my experience in dreams recently feel like seeing. i can pick out my reflection, my ordinary world reflection in my dreams. my dream memory has improved a lot this year thanks to practice. tho i havent been to the darkroom recently and havent recapitulated in a while.
but ive been exploring the strange friction between life events and practicing silence through it until distinctions become more definitive.
it’s not the vividness of the dreams that catch me but i’m now certain its a version of seeing that is accessible to me.
(i reckon it’s like how Don Juan asked Carlos what he saw and he said a poodle lion through a window or something lol. and that seeing was too detailed to be useful.)
now from practicing a kind of presence from my silence that lets me see through things, the dreams have started to make more sense and have less randomness.
i can feel the link between what i see and what i see (lol) (in first attention). i reckon many have done this through the ages.
however, this hasn’t felt like a detour in my practice. i was pulled by power to witness these things.
i was able to observe these things through efforts to clean my tonal.
i’m also subtly aware of the shift in my ap while and just after dreaming.
sometimes i get pulled into the river of shit from life events assaulting me but the more i remove human connections and clean the tonal island, the less that problem occurs and the more focus i have i.e. less distractions.
ive also found myself in between occupations that feel like acts of sorcery just by the sheer amount of effort required to pull together my power to deliver results. and i have relished taking sore advantage of those events by allowing the assaults to shrink my tonal and practicing silence enough to see.
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"Ordinary dreams get very vivid as soon as you begin to set up dreaming," he said. "That vividness and clarity is a formidable barrier and you are worse off than anyone I have ever met in my life. You have the worst mania. You write down everything you can."
In all fairness, I believed what I was doing was appropriate. Keeping a meticulous record of my dreams was giving me a degree of clarity about the nature of the visions I had while sleeping.
"Drop it!" he said imperatively. "It's not helping anything. All you're doing is distracting yourself from the purpose of dreaming, which is control and power."
He lay down and covered his eyes with his hat and talked without looking at me.
"I'm going to remind you of all the techniques you must practice," he said. "First you must focus your gaze on your hands as the starting point. Then shift your gaze to other items and look at them in brief glances. Focus your gaze on as many things as you can. Remember that if you only glance briefly the images do not shift. Then go back to your hands.
"Every time you look at your hands you renew the power needed for dreaming, so in the beginning don't look at too many things. Four items will suffice every time. Later on, you may enlarge the scope until you can cover all you want, but as soon as the images begin to shift and you feel you are losing control go back to your hands.
"When you feel you can gaze at things indefinitely you will be ready for a new technique. I'm going to teach you this new technique now, but I expect you to put it to use only when you are ready."
"He said that the old sorcerers anchored the art of dreaming on five conditions they saw in the energy flow of human beings.
One, they saw that only the energy filaments that pass directly through the assemblage point can be assembled into coherent perception.
Two, they saw that if the assemblage point is displaced to another position, no matter how minute the displacement, different and unaccustomed energy filaments begin to pass through it, engaging awareness and forcing the assembling of these unaccustomed energy fields into a steady, coherent perception.
Three, they saw that, in the course of ordinary dreams, the assemblage point becomes easily displaced by itself to another position on the surface or in the interior of the luminous egg.
Four, they saw that the assemblage point can be made to move to positions outside the luminous egg, into the energy filaments of the universe at large.
And, five, they saw that through discipline it is possible to cultivate and perform, in the course of sleep and ordinary dreams, a systematic displacement of the assemblage point."
You need to be able to be systematic with regards to dreaming, following the instructions.
The stated purpose of this subreddit is to aid in restoring the reputation of Carlos Castaneda and the knowledge he imparted, by pragmatically applying that knowledge IN PRACTICE. This means that we are sticking to what really works, as proven by direct experience by long-practicing members. We need to make clear our intent to move away, as a community, from the mistakes others have made. Content that is at-odds with this purpose will, upon review, be removed.
One last thing, Carlos was standing up when he saw the poodle:
"You think I'm a hopeless idiot, don't you, don Juan?"
"Ah ha!" he said and jumped to his feet.
His reaction was so unexpected that I also jumped up at the same time.
"Tell me exactly what you think my feelings are," he said emphatically.
I felt I knew his feelings. It was as if I were feeling them myself. But when I tried to say what I felt, I realized I could not talk about it. To speak required a tremendous effort.
Don Juan said that I did not have enough power yet to see him. But I could certainly see enough to find myself suitable explanations for what was happening.
"Don't be bashful," he said. "Tell me exactly what you see."
I had a sudden and strange thought, very similar to thoughts that usually come to my mind just before falling asleep. It was more than a thought; a complete image would be a better description of it. I saw a tableau containing various personages. The one which was directly in front of me was a man sitting behind a window frame. The area beyond the frame was diffuse, but the frame and the man were crystal clear. He was looking at me; his head was turned slightly to his left, so he was actually looking askance at me. I could see his eyes moving to keep me within focus. He was leaning on the windowsill with his right elbow. His hand was clenched into a fist and his muscles were contracted.
To the left of the man there was another image in the tableau. It was a flying lion. That is, the head and the mane were those of a lion but the lower part of its body belonged to a curly white French poodle.