It’s about 4:30am. I’ve had my cup of coffee and smoke and my brain juices are flowing. I got to thinking about two weird experiences I had...
One was a lucid dream. I “woke up” consciously in my dream. I knew I was dreaming and everything was so real. I was in Russia, Moscow to be specific with my boys, walking to our hotel. I told my oldest I was dreaming and he looked at me like I was crazy. We got to the hotel and my youngest laid down on the couch. I sat at the end, near his feet and touched the coffee table on purpose. It was solid. I remember being so amazed at how real it all was...
The second was I took a small nap. My bed is situated where the head of the bed is against a wall but you can see down the hallway. I woke up, and couldn’t move. I was awake and had a bad feeling. I looked down the hall and I kid you not two fucking aliens are heading my way....one your typical grey and the second was one of those “teddy bear, cloak wearing, Star Wars” type. I remember yelling in my head “get the fuck out of here!” They disappeared and I could move.
Just to be clear, I had heard of sleep paralysis but had never experienced it before. Crazy shit.
I shared these experiences here because some of the people I know in real life would conclude otherwise... and when others share their experiences with me and conclude “Demons, Alien abduction, angel, etc” I tell you - I don’t dismiss their experience (in most cases) just their “conclusion”.
I had a friend who really believed her spirit guide talked to her. She was dating my brother. Over coffee once she told me her spirit guide wanted her to get pregnant with my brothers kid. I fucking almost spit my coffee over the table. I just asked her ... “really? Is your guide going to raise the kid? You know, make money, change diapers - if not - I’d tell it to shut the fuck up”
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Dreams are just a reflection on what is going on in your brain.
When you go to sleep, your brain is performing what would be roughly analagous to a hard drive being defragmented.
Yes. I know. Have you had a lucid dream? I am NOT saying it is in anyway supernatural BUT it was weird. The brain is an awesome thing.
@ Whitefire13
Have you had a lucid dream?"
Most definitely yes. But what intrigues me is what dreams I remember. Often I wake up knowing I had a dream, and a few tidbits on what it was about. Then ten minutes later, a complete blank, with the exception knowing I had a dream. Then there have been dreams that definitely left a strong imprint on my memory, I could recall portions with clarity and they did not quickly fade away.
Yes, the brain is an amazing machine. But that is my perception, that it does no possess any magical properties, it is just a freaking insane computer.
I was one of those who did have a near death experience. I was in a major operation, they lost my vital signs twice and had to revive me. When I woke up from my operation, I distinctly recall what is possibly the most intense and powerful dream I ever had. But everything was logically and rationally explainable, nothing that would sway me towards believing anything spiritual.
@Whitefire13
With some practice you can start taking control of your near waking state dreams.
I also have gotten really good at identifying dreams when I am in this state. Just like in the movie inception, just ask yourself, "how did I get here?"
The hard part is not waking up at that point, (if you want to take control of your dream instead that is.)
I’ve tried to wake in my dream. It’s fucking hard. I practiced looking at my hand in my wake time ... set up other triggers - nothing has worked. Oh well. It happened spontaneously- maybe I’ll have the pleasure of the experience again.
I didn’t experience the old hag BUT fuck it felt real (sleep paralysis).
David ... nope I’m not swayed into believing I was in an alternate reality or that aliens were really coming down my hallway (smiley face). But I am now convinced I am a brain in a jar...
David - give some details. You are the first group I even mentioned this to because i didn’t want to be met with “you’re an alien abductee that doesn’t remember ... go get hypnotized” (eye roll).
The one thing these experiences have in common is the connection to “sleep”. Waking up, surgery... different states of brain activity??? Or hiccups in the brain firing.
@ Whitefire13
"David - give some details."
Before I had to go to the hospital for my procedure that turned into three weeks of pure hell, I was heavily researching battleship construction and the history of some ships, notably the Bismarck. I was even in the middle of assembling a lovely plastic model of the Bismarck.
The initial operation within my abdomen went sideways, my intestines were leaking and I quickly developed peritonitis. It took about three days to establish this fact, but my white blood count was at a lethal level. As they wheeled me into the operating room for emergency surgery (late Friday evening), I recall saying to myself "well, if I wake up, that would be nice. If not, I won't know anyways". I did not plead to any god.
When I came out of surgery I recalled an incredibly powerful and intense dream, where I was a crew member of the Bismarck, and was deep inside the ship, specifically the tiller flats.
RE: "I had heard of sleep paralysis but had never experienced it before. Crazy shit."
Well you have experienced in now. Sounds like a classic example. Yes, you can convince yourself of anything in this state. If you can learn to just notice it and not react to it, you can extend the time of the experience.
The bullshit that is out there on OBEs are a prime example of imaginations gone wild. Yes, people believe all sorts of weird shit.
I didn’t like the sleep paralysis...and I have no idea why I’d see “aliens”. My guess is the fear that grips you (first) and I think it’s because you are awake but your body isn’t moving or responding. I loved Star Trek growing up and the internet is ripe with woo (mind candy). I remember thinking afterwards wtf when I realized it was the fucking teddy bear cloaked bugger off of Star Wars. Like the lucid dream I haven’t experienced another.
I know there have been experiments that can create these states...a documentary I saw once had the subject strapped in a spinny machine - spun that sucker around till he was having “otherworldly presences” etc
Well, if you did not like sleep paralysis. you would hate what follows it. Most people feel a dropping sensation that can be described as riding a motorcycle in the wind at 100 mph. Your clothing vibrates against your body and there is a roaring sound in your ears akin to standing next to a passing train.
...so COG...I wanted to ask...in this state where it’s like your minds “dream image” is imprinted onto reality - if I could get into this state again, you think I have Colin Farrell walk down the hall and crawl on me...you know while I’m all paralyzed and stuff...hmmm
YES. It's a Lucid Dream State. With practice you can learn to control it, so I have read. Lucid dreaming is different than OBE but I imagine they are very similar. I have never practiced lucid dreaming but I can sure think of a few dreams that were so real that I have remembered them for over 40 years. Some of these involve places that I revisit on occasion. The brain can do some really weird shit when you start letting it play.
"Have you had a lucid dream?"
Oh indeedly doodly yes. Many dreams over the years have seemed utterly real and have been remembered for a couple of days before fading away. I can't ever remember having experienced scents or odours in a dream. Crucial to me, because smells are often very evocative for me, far more than music..
In days long passed I put dreams into three categories . (1) Housekeeping; all sorts of nonsense jumbled together , which I saw as the brain getting rid of the day's detritus. (2) Prophetic; quite rare dreams about the future. Can't remember any coming true. (3),
"Wish fulfilment" which I still have from time-to -time. Such dreams always feature a much younger self, set in ideal times, where I am with a girlfriend of 50 years ago or perhaps my ex wife. These dreams can be heartbreaking, and I sometimes I wake in tears.
These days I have very strange dreams, apparently caused by the medication I take. I am always looking for something thing, which I do not have in real life, or which does not exist. I often wake and continue looking, taking a few moments to return to reality.These can be a bit scary because of the loss of control. Not the kind of thing one tells anyone in authority .
My common dreams involve homes. Kitchens bedrooms buying selling - moving. My stress dreams usually are I’ll realize I’m around JWs who think I’m one of them - they’ve forgotten I’m disfellowshipped and I’m looking for a place to go have a smoke (a big giveaway if my dreamfolk saw me).
There are a lot of things I wouldn’t mention to anyone in authority...
I love my flying dreams.
The content of a dream is not as important as the emotional connections being made. What you dream about is less important than your emotional attachment to what you are dreaming about. The best evidence suggests stress is released during our dream states.
@Hypnagogia is the experience of the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep in humans: the hypnagogic state of consciousness, during the onset of sleep. Mental phenomena that occur during this “threshold consciousness” phase include lucid thought, lucid dreaming, hallucinations, and sleep paralysis.
Just FYI
https://nopanic.org.uk/hypnagogia/
David...sorry to hear about your intestinal problem. I have crohns and also once went through what you described when I perforated and didn’t know... almost died too
When you said ...” I recall saying to myself "well, if I wake up, that would be nice. If not, I won't know anyways". I did not plead to any god.”
Ditto. Absent the NDE.
Uhummm, clears throat... I loved the morphine pump afterwards.
Back when I was much younger (late teens) I was intrigued by lucid dreams and decided that I had to find how you fall to sleep. I thought that you would go on dreaming about whatever was the last thing you were thinking about when still awaken. Somehow, I managed to split my awareness and keep a part of me watching me falling sleep (crazy, I know) I found that the moment you fall asleep felt like vertigo, la going spiraling down a drain. Then I trained myself to keep my thoughts on whatever I wanted to dream on up to that point (not very easy because my mind tended to wander way into any other associations). After several trials, I was able to choose with good certainty what to dream about and in many cases go into a lucid dream. These ones were the best because they were absolutely realistic but you could do whatever you wanted; breathe underwater, fly... Nowadays I cannot do it as well as before and I do not have lucid dreams frequently though once in a long while I have quite realistic nightmares and I wake up screaming.
My late wife in an attempt to give up smoking took to nicotine patches.
True to her rebellious and sometime lazy nature she wore them to bed. And had the weirdest dreams.
The weirdest involved debating Einstein, Freud and Jung (her heroes), in an Edwardian drawing room. All remarkably detailed. She could taste the liquor they were drinking and the smell of the cigars, the upholstery of the sumptuous armchairs.
The call of nature woke her up and she admitted later that she was a little relieved for the interruption as the debate was getting rather intense and not going her way at all, "the buggers were ganging up on me" she complained.
So, nature satisfied, back to bed and fall asleep, where she dreamed re-entering the same room with the same sensations and Einstein, Freud and Jung all standing for her on her entry as gentlemen of that age would do, and Jung saying, "Oh good you are back. Albert and I wanted to go back over the last statement you made about reincarnation before you left...."
She went back to smoking and dreaming about Dirk Bogarde.
@ All
When I was in my 20's I practised lucid or "dream direction". Not something you talked about in general society, or you ran the risk of being labelled a "kook" or "hippy"....I was introduced to the techniques by a genuine "kook" Long flowing hair, incense, dream catchers the whole shemozzle...but it worked. I took control of my recurring nightmares and directed them (nearly every time) to satisfactory and happy endings. Resistance from "my other brain" as I called it was stiff at first, then more subtle and finally it gave up entirely and I have not had a nightmare of that nature since.
Later when my writing career was at full pace, I , when blocked, or working out a scene would set that problem "in my head" before lying down to sleep. Without exception I either dreamed the whole scene/plot and got up to write it down or, when I sat down at my keyboard the next day the dialogue/action flowed like warm honey from a spoon. Like many writers my characters "spoke to me" and all I did was write down their voices.
Now I enjoy sleeping and not knowing what the blue fuck my twisted brain is going to present for my nightly film show/1st person drama....my wife tells me I now sleep talk constantly..which annoys the crap out of her. I still use my triggers to avoid nightmares but they are infrequent or unremembered.
@ Old Man, I might have met the same kook in my twenties. I don't recall why but I too started controlling or directing my dreams and to this day I never have nightmares. My late wife would wake me up in the middle of the night complaining I was laughing in my sleep and disturbed her dreams of Dirk Bogarde. I was guilty as charged. I had been dreaming about the Marx brothers having dinner with us. Can't recall exactly what it was I was laughing at but they were funnier than having Abbott and Costello over for lunch.
Further to the dreams I also read somewhere that instead of straining for solutions to problems it was more productive to identify the problem and all the attendant details in my mind without formulating a solution. Just measuring up the problem and then to forget about it entirely for a day, just sleep on it and let the subconscious deal with it. Sometimes hard when you have a deadline or the need for a solution was desperate. But as you say, like warm honey from a spoon, hours later, the ideas flow freely and with surprising previously unconsidered resolutions. And it worked for writing, drawing and problem solving.
I still sleep soundly and I occasionally still laugh out loud. My partner accepts it as part of her assessment that I am partly and harmlessly insane, but she's never experienced the Three Stooges for breakfast.
@ Grinseed
My best dream ever was being part of the Goon Show and screwing up all the sound effects ...Live radio in those days was live and the SFX guys and gals did footsteps and water and everything live.
The dream kept me laughing for days.....eventually we put it on as a stage show where we had actors performing a " radio" Goon show script on a split stage with audience volunteers trying to keep up with the SFX....fekking brilliant! Hilarity ensued. The clean up was the worst bit.
That show ran for 8 weeks, 4 nights a week and twice on Sundays until the theatre wanted us out for the next show and was redone a couple of years later. We were asked to revive it again but audience involvement with that show ...we could not get insurance at a reasonable price, But a helluva memory!
Old man shouts... my one boy, now 17 is a writer. I say that because you said something he tells me ... “Like many writers my characters "spoke to me" and all I did was write down their voices.” He says he just writes their stories. Cool with the nightmare redirection.
Oh fuck, Grinseed...that’s a great story of your late wife. I love how at the end it was the topic of reincarnation! Lol. And they were ganging up on her.