Dreaming – Virtual Reality
by pre.
In their FAQ, The Lucidity Institute suggest that lucid dreaming can be used for ‘transcendental’ purposes. They say:
The experience of being in a lucid dream clearly demonstrates the astonishing fact that the world we see is a construct of our minds. This concept, so elusive when sought in waking life, is the cornerstone of spiritual teachings. It forces us to look beyond everyday experience and ask, “If this is not real, what is?”
When dreaming, your consciousness is nevertheless in some sense awake. It is experiencing things. You are conscious of your dream, of your own actions. When the dream is lucid you are even aware of your own consciousness during that time. Yet the things you are conscious of are not the things which are actually happening around you.
Experience without senses
Consider one of this author’s lucid dreams from a few months back.
I wondered around the house some more, impressed by how incredibly *vivid* the dream experience is. How easily I had managed to fire up this virtual world, how the colours and shapes and textures were all just *right* and the pictures were as clear as can be.
In my dream I stroked a hand along the banister and pondered: In the real world, outside the dream-scape, when I meditate, when I day-dream or try to recall the way some object looks, the experience doesn’t have this incredibly vivid, utterly realistic quality which the dream world I’m wondering through now has. I can’t *see* my wakeful visualisation as utterly convincingly as I can currently *see* and *feel* the grain of the wallpaper pasted onto the walls around me.
Experiences like these impress on your mind that, even while waking, you do not see photons. You do not see light-waves or even really patches of colour unless you actually look closely. Instead your consciousness sees objects, constructs from data.
When you are awake, your brain is interpreting the data your sense organs are feeding it, constructing a tale and virtual environment from that data, building a world from it in which you think you live.
These experiences suggest that when you are dreaming, the same thing is happening, but with the sense-data cut off or ignored and either random noise or the echos of the previous day’s data percolating through your mind instead.
When you are awake, you are still living in the dream world, it’s just that the world is now constrained by sense data in a way that the dreaming world isn’t.
Next month, we will talk about this Virtual Reality in which we live, the reality model, how it’s built, how the knowledge that your experience is experience of that model rather than of reality can help you, and hurt you, and how to increase the help while decreasing the hurt.
In the mean time though, this week we present a new meditation.
Introducing the Lucid Dreaming Meditation
Our meditation this month, and indeed all the meditations during the following lap, are designed to be set as an alarm clock to wake you. Set it to go off just over ten minutes before you have to actually wake up. It will be slow and gentle, designed to infiltrate your dreams and remind you that you are dreaming, to bring on lucid dreams.
The meditation will gradually get louder as it goes on, increasing the chances that it will seep into your dream world.
Finally, after around ten minutes, it will end more loudly, with suggestions that you’ll wake up bright and fresh ready to start the day before finishing with a bang.
Remember, if your alarm isn’t interupting your dreams, you should try setting it twenty, or forty, minutes earlier. Experiment to find the best time for it to wake you slowly from your dream.
Download The Meditation:
| Bonus Guided Meditation File! – Dreams Backing Music “Tomorrow Morning” By SBUT |
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