By Daniel Lawton
Here are five very distinct and different types of dreaming that I’ve learned to do, not by talent, but by lots of practice.
I. Stopping an Ordinary Dream
This is the type where you stop the dream, look at your hands, and roam around looking at objects. Carlos clarified this type in class one day by pointing out that looking at objects helps to solidify the landscape. I originally became obsessed with this type of dreaming and spent endless hours roaming around very bored-fuckish. My practice was to look at my hands, then start walking, look at exactly 4 objects, then return to my hands and repeat. I kept this up for as long as the dream lasted, which was usually about 20 seconds. I never deviated.
Doing this I learned a lot about dreaming, and I recommend to beginning dreamers that they try to do this first of all, because it’s important to learn about sobriety in dreaming, or rather the injection of reason into the dream. Reason is what turns an ordinary dream into dreaming, in my opinion. A vivid dream does not constitute dreaming, it might be the result of too much pizza. So using the finding of one’s hands as a goal, with at least a little looking at objects, gives a good criteria and keeps one from considering anything at all to be dreaming and becoming satisfied with the ordinary.
For me, the best way to get this type of dreaming is to sleep for as long as possible, and then go back into an ordinary dream just after I wake up, concentrating on seeing the last object I found, or my hands. The other method, to wake up inside an ordinary dream, is a crap shoot at best. It’s difficult to arrange. Practicing internal silence helps, but in the long run it’s best to learn to use ordinary dreams to get this type of dreaming.
This type of dreaming can be extended by changing dreams. There are endless ways to change a dream. You can kick one of the phantoms nearby, thus starting a ruckus. You can stare at a distant object (by far the most fun method) until it pulls you over to it. You can jump into paintings on the wall, or just walk through the wall. You can spin around. The methods are endless. Don’t think that a dream change means a complete change of scenery. It’s unlikely you will have that great of sobriety, to be able to detect that. It’s best to go by the feel. If the dream rhythm changes, it’s a different dream.
The method of zooming is my favorite because you get to choose, in some measure, the new dream, and you don’t risk a black-out period. Try to avoid flying, flying isolates you from the ground and makes it easier to either lose the dream, or slip back into ordinary dreaming. Zooming wasn’t like flying for me, for several years. Eventually I learned to continue the zooming, then it sometimes degrades into flying, which is something I consider a liability.
After each dream change you will get more dreaming time, this is the way you can learn to extend the dream to last for hours.
It’s also important to learn to fight waking up. If the dream starts to fade, use every measure to go back in. Even drop and grab something. Vision seems to go away before feeling. Even if everything gets black you can still move around feeling things, eventually the visual will return.
Other things you can do in this type of dreaming:
Look for scout objects. Look for things that are inanimate objects, but move. Examples: daggers on the ground that are crawling along. Statues with faces that move. Rocks that give off a strange electric feeling and wont stay focused. Generally speaking, I find that there are objects in dreaming that don’t behave like other objects, and give off a strange feeling. It’s a mixture of fear, creepiness, and electricity. Standing close to these objects insures the dream will continue. This can’t be faked or imagined, it’s difficult to maintain a dream normally, so the existence of anything that makes it easier to sustain the dream is valuable, even if it isn’t what the Nagual originally described to us as scouts. The fact is that there are objects in dreaming that give off energy. Maybe these are the scout objects. I’ve tried staring at them, and they always behave as expected, which doesn’t prove anything. To me, what’s important is the feeling they give off and the fact that they make it possible to stop and examine the current dream location without risk of waking up.
You can also look out for companions in this type of dreaming. You can’t actually look for them, but they’ll probably show up after a lot of dreaming. I have no idea what they are, except that they aren’t like dream phantoms and their presence extends the dream. They don’t extend the dream like scout objects which give off the feeling of electric fear. These companions give off a feeling of affection, and tend to make the dreaming slip back into more ordinary dreaming, unless I fight to stay sober. For me they take the forms of dogs, flat chested slim women, or cats. There are always 3 of them, but only 1 of them is fully interactive. They rarely talk to me, when they do it’s quite an interesting experience because they tend to give out instructions. Don’t try to fuck them.
II. Dreaming a Copy of Your Bedroom
This type of dreaming is induced by silence. It’s a type where you go directly into dreaming from waking, although there may be a black out period. My experiences with this type of dreaming suggest that it isn’t like the first type of dreaming. It’s almost like you are really in a copy of your own bedroom, but in a dreaming realm. The feeling is also different. While the first type of dreaming is pretty relaxed, it’s like roaming around with no particular purpose, this second type of dreaming can be really frightening. Most of the time it takes me a long time to figure out I’m even dreaming. Then, once I figure it out, I find strange presences in the room that produce sheer fright. For instance, moving curtains, noises of someone in the next room, etc.
This type of dreaming is easy to induce if you know how to get silent. My latest procedure is as follows:
Lie down on 2 pillows, with your head propped up enough to see the TV. Select a TV station without commercials, so the volume doesn’t rise and fall. My favorite is a TV preacher on channel 18 from 2:00AM to 6:00AM. His voice is level, monotonous, and runs continuously during those hours in the week. On the weekends, I use channel 28, the classics program where they place music and operas. I turn the volume so low that I have to strain to understand, put the weight on my stomach, and force my internal dialogue off for as long as it takes to either get into dreaming or fall asleep.
Most often I wake up, angry it didn’t work, and start watching the TV, only to find the program is getting really strange. It usually takes me about 10 minutes of watching to convince myself it couldn’t possibly be the same program, I must be dreaming, despite how correct the room looks. Sometimes I even get up and go off to another room in my apartment, even having a snack to eat, before I find something wrong and figure out it’s dreaming.
For me, this type of dreaming is the most disturbing, although I can’t say why. It’s almost like an ordinary dream, except for the moments of pure fright when you aren’t sure whether it’s a dream or not, and something out of place is discovered. This type of dream is very stable, I don’t have to fight at all to keep it going. When I finally figure out it’s a dream, I have the option to simply remain in the dream copy of my room, or turn it into the first type of dreaming by leaving.
For me this type of dreaming ends differently than the first. The first eventually runs out of gas and I wake up. This type of dreaming ends by turning into ordinary dreaming. It’s stability and the realistic copy of my apartment is the defining feature for me, besides the sudden spells of fright.
An odd thing about this type of dreaming is that it has the same “feel” as the type of dreaming where I find myself working out with other Tensegrity practitioners, perhaps even with the Nagual. I used to dismiss that type of dream as being an ordinary but interesting dream, until I learned that dreams have different feels, and that type of dream often feels like the kind I just described.
III. Replacing Someone
This might be related to what Carlos described as cyclic beings. This type of dreaming is also very different than the last 2. I believe it takes a lot of experience with the first type of dreaming to be honest about this type of dreaming. If you try to define this type of dreaming by the dream content, you’ll be mistaken. This type of dreaming is detected by the feel of the dream.
In this type of dreaming, I find myself having assumed someone else’s identity. This isn’t an unusual occurrence in an ordinary dream, it happens all the time. But in this type of dreaming, the difference is that no matter how hard I try to stop the dream and turn it into the first type of dreaming, I don’t succeed. I stop, look at my hands, and proceed to walk off, only to find that the people occupying the dream with me won’t give up. They treat me like I’ve gotten sick or something, take me by the hand, and try to pull me back into going along with the dream. In ordinary dreaming, when I stop the dream the phantoms lose interest. In this type, they keep following me and bugging me.
I’ve learned to go along with it. That’s also shown me another difference with this type of dream. In an ordinary dream that you stop and turn into dreaming, you can also play a dangerous game of going along with the dream. The risk is that you’ll lose sobriety and forget you are dreaming. But in this special type of dreaming, you can easily maintain both the sobriety, and the syntax of the dream. In fact, you can even separate yourself from the dream person and simply observe. Or you can take over and cause trouble. In either case, you know everything you need to know about the environment, even who the people are and what their relationship is to you. But at the same time, you know it’s not “true”.
My favorite activity in this type of dreaming is causing trouble with the dream phantom family. For instance, last night they were feeding me a snack, and I devoured the entire assortment of pastries, plus a whole pot of coffee, boiling hot, commenting “Boy, I sure hope this doesn’t keep me up all night!” I guess it loses it’s humor in the translation, but having had to give up coffee and pastries it’s amusing to find a place where you can consume the whole pot without worrying about the effect.
I theorize that this type of dreaming is switching places with a cyclic being, but that the Nagual exaggerated it a lot, or else I’m not very good at it. Or I’m an idiot and it’s not cyclic dreaming at all. One thing’s for sure, it’s different and it took years of regular dreaming before it happened to me. The first time it happened, the dream went on for 3 hours, without changing context at all. It was quite a shock to me.
IV. Gazing Dreaming
Gazing dreaming comes about by becoming silent, while gazing at something, even the darkness of closed eyes. Your dreaming attention comes on without your body falling asleep. It allows you to watch dreaming scenes, without entering into the dream. You can also learn to superimpose this dream image over real physical objects, and do it with your eyes open.
I learned to do this by lots of time spent on the stick.
It’s also possible to learn to deliberately enter into the dream visions you have, it’s not difficult at all, but it changes the nature of the dreaming into the first type. The techniques that I’ve noticed which help in this regard are ones which involve “playing” with the vision in some abstract manner, so that you gain more degree of participation in the scene. I’ve successfully used “fanning” the scene by rotating my eyes, “tapping” my way into it by moving my fingers up and down (very interesting thing to learn to do because it requires moving), shouting obscenities at figures in the scene or talking to them (requires dropping rationality quite a bit to pull this off), and by focusing attention in a manner similar to changing dreams by staring at a distant object.
Other things you might want to try: Dreaming an exact copy of the room (usually by accident), standing up in that copy, either in your dream body, or in your waking body. You can also dream a scene, then wonder what’s to the left or right of it, and activate a “panning” mode, where you are scanning along, in a dream scene, looking at things. Just focus your eyes to the left or right and if you’re lucky it will move that way.
Another thing to try is object visualization. Do this when you find the scene changing constantly. Think of an object, without talking to yourself, and see if it materializes. If it does, you’ll be on a roll for sure, you can probably see anything you want to see, in great detail. My downfall was women’s crotches in frilly panties.
Most of the time I don’t have a choice on which of the above possibilities I get, it depends on my energy level. Group practice (presumably the mass) makes a huge difference.
V. Abstract Dreaming
This type of dreaming is like the last. It comes from being silent. But when the dream images come, and you have the opportunity to gaze at them, force your internal dialogue off even more and refuse to entertain any thoughts that are not completely abstract. Abstract thoughts are feelings, without any meaning attached to them. The feelings might be as clear as can be, guilt, remorse, happiness, etc. But there isn’t anything concrete associated with them. I guess this results in reverting to the level of feeling, instead of the level of vision, but the vision remains.
This type of dreaming is what I consider to be seeing energy. In this type of dreaming, I’m fully awake, could open my eyes at any time or answer a question if someone asked me, but I’m looking at an absolutely abstract scene. That scene is composed only of light, usually of discernable fibers of light. It has a distinct shape, I intuitively know what it is, and I’m observing undeniable facts about the object. There’s usually an accompanying voice. As an example, I might be looking at a shape that resembles what you would see if you looked at a single celled creature that had been blown up to about 2 feet wide by 1 feet high, and was made entirely out of fibers of light, but with well defined boundaries, perhaps even an encasing membrane.
The scene seems to end either when I’m disturbed by something in the room, or I wear it out, by getting all the facts I’m going to get.. This type of dreaming is often unnoticeable until after it’s happened, then can be remembered in extraordinary detail for about 1minute, fading off completely within a few minutes. In fact, I’d recommend to people that they look for this, memories of periods of time that just happened, which emerge in great detail but without actually having noticed them at the time.
Usually, even if I pay attention and remember the vision, a few days later it’s all but gone and I hardly think about it. This is in contrast to the other types of dreaming that can leave exciting memories for years.
For me this type of dreaming is dominated with images of blobs, made out of fibers, set in a vast space, usually with nothing else in it. But sometimes interpretation sticks to the object, and I get to see the blob of fibers change into the object I knew it was, and in the process get some other undeniable facts, all of which are completely useless once I wake up. Only 3 times I’ve seen a grouping of such objects.
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