I noticed that my previous post was removed, and I’m trying to understand why. If there was an issue with how it was framed or if it didn’t meet the guidelines, I’d genuinely appreciate some clarification.
I’m asking because I’m looking for practical, experience-based insight. While many advanced concepts are discussed here, I haven’t seen a clear, concrete answer to a specific question I raised.
I believe this is an important topic, and if anyone with firsthand experience could share how they progressed from very short periods of lucidity (a few minutes) to sustaining it for extended durations (days or longer), that would be extremely helpful.
I’m especially interested in pragmatic methods and real-world experience rather than theory. Thank you in advance to those willing to share.
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These pages contain more than enough on this, as well as in the linked posts that are listed therein:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/wiki/dreaming
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/wiki/dreaming/womb_dreaming/
We are pretty insistent that men move on from pursuing sleeping dreaming as a primary avenue of practice.
The linked content explains why.
TL;DR it’s a waste of time unless you can already do waking dreaming.
If you’re looking for practitioner input, I’d prefer to see this type of post removed.
I deleted the first one because it didn’t have any responses, and it was a shorter version. But this one already has several comments that should be retained. We’ve also only had three posts in the past three months on 4 Gates Dreaming (plus one from Dan). That’s about the right amount. Enough to acknowledge it, without overemphasizing.
Cool! 🫡
We aren't after lucidity.
Carlos always made fun of that practice in private classes, as did Taisha and Florinda.
Instead, we're after bringing tonal rationality into the dream. To merge with the energy of your double.
Which requires proof. If you can't do what the instructions in the book said, then you didn't even reach the first gate.
If you didn't find your hands, then look from them to objects in the dream, and back again, then you aren't even at the first gate.
Just knowing it's a dream, isn't even useful.
Except in the lucid dreaming subreddit, where they delete my posts if I try to tell them about waking dreaming.
And at the second gate you need to literally go to the IOB realm, and learn from them.
Hundreds of times, for hours and hours and hours.
No one's done that using sleeping dreams.
But several have using dreaming awake.
It seems as if you're pretending your sorcery, something we don't like in here. Thus the answer to why your post got deleted.
It wasn't a serious post.
However, I can answer that question, having gotten so good at finding my hands that I literally went from twice a year, to 6 times a night. While staying in dreams while being aware enough to look at my hands once in a while, to prove I still had rationality, for 12 hours.
12 hours in a single dream!
That was 30 years ago or so.
You get there by being obsessed over it, so that you go to bed at least 2 hours early and spend all of that extra time forcing off your internal dialogue, trying to learn to see a dream image while still awake with your eyes closed, laying down, and then traveling directly into a dream without going to sleep.
And by refusing to let dreams you get hold of, end. Learn to spin around and jump up and down or grab dirt, to change the dream and get more energy.
And also by zipping through a solid wall, or to a mountain far away, ever 1 minute. So prevent yourself from using up the energy at the current dream location.
If a dream ends, you refuse to move in bed, and keep visualizing the last thing you saw. until you re back in the dream.
It's a LOT OF WORK to get good at sleeping dreaming.
However, it's not only a dead end, but it's a complete misreading of Art of Dreaming.
You're picking and choosing from the book, instead of actually trying to follow the steps in there.
Keep in mind, the goal in there is to go into dreaming, and lure your double out into the real world.
We already do that using Tensegrity and "dark room" practice.
We can literally see our double, the dreamer, standing right there next to us.
And switch over to it, if we want to walk through a solid wall.
Did you even bother to look around in here?
There's three private class students of Carlos himself, helping out in here.
Take advantage!
Thank you for answering the my questions. I’m here to learn and grow with you guys. So basically according to you if someone wants to go from only being lucid for 3 min to being there for almost a week it boils downs to these 2 things
1) Being able to find my hands consistently
2) Constantly zooming and zipping across different dream objects in the dream
I really appreciate if you can share other techniques too if I am missing any. I truly want to increase my time systematically with discipline. So open to really learn what other techniques there are that one can do to achieve this. Appreciate all the knowledge and insights
I used to write articles about this on "sustained action", but it's an anti-Carlos site now.
To simply it, you have to take some of your Tonal energy (your daily life's energy) and focus it on your energy inside a dream.
Obsess over it, to break our obsession with the daily world where we've beent rained to ignore or dismiss the dream world as "real".
We've been taught that it's NOT real.
When in fact, it's far more real than our waking world. It's pretty much all that will survive after you did, and at that point anyone who hasn't learned to interact with it daily, will just dissipate forever.
So do everything you can to delibverately enter directly from awake and laying in bed with your eyes closed, into a dream.
Learn about the "barrier of forgetting" where you came from, and what you wanted to do.
The key to that is stopping the internal dialogue, while looking for dream scenes to form.
But the key to that, is not making them go away, on purpose.
We've been trained to block those sights.
So you use internal silence, a complete absence of words in your mind, to perceive dream realms while awake (though laying with your eyes closed), and then you learn to go into dream directly, without ever falling asleep.
Of course, you'll fail miserably, so it's better to get yourself an "Ally" (supernatural spriit that's fully visible), and have them open up a portal into the dream world. Such as an actual door or window, that materializes in your room.
Fortunately, even though you'll fail miserable trying to learn to enter directly into a dream, it'll produce an obsession which will cause you to wake up inside dreams more often.
So then you practice changing dreams, so that it doesn't fade away too soon, holding onto dreams when they end by refusing to move in bed, and visualizing the last thing you saw, and then ultimately you learn to change dreams.
perhaps by laying down to go to sleep, inside a dream.
Which produces a time change where 1 hour in the dream, is only 1 minute in the real world.
There's endless more techniques such as grabbing dirt when the dream starts to fade.
But all of those require enough rationality inside the dream, to remember to do that.
And lucid dreaming is NOT done with much rationality.
It's typically almost pointless because people give in to self-flattery, and don't want to actually pay attention to what's happening.
You know you've gotten somewhere, when your lucid dreamer finds it way out into the real world, and your waking body can literally see it standing right there.
Cholita's dreamer can even move objects in the 'real' world.
Watch some movies to see how COOL waking dreaming is, and also how women do "womb dreaming" and learn about alternate timelines.
Also how to enter directly into a dream of the past, using recapitulation.
But the end shows how to zip right into the past, in your physical body.
Here's how you succeed at dreaming awake, from a technical point of view of why its possible. It also shows at the end, what you yourself can do if you skip the obsession with recycling your sleeping time and make some time to practice while awake.
The two entities in there, are the actual allies of Carlos himself,. which he gave to one private class before he died.
I'm 99% certain it's "little smoke" (the moth), and "the devil's weed entity" (the talking lizards).
But either way, both will help you if you put in a serious effort.
I've read several books about lucid dreaming. The best technique is to wake up early, pee, and go back to sleep. When I find my hands in a dream, I start saying out loud: "Hands, objects, hands, objects, hands, objects." It's funny to remember, but awareness remains. However, I don't cause lucid dreams on purpose. I like that people in this place are focusing on waking dreaming.