lucid dreams

[Derek]

Anyone else had a lucid dream? (where you can control a lot of aspects of the dream) I had my fourth truly lucid dream last night and it was a very exhilirating experience:

The first part of the dream was vivid, and not lucid. I was flying around in this cylindrical corridor and kept entering a tube in the top of this huge tower with speckled marble all over it. I would fly into it, and then I'd be in the same room as though it was telescoping. There was a robot I kept flying past that was wailing about love and affection, some sort of allusion to Frankenstein I guess.

Anyway, eventually I was set gently down on the ground. The tower I had been flying into was now about the same height I was (I apparently had grown, or the room got smaller by many magnifications) and I was in a room. The floors, and the tower were covered in beautiful speckled marble. There were many windows with soft blue light coming through them, and one exit from the room which led to a dark, brown colored room.

I looked at the tower and I remember saying: "Wow that's pretty..." and smiling. Then I looked around, and I said: "Wait a minute...I am dreaming!" And I walked around in the room..it was as vivid as my typing this forum post is now. I touched the solid marble counter in front of me and then I declared: "I'm having a lucid dream!" WHOOSH! I woke up.

I wrote down my whole dream in my dream journal (I had been keeping one for a while, for some reason I stopped for a few months, but this experience has inspired me to start taking it seriously).

What I was amazed by was how permanent everything in the dream seemed. That is, the room and objects in it were permanent, not fuzzy and squishy like in bad-food dreams. The key difference of course was that I was choosing where to look, where to walk, what to touch, what to say, etc.

[prometheus]

It is my experience that dreams can be as real, or even more real, than reality.

I never had a lucid dream. Frankly, while dreams do interest me to some extend as to where I kept a journal for the very memorable once, I am not really interested in having one. Sure it would be nice to experience. But my main interest in dreams is what fiction my subconscious can come up with and what kind of experiences I will have, thinking my dream is real.

For example, I once dreamt I lost my leg. Awake, one can not experience how it would be to live without one. But in a dream you can. You can experience how it feels to lose your leg. Ok, this is probably not the same as what one would experience when one would actually lose a leg for real, but it is quite profound to experience it in a dream. My personal experience is that dreams can awake emotions that I am not able to feel otherwise.

[pianolearner]

It is my experience that dreams can be as real, or even more real, than reality.

An unusual quote from you prometheus! Where is the line of demarcation between real and more real? I hate the dreams that disappoint. Like when you dream that you have something you have always wanted.

Dreams reinforce my opinion that in the not too distant future we will have the technology to inject real world experiences directly into the brain. Exactly like in the movies ‘Brainstorm’, ‘The Matrix’, ‘The Thirteenth floor’ and ‘Vanilla Sky’. We are almost there now!

https://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2237

We may all just be software running on a super-computer built by aliens vastly more intelligent than us.

[prometheus]

I am not saying dreams are 'real' or reality is a dream. I am just talking about how I experience it. And this makes sense. Both our dreams and our reality are basicly build up by our brains, in a sense by our fantasy and imagination. The world doesn't really 'look' the way we see it. The way we see the world is just one of the ways to do it. It is just one of the interpretations of our brains, with their creativity and imagination, based on very limited information gathered by our senses.

I think people would be interested in buying dreams, creating something similar like watching a movie or reading a boook. Or recording their dreams to show them to friends or something. As for creating a virtual word, in a sense we already have those in the form of online computergames.

Actually a friend of mine, who studies literature, did a lot of reading and research on this development. I don't know if you play games like Word of Warcraft of Diablo, but if you do and if you are really critical about the way you use concepts, you use concepts that would imply the computer game is a reality. You aren't conscious of the fact that you are controlling 'an artificial doll'; you think you 'are' the character.

We may all just be software running on a super-computer built by aliens vastly more intelligent than us.

This violates Occam's razor, for one.

[pianolearner]

This violates Occam's razor, for one.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge"

-Albert Einstein
US (German-born) physicist (1879 - 1955)

[Derek]

You bring up an interesting point, prometheus. Is our perception of reality really just one interpretation of it? Or is it in fact an IMMEDIATE representation, that is, perhaps everything we perceive is a direct result of the massively parallel, associative neural network that makes up our brains.  In other words, our brains do not translate sound, instead neurons get excited in response to sound, and the spreading of neural information is not translated at all it is merely processed in this massively parallel, associative network.  Actually I shouldn't say merely, because I have no idea and I am only speculating.

But if what I say is true---then the way we perceive reality, though it may only include certain limited aspects of it, is in fact what reality looks like/sounds like/smells like/tastes like/feels like.

To drive the point home---I would speculate, for example, that an immediate sense of the external world probably makes more evolutionary sense than a brain which "translates" if you get my meaning.  Given this speculation, that would mean that if one could enter the consciousness of any animal that could see in color, the color blue would appear the same as it does to us now.

This is all idle speculation of course but I have a gut feeling that this is all true.

[henrah]

About lucid dreams: I had one when I was younger, after seeing Jurrasic Park - The Lost World. I was running from a T-rex through a forest, previously being in the 'high-ups' as they called them in the film, and came out of the forest and was running towards a barn with a wier beside it. I was getting so scared, and I jumped into the wier and then thought 'I don't like this dream anymore, I want to die so I can escape. I'll let the dinosaur eat me.' So I did, and I woke up.

[zheer]

About lucid dreams: I had one when I was younger, after seeing Jurrasic Park - The Lost World. I was running from a T-rex through a forest, previously being in the 'high-ups' as they called them in the film, and came out of the forest and was running towards a barn with a wier beside it. I was getting so scared, and I jumped into the wier and then thought 'I don't like this dream anymore, I want to die so I can escape. I'll let the dinosaur eat me.' So I did, and I woke up.

   Hi , my name is Dr Fraser, i found what you said rather alarming, please tell me about your childhood.

[silvaone]

you know it is possible to train yourself to be able to lucid dream

I for one got deeply into lucid dreaming about 1.5 years ago

I kept a dream diary and everyting I hope to get back into it someday soon

I once had 1 a day for five days straight in my peak

many people can have them every night if they want to

the site i frequented was www.ld4all.com

and I bought a book

''Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming'' By Dr. Stephen LaBerge a foremost if not the founder of the knowledge we have of LDing today....

I suggest you check out the site

and if you decide to sign up to the forum search for Silva in members.... in the dream diary section, I posted up alot of my lucid dreams

if you have any more questions I will be happy to answer them

I have a 2 hour (I think its 2 hour) radio interview with Stephen LaBerge on mp3 if anyone wld like me to post it up just reply here and Ill upload it to yousendit.com or something

take care

- Silva