reading.

The question may arise, ‘Why do I claim that you are asleep and dreaming now?’. Well, from the state of consciousness I call Alertness, I can see that mostly, you are asleep, you believe yourself to be a separate self, you are a captive of the works of your mind.

You Are Not Present

What is the evidence for me to say that you are now asleep and, as a citizen of a dreamland, you are dreaming that you are awake?

It is because you are not present. To be present means that you are fully alert, attentive, and conscious in the present moment. Whatever you do, you do that fully consciously, you focus your entire attention on that particular activity.

Do you feel free to declare that you are present in every moment of your life?

What does it mean to be awake? It has happened to all of us that we have come under the spell of a moment, at some time during our life. A beautiful landscape, a sunset, a beautiful piece of art, the rhythm of music enchanted us. It may even happen that we are just lost in the silence of a peaceful moment. The identification with the forms and shapes loosens a little bit for a short while, and in that instant, we may experience an entirely different state of Consciousness.

You Live in a Separate World

How deep you sleep may depend on how realistic you find your dreams, how much you identify with your identity embedded in your personal history. The less alert you are, and the deeper you submerge into your dreams, the more isolated, solitary and individualistic you will become.

Every sleeper –including you– has a separate world, only those who exist in the state of Conscious Alertness (the true Lucid Dreaming) have a common, shared reality. All those different and separate worlds are created by the mind, which generates the state of separateness: the Ego, which appears as the focus of our identification with our thoughts and emotions. Thus everybody has a separate identity, personal history, individual world view and methods of action.

Sometimes suffering alarms you from your sleep, but then you hasten to return to it, and start a new dream, a new objective in life, new ideals, passion, ambition that confirms your connection with your identity, rooted in your personal history.

The Reasons of Your Sleep

The reason of you sleeping is that you are not alert, only awake. Only one dimension of Alertness is present in you. Although you are able to focus your attention on your internal emotions and your environment, in your present state of Consciousness you are still powerfully identified with your mind and its functions.

You are therefore drifting on the stormy ocean of your thoughts and emotions day by day, and the space necessary for the emergence of a contemplating Witness is missing from you. You still identify with your thoughts and emotions. These generate the dreams of the Mind, in which you live as a separate self, and try to find the ways of safely navigating your life on the stormy sea.

Longing for Freedom

In this separate state of Consciousness, the lack of Alertness may appear as a desire for freedom. This desire emerges from your real self, as your mind remembers its origins. This atavistic memory of the ancient past is the quiet attraction that will eventually take you back to Silence.

This deep desire will only cease if you become alert again, that is, you will not be awake but also alert. Then the Consciousness awakens to its own existence in the human form you at present call yourself.

Only giving up the struggle with the thoughts and emotions and the recognition of the futility of insisting on them will bring you the real freedom, The freedom of independence of the functions of the mind.

Alertness, the awakened Consciousness, the world of internal silence are all beyond the functions of the mind. If you wish to reach beyond the identification with your thoughts and emotions, if you recognize the functions of the mind and the intensity of your identification with them loosens, you may become alert again, in the quiet, pure space of Consciousness.

In this way, the third dimension of Alertness, that is, the contemplating Consciousness, appears in your life. This the original state of our existence, the pure Consciousness, the state of the witnessing Presence.

This article was excerpted from the new book by Frank M. Wanderer, Ego – Alertness – Consciousness: The Path to Your Spiritual Home.

from: http://wakeup-world.com/2016/06/24/lucid-dreaming-as-a-gate-to-spiritual-awakening/

On Lucid Dreaming

Posted on December 19, 2014 by marcia

Lucid Dreaming: The Basics

Charlie Morley

The following is excerpted from Lucid Dreaming: A Beginners Guide To Becoming Conscious In Your Dreams, to be published by Hay House Basics in February, 2015.

“What is lucid dreaming?”

Lucid dreaming is the art of becoming conscious within your dreams. A lucid dream is one in which you realize, ‘Aha! I’m dreaming!’ while you’re still asleep. Once you become conscious within a dream, you can interact with and direct it at will, partner-dancing with your unconscious mind.

It allows you conscious access to the deepest depths of your mind, and the opportunity to guide your dreams at will. In a lucid dream you’ve not woken up – in fact, you’re still sound asleep – but part of the brain has reactivated (the right dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex, in case you’re wondering), allowing you to experience the dream state consciously with self-reflective awareness. Once you know that you’re dreaming as you’re dreaming, you gain access to the most powerful virtual reality generator in existence: the mind.

For me, one of the most revolutionary aspects of lucid dreaming is that it makes sleep fun! It completely reconfigures our relationship with the third of our lives that we spend asleep. Suddenly, sleep is not just ‘wasted time’, as some people see it, but rather a potential training ground for psycho-spiritual growth and a laboratory of internal exploration that makes us more lucidly aware in our waking lives too.

In fact, the term ‘lucid dreaming’ is a bit of a misnomer – it should really be ‘conscious dreaming’, because it’s the aspect of conscious awareness that defines the experience, rather than its lucid clarity, but for now we’ll stick with it.

However, given that there’s so much misunderstanding around what lucid dreaming actually is, it’s worth taking a moment to look at what lucid dreaming is not…

It’s not a half-awake/half-asleep state. In a lucid dream you’re in REM (rapid eye movement) dreaming sleep and out for the count, but part of your brain has become reactivated while you’re dreaming, allowing you to experience the dream consciously.

It’s not just a very vivid dream. Although lucid dreams are often super-vivid, high-definition experiences.

It’s not an out-of-body experience (sometimes called astral projection). This point is still being debated by many lucid dreaming practitioners, but as I see it, a lucid dream is happening primarily within our own personal mindstream, whereas in an out-of-body experience we’ve moved beyond these boundaries.

Lucid dreaming is a dream in which you know you’re dreaming as you’re dreaming. I’m glad we’ve cleared that up!

“So why would we want to dream lucidity?”

So many psychological problems have their source in the fact that we don’t know ourselves. We don’t know our minds; we’re unmindful and unaware. Through lucid dreaming we get to truly know ourselves, and to become more mindfully aware in all states of day and night.

Our unconscious minds hold a wealth of wisdom – about both ourselves and the world around us. This treasure trove is rarely accessed in the waking state but once we become lucid we gain access to a library of insight that resides in our dreaming mind. Through lucid dreaming we become conscious within the unconscious. This opens up the possibility of directly communicating with our own divine potential, and witnessing just how limitless we actually are.

“What are the actual benefits of lucid dreaming?”

There are so many benefits to lucid dreaming but in a nutshell, once you become conscious within your unconscious mind you can (much like through hypnotherapy) make lasting changes to your body and mind while you sleep.

A few of my favorite benefits of lucid dreaming are:

Psychological healing (phobias, trauma, confidence)

Physical healing

Spiritual practice while you sleep

Exploration of the unconscious mind

Treatment of PSTD and nightmare integration

Increasing and tapping into creativity

Preparation for death and dying

Enhanced learning and access to past memory

Lucid living and waking up to your full potential

Having fun (it’s the most fun you can have in your pyjamas!)

“Sounds great, but how do I actually do it?

Now comes the fun part! You can actually train yourself to have lucid dreams. It takes some effort but here are a few tips to get started with

The first step is start remembering your dreams,

Step two is to write them down as a way to learn and familiarise yourself with their content.

And step 3 is to start spotting patterns. Once you notice that “Oh look, I often dream of being back at school” you can set a trigger in your mind telling yourself “the next time I’m back at school, I know I’m dreaming!” Then the next time your dream of being back at school you’ll think “Hey! I must be dreaming!”

Those are just a few tips to get you started but if you really want to learn check out my new book which will teach you how: Lucid Dreaming: A Beginners Guide To Becoming Conscious In Your Dreams out Feb 2015 and available for pre-order now!

from: http://realitysandwich.com/236292/lucid-dreaming-the-basics/

Lucid Dreaming and Consciousness

Posted on July 27, 2012 by marcia

Lucid Dreamers Offer Clues to Consciousness

Megan Gannon, News Editor

Date: 27 July 2012

Man in bed dreaming
CREDIT: Phase4Photography | Shutterstock

Lucid dreamers, people who can deliberately control their dreams during sleep, have long fascinated scientists. And now brain scans of those self-aware sleepers could offer insight into the seat of self-reflection in the mind.

It is difficult to get a full picture of what goes on in the brain when we make the transition from sleep to wakefulness. In fact, the specific areas of the brain underlying our restored self-perception and consciousness when we wake up have eluded scientists, according to a statement by the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. But a team of researchers was able to get a picture of that isolated activity in lucid dreamers.

“In a normal dream, we have a very basal consciousness, we experience perceptions and emotions but we are not aware that we are only dreaming,” study researcher Martin Dresler, of Max Planck, said in a statement. “It’s only in a lucid dream that the dreamer gets a meta-insight into his or her state.”

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans, the team compared the activity of the brain during one of these lucid-dreaming periods with the activity just beforehand in a normal dream. Out of four participants, only two lucid-dreaming episodes could be verified as lucid dreams and were long enough to analyze with fMRI, which measures blood flow to brain regions in real time; an increase in blood flow to a specific region is a sign that region is becoming more active.

The results, detailed online July 1 in the journal Sleep, showed that a specific cortical network is activated when lucid consciousness is attained. Michael Czisch, another Max Planck researcher involved in the study, said activity in certain areas of the cerebral cortex spikes within seconds when a lucid state begins.

These regions include the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which has previously been associated with self-assessment, and the frontopolar regions, where the act of evaluating our own thoughts and feelings takes place, Czisch explained in a statement. “The precuneus is also especially active, a part of the brain that has long been linked with self-perception,” he said.

Previous research at the Max Planck Institute compared the brain activity of lucid dreamers as they entertained the same thoughts while awake and asleep. The brain activity was similar, if weaker during sleep, the researchers found.

from: http://www.livescience.com/21904-lucid-dreamers-offer-clues-to-consciousness.html

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