An odd note on recording dreams.

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I've pushed myself lately to start journalizing my dreams. One of the things I've noticed though is the specific way memory of them recedes, how fast the onset is, and even more strangely what else you can find in the process of trying to remember dreams that are already rapidly receding.

The couple times I woke up so far and knew I had at least three dreams that were memorable it felt like I had driven a tractor into a swamp or a huge pit of mud, that in waking up I had risen up through that mud, and that in the act of trying to remember my dreams I was trying to dive back through the mud to pull the tractor or vehicle up by hand - which was an impossible task. The best I could do was swim down and touch the various facets of the vehicle and for every different piece I could touch (again - not literal but active metaphor) I could remember a key aspect of one of the dreams that were slipping away and write it down. The funny thing about that process was that the more awake I was and the harder I had to work for it, not only did those sections of dream appear in very clear almost snow-globe relief landscape, almost hyperreal snippits, but I also had fragments of other dreams from other nights sort of come with them.

For me this is outlining some very interesting characteristics. First of all there's that thick layer of mud - which I mean the transition between me being wide awake and sleeping and me being in the dream state. That mud is the sort of dumb-pleasant numbness with bad breath where your body and conscious mind are fully under, the deeper portion is hypnogogia organizing into adventures of different sorts, the surface side is of course you waking up with drowsiness, bad breath, and the often customary viagra moment. To even reach back through the sleep layer while the dreams are still fading seems to make the fragments themselves lucid, however you do get the distinct feeling that when you're trying to recall a dream you're not trying to pull up one dream out of the muck, its more like its tied by chords or ropes to every other dream you've ever had or possibly will have and because of that if you're trying to pull that tractor that you heisted on a drunken blackout back out of the swamp just to see what kind of tractor it was you were riding all night its also got one of its wheels hooked around the frame of another car, which is hooked to another tractor, and you're really trying to pull an entire junkyard up to the surface. Its interesting to see that kind of preservation though and it seems to infer that if I could tune my mind the right way (like getting a scuba kit strong enough to survive swamp or mud) I could examine all of them in their entirety.

So has anyone else here tried specific/deliberate dream recall? Did you notice any similar relationships or even stranger ones just in terms of how they tie together or how the recall process works?

There are certain dreams I have had that I can remember well. But others not at all. I never make the conscious effort to remember dreams so I can't answer your questions. But I do think dreams are interesting.

Perhaps the brain stores the memories of dreams all in one place. Any attempt to recall one dream may mean recalling another.

i keep a dream journal for a couple of years now, both of scientific curiosity and a felt need to stay in touch with subconscious thought processes that are partially an amazing source of creativity and experience and partially an indicator for disturbances going on under the surface of what i would notice as an emotionally balanced person in waking life which i found well worth looking into. surprisingly dreams make a lot of sense when they are analysed.

forgetting dreams upon waking is actually a natural program to avoid the crowding of mental workspace with imaginary experiences, its something that is meant to get lost in some sense, which makes those memories very fragile and hard to take over into the wakeful mind. i also feel that for me the accuracy of dream recall decreases with every second that passes after the transition, it is as if my mindset changed so radically that im unable to grasp certain aspects of the dream that seen in that rational frame are simply not comprehensible anymore. and by that i dont mean so much logical errors about bizarre dream situations becoming apparant once critical thinking kicks back in or details that fade away, i can still tell the story and see all the pictures, but often it is merely a lame inventory of facts that are bare of how they felt a minute ago. somewhat like someone elses travel photos.

sometimes i get some of those emotionbound or otherwise deep level fragments back at very inappropriate times troughout the day and i know then that this is exactly the feeling i forgot about, but i rarely can hold onto it and even if i do, i try to reach back through all the cognitive associations that are tied to it and end up just having a metaphorical loose string in my hands that wasnt that tightly connected to a metaphorical sinking fisher net after all.

in general the best recall is possible for waking up directly from a rem phase without passing through all the gradually lighter sleep stages that usually follow a dream, which is why we usually only remember a fraction of the dreams we had, the ones that were so weird that we woke up. apart from that keeping a journal or simply engaging oneself in dreams and thinking about them while awake really increases dream recall rate a lot.

it also helps to try and remember to stay in the same position and to not open your eyes when you woke up and to then go through the dream or what is still available to you in your mind (so that the recall of your dream becomes an indirect yet closely followable actual wake memory via mental copy and paste so to say), but this takes a lot of concentration and as soon as any sensory input or thoughts about that you have to get the hell up now and take a shower before going to work reach you its pretty much over, at least for me.

if you have the time and the calm to become awake slowly and start going back through your minds path before and before that and before that without thinking too much you might eventually pull up the whole dream sequence with you even though otherwise you would have only known about the last part. for me this really depends on attention and being at ease, even the slightest distraction like something else crossing my mind, feeling too warm, any movement, changing the side, being to impatient or starting to interpret the dreams already and whatnot ruins it immediately.

another weird thing i noticed is that in case i become lucid while dreaming and then recall those otherwise sterile memories of past dreams they seem to translate themselves to their full content again and open up twenty new doors for every one i went through as if they were fully available to me the whole time and i just didnt look at them right to decode them properly. im still (since awake and leftbrained) sceptical though whether there is such a thing as an independent dream memory or whether those were just random deja-vu effects due to delayed or unsynchronized neural signals.

lucid dreams themselves i never found difficult to recall however, so maybe this would be the ideal point to see through. going down the rabbit hole with a clear head might seem like a futile attempt at impossible jedi mind tricks until it actually happens, unfortunately i can just tell you that its possible not how to do it since im still not able to lucid dream at will, its not something that i can control in any sense and if im actually there again i tend to have a different agenda.

i once dreamt that i had invented a dream recorder, a kind of camera that wasnt just video but also saving all those abstract planes of feeling, thought and perception together. i was watching the dreams i just had had that night in fast backward mode which was a very insane thing to experience (again, not sure about the deja-vu thing, but in this case the amount of data and the reverse order were pretty damn believeable so maybe there is at least some kind of short term memory bank), and felt incredibly happy about finally being able to keep tapes and how i would still have them when i was awake. needless to mention i was very disappointed after i woke up.

I've noticed that when I wake up with one dream vividly remembered and nothing distracts me too much I can occasionally reach in deeper and grab a hook on one of the two, three, or four plus dreams that happened before it. Its kind of like if I do have somewhat vivid access to one I can, as you put it, work backward (albeit not necessarily moment by moment) and still contact the others before they completely submerge.

I agree though, the writing aspect itself even seems to have a lot of communicative power. Its a bit like the part of you that actively does the dreaming is just as aware that you're writing these things down as you are and with that it forges a dialog. It funny though, I used to believe that dreams were the act of different psychological pieces and parts of the brain/mind having their nightly corporate minutes. Even if one says 'aspects of self' and denotes extraphysical implications the corporate minutes part still doesn't seem to be any farther from the truth.


One thing about remembering previous dreams though; when I was sort of dragging a chain of dreams back into focus from a close-to-REM wakeup I did have some scenery (night time: a marble and glass maybe 20 story building, kind of stilt-supported and having a square bowl of steps leading underneath) from another dream come up that was somewhat unrelated but I was quite convinced of it being in a dream I'd had earlier in the week.

Speaking of the last part - I've noticed for some reason I tend to build a lot of really eccentric structures like airports with 20 or 30 story concourses, huge five/six story malls with man-made rivers and riverboats) or taking a city that's real hilly (like Pittsburgh) and making it even more hilly, giving things the 19th century lavishness and making things very exquisite but at the same time exteremely 'busy' on the eye. I love when my dreams do echo my life in interesting ways and I can't deny that taking structures and multiplying them many times over seems intuitively like a sign denoting urge for major expansion or even deeper/inner activity toward said goal. I'd be one to think that even if this is our subconscious minds and nothing more, the subconscious still has an incredible amount of raw power even if its psychology is largely alien to our own (I've had an explicit waking experience or two that showed me this in panorama).




Lucky you, I still haven't had a lucid dream. I used to think it was a waste to do such a thing - ie. dreams were messages, why would I want to get self-conscious that I'm in a message just to distort it and make a mess of what ever info I was supposed to get? I've since realized that the deepening of experience and realism is not only worth it but the degree to which you can then scare up a much more active dialog between subconscious and waking self is pretty big.

That said I have heard the pros say that giving a suggestion to yourself before sleep works quite well at giving you what you want once you go to sleep. Unfortunately that hasn't worked for me yet consistantly (on other things) and since I'm not able to pick or choose when my sleep cycles kick in I can easily give such suggestions and then go on thinking about other things for another good half hour or 45 minutes which may be part of the issue (let alone I'm sure that practice-makes-better is as true here as it is anywhere else).


That's really interesting, as in that really sounds like in your process of dream analysing your subconscious was kind of smiling at you and saying "I know exactly what you're doing and why". Did lucid dreams start after that point or were they both before and after?

this would definately indicate that dream memories are stored in some way even if they are not as easily accessable as episodic waking life ones might be.. i dont know, maybe i was also just too sceptical about this to be able to retrieve them so far. i still find it rather difficult to reach the dreams i had in the same night even.




i would interpret this multiplication effect in the same way as you did. also your imagination sounds really, really cool and especially your description of eccentric architecture touches something that always got me wondering about dreams. do you have a photographic memory by any chance? i dont, i might be able to draw a rough scetch of something i saw once but there will still be many things missing, so in order to get the details i would have to look at it again. nevertheless i find some dreams to be incredibly detailed visually, to have a correct perspective and to often be "busy on the eye" as you put it.

this becomes especially apparent when im there as a conscious observer so to say and sometimes i cant really believe what im seeing and i dont have any explanation for how it is possible to portray all those structures, movement, perspective, light and all those tiny aspects that turn it into a realistic scenery so accurately. this gets really insane when you find yourself in say a huge entrance hall of station building somewhat 1920 style with a tiled floor that has a pattern, people, someone selling newspapers, pigeons, clocks, train schedules, sunlight through glas windows in the ceiling and their lattice like shadows, cafes and all which is constantly in motion, and you cant find a single distortion in it that would indicate that this is something you are making up.

also there are dream locations that represent places i know, my parents home when i was a kid, atlanta, basel or whatever. they might even display themselves in a very bizarre way or not look much like their geographic equivalent at all, but i still know where the door is, that there are stairs leading up, that if i go down that road it will take me to the river and that i will get to a bridge if i keep somewhat to the right. then again there are dream cities or areas that i cant find any reference for no matter how much i think about it and compare them to real places ive been, and yet they have stable maps and im able to revisit them in other dreams in which this specific spatial construct holds up and i find myself in exactly the same place again or get there when im looking for it. i cant really explain that either and its always freaking me out quite a bit.




im really curious about said waking experience in case you would like to tell.




actually i somewhat agree on the first part, i think that whatever function dreams might have for psychological stability or memory consolidation or whatnot would be inhibited or at least altered if every single dream would be lucid. being aware of all your dreams while you are dreaming them would change their natural course of free associations and thereby hinder important messages to get across because your subconscious would have to be partially silent while you are busy with so many other things.

also i dont know about any studies about this but i could imagine that being basically conscious all the time would result in similar effects as rem sleep deprivation. and if you ever created a whole world with all the possible and impossible things and insane details you can imagine, in which you can do whatever you want to do and never be bored by your own creation because the part of you that invented it and the part that interacts with it are still only communicating on a metaphorical level with each other, then thats definately something you want to do again and again, so maybe its not that bad to have to struggle and to just get there occassionally. then again there are those crazy people who dont seem to be too much affected by what i would call severe insomnia and i never had such a high lucid dream frequency myself to be able to tell, so who knows.

anyhow id be just too curious too leave it and the more active dialog is definately true, sometimes even in a very literal sense although it is always indirect through metaphors of specific dream situations or characters that represent some aspect of self if you will.




not being able to fall asleep for quite a long time and an erratic sleep cycle in general make it really difficult to work on this.. i wish i had a solution to that, if i ever find one ill let you know. dont try drugs for this though, they are not just not helping in this regard but i also found them to interfere so much that a deeper dialog of any kind is just off the table. melatonin would be the only sleep medication id find at least somewhat useful since its just simulating the natural case, but i still wouldnt advise it unless you lie awake for hours every night.




yes, you described exactly what i find, except for that smiling is a bit of an understatement. i had this one dream during a time when i really tried hard to get into lucid dreaming and make it happen by reading a lot and telling myself each night that i would remember this time just as you suggested. i then dreamt i was in some kind of lecture hall and someone who apparently knew me asked me where i had been. i didnt really know what to reply, but the person kept talking and it turned out i had been traveling and that person wanted to see pictures, so i pulled an envelope out of me backpack, that kind of envelope you get analogue photographs sent in from a developer, and i opened it and showed the pictures without having the slightest idea about the story behind them.

then some professor in her 40s came up to us and said that the exam would start now. she seemed oddly familiar in some way, but i could not recognize her and i told her that if i had registered for a test i would certainly know that. her answer was that it was "a different kind of test" and i became increasingly confused about the whole situation wondering what i did that my memory had such huge holes in it, and just when i was really worried that i might have some psychosis or retrograde amnesia or something she started laughing and in that moment i realised that that woman laughing at me was me some two decades later and what was so damn funny and i woke up cursing myself. (;

i had semi-lucid dreams like the recorder one since i can remember, long before and after the first lucid experience. in them i realise that im dreaming but i accept that as a random fact without really thinking about the implications and therefor it doesnt go anywhere and the dream continues as normal. this happens quite often, but sometimes there are also dreams in which my mind is tricking me into staying unconscious by inventing distractions, letting me dream i just woke up or offering me a perfectly logical solution to explain weird aspects of the dream once i noticed that there is something off. in that regard im apparently really creative and it seems to me like there might be some unexplained need to show myself a "keep out" sign at times when there are other things going on that i should or should not pay attention to.

id really like to write a lot more, but i already feel a bit guilty for typing half a novel chapter, so ill give it a break for now.

I don't have a photographic memory but I can remember the 'substance' of things and the general thrust of energy; a bit like the line, mood, and lightingwork that an art class teacher would detail in class if you were to academically study a piece of art. That said my painting/drawing skills are novice but if I were able to draw what I did see it wouldn't be exact but it would capture the mood, texture, and angles of the experience 100%.


Yeah, and when you find yourself at a previous job - like I used to dream about bussing tables at an Olive Garden (chain restaurant) and panic when my alarm went off because I still had five or six tables to clean and set; when dreams are built mundanely enough its quite difficult to bring yourself to awareness that you're dreaming.

What you're saying with highly detailed historical stuff though - I've never had that, and that does sound incredibly interesting. I did have an odd dream though of being in Sumeria/Mu but it was almost a perfect replica of a four lane road near us that had industrial plazas and car dealerships all up and down the strip - that was an odd sensation.


I tend to take incredibly dull/boring places I've never been and then do outrageous things to the topography of the land on a map (like all kinds of seas, inlets, and waterways in the Southeast US through Kentuckee, Tenessee, Georgia, etc.), making Michigan a series of lucks with some dream interest I had in Brighton, Michigan (I swear I didn't go to sleep high on something). I also remembered having dreams where I'd be in Argentina or Chile and be way up on these green pasteured planes with waterfalls draining into the Atlantic or being back to where my childhood was just south of Ann Arbor, Michigan and seeing everything very elegant and gold/brass-domed. There would even be strange Yellowstone type soda lakes that I could take steamboat tours of not far outside of town.

I've also cringingly experienced the effects of video games on dreams. Recently I've played Guild Wars 2 a bit in my spare time and that will inundate my dream content - which annoys me just because it feels like pollution. What was worse was some years ago playing the Dynasty Warriors games where every enemy has a floating red life bar - I'd not only see those anytime I closed my eyes but my dreams would be swimming in red life bars.

Something that did make me laugh though - and its the kind of distortions I think you're talking about above; I had a dream just this past week that I was at my parents house and that they had company over. The part where it gets rich: they have a small 35x50 front lawn and rather than it being outside the inside of the house stretched to include the front lawn - putting the outside wall of the house right on the curb! And yes, someone mowing the indoor tree-lawn in front of the indoor sidewalk was also part of the dream.


I'm PDD-NOS and my blend of features puts me on an edge so close to the AS/NT line that I often times historically felt obligated to overcome everything about my autism. Even once I realized that wouldn't happen I still almost religiously hyper-analyzed social situations; trying to figure out what I was missing, trying to figure what on earth other people supposedly 'got' that I didn't, and feel like it was on my shoulders to create that part of me to fit in and essentially be able to function full-NT; if I wanted the best of my other traits to have what I felt I needed to record my memory in other people, in success, in a partner, etc..

One night I was out with my friends at a trendy club district downtown and I remember it being a bit unusual in there - it was one of those times where a girl tried to talk to a girl who was out with us, I jokingly commented to her about my friend being off in her own world, she gave me a look, and her boyfriend having no clue what was going on decided to say something really cutting to me as if he thought I was some schmuck hitting on his girlfriend. I also saw a really attractive girl who went out for a cigarette, she had four guys fawning over her and one of them bumped her beer and spilled it all over her purse. Just a lot of small but odd stuff happened that night. When I went home I was still actively trying to connect what I thought were dots just barely below my visibility, bigger significances, trying to - like usual - hope and pray that I could 'fix' myself my knowing something I didn't previously.

From that last part I actively - as an atheist/agnostic - begged some part of me not to forget a single detail; mainly because again, I was terrified of going to my 30's and 40's with my future essentially swallowed by a force in my life that was completely against my will. From there something strange happened. I all of a sudden saw all of those situations, almost like 360 degree stop motion, with these odd white connective/illustrative lines through them, and that diagram went on... and on... and on... much farther than I could even remember the details and I couldn't even follow what I was being shown on that scale so I decided to zoom out. I saw increasingly intense crisscrossing that thickened further as I zoomed out, and as I zoomed out to see the full thing it became a circle with a crisp set of lines almost making these church-window style diamond patterns within it which were lit up in neon/rainbow colors, each diamond a different color. I distinctly got the sense that what I was seeing was something of a physical representation of the database my subconscious was carrying with it - the message from that clearly "Don't worry - nothing's ever forgotten".

There was one particular atheist here a while back (haven't seen in a while, may not still be with us) who used to talk about how large he believed the subconscious being was and how he believed the self we know is just a tiny tip of the iceberg. When I experienced that I had to admit to how true that was. Even after reading a bit of Jung I still hadn't really believed it.


Its more of a metaphysics thought but its said that there's an inner and outer ego; outer ego is us dealing with five senses, the inner ego is the part that's faced the other way toward the subconscious and higher self.

Regardless though yes, it seems like its a very specialized kind of event to have a lucid dream and I figure the mind does a lot of picking and choosing - likely saving the most important "shhh! don't tell the ego!" dreams for what you'd wake up and think were dreamless nights, the dreams the ego is supposed to see as being symbolic of the activity presented at the corporate minutes, and then lucid dreams for when the the rest of the mind figures it has enough time or feels like the ego is yearning to be further enfranchised from a waking perspective.


I was on 6mg of melatonin per night for the past year or so because my life-long insomnia was hitting a head. I wasn't as bad as some people I met who are up for weeks on end and crash for a week but I would go to work on 4 or 5 hours of sleep much of the week, had many Monday mornings (perhaps one or two per month) where I'd go to work still up from the day before and essentially useless. Cutting out all caffein for a while and taking melatonin seemed to break me out of that well. The good news - the more I've played with binaural alpha/thetas and things like that the more I've been able to perhaps build the wiring I need to make the process happen a little better on my own. Still, the distance between a suggestion to my subconscious and actual sleep still can be close to a half hour if not slightly more.


That's pretty wild. I've still never run into a future self in a dream. Some people do swear though that when we see other people we know in dreams or even people we don't know that it is just as often as not a shared dream via the collective unconscious. They'd also say that we have dreams where we literally do interact with not only older or younger selves but selves in other probabilistic systems or even other incarnational selves.


I was just reading the third book I've read from the Seth/Jane Roberts series. The book was on Dreams, Lucid Dreams, OOB, etc. and she mentioned that when she would have blatant distortions that she would get in a mode where in her rational mind she'd kind of roll her eyes and say something to the effect of "Hallucinations disappear!" - usually that would remove the artifacts. What she'd said in her works and in her own dream experiences was that if she saw something, like an inner apartment wall laying down on the floor and she either just let it go or found a logical rationalization that whatever lucidity she'd gained would be swallowed right back up in the tides of passive dreaming. She talked about false starts a lot - similar to what you had, and what's worse is her false starts had her talking about her false starts with her husband who'd act in her dreams just like he would in her waking life and assure her that she was awake. If she had a false wake-up and realized it she'd have to focus intensely on sensory detail, and if hallucinations crept in she'd decide often to go back to her body and start over.

So yeah, it seems like even when you know all the games your mind will play with you on this level it'll still obstinate and even playfully insult your intelligence over and over hoping you'll get tired/exasperated and give up.

thats interesting, because from that the vividness of your dreams doesnt seem that surprising. id really love to see your dreams, im lucky when i get surrealisticly creative ones like those.




i completely agree on this, but still there is a difference between believing or knowing such a thing and being practically able to trust it. im always trying to find references for historically or geographically detailed or otherwise very vivid dreams, like movies i saw, places ive been, books i read and whatnot, to kind of compare it to the memories i have access to and see where it might all be coming from. the thing is that i can rarely match dream content to a few clear sources, so if i exclude actual mental travel as a hypothesis then i have to assume that all of the information i gathered during my life so far has to be somehow available to me to form such a recombinant and highly coherent picture, but somehow i still cant really wrap my head around that idea.

thanks for sharing your particular waking experience, im fairly impressed by that and it seems to me like you are much closer to that underlying potential that im yet not openminded enough to dare to assume possible in a way, at least not awake.

by distortions i did mean surreal aspects (although my dreams tend to be very realistic and somewhat boring in that sense, or at least not as creative as the ones you described) but also imperfections in visual perception. if you pick a detail from that station scene like a pigeon flying from somewhere up on a projection on a wall and landing on the floor and youd ask waking me to describe the sequence of wing flaps then i couldnt tell you much more than what i just did, but in that particular lucid dream i saw that movement so accurately as if i had excessively studied bird flight behaviour.

there is one visual distortion i found in dreams though and that is so far the only clue my subconscious cant outwit me on. when im in a visually complex environment like in a city for example and im looking on the ground and then up again very fast the change in perspective happens instantly. when its a dream though there is a slight delay as if mental processing takes a moment to calculate and load the new image correctly. this latency applies to all movement that is somewhat faster than i can still reliably imagine, so when i start running and i dont get a proper motion blur im sure that im dreaming.




i tried to analyse situations like that too for some time but i realised quickly that there are so many possibilities how another person might perceive someone elses behaviour and that its no use to try to get it because i will never know it anyway unless i ask the specific person directly and that there are way more important things to think about. i guess it probably never got me worried that intensely because i already find myself challenged by much more lowlevel issues. when i talk in the same way i think it almost never fails to weird people out and they just politely stop talking to me after a while, its as if there is something so off about my thought processing itself that makes it completely alienating, so i put a lot of effort in adapting other peoples style of communication and to phrase things as straightforward as possible. also i have to constantly remind myself of smiling and making eyecontact (people tend to assume im shy or arrogant or bored and whatnot real quick just because i forgot to look at them), so if i can somehow cover those basics and come across as friendly and attentive and people understand what im saying then i already consider myself pretty good.




that appears to me like some variation of the tetris effect, meaning that you take one familiar task like tetris when you played that a lot and then intuitively try to apply it in random other situations like thinking about how boxes in a shelf would fit together more efficiently. this seems to be something that also invades dreams very fast. yesterday i was dully pipetting stuff together for at least 10 minutes just after the alarm rang the first time and i went back to dreamland right away thinking i was already at work. also i get what you mean by pollution, i really hate to dream about silly tv commercials and things that just make no sense at all instead of interesting dreams that are creative and that have some kind of meaning. the good side of this is that it makes you think about how you spend your time and that you could use your mind for a lot more advanced things that are also more to your true liking.

the red life bars in particular remind me of basic experiments by roffwarg and others in the 70s. it has been suggested that dreams might play a crucial role in forming and organizing memory, and what they did in their studies was for example to have some regular subjects in their sleep lab they would wake up during rem and ask them to report their dreams. when the subjects were used to that situation they got red colored glasses they had to wear throughout the day and it turned out that their first few rem dreams in the following nights were consistently tinted in red as well. findings like those point towards some elements of dreams being just memory consolidation related replaying of events we occupy ourselfs with in waking life, but that is definately not everything to it, it just means that for interpreting a dream and filtering some kind of message out of it one has to carefully disassemble the pieces to figure out what to attribute to what.




i met several different versions of myself in dreams, as a kid, much older, even a second version of myself at exactly the same point of time ('she' was quite different in fact, outgoing, very warm person, a bit naive maybe, flowery dress and all, but still essentially me, so after the initial shock we sat down to talk and compare our memories up to that point to figure out logically what was happening. i remember that parallel universes merging in some way was on our list of possibilities). i get freaky stuff like that a lot and because it does feel intriguingly real i can very well understand how an experience like this might strike someone who doesnt happen to be such a neuroscience nerd like me as obvious evidence that there are incarnations in both time and space (or probability if you will) who we can communicate with but that we only witness such a possibility when we are in the right frame of mind to open ourselfs to it. but since i personally find it hard to believe in any direct information transfer between different minds because i see no physical correlate that would enable such a thing, id rather take it as a hint that i must be quite egocentric. (;

i have to admit though that the idea of shared consciousness has fascinated me for a long time and that i found some dream characters to have an incredible feeling of the presence of a real person to them that i cant really describe. what i also see in this though, and there is a parallel to my scepticism towards religion of any kind, is the strong motivation behind holding such a belief. it would enable you to share your mind, to communicate in such a direct way that the communication is fully accurate and comprehensible, to not be alone in a true sense and to be more than just your restricted self that is otherwise always cut off from any experience that is fundamentally different from its own, and this access is definately something that i can appreciate as desireable as well, especially in the context of struggling with such lowlevel issues as i mentioned them. therefor i would not be so sure whether i, if i were to believe in something like this, wouldnt just believe it because i wanted to. anyway, my take on those things in general is that i cant really dismiss anything to be possible, but that there is at least a partial scientific explanation for it if it is true.

what you wrote on the seth/jane roberts book - that does sound awfully familiar. dreams like those are really madening sometimes because they make you ask yourself how you can possibly manage to be so smart and so stupid at the same time. i had some weird thought about the 'picking and choosing' of the subconscious you formulated lucid moments in dreams as though.. my suggestions to myself were always along the lines of that the next time i was dreaming i would notice unlogical details, that i would question myself and remember that i had set myself the goal to become aware of the dream. now i was wondering, what if the proper message to communicate down to sunconscious levels would rather be to say: the next time im dreaming i will let the rest of myself know about it?




im glad to read you're at least out of that limbo of chronic sleep deprivation. im there on and off for years and it really sucks, at the moment id consider it a good night if i manage to sleep before 5am but i also think it will get better again at some point, im just too workaholic and also somehow dreading to do some serious psychoanalysis about it at the moment. if you still feel like it takes too much time before you fall asleep for your suggestions to work, maybe you could write them down or have some kind of ritual before really going to bed like a cup of tea or a cigarette or opening the window or taking interpretation notes in the dream journal or reading something on dreaming or the particular topic of your suggestions? that seems to help at least a bit.

I'd largely say the same. I found out, perhaps years before that I was emotionally able to accept the answer I was coming to, that no matter how good your social skills are in the raw - even if you can mirror people also - so much of what makes life glide smoothly is pure neurological conformity. People who are reasonably popular or effective extrovert can say the most random off-point things out of the blue on knee-jerk and everyone will understand exactly what they're talking about, whereas if I don't think and think and think about what I say before I say it (and yes - end up looking unconfident or unsure of myself in the process) I'll have the room dead silent for a good five or ten seconds before they go on talking as if I never said a thing (that or I'll get ribbed for saying yet another thing that no one could follow).


I hadn't heard about that experiment but yeah, I definitely agree that dreams are a bit like a summary report of a progress and that often enough they'll have recent stimulus used quite a bit for building blocks.


The peer reviewed aspects of mind/brain dualism are nascent to the degree that there's still not enough out there to turn the tides on current thinking. If you haven't heard of it though there is a book out there called Irreducible Mind which is written by a group of Virginia area medical researchers. Its supposedly written at academic level, quite large, and includes most of the evidence being gathered by neurological researchers that would point toward dualism. You can always take a look at it on Amazon to see what you think of the samples and reviews, overall though I think that book might at least help you figure out what you think - whether dualism has more proof or less than you would have anticipated.


All of that sounds good, albeit it may just take time. I was doing binaural beats (usually 4 or 4.5 hz) for maybe 20 or 25 minutes before I laid down to try and kick in deeper theta.

So far I have noticed my progress in the last week - I went from having something to write down every third night to every other night and now to every night. It seems that I'll typically remember three dreams in the morning, sometimes two (today was my worst so far where at best I just grabbed short swaths of what I could recall). Sometimes its helped that I woke up to use the restroom a couple hours before I had to be awake and was able to implant my first couple dreams to long-term memory and then grab the third when I woke up - last night for whatever reason that fell through.

Hi, I am thankful to you for sharing this awesome article with this helpful knowledge on Binaural Beats.

When you first start monitoring dreams, they are about stress and unsettled business. It is memory consolidation.

If you are doing wrong, or being wronged, there is a part of your mind, which will forever keep trying to work through that.

Going forward -- if you go forward -- you will get new ideas, from these exercises, not just pertaining to your day-to-day life.

Geniuses had muses and visualizations. They had to imagine it to be real.

I think, moral reprobates and people forever caught-up in strife, are not in touch with their creativity. They can't have original ideas.

Their mental energy, as it were, keeps returning to the point of trauma, until they can reconcile that.


I think it's called an anchor.

Some people engage in a repetitive activity or line of questioning (W.I.L.D., critical state testing), to help them stay awake, mentally. Other people have some kind of lucky charm. I have heard of the use of spinning tops, or religious symbols, or special music. They keep their mind on it. But, it's adequate to remain focused. The whole purpose is not to get caught up in some routine, but to remain attentive.

I think that objects can exist in more than one world, simultaneously, that doubles or Dopplegangers form a sort of link. (ie. quantum pairing, spooky action at a distance.) I imagine them sharing a sort of energy with eachother, in sympathetic resonance.

I feel that the best form of recall, is to reenact elements of your dream, or follow hunches from a dream, in real life.

I believe that a dreamlike, mental state is accomplished, when you experience deja-vu, or a sense of coincidence. There is a sort of a-ha moment, when you recognize that something has extra or superstitious meaning. Is it luck. There is a sort of positive feedback, when you dwell on this subject matter and act on it, when you say that something in real life is the same as in your dream, and vice versa.

The charismatics believe that everything has resulted from divine providence. They attain a state of religious ecstasy, by means of gratitude. They say that thanks and gratefulness are like a fuel, or energy, or driving force behind a creative miracle. This is like saying that something from a dream is real, or that something in real life is a coincidence, say with a religious meaning.

We have to be very attentive to how we act, to morality, cause, effect, and accuracy, or these exercises cannot be differentiated from a self-reinforcing delusion.