The Pattern of Return
This past weekend I continued the exploration of my most reliable projection process. Lucid Dreams have returned to very crisp and waking-life 1:1 type of fidelity. I’m taking advantage of this rhythm that I’m in as I know that at any moment it can dissipate, just like in physical training this practice too has cycles.
Meditation
Lately an interesting development has been unfolding. When I first lay down to start my meditation session, I am comfortable and relaxed. As soon as I get past F10 and into my ideal state for separation, a burning itch will appear somewhere. It’s not a normal burning itch; I can block those out without much hassle. These itches are the kind that amplify and resist harder and harder the more I work to block them out. Typically, a really strong one like that knocks me out of the zone, itch it or not.
Today I decided, “The hell with it!” I reached up and itched the itch. As expected, I went out of my ideal state. In fact, I had to start over with “mind awake, body asleep” to get back to F10. Here’s the interesting part: I got back to F10 and my ideal state so fast that it surprised me. It seems that once the initial prep and settling down are complete, getting in and out of the ideal state (or much further down) is now a completely trivial exercise.
One more thing to note about something that’s been going on for a while: the white light flashing sensation continues to occur. The sensation is primarily a hard strobe that feels like either two strong flashes or three quick and slightly less strong flashes that appear to come from behind the eyes (and third eye) while emanating in all directions. I’m not quite certain of the meaning, or if there even is one. Basically, I know it’ll happen at some point during meditation. After settling in F10, when I go deeper, I can count on it surfacing and pulsing. It briefly causes a pause in all other activity when it occurs, like a silence within a silence, if that makes any sense.
I’ve begun to associate it with a marker for my ideal state, as I believe it happens on the threshold of losing consciousness and then regaining awareness as it floods back. This seems to be the most solid framing I can come up with for what it may be. Imagine you’re about to fall asleep but then suddenly become lucid, except now add strobes, and your body is definitely still asleep or extremely relaxed while your awareness is snapped back to alertness.
Maybe it’s not meant to be dissected, figured out, or worked with. At the present time, I’m treating this sensation as a system notification, a signal to a transition but not meant to be engaged.
Lucid Dream
After the meditation, I practiced what I wrote about on Friday and set my intent with clarity, present tense, sensory input (this one is still hard to get the hang of), emotion, and release. I specifically stated at the end, “I remember my intent.” I rolled over and drifted off into sleep with some light visualization, which honestly is pretty automatic, though I wouldn’t call it involuntary. I became lucid after about one minute of the dream.
During that minute of dreaming, the sequences had that hazy, dreamy quality. When I became conscious, everything snapped to “4K clarity,” indistinguishable from waking life. I can’t stress enough how disorienting these can be at first. I’ll even go out on a limb and say that I believe these altered states have probably caused a lot of false memories in the past, before we had a better understanding of the phenomenon.
The setting: I was in the garage gym/workshop, sitting at the shop bench repairing a metal object with a screwdriver. I think it was a knife pivot, pry bar clip, or a part on a fancy pen. I looked to my upper left and noticed two guitars hanging on the wall where a small cabinet used to be. I recognized one of the guitars, it was the old K I’ve had since forever.
Lucidity: I never sit in the garage; I always stand, even if it’s for hours. No guitars are hanging up anywhere; the old K is sitting on the floor and leaning against the shop bench. The K is brown in waking life but appeared pearl or light pink in the lucid dream. To make things more obvious, the guitar was very clean, nicely taken care of, and in good working order (shame on me).
As I sat there and all of these things hit me at once, I chuckled a bit and said, “Oh yea, okay, I’m here.” I instantly remembered what I came here to do, setting my intent worked. I walked away from the bench and looked around, astonished at how exactly like waking life this was, because I never get tired of that realization. I then lifted up a few feet into the air, thought about going through the roof, but instead leaned back and hovered over the floor horizontally.
I closed my eyes and started to meditate while moving my awareness inward to begin projecting. I took a deep breath in and exhaled while repeating, “I surrender.” My vision went black as I felt myself, my awareness, literally move inward with a “wooshing” sound. Soon after, I found myself inside of a tunnel. The end of the tunnel had small but bright and geometric (cubes, glitchy looking, almost like pixels but with depth) lights comprised of blue, white, green, and red. I may have seen orange as well.
As I started to move through the tunnel and toward the lights, they too started to move away from me. The overall feeling of being in the tunnel and the gravity that was pulling me in began to fade. I worked and worked on keeping the momentum going, but it was no use. I surrendered to the experience again, hoping that I was simply too busy and needed to get back to awareness mode, but it was no use at this point.
I accepted that it was over relatively quickly and came to waking consciousness in my office. This is the third time in a row that I’ve had a successful projection from a lucid dream employing careful intent setting. All instances have followed a similar pattern once projection was initiated and held true to the “instructions.”
I’m beginning to see the lesson here: I’m still too analytical and thinking when I start the projection. I need to be an observer immediately after moving into the projection sequence, and I need to trigger this automatically because thinking about it in the moment defeats the purpose. My working theory right now is that while I set the intent prior to the experience, I need to make a clear and emotional point about becoming an observer the moment that I say “go” in my lucid dream regarding the actual projection. Furthermore, and maybe an even greater point to it all, I absolutely need to craft my intent with a destination.
The Pattern: Lucidity stabilizes beautifully, the projection sequence begins cleanly, and then analytic thought flickers on and pulls the whole thing back toward waking.
What if, instead of lying down in the LD and meditating to initiate the next altered state and going inward, I do the opposite? The idea comes from the catapult vision I received after asking a question related to all of this. The problem I’m facing with this idea is that in one of my past attempts of basically doing just that, I was “reset” within the lucid dream back to the starting point each and every time until the experience broke down and woke me up.
Many great practitioners say that you need to direct yourself inward, not outward, during this practice. It’s often said that these states are inward-facing, paradoxical to the experience that you’re having. I tend to agree. My first experience inside of a tunnel going at insane speeds felt like I was going inward initially, until it didn’t. At the end of the day, I’m continuing to focus on what feels natural to me and not what someone else says happens (inward, outward, etc.).
To start, I will integrate the following into my intention-setting sequence: I am lucid and resting in awareness.
