A Guide to Lucid Dreaming, Astral Projection, and Hedgecrossing [1]
Dream States
Sleep states are fun to consciously control for various reasons. They can be used to view and analyze our memory and sense of self in an indirect way. The feelings and ideas produced by sleep feel profound and vivid, and can be used for creative inspiration.
The characters and places we encounter in our dreams are reflective of the things we have experienced and imagined. We have dedicated systems of memory for things like our stereotypes of people and places, as well as our relationship to our environment and to ourselves. When we are in a dream state, we see the boundaries between ideas contained within our memory distort and change, leading to the experience of a world created entirely from the contents of our knowledge and memory.
Sleep is essential for functioning. Contrary to what one would expect, the brain is active even during sleep. When we sleep, the brain goes through a process of regulating physical and mental functions. Sleep is essential for memory consolidation. It is difficult to retain and recall information that hasn’t yet been consolidated during sleep.
There are several distinct stages of sleep. Older psychological texts used to break these up into five stages of sleep. Today, most researchers divide the stages of sleep into four stages: NREM 1, NREM 2, NREM 3, and REM sleep. REM stands for rapid-eye movement. During REM sleep, the eyes move back and forth quickly, hence the name. NREM stands for non-rapid eye movement. In these stages of sleep, the eyes are still, unlike in REM sleep.
Staying lucid during the different stages of sleep is an interesting experience that many enjoy and find thought provoking. Each stage of sleep is experienced by the dreamer in a different way. Studies have been conducted on participants who were woken up during the different stages of sleep and asked what their dreams were like. People who were woken up during light sleep felt as though they had entered an immersive daydream but hadn’t quite fallen asleep. People woken up during deep sleep (NREM 3) reported feeling fully immersed in their mind, but that the dream felt more thought-like and involved mundane subjects, activities, and places. People who were woken up during REM sleep reported vivid, surreal, and fantastical dreams.
Different mystical traditions delineate between three distinct types of dream-work which map onto lucid dreaming during the three stages of sleep. Hedgecrossing occurs during NREM 1 and NREM 2 sleep. During this stage of sleep, if the dreamer is lucid, their thoughts become random, vivid, immersive, and contain spontaneous events that feel profound. Their thoughts feel out of their control. Spiritual traditions use this stage of sleep for the purpose of contacting spirits or interpreting some aspect of their lives.
Lucid dreaming during deep sleep is experienced as astral projection. Astral projection stereotypically involves the perception of leaving the body and walking into the world just outside of the self. Traditionally, the world becomes more random and mystical as the person moves further from their body, which maps onto the idea that the change in sleep states causes a subjectively perceived change in experience while lucid dreaming.
Lucid dreaming during REM sleep is what people traditionally think of when they think of lucid dreaming. REM sleep dreams depart from the normal laws of reality the most severely of all of the stages of sleep. Because of this, lucid dreaming can easily be used to generate creative ideas or to explore themes from one’s life through the vivid feelings produced by the dream. In addition, it is possible to attain some degree of psychological healing through dreams because of their connection to our memory, and because dream experiences feel vivid and thus their content and our reaction to them can significantly impact us even when we are awake.
I will describe how to attain each dream state in the next section. In a subsequent section, I will explain how spiritual practitioners approach dream work. I will then explain how to use dream experiences in a constructive way (such as through dream analysis, creative inspiration, and overcoming traumas and internal conflicts through dream role play) as an alternative psychological technique.
[ If you liked this, check out my book, The Path: Psychomancy. It goes over this particular topic in addition to covering how to practice and understand other occult and alternative psychological techniques.
https://www.amazon.com/Path-Psychomancy-Astora-Diam-ebook/dp/B08F2YD1GM
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