Lap Three – Summing Up
by pre.
We have come to the end of our expended ten month period spent examining dreaming, and trying to learn how to take better control of your slumber. You’ve learned how to become more lucid and so direct your dreaming process. How to use this ability to direct your dreams to push your mind forwards, towards improving your awareness, memory, immune system, body control, reason, influence, language and empathy. This is probably a good time to ponder the obvious question:
How well has it worked?
Perhaps the first question of course is: have you been doing the excercises? If you haven’t, then obviously it won’t have been much help. In that case trying to judge your improvement is likely a waste of time. Instead, perhaps it’s worth going though the last 10 months again, and this time doing it? I’m sure that you will find it easy to simply set your phone to wake you with an MP3 from our site.
Assuming you have been doing the excercises, at least twice a week (that is 8 times per guided lucid dream) you should be in a position to look back and compare your experience, you mindset, to that before you started this lap.
Lucid Dreaming
What proportion of your dreams are now lucid? Do you at least remember more of your dreams? Think back over the last few months to all your memories of your dreams, to all the times you realized that you were dreaming and continued to dream. Are those numbers higher than they were before you started to concentrate on the issue?
Awareness – Reality Modelling
Are you learning to notice the differences between your model of the world, and the world itself? Are you asking yourself more often to check if you’re right? To try and test your theories, look for counter-examples rather than confirmation? Have you begun to learn that the world is Null-A, not black and white. That is is Null-I, no two things are exactly the same. That is it Null-E, that even the space around you isn’t as it appears?
Have you noticed occasions when what you think someone thought wasn’t what they actually thought?
Memory – Recall
Have you been able to dream up forgotten details from your past? Dreamed, ideally intentionally, of old lovers, old friends, dead relatives and long gone environments? The places and people of your youth, even simply forgotten drunken nights?
Immune System
Do you feel fitter, stronger or more healthy than you did before you started to try and train your immune system, your muscles? Has your posture improved, do people tell you that you look more healthy, happier? Do you at least think you understand how your immune system works, have you tried to concentrate on it, to consciously help it?
Body Control
Do you think you have more awareness of how hard your muscles are working? Of whether they are currently resting, or working, or working hard? Have you found yourself thinking of these things more often? Perhaps being more willing to excercise more often? At least, surely, your bedside manner has improved? Are you better able to cheer the sick and miserable?
Reason
Do you have a better understanding of how your ability to reason works? Are you using the extra mental skills you have learned from these excercises? Perhaps you’ve just noticed yourself more able to use pen and paper to aid your thinking, to be more willing to use lists, drawings, diagrams, notes and writing to help you come to a decision? Can you see more clearly how information flows around the world, and is used by your mind to help you think?
Influence
Have your skills at arguing improved? Are you more aware of the mistakes in other’s arguements? Have you noticed how little of people’s opinions are actually changed through argument? And how often they are influenced by a good story, an emotional nudge, by being led through an emotional fairground ride?
Are you more aware of how in synch you are with people who you want to influence? How able you are to follow their moods, and have them follow yours?
Language
How’s your internal monologue coming? Hopefully you’ve started to pay attention to how often it’s positive or negative, and have even started to make it praise you more than chastise you? Has it become more questioning, more searching, been more able to narrow it’s focus to the crux of your thoughts?
What about your linguistic performance when speaking to others? Have you found yourself putting more effort into noticing the words you are using, to picking those which will provoke the desired emotional impact? Are people hanging on your words more, eager to hear what you have to say because of how beautifully you say it?
Empathy
Finally Empathy. Obviously there hasn’t been as much time for this to begin to sink in as the other topics, but ask yourself if you have begun to notice rapport when you have it? Started to be more able to synch yourself with another’s emotions, to spot their moods and to actually feel them. If so, perhaps it won’t be long until you also feel more aware of the source of your emotions. More aware of which of them come from you, and which are just mirrors of your friends, your family, the strangers you talk to.
We hope you’ve judged yourself to be improved on some or all of these mental skills, and to more clearly see a path ahead to improve each of them more, because next month we start on the fourth and final lap around our transcendence spiral. We will begin to integrate each of the skills we’ve improved, to use them holistically, to let each feedback more powerfully into the others, and to shine light upon the path to even more transcendence that you’ve achieved so far.