My Dream Journal

[aboutmydreaming-blog]

Is it possible that the idea of Inception is real? Can we be living in someone else’s dream? Elon Musk says, it’s highly possible.

[aboutmydreaming-blog]

There is a part of me that was moved by the movie The Inception. As you might know, the movie is about dreaming and how one can be the architect of his own dreams. Also, the movie talks about how it is possible to live in other people’s dreams. And I think there is a lot of layers under that saying. Furthermore, there is one thing that the film talks about in particular which is about how to spot if you are living a dream or a reality. In the film, each of the people had to pick an object of reference for their own, that they would look at in times they doubted if they were actually in someone’e dream or they were inside the reality. Johnny Depp who plays the main character in the film, tells the girl he hires about the nature of dreams. He says in the dreams, there is always something weird going on that would not match reality but you would not see it if you did not look. That is why it was really dangerous for people to go into deep dreams because the odds were they could be trapped in the dream and never come back out of it into the reality. This idea always fascinated me until I started noticing them about my dreams. Most of my so-called “lucid dreams” had a flaw inside them. For example, if in my dream I saw my family having lunch in the backyard, There would be always something wrong either with the environment or the people who are having the lunch. Sometimes I could not see the faces, and just guessed who the guests were. Sometimes, our house was not really our current house. It was our old house but it felt like it was our new one. So, After noticing this in the film, whenever I noticed this in my dreams I realized I would wake up. It’s like my mind can’t find more stuff to produce in the dream after I notice the flaw.

I also think this can be a waking mechanism. Whenever you are having a dream and you have an appointment in the morning and you need to wake up, your brain tries to drive in something really weird inside your dream so you would notice it’s not the real world and you would wake up and come back to reality. It’s an interesting concept. Worth thinking about, or actually worth exploring.

[aboutmydreaming-blog]

There was a time I was really depressed and isolated back in high school. I had so much pressure on me, emotional and physical. I had a huge emotional breakdown and I had to prepare for my high school finals and big national tests. The stress was enormous. I also was taking extra curricular classes like violin and IELTS outside school. There were just a lot in my life and my mind. In times like these in the past, I realized I would have emotional releases in my so called lucid dreams. I would take a nap or fall into sleep out of exhaustion and I would have an out of body experience and when I came back I would feel more energized and rested.

So at this time of my life I really needed a escape like that. The problem was that most of my naps were incomplete and never became an OBE. Therefore, I decided to write a poem to invite that inspiring experience to come to me one more time. In this poem I use sailing in a boat as a metaphor for sleeping and swimming in the sea as a metaphor for breaking free with having an OBE in lucid dreaming.

The translated poem comes as follows:

You can watch me when I’m sleeping, without worrying about making me embarrassed,

when I’m all curled up on the sofa,

or when I’m hugging my pillow vigorously

knowing my bed is my boat.

In my ocean of dreams,

it sails.

Not so much of a boat,

though…

more like a raft, I assume.

I don’t remember building it,

keeps me floating, with luck.

I’m always wet

cause my raft

is always hitting the rocks

and shaking me in sleep.

Shaking oddly,

in a funny or hilarious way,

sometimes like horror films..

if you are there and you look at me

at the time I’m hitting the rocks

and the other boats are going any way but my way.

And I’m hoping I’d hit a land eventually,

helplessly,

wishing the raft would break apart

and I’d grow in gills

so I could finally

break free into the ocean

and get rid of all the messy oxygen

that has depressed me for long.

Sep 28, 2010

[aboutmydreaming-blog]

It’s interesting how free market has also entered the area of lucid dreaming, This machine helps the consumer to be reminded that he is dreaming to make him stay aware in the dream therefore makes the dream more lucid.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3824800/The-real-life-Inception-245-headband-claims-able-control-DREAMS-fulfill-fantasy.html

[aboutmydreaming-blog]

This is how one feels like in the world of lost dream states...

[aboutmydreaming-blog]

Okay, here is the thing. When I saw the Matrix trilogy, I was mind blown. It’s still the all time favorite film of mine. I used to dream I was Neo. I used to feel godly, in my thinking. I started thinking if it was really possible to be like him, to feel like him, to create like him. I started practicing lucid dreaming practices. I started reading about lucid dreaming, I started watching the trilogy, over and over again. I eventually was able to feel like Neo for a while in my dreams but only for two temporary moments. In the midst of my practices and explorations, I became acquainted with Carlos Castaneda’s about lucid dreaming, it was called The Art of Dreaming. It got me hooked with his ideas and his way of writing. I started reading his books one by one. I did not finish. It got me so confused and left me feeling so lost I gave up on him. His books aren’t like any other books. He writes like his pen is some sort of a device that carries a hallucinating ink inside so it makes the reader get lost in between the lines. His books are like dreaming itself. You have to read them over and over again to realize what he really means.

I never came back to Castaneda and his books but I always cherish them as an inspiration. I remember somewhere in the book I read that if one could master the art of dreaming, he could master the art of living. And I think that sentence is more or less accurate.

[aboutmydreaming-blog]

Manifesting parts of dreams in art. 2012. Pencil, ink, graphite on paper.

[aboutmydreaming-blog]

After you have an out of body experience or see bizarre lucid dreams, you are never going to be the same parson again. For me, the thing that changed entirely was my emotions. My whole belief system about death and love changed after a course of my experiences in sleep. I became a more emotionally intelligent person because of my dreams (at least that’s what I’d like to think). Even though my dreams seemed to carry me away from this world I felt more connected to my emotions and my being on this planet. As a result of being more aware in my dreams, I felt more aware in real life, when I was awake. I felt poetic. I felt lucid. I found inspiration. I started making art for hours and hours in my room. Art I would never show anyone.

[aboutmydreaming-blog]

Abstract “things” inspired by dreams.

[aboutmydreaming-blog]

When I started noticing stuff in my dreams, I saw more dreams, and I saw more lucid dreams. Although, I have to say I only had two really lucid dreams in my whole life that I was almost aware of most of the things that was happening inside the dream (if you know what I’m talking about you’d know that this can be actually quite a bug deal, haha).

One thing I really liked about lucid dreams was the fact that how bizarre they were! I had started writing a journal of my dreams so I remember many of them until now and I have to say they all seem bizarre after all these years. Seeing a house on a fire, on a whale that is swimming inside an aquarium inside an elevator that is made out of crystals that would go up to infinite number of levels in space from the hotel of a resort that is hosting a ball full of weird Alice-in-Wonderland-like guests (which all of them are your friends and you find a few of them sexually engaged with each other) should seem bizarre to you, right? The thing is, when it also seems really life-like, and feels like it’s real life it’s not bizarre anymore, it’s not a usual dream anymore, it’s a lucid dream. Technically, any dream that feels real is called a lucid dream. However, what I call a lucid dream is a dream that you create for yourself, intentionally and you experience it intentionally, and get out of it intentionally. I never had a full experience of lucid dreaming in that sense, but I have had a glimpse of it.

After researching all this stuff and experimenting with dreams, I got a little addicted to the creative worlds, the inspiration, the bizarreness of dreams. I found myself writing down numbers and numbers of journals of dreams. I got inspired in writing poems, and drawing doodles and expressing feelings. The mystery of the dream world had drawn my attention so much it changed the course of my academics towards arts, eventually. I could never live up with engineering like that, I had to change my major. Einstein says, “The most mysterious thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He whom to the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead.”

[aboutmydreaming-blog]

Sketches from 2012 visions.

[aboutmydreaming-blog]

In this post, I thought I’d share some insights of an interview I had, after some unusual experiences I went through about the dreams that I used to have before my 20s. I’d dream lucid dreams 1 or 2 nights a week and most of them were very bizarre and scary. I’d see my little brother who was a kindergartner die in front of my eyes many many times. I had seen my mother die or get sick a few times. I had seen my parent’s car or jewelry stolen in front of my eyes many many times. The problem was I couldn’t do much about it in the dream. I felt distressed, scared, and curious. I stopped keeping my dreams a secret and started telling people about my experiences. After talking to a few friends and relatives, and a religions scholar I finally found my guy (sort of). He was the founder of a small spiritual practicing institute and I got introduced to him through a family member. I met him some time in 2008.

I was told he had answers for me so when I went in his office I was waiting to be all ears and hear all the wonderful things he knew about the dream world that I did not know of. Some part of me was hoping I’d be a hero by having had this ability to go through these dreams but some part of me was scared to hell and just wanted a way out. So…. the interview did not go as I expected.

He started asking me a lot of questions about my experience: how I felt, what I saw, how I reacted, how other things felt like. Many of these I did not know the answer of. I was mostly scared and unaware of the situation I dreamt about and went through a story line that my mind drew for me or whatever else that was happening in the dream state that I did not know of! So, I told him about my fears and hunting dreams about my family and loved ones and he suggested looking for more details in those dreams. It was hard for me to go through how my brother had died in a bath tub or how my mother’s hand got cut off and ripped from her body and got thrown on the wall while it felt it was still alive! So I insisted asking for a way out. He said, “are you sure you want to stop this ability?” I did not answer. He said, “Have you ever seen something that was not hunting like these?” The answer was yes. I had seen bizarre dreams that would make me wonder about the world I was in but in most cases they ended up scaring me anyway. I did not say that to him. He told me to pay more attention to my dreams and try to be indifferent about what I saw in the dream. He said, “if you are in the dream, just watch the dream. Explore. See what happens.”

It started to seem interesting to me. He told me to look for clocks in the dream. “Since there are no frame of reference in timing in dreams, it is always a good idea to look for calendars and clocks in the dreams. Maybe you are in the future and you believe you are in the now. Maybe you are in the now but the world doesn’t seem as you know it to be.” I did not quite understand what he was saying but I liked the way I was feeling about them. He told me to pay attention to the environment of the dream. “Can you be certain in your dream that you exist? Can you look at your hands and realize that your body actually exists inside that dream?”

Later on, after many years passed and I had more experiences and studied more on this matter I realized a lot of the things he was saying were actually practices that lucid dreamers do to have these experiences. It’s not shocking to know these all now but it was shocking to hear all that then. He also told me to have more honey and meat in my diet. For some reason, it apparently was supposed to help people who are continuously drawn into lucid dreaming stay balanced and grounded. I did become a heavy meat eater for a few a few years afterwards.

[aboutmydreaming-blog]

In the famous movie “The Matrix,” there is a scene where Neo sees a boy bending a spoon with his mind.

Neo walks up to the boy and tries to bend the spoon using his mind as well, but he fails. The boy seeing Neo struggling with the spoon offers up some words of advise:

“Do not try and bend the spoon, that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth…that there is no spoon. Then you will see it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.”

Isn’t it interesting to think that life is larger than us, and what we know to be true?

[aboutmydreaming-blog]

I later found out its scientific term was sleep paralysis. Before that, I heard its called an out of body experience. In between those times, I learned that if you can pass the sleep paralysis and go into the lucid dreaming your life is going to change, FOREVER.

So, now that you’re hooked… I have to inform you that what I’m about to tell you has been hard for me to tell people throughout the years because I was afraid they wouldn’t believe or they would think of me badly, or… you get the idea.

How did my experience start?

One night, when I was 15, I went to sleep like every other night. I brushed my teeth. Prepared my stuff for school routine in the morning, I did some reading before bed and then went to sleep. In this special night, however, I woke up after a while, in fear that someone had broken into our house. I heard a loud noise of doors being hit by something and a few men talking in a very scary way. So I came out of bed and tried to see what was going on. My room was much closer to the entrance so I wanted to wake my dad up to let him know what was happening. I went outside and saw nothing. It was like they all had left. I went to may parents and wanted to wake them up when……suddenly, I woke up again. I was shocked, and a little relieved that it all had been a dream. I was thinking about how real it felt to me though.. I went out of bed to talk to my dad about this but I heard a loud noice that came from the parking garage. Somebody was stealing the car. I ran to may parents to tell them about the big event but I found myself woken up in my bed again! I was shocked, angry and scared. What was happening to me? If I was not dreaming then how could I escape that scary world? This time I ran through the hallway straight to my parents and saw an even scarier scene. My mom was dead.

I woke up again.

It was all over. It was a dream, however real and bizarre it felt.

After a while…

I started seeing other things in my dreams like seeing my room, or our house from above. It did not last long though. Some other things came on to me in my dreams that were obstacles to my experience. They looked like shadows and they made high pitched radio noises that felt like screaming that would hurt my ears and made my want to cry in my sleep. My dreaming had become huntingly scary and worrisome. I did not dare to tell anyone about them yet. It seemed to me that those were there to grab me to their world but they never succeeded. I always thought that some day they would, and it scared me to my bone every time I thought about it.

This experience came on to me in times when I was most stressed out or most busy. Therefore it got decreased after I passed high school and went to college. Although it remained a mystery for a while what those dreams meant and how I could react to them. Was I supposed to be worried about my mental health? It turned out, I was not. After I discovered how to research stuff on the internet I realized many people have experienced the same things throughout history and in many cultures. There were so many assumptions about it one could not make judgments on what it actually represented. So I became a little less afraid a little more indifferent to my fearful dreams.

Some day, when I was listening to a Buddhisatwa talking about buddha blessings I realized that my bad dreams are gone. It was that day that I grew a lot of respect for buddhism and its practices. Later on, I discovered that in Hindu tradition, also, there are practices on how to control your dream.