2017-05-21
[Dream of the Day:]
Walking outside with bare feet on a gravel road or path. I REALIZE I have no shoes on and decide to keep going.
[I have no idea when I dreamed this. It just popped into my mind in the middle of the day and it seemed important.]
7:00 am
[Meditation.]
1:00-3:00 pm
[Slept.]
3:00 pm
[Meditation.]
7:30 pm
[Drank a large glass of beer.]
8:45 pm
[Took a choline bitartrate capsule and went to bed. Haven't tried this in months or weeks at least. Only reason I took it was that it was expensive so I might as well use it, but not every day.]
2017-05-22 1:15 am
[In a long, complicated, melodramatic dream plot in which] I sometimes have first person perspective but at one point the main character is played by the COMEDIAN Steve Martin and I'm just watching. I make a mental note that I'm glad he's returned to the goofy clueless character he played in his early act before he got rich and started taking himself too seriously. The plot of the non-lucid part was a lot more convoluted involving double-dealing, dirty-double-crossing and diabolical danger, but these details are forgotten. The event which I refer to below as my "death" was not that clear cut. There was a wizardly, mystical element to it, more like I merged with someone else or reincarnated as someone without dying first, or something like that.]
[The plot involves] purposely abandoning my mom by dying and going to another place [unworlding], but after a week or so I go back to take over the house I expect to inherit somehow due to my own death. My mom explains that unfortunately, while I was away, she had to deal with my affairs herself, and as it turns out, the money I'd gained by dying was only $29,000 [the number 9 again--the number of my higher self, Whirly]. This was not enough to pay the house off, so she'd had to mortgage the portion she'd been able to pay for in order to pay off the rest. I mentally accept this [Nubberzuck].
I notice that my younger brother--who is a child in the dream and lives with my mother [SC]--has dropped his usual cynical attitude toward me since he thought I'd died, and he's now acting shy and glad to see me instead of insulting me every time he opens his mouth. We're in our bedroom when I notice this [but he is unseen].
I'm WALKING DOWN A LONG LONESOME ROAD [the Tunnel; Chaining dream content from the Dream of the Day]. Through the dry, brown, Hilly Country, thinking how I have plenty of time to walk so I might as well enjoy it [Nubberzuck]. All my worries and woes from the preceding dream plot drop from my shoulders [I merge with Limberluck], and I decide to SEE IF I CAN FLOAT a short distance off the ground. I try it and surprisingly, I can float.
Lucid now, I fly into the cloudy sky [the Nowhere] yelling loudly like Tarzan. I FEEL THE LUCIDITY STARTING TO SLIP AWAY AND VOW TO KEEP IT. I ASK MYSELF WHAT I'D PLANNED TO DO UPON BECOMING LUCID AND REALIZE I'D PLANNED TO GET DOWN ON MY KNEES AND TOUCH THE GROUND TO DEEPEN THE STATE, so I touch down and sit on the ground, touching it all around. But the plot from the earlier dream starts to seep back into mind, since I'd landed outside a house which I assume is the house from that dream.
I CATCH MY MIND WANDERING AND REDOUBLE MY EFFORTS to feel the ground with my HANDS. The grass stubble around the house feels like artificial grass. I retain lucidity by saying loudly to myself, "I touch the ground, I touch the ground..." over and over, palming the grass stubble all around where I'm sitting. I am afraid of losing lucidity and I wonder what I'd planned to do next after touching the ground, but when I shift my attention in that direction, lucidity starts slipping again so I keep saying, "I touch the ground" a ridiculous number of times [while sitting in one place and forgetting my next agenda item, which was to crawl around the corner to experience the Urumara.] Then a noise outside my real house makes me aware of my body lying in bed. I grasp at lucidity once more, touch the ground a few times, but I'm too excited.
[I moved in bed and tried to Chain back in by wiggling my fingers slightly--FILD--but forgot to try to roll out, forgot to cycle through techniques, forgot everything. This unworlding came after only three sleep cycles or 4.5 hours.]
6:10 pm
[Breathwalking, hopping in order to Timeline Smudge the previous night's dream.]
6:45 pm
[Last night I had a lucid dream in which I was walking down a country road that was very familiar to me. I had a lot on my mind because I'd come there from a complicated, melodramatic dream, but suddenly I decided to drop all those complicated thoughts and just enjoy the Moment. Here's a case of daytime practices paying off: Blaffinveigle is getting to be a habit and spilling over into dream impulses. This is also a demonstration of how Blaffinveigle replaces reality checks or has the same effect.]
Now traveling under a lightened emotional load, I spontaneously decided to try and see if I could float. I lifted up into the air, became lucid, and shot up into the sky hollering like Tarzan.]
[So today my daytime practice involved acting out last night's dreams, in accordance with Timeline Smudging, so during my twilight Breathwalking on the country road where I live--which is not lined with houses but is fairly well populated--I decided I should go ahead and do some hopping. This could cause me to fly if perchance I was not actually awake as I seemed to be, but mainly I wanted to practice Timeline Smudging by re-enacting my dream from the night before. And in accordance with Castaneda's teachings against self-importance, I decided to do my hopping without regard for whether or not people would see me. Let them wonder about me, if someone sees. I didn't purposely leap into the air just to show off, but in my mind I had to do this act without any self-consciousness, five times in a row. During the 30-minute walk I performed the five hops a number of times, unabashedly.]
[And when I got home, there was a buzz of excitement on the front porch, because while I'd been hopping around out on the road, a ghost or something had been seen up close on the front porch of my house by a level-headed young woman, a niece, who got excited and ran away. The ghost wore a white T-shirt, had wet-looking, black hair, and no face. Yup, no face. She was about eight feet away from the apparition when she noticed it in her peripheral vision on the well-lit front porch, sitting on a bench, with two or three dogs staring at him. She was carrying a baby, but she ran like hell, backwards.]
[I do not doubt that this was a sign for me to continue the Timeline Smudging practice, and while I'm at it, I'll append it to my Dream of the Day practice which I continue to do in place of what I used to do, spending hours a day recalling and recording non-lucid dreams. In fact I think that my leaping on the road probably loosened one of my dream bodies and I'm sure that this is what my niece saw.]
2017-05-23 2:00 am
[Lately I've adopted a routine which is sort of a cross between a reality check and a series of actions whose purpose is to focus my intentions in general on the things I want to accomplish in unworlding. The mantra included in the description below is the term "unbending intent" which is from Castaneda's books, but the method is one I custom-designed for myself.]
[Whenever I remember to, and not less than 15 minutes apart, I perform this procedure. I rub my hands together in front of my face, up-and-down nine times, then cover my mouth with my cupped hands and say my mantra. Then I do the Buzz Breath five times into my cupped hands, and on the final exhale I move my hands away from my face and keep pushing air out of my lungs while I stare at my palms, flip my hands over, flip them back, and flip them over again. Then I start over and do the whole procedure three full times. It takes quite a bit of concentration to remember to do everything, do it all in the right order, and the right number of times.]
I'm working for RM, the persnickety, arrogant machinist with an intrusively healthy ego and intimidating presence [the Boss is my 3ness dream body]. I'm fed up with him and quit my job in an emotional huff, bolting OUT THE DOOR [the Urumara] while he tries to offer me a GLASS OF COCA COLA [Miruvor, energy drink] to calm me down. I just keep going [balancing 3ness.]
It's a hot, bright day. The building is located on a tiny plateau on top of a dry, dusty brown mountain. The way down is straight down with no benefit of a road or path to walk on [the Urumara]. Someone [SC] has preceded me to show the way, so I just follow his cloud of dust [the Nowhere]. Without hesitation and under the influence of a considerable jolt of adrenalin, I leap onto the dangerously steep slope and skate down the dry dusty cliff face on my feet. Like an expert skier, I switch from bank to bank and finally end up hugging a dangerous vertical cliff ON THE LEFT without slowing down.
I'm in a brightly lit conference room sitting around a big table with a group of engineers [my Soul Retinue]. I'm trying to prepare a small block of soft wood in my HANDS for carving, by plugging holes in it to try and make it smooth. TO MY LEFT is GongGong [in real life a little boy, but in my dreams he has represented Whirly, a.k.a. Stumped-No-More, my higher self]. He tells me I am too slow, and I tell him I have to get all the holes plugged up. He tells me to forget about plugging the holes, and to look closer at the block of wood in my HANDS.
Peering closely at the block of wood and turning it over to see it from all sides [almost lucid], I see that drawings have already been made on the wood to guide the carver. One of the drawings is of a CAR.
The wood is now a toy CAR, and I mention to GongGong [SC] that it has an "impossible wheel base" and then WONDER what I meant by that. LOOKING MORE CLOSELY, I see that there are THREE SETS OF WHEELS INSTEAD OF TWO, with the middle pair too close to the middle of the car instead of right in front of the back wheels like they would be on a big truck. I tap the car on the floor to click it into the right configuration and re-inspect the position of the wheels, which is now correct.
I go to the bathroom to pee, but never get around to it because I'm distracted by the arrival of an IRIDESCENT GREEN GERMAN SHEPHERD. The dog's hair is beautiful, and when he moves around, the dark green morphs into black [the Dream Usher]. I speak loudly to the dog, "You're the greenest dog I've ever seen! You should see what I have at home: a red bird!"
[I woke up but barely had to pee. Forced myself out of bed anyway after deliberating whether or not to just Chain back in, but it was time to meditate.]
[I lay down on my dream bed on my back with my knees up, without pillow, blanket, sleeping mask, or mosquito net, choosing not to try to meditate because I was so sleepy and I'd had two small bottles of beer before bed. I had jotted down some notes about the preceding dream because I wanted to take advantage of this sleepy state by going directly back under. But I wanted to try to go to sleep with my eyes open, since this is supposed to increase the chances of experiencing conscious sleep paralysis. Keeping my eyes open was almost impossible, so I practiced Reverse Blinking instead, as long as I could, before going to sleep. I didn't go directly into sleep paralysis consciously, but I did stay mentally focused on the topic and something amazing and closely related to this intention happened later in the morning.]
4:55 am
[Back in main bed.]
A group of people sitting on the floor in a fairly dark place [my Soul Retinue] are singing a song together when suddenly they stop singing and someone complains that the song is not appropriate for a happy sing-along because it's "Hotel California" which is about a nightmarish experience that the narrator wants to escape from [the Urumara]. I complain in turn, "But I like 'Hotel California'!"
Cwahacoy appears as Alex'a. She goads me to wakefulness by mumbling, "Wanna see me naked?" Well of course I do. She's wearing a DEEP, DARK BLUE tight dress with a long slit to show her legs, and I pursue her [through a few forgotten episodes in which] she keeps me from falling to sleep by occasionally mumbling, "Wanna see me naked?" and then walking away.
I barely notice that her HANDS and wrists are also the same DEEP DARK BLUE color [the color of 7ness, the 6th chakra, which rules over intuition and wisdom, indicating that she is introducing or merged with Mouse, and not just Cwahacoy]. Finally she sits down and I plop down next to her. She's sitting ON MY LEFT and I put my HAND on her upper leg with fingertips pushing slightly down between her clenched thighs. She tries to engage me in conversation by wondering aloud what day it is, and I reel through NUMBERS till I decide, "It's the 20th at least."
7:45 am
[In the comments below, "4ness balanced" refers in general to a state I found myself in due to finding--or at least actively seeking--a balance between constant practice and ignoring my practice, between making myself meditate and meditating any damn way I want, between giving up harmless-but-meaningless-or-annoying old habits and time-consuming hobbies, and graciously letting myself break nitpicking rules and enjoy being human.]
"Why Don't You Move into the Zeroes?"
[A long dream with several episodes taking place in the Commune, which is the residence of my Soul Retinue. Connecting details, if any, have faded because I became lucid-or-more and spent two hours writing down the climactic conclusion of the dream, and I'm just now getting back to recording the earlier episodes that led up to it. However I think that I've remembered the important parts of the dream and put them in the right order. Several obvious instances of Chaining plot content take place. The transitions between episodes seem disjointed plotwise, but they all take place at moments of strongly focused intention or budding lucidity in the form of wondering, and that is why the plot jumps, because it matches jumps in my perception or mental state. In all that follows, note the strong connection between Voice and Intent, mine and Mouse's.]
We live in a PERFECTLY SQUARE [4ness] large, darkish, open room with a concrete floor [the Nowhere] and no windows. Our beds are lined up in a SQUARE ROW LINING THE OUTER WALL with an open QUADRANGLE or commons area taking up the bulk of the room's inside area. Some renovations of SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS are taking place with beds having been taken apart and general cleaning and rearranging also being done. Someone [SC] asks me what to do and I tell him/her to PUT A CERTAIN BED TOGETHER, an old beat-up wooden bed which I intend to use. The person is unsure of how to do it and I tell him IT'S EASY, YOU CAN JUST FIGURE IT OUT.
I lot of JUNK has to be gone through and DISCARDED [the slimming down of the conscious mind so it will fit through the Urumara]. I TAKE CHARGE OF THIS, although my being in charge seems to be spontaneous and voluntary, not official in any way, but someone has to do it.
There are TWO ROOMS [4ness as octave of 2ness] and the STUFF that is to be KEPT has to be moved to the nice, organized, but smaller WORKSHOP next door, out of the big square sleeping and living quarters, so that the big square room WHERE WE SLEEP CAN BE RENOVATED, REORGANIZED, AND CLEANED. I WONDER how we will fit all the stuff into the workshop without disabling the workshop.
Back in the back part of the big room, a SMALL, RULE-OBSESSED MAN [4ness protecting its turf; he looks like a dwarf version of me] objects to MY PLAN TO BURN STUFF because he says we shouldn't be burning stuff on Friday [fourday?]. Without hesitation, I set him straight, silencing him quickly with a POINTED STATEMENT OF INTENT that I will burn anything I please, on any day I want [balancing 4ness, i.e. taking away the energy it tries to dominate and giving it to 5ness, the Dream Usher for redistribution, which changes the scenery].
As I'm HEADING TOWARD THE DOOR THROUGH A DARK, CONSTRICTED AREA ON THE LEFT end of the room [the Urumara] with a big stonework free-standing chimney like a forge to my right creating the restriction and blocking what little light is in the room, a worthy opponent [Dream Usher] appears, my wife's teenage nephew d'Boy [who I've had a sort of sibling rivalry with ever since he was three and I was a wee lad of about 49]. We face off in the constriction [sleep paralysis negative entity]. His eyes are nearly closed in an evil squint, he silently glares at me, and he's carrying an old stick with hooked piece of sharp, rusty braided cable stuck in the end. I DECIDE TO NOT HAVE A CONFRONTATION WITH HIM and just keep going.
In a bright place [with no physical features that I can recall] a plain-looking, androgynous woman with short blonde hair [Mouse] has just shown up at the Commune and has just been introduced to me by another woman [SC]. She seems to be looking down at me from above as if I were LYING DOWN. The woman announces, in a VOICE that is as male as it is female, that she has totally transcended any fear of money or financial problems. In my relaxed and humorous mode as Limberluck [8ness balanced--that's the final step just before lucidity] I blurt out, "Will you marry me?!"
She is NEITHER AMUSED NOR OFFENDED by my stupid joke, and proceeds to explain that she has also transcended marriage since it seems to her that pairing up soon turns into just a matter of "AN ARMLOAD OF LAUNDRY". I don't mind, since I was just kidding, and I suspect she's a lesbian anyway. But she is also quite the transcended being, and launches into a lecture on metaphysical principles that includes the word "algebra," so my mind starts to wander, but SC listens with rapt attention. [Note the similarity between the words "marriage" and "merge".]
I'm outside now, in my most relaxed persona [as Limberluck], and the Commune is now represented by a trailer court which I sense more than see, but it's not a typical trailer court. The sense is of a campground for recreational vehicles. The RVs are all laid out in a single row, not in line like the cars of a train, but side by side and spaced apart. The row bends around to form a complete square. I don't see all this, but I'm aware of the layout as I set out on foot along the edge of the QUADRANGLE WITH A SQUARE ROW OF TRAILERS [chained content from previous dream]. One side of the square begins just to my right, another row is just behind me, there's a row far ahead of me, and a fourth row far to my left [4ness is balanced or "square"]. What I do see is lots of PLEASANT, BRIGHT SUNLIGHT, and the impression of YELLOW flowers [3NESS] outside the trailers, meant to signify Home Sweet Home. I can tell it's morning, because there's a clean, shiny quality to the sunlight.
I can still hear the woman's voice. I don't recall her words, but she's filling the air with intuitive words of independence and courage. Her voice is the voice of freedom, and I'm suitably inspired.
Her talk has something to do with mathematical abstractions, and in my mind I see a corresponding string of numbers with digits to the left of the decimal point and a string of zeroes to the right of the decimal point. Then for my personal benefit, directly to me, right inside my head, she says these words: "Why don't you move into the zeroes?"
I can only but agree, and in response, something instantly overwhelms me, something of an energetic nature that seems familiar yet transcendent. [I don't recall ever feeling this in a dream or lucid dream before. The closest thing I have to compare it with is the experience of suddenly coming on to a powerful psychoactive drug, which is a bad example because I don't want to scare people, but the sensation is so real and totally physical that I have to try to use a physical analogy. Unlike lucid dreams in which I have a sense of lucidity or a sense of flying or some sense of this or that, I have to try to emphasize that] I feel my body overcome by something as real and physical as an injection of a drug that totally changes my physical and mental reality in seconds as it courses into my veins, as if pumped there by my heart and lungs.
My body rises into the air slowly, but there's no body and no air. I'm completely lucid, but there's no such thing as lucidity, no such thing as dreaming, no need for any of that. I'm the same person as if I was lying in my bed, but there's no bed. I'm essentially blind, but I can see the Nowhere around me in all directions, as a three-dimensional soup of gray tones containing every color of the rainbow. I don't want to overstate this, but I just got done having one of the most amazing experiences of my life, so it's hard not to exaggerate in order to get the point across. This experience was more intense than all my recent lucid dreams put together.
The trailer court and the woman are gone, not forgotten, not irrelevant, [but it seems I have merged with all of that. By agreeing to Mouse's suggestion, I merged with her and her suggestion to enter the Nowhere.]
[I didn't become completely aware of it until a little later, but] I'm floating in a horizontal position exactly the same as the position of my body in bed. I'm lying flat on my stomach on the non-air, my arms and legs splayed out kinda spread-eagle, my arms bent at the elbow and my hands grabbing the non-air like claws near my head. Except my hands can't grab anything because I have been overcome by a literal shot of immobility. It takes a while for me to consider that this is the simple, everyday thing that everybody keeps calling "sleep paralysis". This is a miracle of consciousness, if it's anything. Maybe it's what underlies miracles of consciousness, because it's beyond description and I am way too caught up in experiencing to bother with description. [I was too caught up in the experience to try and move my body to see if I was paralyzed. I can detect chemical-induced immobility when it happens to me, although I've never quite consciously detected it before despite the fact that it supposedly happens to me every time I go in or out of REM sleep.]
As I float into the air, I don't really have the feeling of its being air, and it isn't. It's something more real and substantial than air, and it's something more real and substantial than floating. Unlike a flying dream, I don't have any thought of trying to fly, nor worries about falling. Lying on my stomach with my hands like frozen claws grabbing Nothing next to my ears, I try to scream and scream with delight and ecstasy made from fear transformed, but unlike the ecstatic yells of my lucid dreams when I fly into the air and bellow like Tarzan or shriek with laughter like a little boy being tossed into the air by his favorite uncle, this ecstasy was half fear and half gratitude for the experience, with the fear dissolving the gratitude and the gratitude dissolving the fear. [Sorry for the attempted poetry, but there's no way to explain this state of mind, and it isn't just a state of mind, it's a state of mind and body and world, all at the same time, evolving from and into each other timelessly.]
[But it isn't that either, it's something that underlies all that. I guess I felt the world dissolve. Yeah, that's what happened, I felt the world dissolve. And while I know I could panic if I wanted to, gratitude for every drop of this sensational experience dissolves the panic and turns it into more gratitude. I'm not talking about some drippy religious crap. I'm talking about what happens if someone injects a truly magical substance into your core being that frees your mind from its emotional ego prison of attachments while immobilizing your body at the same time. If you're ready for it, it's the greatest roller coaster ride of your life. If you're not ready for it, there are plenty of horror stories of people experiencing sleep paralysis when they're not mentally prepared for it.]
[That is essentially what happened. There really are no thoughts, except to wonder if anyone can hear me screeching. Because whenever I'm in an urum, a dream of being paralyzed and unable to scream for help, my wife will wake me up, afraid the urum will kill me. The above raving is just an attempt to describe something when words can't do it justice at all. Partly because the memory of a totally altered state fades with tragic swiftness. In recent weeks I have felt this almost happen a couple of times from a conscious, physically awake state when I was able to hold steady near the borderline of sleep (the Urumara). I knew or suspected I was getting close to moving into sleep paralysis consciously. This was a kind of tingly vibrational suctiony thing, but since I had been still on this side of awake/asleep, I had stopped it by focusing on it too hard.]
[But what just happened to me, this was the whole thing. In and out and back again, just what I've had on my Intent Agenda for so long. It was so intense that I did not try to prolong the experience like I did in my lucid dream the night before, I just let it fade and end. I was satisfied in one way and in another way I was heartbroken that the experience had apparently ended. At first I was so blown away that I didn't try to prolong it. It was so different from anything I expected that it never occurred to me to gloat about my most coveted agenda item coming to fruition, finally, after all this waiting. But if you look back over my string of unworldings, and compare what took place with the Intent Agenda in its various forms corresponding to the time context of those unworldings, as a matter of fact my agenda items have all come true, sometimes with several items being ticked off the list in one unworlding, and more recently as I get closer and closer to experiencing the Urumara consciously, one thing at a time. One grudging step at a time. About three lucid dreams ago, I remembered to get on my knees and crawl instead of flying. Or I guess it was after flying. Once I even remembered to crawl out the door [the Urumara] but this caused a lapse of lucidity. Then just two nights ago I got closer, I hauled myself out of the air and down to the ground and remembered to try to deepen the state by touching the ground. But I got stuck at that point and kept touching the ground over and over while saying to myself, "I touch the ground! I touch the ground!" really pleased with myself for remembering to do this, while simultaneously trying to remember the next item on my agenda. But having to grapple with forgetfulness had woken me up.]
[So today I went straight to the goal. Never mind crawling out the door or around the corner, this time I went straight into the Urumara with full lucidity, and back out again, with full lucidity.]
[Anyway, back to the narrative.]
So I'm in the Nowhere blind and trying to scream in ecstasy and my mouth is open, but frozen open. My lips can barely shiver when I try to close my mouth. My eyes are open, but all I see is a vast field of dots of every color in every direction which adds up to a dark gray infinite void. Oddly enough, when I try to scream, I can hear the screaming, but I hear it from way far off, remotely, not coming out of my mouth. This is why I'm worried that my wife will hear and wake me up. [But she's downstairs, fortunately.]
Finally I sink down as gradually as I had floated up, until I'm lying in bed, in the exact same position I'd been floating in, lying on my stomach, mouth gaping open with my hands frozen like claws near my head. The ecstasy hasn't faded yet, but after bathing in it a while, I try to move a finger just to test whether this is sleep paralysis, and find that there is in fact a definite immobility going on, similar to when a limb falls asleep tingling like pins and needles, but it's all over my whole body, it's way beyond pins and needles, and it doesn't hurt at all. I could feel the tingling fading so I didn't try to move anymore because I wanted to hang onto the state as long as I could. Then I did move to see if I could, and I could, but then I said to myself, "What the hell am I doing, I have to try to go back in if at all possible!"
[I'd only moved my hand a little bit, closed my mouth to let it moisten itself, and I hadn't opened my eyes at all, so I focused on my breathing, and very quickly] I find myself back at the Commune.
This time the entire Commune is inside Mouse's recreational vehicle [chained content] In this RV, which seems to be of unlimited proportions in the back part, where all our beds are lined up on both sides going way back, but like a normal RV in the front part where the driver and passenger seats are, I am keenly aware of having wisely chosen to POSITION MY BED right behind the driver's seat, because it's the place where I will experience the smoothest ride. From this position I look at the VERY FAMILIAR, big, stocky, white-haired man in the driver's seat [Whirly, my higher self]. The woman [Mouse, the androgynous character who had taken center stage in the previous dream] is sitting sideways on his lap facing his wife who's in the passenger seat on the right side of the cab. I wonder why they are so friendly, because the man's white-haired wife is right there.
[Then I woke up and decided I had to write all this down. As usual, the dreams I had all night were evocative of the lucid, more-than-dream, unworlding experience that I finally had this morning. It took six hours to write the past two night's experiences. But I get to wear my Lucidity Hat, that's the hat Limberluck wears, which I only wear while recording full-fledged unworldings.]