I’m working on my startle response and annoyance to blanking out as I start getting pulled into dreams. I think from having so many nightmares and almost never having anything resembling a lucid dream my whole life, I have a bit of a phobia about them.
It’s just now occurring to me as I’m typing that I probably need to start specifically recapitulating my dreams, because I keep spontaneously remembering them more and more during my practice sessions.
Yesterday after getting things going with the tensegrity intent series, I made it to a point where all the vivid colors and abstract objects I was gazing at and interacting with faded to a view of a whiteish surface that covered my whole vision, and was very close to my face, and there was a notable change in how my whole body felt. I felt like I suddenly wasn’t struggling to stay silent, and that not thinking felt effortless.
As I gazed across the whiteish surface, I started noticing little “things” or disturbances in the white that looked like some detail I would focus on, and I started finding myself in full dream scenes, as though I were falling asleep and a dream was starting.
I would vaguely know what was happening, and would get “spat” back out of the dream, where then I could see the “spot” where I came out of, notice another disturbance on a different part of the close-up surface, and then get surrounded by or pulled into another dream.
This happened over and over again about five times. Unfortunately, I can’t remember any of the details of the scenes I was pulled into, except that one seemed to be outdoors in a park or on a trail in the woods. The most notable thing for me was that I never completely blanked out.
Unfortunately, I can’t remember what happened after, as I was interrupted by a phone call.
This seems to be a little bit of progress in not *completely* blanking out, and being able to go in and out of a few dreams. But I do feel like this is something I particularly need to work on.
I must give credit to u/drinkjetfuel for the conversation we had about blankouts and dream scenes in his recent post, that gave me some motivation to push past my annoyances. And going through other practitioner’s posts and comments about their experiences with them and entering dreams has also been very motivating and helpful as well!
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u/danl999 has a post where he claims we should be recapitulating our dreams. I think an IOB told him. So that tracks.
And on blankouts, it seems like you’re in agreement that they’re good and a sign that your AP is shifting.
Cool experience! Thanks for sharing.
Thank you!
It makes sense, I’ve just always hated dreaming before starting waking dreaming practice 😅
So, clearly an issue to work out and get over.
We must recapitulate all the experiences of our lives, even those of second attention!!
nice post btw!!!✨🤗
Thank you! 🩵
And you’re absolutely right, it’s unavoidable
I remember from the books (maybe from The Art Of Dreaming) that Carlos complained to Don Juan that he had been recap his entire life and that he had nothing else to remember. The answer he received was that he still had a lot to recap, as sometimes even the smallest details need to be remembered because even in them much is hidden!
Your comment has funny timing… I just stopped a darkroom session and saw you just commented this!
During the session, I got to a point where I was watching these white sparkly blobs start morphing into dream scenes as more details appeared as I stared at them, and suddenly I remembered my dream from last night’s sleep, so I started to recap it on the spot, breathing with the head-sweep.
I could see everything very clearly as I ran through it backwards, and it felt and looked like I was back in the dream. The more I recapped, the more details I remembered, and the more details I remembered, the more of the dream I re-experienced (except in reverse order from how it happened).
I like it when this happens! It happens a lot between many practitioners ... we'll write something, say or think something off-sub reddit and then it's here, written and waiting!
Florinda Donner had a problem with nightmares. As far as I remember, she needed to do a recapitulation. Fortunately, I've had the habit of writing down and thinking about dreams since childhood, so nightmares are rare. There is a notebook and pencil next to the bed.
It definitely seems like it can be helpful to do! That should really come in handy for any recapitulation you need to do, or maybe you already do that?
It doesn’t appeal to me at all… so maybe that means I should give it a go 😂
Another tip from the books is An Album of Memorable Events. I have only 12 pages. One of the pages is a dream map. These are locations that are often repeated in dreams: homes, schools, institutes, places of work. I still often dream about locations from video games. It seems to me that this should also help with understanding nightmares.
Blank out is a bitch.
It's tempting to think it's a "behind the veil" kind of thing.
But actually that's a bit of a kabalistic point of view, which means it's from people who could barely do anything interesting at all, and even then only once a year for an instant. But they bragged themselves up into "Prophets", so that people take that point of view seriously in Christian countries. EuroMagick has a lot of it.
Meanwhile we're at a different level of going in and out of other realities multiple times every single night. With no one to brag to about it.
And we even have our double come out of the dream world, and into the real world, to stand right next to us.
I get to see my double almost every night.
So we have things going on both directions.
And are in a better position to clarify what happens that causes blank out when you cross the barrier.
What happens that confuses our tonal copy, is that there's TWO OF YOU.
And no reason to expect to switch back and forth as if there were only one.
To make it even more complicated, the double can come out and make a perfect copy of our tonal being.
But our tonal being can supposedly make a perfect copy of your dreamer!
So there's FOUR OF US????
I have no idea, but in light of all that, there's really no reason to expect you can skip back and forth, without some memory issues.
Cholita for example, is not usually aware of what her double did.
And when she is, it's only for an hour or two.
After that, she doesn't seem to be able to recall any of it.
I use multiple AIs to draw things, then pick the best.
This time, Grok fell prey to the "Superman effect"!
So that tendency seems to be inherent in the Ai training database!
Grok made this version where it interpreted that a woman with this much power, is kind of like superman.
😂 So even AI is “only human” sometimes!
Well that explains a lot of weirdness that goes on the more I practice.
And just to make it more confusing, in last night’s dream that I suddenly remembered during darkroom practice about an hour ago that I was just now telling Bilissss about in another comment, I was three different people who weren’t “me”! 😵💫
Multiply the weirdness you think goes on, by 4.
Unfortunately as our assemblage point moves, "weirdness" can seem 100% normal and we don't notice it at the time.
And later is too late. It evaporates from what we might call our "memory".
I had an odd experience last night.
I was watching an open market on dirt in some other country. It was steady and stable and I was surprised I could watch it for so long, even moving along as if someone had a camera and was walking through the market, so I could see what was for sale there.
So to make sure I could remember it, I gave it "two thumbs up". That helps find the memory later on, since it's now connected with a physical movement and an actual deliberately chosen action.
A memory that is only connected to the second attention, is next to impossible to recall.
But if you can tie it to the first attention too, you have a much better chance of recalling it.
About 2 hours later while watching other visions floating in the air, unwilling to move my body at all, I became puzzled why it was so easy to raise my arms and my thumbs, for the more encompassing vision of the foreign marketplace.
I didn't hesitate at all to move for that one.
Then I realized, that wasn't me. That was my double, giving the scene the thumbs up.
I had literally leaned horizontally into the scene, defying gravity on both sides of the video.
So your double helped out because you had enough rationality, or tonal awareness, to want to give the thumbs up then. And your double made the impossible, possible.
That has to be another practical aspect of doing tensegrity then: not just manipulating the energy you’re seeing and perceiving, but getting your tonal involved to make memory access to the second attention more likely?
Because I do find it easier to remember experiences in the second attention if I was doing tensegrity during them. Or some deliberate physical action like saying “hello” or something out loud.
Remembering more easily what I did, and in remembering what I did, remembering the details around what I was seeing/experiencing that made me do that.
We don't really have the answers to stuff like this so we'll have to discover them ourselves.
My latest theory is that our path is somewhat different than the "Nagual's Blow" path of the lineages, and we'll end up with more "in-between states".
Some of which will involve partially being in your double when you seem to be awake normally, or partially in your tonal if it's a sleeping dream.
That's good progress!! This happens to some of us as you know the back and forth from gazing to dreaming from awake , getting fully into the double awareness from blanking out or not, it doesn't matter at this level. And the memory lose is a thing that occurs to all of us. I suspect it has to do with recollecting dreaming energy and good recap. Since also we struggle to keep awareness in the dream, check our hands, do something with intent there, not getting lost in the sauce of the dream scenario, maintain the dream.... Which is a long list of stuff to master.
Thanks! 😊 that’s encouraging to know, and makes me feel a little less cognitively impaired lol
Definitely posts that you and others here have shared about transitioning into dreams from awake have been helping me feel less confused about what’s going on, and more empowered to push forward (even if it‘s a bit startling and disorienting!)
Keep up the good work and everything will fall into place sooner or later, just like many of the questions we have daily about everything we experience are solved in one way or another!
We are all creating a kind of "connection" that is quite constructive!!!🔥💪