In the first lesson we learnt about the three meditations necessary in order to prepare one mentally for entering the dreaming domain. These meditations focused on negating thought, stilling the mind, and the categorisation of thought upon the reception of higher order information that may come through during a lucid dreaming session. This next lesson will build upon those meditations and deal with some strange concepts but it is necessary for the student to grasp as solid an understanding as possible of them.
Consider this like reading a map before going on a journey. If you don’t read the map before hand, you are likely to become lost along the way. But just like you can never really comprehend the totality of terrain layout on the map, you can never really comprehend the terrain of the lucid world, despite how much preparation you put into it. You can prepare for your journey all you want, but you will never know when that tyre is suddenly going to catch a flat. Would you rather have had the forethought to include a wrench or find yourself stuck up shit creek without a paddle? It could go smoothly, or it could go badly depending on how much practicing of the three meditations you have undertaken.
So, by now, you should be getting good with your visualisation practices. You should be able to go into your mind and get “lost” in the movie you find yourself playing of the oranges and bananas. You should be able to “daydream” this movie out for a good few seconds and have perfect definition of it in your mind’s eye. And you should be able to have this amount of clarity with whatever scenario you wish. If not, then keep practicing.
Now, consciousness follows a fairly standard pathway as it enters the dreaming state. This pathway, according to my experiences, is generally as follows:
1. The body shuts down and goes into a stasis state 2. Consciousness “inverts” and travels back in towards the pineal gland 3. The frequency of one’s consciousness reduces by about an octave (1 half), as it undergoes the transition into the sleeping state and completely disengages form the physical body. 4. One now exists as a pure conscious thought form; perception switches from 3D based physical objects to 4D based energy signatures and images. You literally “see” what is in your sub consciousness. 5. Images stored within the subconsciousness are “attached” to consciousness and a new holographic 3.5D environment forms around it 6. The dream ends. Physical reality is overlaid on top of the holographic dream at a rate of around 0.5Hz, until consciousness locks back into the body, in which physical reality solidifies.
Most Lucid dreaming techniques – well those I have come across, anyway – are geared toward becoming consciously aware during the dream state after sub conscious imagery has already had some say in how the dream will be formed. This is known as Dream Induced Lucid Dreaming (DILD), and is considered the best method for beginners to practice lucid dreaming. With the DILD method, you are unconscious until number 5, where you regain limited control of the dream upon becoming lucid. As the subconscious distortions have been the dominant means for the holographic dream environment to materialise by, this environment will become “anchored” in and quite hard to change through visualisation. You can usually only change certain things within the environment, but never the environment itself.
My goal, however, is to keep you conscious through the whole transition period into the void space so you can “clear” out these sub conscious distortions and replace them with your own visualisations. This is more along the lines of what is known as Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming (WILD). This is recommended for those who are more skilled at LD, as it takes a degree of dedication to be able to carry out a WILD session effectively. Though I have come across many speaking of this method of inducing lucid dreams, I am yet to come across anyone talking on the importance of regaining control of the void space and clearing out the distractions present within it to create a stable dreamscape. Thus one may consider my techniques an extremely advanced version of the WILD technique. There is a degree of mental discipline that must first be reached before one can expect results. We will build upon these concepts in later lessons.
Given this mud map of what we can expect consciousness to do, we can break it further down into the phases it passes through as it makes its way into the dream state. In doing this we can start to gain an idea of what to expect so we can better prepare ourselves as we move through each phase. One should be aware though, that these phases vary quite significantly from one to another, and there will be some adjustment of comfortability as one progresses through each one.
This is where I tell you to hold on to your hats, because the things experienced in this domain are unlike anything you will ever experience in waking reality. Also, it should be born in mind that astral projection can be achieved from more than one of these phases, though the success of the projection will also vary depending on which phase. The phases, in order one can expect to experience them , are:
Relaxation Level 3/ Theta State Sleep Paralysis/ Hypnagogic Phase Consciousness Inversion/ Transition Phase Detachment phase Void space phase Dream creation Phase Non physical travel phase (if desired) Auric projection (extremely advanced practice, aided by non physical entities when one is ready; this is where your 4D lucid train ride terminates in 5D reality)
When you close your eyes at bed time you have two potential pathways you can take into never never land. You can either succumb to fatigue and go through the phases unconsciously, in which case your best bet would be a DILD, or you can remain conscious and enter into either Theta State, Sleep Paralysis or straight into the Void Space. Astral projection can take place in all three of these phases, though I have found personally that it is best achieved whilst in Theta State.
Theta State and Astral Projection:
Theta state is not always necessary for lucid dreaming. You can actually bypass it all together quite easily and still have a WILD. If astral projection is a goal, however, then entering Theta state is probably the best place to initiate such and OBE. When working with the Monroe Institute’s techniques for inducing Astral Projection, they mention that one must first enter this state of what they call level 3 relaxation.
So what is it? I want you to think of diving into the comfiest bed you have ever been in. You’ve got fluffy pillows all around you, a big brand new duck down doona covering you and best of all it is a King Size bed that you’ve got all to yourself. You can lie here naked completely by yourself and just spread out as much as you want without an annoying spouse taking up half of your chilling room. Or even worse – kids. Imagine just being absorbed into the bed and its linen. That feeling of pure bliss that makes you feel all warm inside just knowing you are going to get a good nights sleep. Well, that is relaxation level 2. To get to relaxation level 3, you need to go deeper than that.
How do you do this if you are completely relaxed? Well, you aren’t really as relaxed as you think you are. All the muscles you are lying on currently hold some amount of tension in them as they hold your body up. When you get comfy you don’t really notice this tension, but it is there, I guarantee you. To get to Theta State, you have to relieve this tension, but at the same time keep yourself awake whilst doing so. The trick is to take slow, deep breaths and “feel” that tension leave you on your long exhales. Personally for me it takes about half an hour to an hour to properly get into this state, sometimes even longer. Sometimes I will enter this state briefly then go straight into sleep paralysis or the void space without even getting a chance to astral project. It all depends on your fatigue levels.
Once you get to this state, your body will begin to feel light. There might be a high pitched tinnitus like sound in your head. For me it sounds like when you open a soda bottle and hold your ear right up to it and can hear all those small bubbles popping and “grinding” together. If you want to properly astral project, you have to focus on this sound and nothing else. You cannot allow your mind to get distracted following the wandering thoughts that will appear; these will carry you into an unconscious sleep state. They will appear as strong thoughts which catch your attention and then quickly diminish into incoherent unconsciousness as the trail of thought becomes harder to remember. Again slow, deep breathing helps. You focus on the sound and try to “listen” to your breaths whenever your mind starts wandering.
Your fingers act like antennas that can pick up subtle energies around you. Try to listen to them if you can. Try and pull these energies from the atmosphere and push them from your head to your toes and back again. There is also the possibility of seeing pulsating waves of energy through your vision, or of feeling a vast space out in front of you. I have had a lot of moments where it feels like gravity is distorting around me, like I am spinning on a giant wheel and the centrifugal force pinning to me to the bed keeps changing directions. Personally I have found it too be quite therapeutic just lying in it and taking it in. These may lead to some excited emotions, but it is important to keep that excitement at bay, or it will ruin the projection.
If all goes well the soda bubble noise should get more and more intense until you feel something happen. This something is hard to describe but it is a very prominent feeling that you are “coming” out of your body. The process can be aided by visualising standing at the end of your bed or rolling out of your body, but personally I have found it easier to just keep focusing on the soda bubble noise. Eventually you should hear a loud pop and your astral body will just float out of the physical.
The experience will be surreal. It will be extraordinary, and exhilarating, and it will feel absolutely definitely 100% real – until you wake up, in which it will feel like it was just a dream. But there will be time to take it all in later. The first thing that one should worry about is putting some distance between their astral body and their physical one. The reason is that the physical body acts like a magnet and will snap the astral body back into it if it stays too close for too long. Aim for a couple of rooms distance, and remember that just thinking of a place will take you to it; to get back to the physical body one just thinks about it and they automatically appear back there. Surprisingly, navigation seems to come quite naturally and easily during astral projection. Well, it did for me anyway.
Now that we have got astral projection out of the way, we can get into effective Lucid Dreaming concepts and practices, where navigation is much, much more difficult to control. In future articles we will go into techniques I use to control the dreamscape, but for now let’s start with your awareness of the physical plane:
Projection of Consciousness During the Transition.
Your consciousness projects out from your eyes in a sort of hemispherical fashion until it hits the horizon. This is the only way you can consciously perceive anything whilst you are awake. Thus this projection is uni directional; it cannot go any other way (not with your eyes open any way). What happens is that you project your consciousness out through the eyes and then the light entering into your eyes from the boundaries of this projection your brain picks up and processes as reality. My experiences suggest that consciousness projection during astral projection follows a similar pathway; out in front of you to an object separated by “astral space”. You perceive the non physical environment around you like you perceive the physical world whilst you are awake.
Conscious perception in the dream state, however, is completely different to conscious perception in both the physical and astral planes. It is omni directional; it has more than one way to go than just out the eyes towards a horizon. It can go both inwardly and outwardly, but for arguments sake we will say it can both contract and expand. When you are awake, and consciously observing something, your consciousness is effectively “locked” into a state of infinite, inward projection/ contraction and is never allowed a chance to expand. It is like squeezing a stress ball then freezing it so the fibres never have a chance to return back to their spherical state. They remain locked to the curvature impression of your fingers. Consciousness is not really going “outward” – sure its going out of the eyes – but more so “inward” to a more dense state. This is a confusing concept and may seem counterintuitive, so I suggest meditating on it to get your head around it. Think of it like the science experiment where you suck all the air out of a soda can and the tin crinkles into a ball. You just don’t realise this because of the block put in place by your physical brain.
When you enter the sleep state, your consciousness expands back “outwardly” to its original, spherical state. It inverts and goes back through the eyes in towards the pineal gland; you can actually feel this during a conscious transition into the sleeping state. You can feel the moment consciousness stops trying to condense and changes direction to expansion. It is a fucking incredible experience and better than any sex or drug that you will ever come across.
Consciousness can therefore be thought of as a sphere that has two extremes of possibility; maximum compression and maximum expansion. If we consider the edges of the universe to be maximum expansion, and an atom to be maximum compression, this becomes our 4th dimensional range of travel potential for our consciousness when disconnected from our body. It is a bit more complicated than that, but for now this concept will do. What happens during the transition into the sleep state is that your consciousness “inverts” right at the transition point. It goes from a locked inward projection to a moving outward projection. This is important to learn because it becomes the fundamental aspect behind how you travel in and out of different planes of different densities.
From what I have experienced, physical universes are sort of “stacked” inside one another separated by a 4th dimensional distance of consciousness “space”. Picture the atom existing in the middle of an entire universe; the atom is solid, yet it exists in a sphere of empty space. If you expand your consciousness outwardly to the edges of that space, you become yet another atom existing in yet another vast, spherical space and on ad infinitum.
This is what is meant by “as above, as below”, or “micro and macrocosm”. Consciousness is mercurial in the sense that it can slip through this 4th dimensional space between physical and non physical worlds like water through a crack simply by compressing and expanding. No matter which way you go, you eventually arrive back at the same point, just like if you head in one direction on the earth. To properly master lucid dreaming, you have to learn to become “slippery” when the time calls for it, and “solid” when it doesn’t. Astral travel is thus simply just your consciousness slipping back into the plane of your astral body. It is merely a station along the many that can be taken by the train that is lucid dreaming.
Lucid dreaming is therefore a completely different thing and should not be confused with astral projection. It is an existence of pure consciousness detached from any type of body, but it allows the potential to “jump” into those bodies like you are putting on a suit. It allows the potential of astral projection as well as many other things. Visualisation allows one to choose the suit they wish to put on. The void space is akin to your wardrobe space, and each plane of “reality” is like a suit hanging up within that wardrobe. Most people believe this physical reality is the only suit they can wear. They never get the option of choice.
However if you learn how to control the mercurial state of consciousness whilst in the void space – ie, solidify yourself as you slide through the 4D consciousness space – you can wear whichever suit you damn well please. Well, within reason. It is entirely possible to move out of the physical body, slip into another physical/nonphysical one and live out that experience just like you would in this physical world, before slipping out of it and back into your physical body. I have done this many times before, often times for weeks on end in the span of single earth nights. Some of these other worlds I have visited have also been corroborated by other lucid dreamers. This poses the question of what these bodies are really doing when you are in them utilising an unconscious state of awareness. So where do we draw the line when it comes to reality if you can be aware of all these places but not actively engaged in them?
Therefore, there is a degree of “psychological hardening” one must come into before undertaking these sorts of journeys. You have to be able to adapt to the many different environments you may find yourself in. And boy there are many, with many weird, indescribable things going on. My advice is that you always remember to focus on the ”absolute now” and not try and dwell too much on other places. By all means record them and think of them objectively, but try not to get too hung up on what is going on “over there”. If you think our world is depressing and hard to deal with, there are many that are much worse in the non physical planes. You need to learn to cope with what you experience without dwelling on it, or it’ll drive you insane.
But none of this can be consciously witnessed if one does not first learn to control their void space. And to control the void space one must enter into it through a conscious transition into the dream state – ie a WILD. This can be done in one of two ways; by direct access, or via Sleep Paralysis. Sleep Paralysis seems to be the easiest way to get into the void space. Unfortunately, it is also the most unpleasant.
The Sleep Paralysis Phase:
Let’s pick up where we left off from in the first lesson in regards to lying still where the arms and legs start to become numb. I mentioned this is the stage immediately preceding sleep paralysis. If you continue through this numbness without moving or initiating an OBE, eventually your whole body will become completely paralysed and you will not be able to move. What this feels like is that gravity has been turned up by about a few billion and you just can’t move anything no matter how hard you try. Except for the eyes. You might notice they move too easily about and that it takes some effort to get them to stay in a particular place.
Contrary to most belief, you can actually be completely aware of your surroundings as if you were completely awake when in Sleep Paralysis. I have had many instances where I have woken up, looked around and thought I was good enough to get out of bed, only to accidentally pull my astral body out due to me still being in sleep paralysis. This is the key to astral projection whilst in this state; you have to try and roll or pull yourself out, but the paralysis makes it extremely difficult to do. Awareness of one’s surroundings is, therefore, not a good indicator of whether or not one is in SP. It should also be understood that there is a very fine, and often times blurry, line regarding when one actually enters Sleep Paralysis. Often that blur can cross over from the Theta State; one minute you are relaxed and the next something very strange seems to be going on. Generally, Sleep Paralysis induced in the morning after a night full of sleep will be easier to deal with than one induced upon going to sleep
Now I need to mention here that the sleep paralysis stage is not particularly pleasant. To be brutally honest, it’s probably one of the most terrifying things you will ever experience, and this is coming from someone who was almost executed at knife point. It will feel like your soul is being pulled in every direction at once. Your voice will be choked to a faint cry no matter how hard you try to yell. You will hear the most chthonic noises imaginable – unlike anything you have ever heard before – and get the most unsettling feelings that make the hairs stand on the back of your neck. It is also not uncommon to see strange beings of various sorts ranging from “demons” to “aliens” standing at the bed. Random scenarios will play out in your head suggesting your impending doom, and voices will whisper things to you that will make you think you are crazy. I have had instances where I was absolutely sure someone had broken into the house and was seconds away from killing me and my family in my sleep. I have had another instance where death materialised around me and hit me with its scythe. Aliens, demons, the whole shebang there to come and eat my soul for breakfast. If you are lucky you will hear the most perfect music you have ever heard, but this only ever seems to be after you have become well acquainted with the Sleep Paralysis stage.
All I can tell you is that if you are big on horror movies and haven’t been putting in your visualisation hours, you are going to have a really fucking wild ride. Visualising unicorns farting rainbows is going to do absolutely nothing for you at this point. But despite this, you must always remember IT IS ALL A LOAD OF BULLSHIT. A wall of illusions put in place to make you really not want to go through with detaching your consciousness from your physical body. It’s like seeing one of those horror movies for the first time as a kid – it is important you take a step back and realise none of it is going to hurt you. It isn’t real. You have to learn to just “relax” and let it play the fuck out around you. This is easier said than done, and I get that not everyone will be able to do it. Hell, it even still gets the best of me at times and I have to exit the session, and I have been doing this for 23 years. So don’t feel bad if you can’t bring yourself to go through with it.
The way to exit a session in this manner is that you shake your head from side to side, like you are saying no. It will be hard because of the paralysis, but you only need 2 shakes and you’ll be fully awake. This is your get out of hell card, use it if you need to.
If you do learn to relax, however, you will gain access to the most powerful part of the human mind that is directly connected to all other consciousnesses in existence; the void space. This is where the fun and magic really begins. This is where you really earn your “wings”.
The Transition Into Void Space:
If you are successful in relaxing properly whilst under sleep paralysis, then the illusion should just all of a sudden fall away from around you. All the chaos around, including those terrifying thoughts just completely leave you. It will be then that you will feel your consciousness invert as it makes the transition into the sleep state. It’s like Han Solo hitting that hyperdrive button on the millennium falcon in reverse; you go through a tunnel of….well, I can’t really describe it – blurry 4th dimensional “shit”. This will be very brief and over in a couple of seconds, and on the other side of it you will feel your consciousness completely detach from the physical body in a completely different way to when it does via astral projection.
You then enter into the void space. It sort of feels like diving into an ocean of pure “bliss”. If you thought astral projection was exciting, this is the most exhilarating feeling you will ever experience, hands down, period, full stop. It is like this weight that you never knew was there has suddenly been lifted and you can finally “stretch out” in ways you never could have even imagined before. You are uncaged. Godlike. It feels like you are left falling into an infinite hole, which is where I assume one really is when having a classic “falling dream”. Although it can be unsettling at first, when you get good, it can provide an effective means of relaxation. I used to enter here and just “kick back” and wallow in the falling sensation for hours. It is the ultimate sensory deprivation tank.
If you made it this far then congratulations, as you are now existing as a pure conscious thought form where the hassle of mundanities such as money and debt are going to be the furthest from your mind. Physical reality is no where to be seen, though you still have 100% awareness of it down to every minute detail.
After making a conscious transition into the void space, you no longer see 3D objects out to a physical horizon. You see pure archetypal energy forms that combine with whatever is in your subconsciousness from a 4th dimensional perspective. These images take the form of distortions that differ in intensity depending on how “deep” you enter it. Think of it like a bubble. At the edge of this bubble the distortions are at their most extreme, but towards the middle you are insulated by a level of consciousness space.
This consciousness space I have somewhat mapped to being 12 layers deep, based on my difficulty in vanquishing the distortions using my own visualization practices. Though, this should be thought of as an analogue gauge rather than actual physically separated layers. The depth you penetrate into this void space seems to be determined by the velocity of your consciousness at the transition point into the sleeping state. This velocity is a product of fatigue of the mind during this transition. If you are too fatigued, your velocity penetrates too deeply into the bubble and you hit the edge. You become swarmed by these distortions which more often than not, leads to a random dream. This is why most people do not realise they are dreaming, in my opinion.
Without conscious awareness and strong visualisation, these distortions become very hard to vanquish, even when one is aware of them. If you penetrate at a lower velocity, you are more likely to reach the centre of the bubble. This is where the distortions are at their lowest. So you could say level 0 = waking reality, whilst level 12 = complete distortion/ unconscious dream. If you can remain conscious and make it into this part of the void space, you can create your own reality suit through the use of visualisation, which you then just hop into. The reality then just appears around you. It is equivalent to the white room in the matrix where a rack of guns appear out of nowhere before Neo. The void space is thus the “load out” screen your consciousness enters into before you load out this physical reality. It is the very first point one enters into in the dreaming state, but most people are too fatigued to realise, and pass through to it’s distortion maxima – level 12 or what I call the “basement”. Thus they become engulfed in their own subconsciousness hypnotism.
If you do manage to a) consciously enter the void space, and b) vanquish the sub conscious distortions, however, you then have an opportunity to witness this dream creation as it takes place.
Dream Creation Phase:
After accessing the void space, you then have the ability to imagine up your own dream environments. We will go into an effective process for doing so later on, but for now one should understand that this is where the idea of being a “slippery” or “solidified” consciousness comes into play. When in the void space you are formless and slippery – 4th dimensional in nature, or as MM would say in wave form – but after you create a dreamscape and move into it you become more “solidified”, or particle like. You create the 3.5D holographic dream environment and become a 3.5D entity within it. I say 3.5D because it is somewhere where between like our physical 3D reality and the 4D of consciousness space. When the dream has been created via conscious implantation of thought rather than sub conscious implantation, it becomes much easier to control. Travel is undertaken when dream creation has been mastered.
The Waking up Phase:
Provided your lucid dream goes all well, you might be lucky enough to witness the transition back into the physical plane. What seems to happen – well, what I have witnessed anyway – is that the physical reality is sort of overlayed as a very faint image over the holographic dream in a wavy like manner. This wave is about 0.5Hz; very, very slow and noticeable. With each back and forth movement of the wave, the physical reality overlay gets more vivid whilst the dream starts to become faint. After 10 – 20 seconds, physical reality has completely replaced the dream and becomes “locked” into place. Words cannot express how depressed one feels upon the realisation they are once again trapped in such a sate. It should be cautioned here, that lucid dreaming is extremely addictive.
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