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Active Dreaming: Exploring the Vivid Dreamscape

Saturday, October 17, 2015 16:08

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(Before It's News)

18th October 2015

By Montalk

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

It is possible to enter a lucid dream directly from waking. Usually this entails lying down, relaxing, and allowing the body to fall asleep while the mind stays awake. Difficulties include falling asleep along with the body, or the body staying awake with the mind. Decoupling body and mind so that the latter can stay awake while the body falls asleep is difficult but possible.

The Process of Sleep

To enter normal sleep we begin by letting our thoughts wander until they turn into daydreams that either dissolve into oblivion along with our self-awareness and volition or else spontaneously evolve into hypnagogic imagery (short vivid hallucinations) that eventually cohere into a full-blown three dimensional dreamscape.

Whether drifting off takes us into oblivion or into a vivid dreamscape can depend on how far we are into our nightly sleep cycle. Early in the cycle, sleep tends to consist of delta brainwave activity and no REM (rapid eye movement), which indicates consciousness is off elsewhere. Most likely the soul is running its astral errands while the body does its repairs. Later in the cycle after these tasks are out of the way, or when taking a nap, the delta stage is replaced by immediate onset of hypnagogic and REM activity after mental relaxation. But these are passive dreams since lack of lucidity in them implies impaired volition.

Why are dreams so much more vivid than imagination? Because the images are being projected by the subconscious, not the conscious mind. Why do we lose self-awareness when we go to sleep? Because as we let our thoughts wander, the subconscious starts to influence our consciously projected internal images (imagination, visualization, daydreaming, mind chatter) while the conscious mind takes on a more passive and self-obliterating role. Not long after that, the subconscious takes over the role of projector and that is when mere mental images become virtual realities. The trade-off is that we have already abandoned ourselves by the time the dream projection kicks in.

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