Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Meditative visuals when tired. Lucid dreaming?

Recently when I have been tired I have noticed a fascinating phenomenon- I am not usually a visual person, that is, it is sometimes difficult for me to maintain mental images in my head. However, I have been meditating quite a lot recently, and when I have been tired, especially if I am not going to sleep but just resting my eyes, I have been paying attention to the shapes and colors playing behind my eyelids. The greater my focus, and greater my relaxation, (I am often meditating casually as I rest) the more real they appear, like the images that can guide you into dreams directly from waking, something I have frequently experienced since the time I was young. I have either been waking up to jot it down or falling asleep, but my goal is to be able to enter lucid dreams from this state, which I'm pretty sure is possible even though I have been as yet unable to control them.

2 comments:

Nicholas Lee Venezia said...

This happened to me in Japan for the first time. I was seeing faces, shapes, vivid 3d creatures from my imagination as i lay in bed at night. I thought i had fallen asleep, and i wasn't sure if i was awake at first. After several minutes i was positive to be awake and positive my eyelids were closed under my own control. These images felt so real and so clear, but incomplete as if vignettes appearing from a black smoke. Since that night my imagination and ability to create in the 3rd dimension has been much improved, something I attributed to training my sense of design over the last year. But now it is something that happens more often, i see faces and figures everywhere like a child looking up at the clouds (something I was never very good at in the first place). I would like to understand what I did to get to this point, and learn how to embrace/cultivate it as time goes on. It is quite thrilling to feel a creativity in the 3rd dimension that was never there.

ALV said...

Working with design you were probably practicing this trait without realizing it and jumped up a huge step in Japan. The experience itself (living in a monastery, being in Japan for the first time, the program, working your ass off, etc.) probably gave you quite the push internally as well.

To cultivate it I would keep doing it, refine it, don't just notice it but play with it, see what you can do to make them change, etc.

I would also recommend meditation, but I recommend that for almost anything.