Crash Course: Lucid dreaming and the individuation process.

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Sn0wfIak3

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#1
Let's start with the fun bit:

Lucid dreaming is when you become aware that you're dreaming and begin to gain control over them. Personally i usually don't even become aware that i'm dreaming, i just become aware that i'm in what i call "the spirit world". I"ll explain this part later.

Lucid dreaming isn't even dreaming, it's a state of trance you access from your dreams. paradoxically, you'll wake up more refreshed and energetic.

You can train lucidity (clarity), longevity and control.


There's three basic techniques for doing this:
  • Reality checks. At certain moments of the day you simply question yourself whether this moment right now is a dream or real.
  • Keeping a dream journal. Write them down after you wake up and also perhaps what you think they might mean. I have written on the first page of mine "i will remember my dreams and not forget to have fun".
  • Once you're in a lucid dream state, focus on awareness of self. Look at your hands, move them, try to feel your body. Try to become aware of your "dream body".
http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/how-to-have-your-first-lucid-dream.html


Now the tricky but mystical bit:

A lot of this has to do with Jungian archetypes. A lot of our dysfunctional behavior results from unprocessed emotions, we don't feel them anymore but they influence our conscious behavior. It's things like "why can't i stop drinking so much or why do i always get into the wrong type of relationships". You're intellectually perfectly aware that your behavior is dysfunctional but something prevents you from overcoming it. Something more powerful than you.

This is why i call it "the spirit world".

The more important archetypes when it comes to using lucid dreams to advance in your individuation process are the shadow and the anima or animus.


The shadow

The shadow are things about ourself we suppressed, in most cases if you're generally a person that tries to be a good person and or a bit insecure most things in your shadow are actually good and positive things. It will however manifest itself as something scary. How you deal with this is up to you.

I kept fighting it, until i realized "why am i doing this?" It's not because i am afraid that i constantly need to fight it, why don't i just allow myself to be afraid. It was in this moment that the shadow itself explained to me that he was my friend, not my enemy.




The anima or animus

This is the archetype you're allowed to trust blindly. This is your best friend. She or he is the gatekeeper between your consciousness and your suppressed emotions. Think of them as Tinkerbell or the Cheshire cat.

Be suspicious of any other characters when they're not being friendly. When they're being your friend you'll know. When they try to make you feel bad, insecure, be suspicious. You'll recognize your allies pretty quickly. That doesn't mean you should completely distrust their advice either. The trick with internal conflicts is always trying to make them become your friend.



http://www.mindstructures.com/carl-jung-individuation-process/

There is one last archetype i didn't mention. The self. You'll recognize it when you meet it.

The individuation process can have incredible holistic healing abilities. Lucid dreams are magical, mystical experiences. What the human brain can come up with is nothing short of beautiful and amazing.
 
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Pandagnome

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#4
I dream at random bursts there was a time i once dreamt i was a a real pigeon aimlessly flying and pooping on those i despised
it was pleasantly refreshing and liberating until my alarm went off :O

Dreams are like chapters the next one could be something completely different some are a lot more real than others!
My fave dream of all time was when i was humping a car and the salesman said its yours my very first Lamborghini
mashed with the knight rider and a pop out basketball hoop. I can't remember the rest went really fast and the rest was a blur
 
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Sn0wfIak3

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#5
I dream at random bursts there was a time i once dreamt i was a a real pigeon aimlessly flying and pooping on those i despised
it was pleasantly refreshing and liberating until my alarm went off :O

Dreams are like chapters the next one could be something completely different some are a lot more real than others!
My fave dream of all time was when i was humping a car and the salesman said its yours my very first Lamborghini
mashed with the knight rider and a pop out basketball hoop. I can't remember the rest went really fast and the rest was a blur
Sounds like a lot of fun. It's weird though, in contrast, my dreams are very consistent. I don't fully understand why, it's almost like a world that keeps building up on itself. The world keeps getting more beautiful and complex.

There's no real chapters as you call them, it's literally just another world to me. Always the same place, always the same (or similar) characters. It just keeps "updating" itself and getting bigger.

Think Never ending story but in reverse.
 
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#6
heh, he didn't sound bad in the first place xD (he kinda sounds like me when i get outta the fucking circle of society xD)

and this crash course also answered the question: "Why the hell do i always choose a female person as protagonist?" (answered after i read the content of the seconds link ^^) and when it is not 'cause of the anima, then it is of my understanding of the symbolic of female and male :D
 
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Sn0wfIak3

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#7
heh, he didn't sound bad in the first place xD (he kinda sounds like me when i get outta the fucking circle of society xD)

and this crash course also answered the question: "Why the hell do i always choose a female person as protagonist?" (answered after i read the content of the seconds link ^^) and when it is not 'cause of the anima, then it is of my understanding of the symbolic of female and male :D
Yep, very observant. Tinkerbell. It's not always a female for men but usually it is.
 

Pandagnome

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#8
Sounds like a lot of fun. It's weird though, in contrast, my dreams are very consistent. I don't fully understand why, it's almost like a world that keeps building up on itself. The world keeps getting more beautiful and complex.

There's no real chapters as you call them, it's literally just another world to me. Always the same place, always the same (or similar) characters. It just keeps "updating" itself and getting bigger.

Think Never ending story but in reverse.
Perhaps the dreams are gate way to an alternative world or shaped by a mixture of , real thoughts, dreams, alternative world all in one melting pot?

http://in5d.com/can-dreams-offer-glimpses-into-alternate-realities/
 
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Sn0wfIak3

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#9
Perhaps the dreams are gate way to an alternative world or shaped by a mixture of , real thoughts, dreams, alternative world all in one melting pot?

http://in5d.com/can-dreams-offer-glimpses-into-alternate-realities/
Who's to say right? I used to be a very skeptical person, some of the stuff iv'e experienced recently did make me more open-minded again.

I like it better this way. Maybe they are. I also like the compassing to multiverse theory.



To me, it IS another world, If it actually is or not, doesn't really matter to me anymore at this point. Its beauty has seduced my skepticism.
 
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Sn0wfIak3

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#12
If you haven't noticed by now, i've become obsessed with Jung. The guy was a little flaky, even delft in the paranormal at times. But his theories on psychology and philosophy are impeccable. You can't get a needle in between its consistency.

The man was absolutely brilliant.
 

ble003

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#13
so, inspired by this i started imagining a calm geometrical pattern when i lay down to sleep last night rather than thinking in words and systems, which is something i should have done a long time ago anyways. went to sleep faster than usually, but woke up a lot and had two dreams, one of which was the weirdest. i'm new to reality-checks so it didn't occur to me to do one at the time. anyways, dreams.

there were two dreams, which i switched between fairly often.
dream one, which woke me up the most: i woke up in the dream and all the clocks showed different times that weren't when i'm supposed to wake up. i didn't know if i was going to be late or not and it was quite distressing and then i woke up. that's how they went, like three times.


dream two, which was the weirdest: basically a video-game with visual novel and bullet-hell elements and it kept changing perspective. first there were a few scenes where i interact with the main family or possibly multiple families as different people, including possibly members of them. then the player's purpose becomes clear:

there exist artefacts that feed off everything in their proximity, finally destroying and absorbing it entirely or possibly turning it into stone. these can be recognized because they have a strong positive and a strong negative about them that give their owners a love-hate relationship with them. the family's cutlery (which is golden and somehow very good, but never smells entirely clean) is among these artefacts.

the viewpoint switches a magical girl or possibly a magical adult woman, i'm not sure if i played the same character before. as this character i'm supposed to save the people by entering the end-state of the artefact to seek them out and help them fight their way out. this is were it got bullet-hell.

basically, i'm just a hitbox with no weapon in a black and purple world. i have to survive in that state, find the person, then use knowledge about them gained from previous scenes to awaken their spirit. the people are the weapons. i only ever got one: a young child who was awakened either to tell stories or to sing or possibly in hindsight to pray, which resulted in a damaging aura. these people are stored in slots that were like party-member overviews in an RPG, so a stack of three or four squares with info. this stack was labeled "babies", which i think was the viewpoint-character insulting them for not getting out on their own.

i don't know how the story continues, because i think i failed and got a bad end cutscene where the viewpoint goes to a prospective buyer/renter of a building; it's the family's house, but rock and empty.


in addition to the "babies" screen, there was also text-narration and subtitles; though i don't remember any in particular except for one where the narration said there was a freezer humming somewhere where the pictures did not show a freezer. it was definitely a video-game, and pretty good. i hope i'll get it again this night.

the main thing that makes it the weirdest dream i can remember is the complexity and language. usually my dreams can be easily summed up, like "i'm at the cinema, but flying "D"s that i think are red are stealing people's souls and nobody cares." or "cockroaches are coming and they can crawl under the doors, but i have to answer trivia to progress." or "there are spinning people and i join them"
 
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Sn0wfIak3

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#14
Turns out leafyishere did a video on lucid dreaming a while back too (not subscribed to him) and i think he brought up an interesting point.

We spend 1/3 of our life asleep so it's kinda weird that we don't spend more time training on how to master it, especially since it can be so much fun and obviously if you're enjoying yourself, it's going to increase your general happiness.
 

NitroMidgets

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#15
Sometimes my lack of dreams makes me question if the lack is in itself a dream. Then I wonder if my waking world if in fact the dream. That or I am actually the Noodle Monster god imagining all of you into existance and when you have no bit part to play in my imagined world your existance stops or pauses.
 

Sn0wfIak3

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#16
I think everyone dreams, we just don't always (or in your case never) remember them. I have aphantasia, i can't even daydream but as it turns out even we can train the vividness of our dreams.

For me dreams are always about stuff i repressed or just symbol versions of real world conflicts. It's when you sleep that your body and thus also your mind heals.

A real nightmare for me aren't the scary ones. A demon or monster showing up in one of my dreams isn't a nightmare. It's an ass kicking waiting to happen. I've been known waking up punching the air. Some of my greatest dreams actually are about these epic battles with giant monsters and stuff. For me, the real nightmares are the shame based ones (little window into snow's childhood i guess). The solution to those is "just stop being so damn insecure" but to this day i still have issues with that.

That said, there was a time that scary dreams were a problem for me too, until i started kicking their asses. I don't mess around with that sh*t anymore. "Oh so you're a demon trying to scare me, are you? Let's see how that works when i cram my fist in your face"

It's the irony that now those situations have become the basis for some of my most epic and amazing dreams. It's the reason why i support Jung's ideas that dreams are a direct gateway to the subconscious because it's around that same time that my real world personality changed as well.
 
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#17
I don't believe lucid-dreaming can be trained. It's nonsense to me.

Lucid dreaming only occurs towards the end of one's sleep, in the minutes when they/their mind starts waking up, so to speak and that's why a person may randomly (and certainly not always) gain awareness that they're dreaming and can even control themselves and their dream-environment to a degree. But, they only have minutes to do so, before they wake.

Some claim they learned to induce a lucid-state that lasts for the entirety of their sleep, which sounds utterly impossible.
 
#18
I don't believe lucid-dreaming can be trained. It's nonsense to me.

Lucid dreaming only occurs towards the end of one's sleep, in the minutes when they/their mind starts waking up, so to speak and that's why a person may randomly (and certainly not always) gain awareness that they're dreaming and can even control themselves and their dream-environment to a degree. But, they only have minutes to do so, before they wake.

Some claim they learned to induce a lucid-state that lasts for the entirety of their sleep, which sounds utterly impossible.
meh.. i don't think that it is nonsense... Even when while you're sleeping only one half of the normal capacity is active that does not mean that you can train how well you use these used resources. After all the brain is the most powerful and complex processor that exists and is also the only one that can really be trained.
 

Sn0wfIak3

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#19
I don't believe lucid-dreaming can be trained. It's nonsense to me.

Lucid dreaming only occurs towards the end of one's sleep, in the minutes when they/their mind starts waking up, so to speak and that's why a person may randomly (and certainly not always) gain awareness that they're dreaming and can even control themselves and their dream-environment to a degree. But, they only have minutes to do so, before they wake.

Some claim they learned to induce a lucid-state that lasts for the entirety of their sleep, which sounds utterly impossible.
I thought the same thing once. Like a said, i have ahantasia, i don't even daydream. People who can daydream react similar to that position as you do to lucid dreaming. They can't imagine another perspective than their own.

The only way to know for sure, is to try it for yourself. I know i did and that's what convinced me.
 
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