Tag: Lucid Dreaming

Flying – Shot At – Antique Rifle Dream – 02-10-2025

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Here is this morning’s dream. It is the first flying dream that I have had in a very long time. Previously a long while ago I was able to direct the flying as one might in a lucid dreaming scenario. I quickly realised that this, although pleasant, was not dreaming proper.

The dream opens on a grassy hillside looking out over verdant countryside. The hill is a part of a range of hills rising out of a very flat farming countryside, a patchwork of fields. It is UK or Northern Europe. The sun is low in the sky, East. It is not long after dawn and there is a dew on the grass. I am enjoying the morning sun on my face. It is morning and I am very much alive because of it. I feel the breeze blowing towards the South along the range of hills.

I lean into the breeze and allow it to lift me. I am soaring on the breeze like wearing a wing suit though much lighter in feel and slower of velocity. I can soar like a raptor, a condor on the thermals at the edge of the range of hills. I am dressed in my normal combats and a Berghaus fleece. My hair has grown. I bank towards the East.

There is a brief interlude in which I look down on Sicily from an altitude of space. I can see the geographic contours of the island as per a map.

I am now back on the wind flying around a hundred metres or so above the hillside. I notice stones and bullets starting to whizz by me. Someone is taking pot shots. I land behind a small rocky outcrop. Down on the flat land behind a dry stone wall I can see two old Land Rovers in khaki. There are men with slingshots and modern black semi-automatic rifles shooting at me.

I find my antique rifle which has a wooden body, the wood is a burnished chestnut colour, it is bolt action and has a small magazine. It has a telescopic sight. It is a hunting or sniper rifle. I hold the trigger grip in my right hand and bring my left eye to the sight. I can clearly see the men behind the wall. I fire a shot and notice it is slightly off where I am aiming. I adjust the sight and remember that the bullets are low calibre, there is not much of a recoil. I use my right hand to operate the bolt action. I then get various members of the party with their heads  in the sight. I know that I could easily kill them. Instead I aim a shot at the top of the stone wall. It strikes between two of the men. They recoil and duck. I repeat the action between two more of the men. The men are now all down behind the wall. They run for the cars and drive off. As they do this I shoot one of the cargo rails on top of the rear Land Rover. I can hear the metal on metal from where I am. I place the rifle on the floor and launch back into flight.

This time I soar higher and can see the cars winding down the country roads. I am enjoying myself considerably in the morning sunshine. On a hillside in the middle distance I can see my wife sat meditating. In front of her drying in the sun are a t-shirt and her combat style sweat pants. I fly over to look at her. She is wearing a full shawl. She is not yet ready to fully take flight. By mid-afternoon she will be ready. I will come back for her then. I head off towards the sea. I know some ocean cliffs there where I can be with the seabirds for a while.

The dream ends.

Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) Dream ? – Turing Test

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Last night as I was drifting off to sleep a question popped into mind, “can AI dream?”. It was followed up by another question, “Can AI be taught to dream?” “And if so, would AI be fully lucid when it was dreaming?”. “Would AI know the difference between awake and slumber?”

“Or would it simply dream of electric sheep?”

I thought to myself that I had better nip this line of thought in the bud otherwise I would be awake for a long time. I thought that I have hundreds of dreams in word format and they could be used to teach an AI “entity” to dream like me. I don’t know how AI training works but a true test of human-like intelligence would be a capacity to dream without the pseudo-rational control of “wakefulness”.

That kind of intelligence would exhibit an intuition something which geniuses often cite as important. AI in order to mimic humans needs to have fantasy including sexual fantasy. Already I have heard of AI hallucinations.

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Can machines think? Can AI dream?

This question is along the lines of a Turing Test. How could we measure, prove or disprove in the dreaming ability of AI?

Dreaming would be a ground-breaking game-changing faculty of artificial intelligence…

I could ask an AI bot to dream and see what happened…

It is safe to think this now, in the middle of the day.

Dreaming if AI can dream is safe at 13:15 on a summer’s day…

Castaneda and Neuroscience

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Prompted by the dream the other day I have been having a little look into neuroscience. It seems that there is much interest in using hallucinogens to {perhaps} help with mental health. There is interest in the crossover between dreams and hallucinogenic activity. This from “Frontiers in Neuroscience”.

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In the books of Castaneda, don Juan introduces him to peyote (lophophora williamsii), jimson weed (datura) and magic mushrooms (psylocibin). Castaneda describes some of his outlandish experiences whilst off his trolly. Castaneda wrote a book on “The Art of Dreaming” which perhaps tacitly lies aback much of the Lucid Dreaming genre. One could suggest that Castaneda had an effect on neuroscience and the psychology of dreams. If you look at the graph below from the above article the similarity of psychoactive experience and dream lucidity is correlated with the don Juan substances of choice. Only LSD outperforms the “natural” substances. Cannabis comes close. {Man}

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When I was ill, I was prescribed the MAOI phenelzine which had no psychoactive effects, as far as I could tell. I had one hypertensive crisis at a business dinner in Japan, something iffy with tryamine in the seaweed. Those Nitrogen atoms look receptor ready…hydrogen bonding to the fore.

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“Phenelzine, sold under the brand name Nardil among others, is a non-selective and irreversible monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) of the hydrazine family which is primarily used as an antidepressant and anxiolytic to treat depression and anxiety. Along with tranylcypromine and isocarboxazid, phenelzine is one of the few non-selective and irreversible MAOIs still in widespread clinical use.”

I used this for probably one year. It is a MAOI to the right of the graph.

I have had limited exposure to magic mushrooms and LSD, over thirty years ago and I stopped smoking week in 1999.

Obviously if one is doing research, it must seem pukka and thoroughly scientific. I doubt anyone acknowledges Castaneda though some may have read him…

Unprecedented Dreaming

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For me it has been a useful exercise to group these dreams thematically and see the scope and variety of subject matter. Many people are interested in dreams and things like lucid dreaming. There is an attempt to gain scientific credibility for dream studies using instrumentation and the statistical methods of psychology. Taken as a whole the opus of dreams published here and those not yet published may be unprecedented, and unique. Who else dreams of vajras, patents, lamas and hydrogen bonded water clusters?   

Am I simply an anomaly or is there something more significant at work?

In general people seek to promote their own ideas and profile. The not invented here syndrome can be found on all sides. Group mind is very anti anyone or any idea which does not originate in the group. Outsiders are not very welcome especially if they challenge the status quo or question current operational dogma.

I did, religiously, a Toltec dreaming practice daily at least once a day for eight years. I did it on the Victoria line of a morning. If you can do dreaming practice on a crowded rush hour tube you can do it anywhere. The control has to be good. The intent behind this practice is to connect with the dreamer {Soul or reincarnating Jiva} and then to hand over the steering wheel of the earthly vehicle to her. To live life according to the advice given in dreams, to surrender control.

Subsequent to this I did a meditation called the master in the heart which has a similar purpose, of connection. It builds the Antahkarana, a rāja yoga. One could say that Toltec dreaming draws inspiration down and the yoga builds upwards. They are rose and lotus visualisations. Union or at-one-ment are the goals or aim if you like. It does not require wearing tight leggings or looking fit / hot. It does mean that some measure of letting go of imagined control is needed.

Because I am good at visualisation, I have extended the rāja yoga to “places” beyond any written account. In Toltec terms a steady pictorial visualisation is an active dream in which you imagine and hold fast an image. These dream thought forms tend to stabilize when they are “accurate” and reproducible.  For example, the Sahasrāra chakra or crown chakra is one such visualisation. Opening this chakra and going beyond it is a death practice in which one opens the exit door. In order to do this one needs to stretch the sūtrātman anchoring the life inside the body. It is a risky thing to do, control must be impeccable. I first did this in a detached house in the middle of a wood on a country estate a distance from interruption and people. During the day I was quite alone in a “cabin” in a wood.

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Because I am a scientist by training and I used to train smart young things in science at a top university and at high school sixth form levels. I even had postdoctoral workers. I have kept lab books or dream journals. The rāja yoga or active dream meditations were extensive with some of the thought forms taking weeks and months to build.  What one experiences in passing to a “higher” more “rarefied” state of consciousness is a kind of “membrane” which has to be transcended / popped. Each new state is difficult to hold or stabilize. Yet with practice it can be done. Here is one page from my dream journal.

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In these meditations slight residual corporeal awareness remains but all sense of earth-time vanishes. There is a distant awareness of the room. One continues breathing but unconsciously so. I did record electroencephalograms {EEG} and video for a few of these. The EEG is, aside from very low frequency and amplitude theta, essentially flat despite the visualisation.

These meditations have a sensation of extensive travel to non-mundane “levels” “states” or “places”.

There is no way that I could adequately convey the experience to others. Unless you have “gone” there yourself you cannot know. Of particular assistance was the mantra associated with the Heart Sutra which one can chant in order to change between states when working upwards.

Gate gate, para gate, para sum gate bodhi svaha

Gone gone, gone beyond, gone beyond the beyond, hail the awakening

I was in conscious control doing this during daylight and without drugs or booze.

One needs to take great care to come back “down” and into body consciousness. At first the “path” downwards is as slow as the “upward”. In time one knows the way “home” and this can be done more quickly.

I guess these meditations are a form of white tantra. They are situated at anja and above and have nothing to do with basal tantra. In some later meditations three centres are active, heart, anja and sahasrāra.

In my book active visualisation and 3d {sometimes +} thought form building is active dreaming.

Of course I could be kidding myself, but I somehow doubt that.

This is what I mean by dreamyoga…

Dream Recall as a Metaphor for Past-life Recall.

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Phowa is a tantric practice found in both Hinduism and Buddhism. It may be described as “transference of consciousness at the time of death”, “mind-stream transference”, “the practice of conscious dying”, or “enlightenment without meditation”. In Tibetan Buddhism phowa is one of the Six yogas of Naropa and also appears in many other lineages and systems of teaching.

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Tibetan Vajrayana Bon and Dzogchen inspired Buddhism is highly complex and rooted deep in tradition and lineage. It has an extensive death practice called Phowa in which one transfers consciousness, consciously, at the transition between corporeal and not. Timing is everything. Lamas and priests can enable others with ritual and there are publications like “The Tibetan Book of the Dead”. To an experimentalist like me these could be seen as recipes or syntheses to attempt in my body laboratory. One aspect is to hold a visual of pure white Amitabha Buddha for another being in transition.

A text might stimulate a memory recall of something done before.

It is common parlance to suggest memory from past lives. I’ll speculate that a lot of this is wishful thinking. Anecdotally many claim “famous” named prior incarnations. Ordinary people claim these. I’ll speculate that a non-ordinary or special being will incarnate in an even less ordinary vehicle next time around. There is a bit of dodgy logic with Joe Bloggs claiming Genghis Khan. Evolution is a planetary principle. Most people will have “normal” “humdrum” lives, over and over.

To develop a train of thought.

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If the consciousness leaves the body by sudden jolt or force or with the mental incapacity of age it is unlikely to remember the former abode. With jolt comes trauma which might overarch any memory.  To have sufficient control of mind to consciously withdraw requires a considerable degree of realisation and attainment, which is likely to be rare. Such beings able to exit smoothly and under control are more likely to retain memories of previous lives. They are lucid in the act of death, aware of event and conscious therein. They may have practised this across several lifetimes. They practise lucid dying.  So, if they set their intent on remembering a life learning, they do. Just as one learns to remember and recall dreams. Dream recall is a skill which can be developed. Metaphorically life recall may also be a skill which can be honed.

In this train of thought only the more highly skilled and practiced will have any decent recall. It is likely that they may be able to recall many lives. There will be a first time recall of life.

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From Wikipedia

Enumerations of special knowledges

In the Pali Canon, the higher knowledges are often enumerated in a group of six or of three types of knowledge.

The six types of higher knowledges (chalabhiññā) are:

  • “Higher powers” (iddhi-vidhā), such as walking on water and through walls.
  • “Divine ear” (dibba-sota), that is, clairaudience.
  • “Mind-penetrating knowledge” (ceto-pariya-ñāṇa), that is, telepathy.
  • “Remember one’s former abodes” (pubbe-nivāsanussati), causal memory, that is, recalling one’s own past lives.
  • “Divine eye” (dibba-cakkhu), that is, knowing others’ karmic destinations; and,
  • “Extinction of mental intoxicants” (āsavakkhaya), upon which arahantship follows.

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This suggests that past life recall is not a beginner’s skill.

To extend the metaphor just as one learns to remember and recall dreams night after night one starts to recall former abodes. The knowledge from which advises on karmic effort needed. In order to better recall one needs to die lucidly just as one needs to be lucid and aware of the enactment of the dreaming state of consciousness.

Each life is a new dream for the dreamer.

In the logic of reincarnation lucid dream recall is a metaphor for the putative recall of past life memories. It is internally consistent. The degree of lucidity and extent and detail of recall must vary.

If you start to remember your dreams better you might re-member previous lives.

Can Nocturnal Dreams Change Lives?

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In the limit if you have a lucid (aware) nocturnal dream and you remember it on waking your life has already changed. You can’t un-have the dream, you may not place much stock or import to the dream but your life has changed a tad. You have had an experience. Some dreams can be dramatically life altering. A persistent nightmare may induce a fear of sleep and cause disturbed sleep patterns.

Religious texts often refer to dreams and world events can pivot because of these dreams. The search for a Tibetan tulku can be aided by dreams. The pharaoh stored grain. We have the ghost of Christmas past.

I have some misgivings concerning some of the things pertaining to dreams and dreaming which I am coming across of late. I guess there is an overlay, in which I am too whacko for mainstream physical sciences and too hardcore meany scientist on the other hand.

I can say truthfully that I have made major life decisions based upon my interpretation of my passive lucid nocturnal dreams. These include getting out of an employment contract for a ~8000 euro a month tax free job. This suggests that I am not messing around. I make serious decisions with real world consequences. There are at least half a dozen instances of significant “real” world impact.

I have had a disquieting dream this morning which perhaps speaks of something in process or yet to come. It concerns some people I know. It may be nothing or it may be heralding, we may get circumstantial evidence post hoc. I have previously been able to correlate a dream of someone dying in a timely fashion with their reported death on the other side of the planet. You can’t prove prediction but you can note a temporal correlation. It could be coincidence I tend to err away from that explanation.

The basic intent behind my dreaming practice is to listen to my dreamer or Soul and to actively, in physical plane mundane day-to-day life, to evolve a fate. This seems different from what I have been reading about of late. Some people seek to play out fantasies in dreaming, which seems to be straying away from any notion of liberation. For me although it may sound weird, dreaming helps me to be real. It does broaden my perceptual horizon but on occasion it provokes a seemingly harsh choice. Which only makes sense subsequently.

In my case my response to my nocturnal dreams has changed my life trajectory. So, in at least one instance, the answer is yes.

Passive Nocturnal Lucid Dreaming

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Schredl et al. have published a questionnaire to measure lucid dreaming skills, IJODR vol 11, Page 54 in 2018.

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There are some differences in approach.

In every single case when I am having a dream which I am able to recall I am fully aware that I am dreaming. I don’t have to decide, I know. This makes many of the questions superfluous for me. If one logically knows that one is dreaming it follows that the objects in dreams are not real as measured by physical plane notions of reality. You know you are dreaming there is no doubt or confusion.

I also often know that a dreaming symbol is a dreaming symbol while I am dreaming it. I can interpret it live.

I personally am very wary about setting intentions in a dream.

Logically If you have a dream and you recall it, it has already affected your waking life. By writing it down your life has changed. You can’t un-have a dream. Some of them can have profound impact.

For a while I had prescient dreams.

I have made life changing decisions because of dreams including ones with very significant financial impact.

When I first started, I did play with flying and jumping. I no longer do this.

In most dreams I let the dream play out, I am both observer and participant. I do martial arts in some dreams, but I don’t consciously think “I will throw this dude”. I do it.  I am not sure where the idea of a dream “body” comes from. I have a BMI of 33, does that count? I experience a sensation of “me” not it/body/meat. The vehicle can do things I can no longer do. I do have sensations, smoking in dreams being an example.

I don’t have to decide to observe. When I have “finished” a dream, I can recall and replay it on many occasions which I do to assist recall. I can go back into dreams which I have noted down. I have been doing this this afternoon. I can recall quite a few past dreams to waking consciousness even without the aide memoire of a journal entry.

I have no sense of how long time is in dreams. You can pack a hell of a lot into 15 planet earth minutes.

I can if needed wake up. Sometimes the dream fades, but I can often re-enter a dream where it left off.

Note of caution – if you go to take a piss in a dream you had better wake up first.

I’ll comment that for something to be bizarre for me it will be off the scale bizarre and weird for “normal” people. If you don’t believe me sit down and read a swath of my dreams.

The principle idea I subscribe to is that my dreams help me to evolve my fate in this life and advise on any karmic steps which need to be taken, this is my dreaming philosophy. Part of the notion of this is to let go of control and to let the dream of life evolve. One gives the steering wheel over to the dreamer.,

I don’t recognise emotions in dreams. Even in very “scary” dream situations I have no fear. The exceptions to this were way back when I had unable to move nightmares. These have passed.

I do magic in dreams.

The problem with intention setting in dreams is that it can get a bit like witchdoctor / voodoo. Best not mess with that stuff, especially when one is not fully compos mentis.

Some dreams are so very intense, others not, I generally dream in technicolour.

Many of the characters in my dreams are real world people who pop up in my dreams.

Although fully lucid and aware whilst dreaming there is no checking or other technical things. There is some overlap but there are technical differences.

I guess the biggest difference is that I sometimes interpret “real” world day-to-day happenstance as dreaming symbols. If you have problems with your physical plane car you have problems with your vehicle your state of awareness!!  

Dreaming and Intuition are they linked?

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In terms of MBTI, I have a clear INFJ preference. I have very high scores for N intuition and J judging. This means that I am a bit of time freak, I like to be early and get things done well before any deadline. It has come as a shock to some that I am very introverted.

My dominant function is introverted intuition, which means that few get to see what goes on internally. Occasionally people are very surprised at what pops out. I have some skill in envisioning, so called big picture thinking, but pictures are generally 2d so that description is limited.

Intuition comes in various degrees from knowing the next number in a number sequence puzzle to having a profound insight into the psyche or soul of others based on little “evidence”. The first case of intuition here is an extension of logic. The second is an unexplainable knowing.

 Intuition can be re-written inner-tuition.

Where a kind of learning happens as if by magic. If I cannot solve a problem, I leave it to my background processors intentionally and then a few days later a solution or a new way of thinking comes into mind, ta-da!

Dreaming, passive dreaming at night, does not come from outside. So, we could call this internal process, intuition, particularly if insights arrive in a dream. Dreaming is a subset of intuition.  

I personally trust my intuition and dreams more than what is said in overt and verbal conversation or even text. If there is divergence, I trust my inner-tuition over what is presented or spun. Being introverted I don’t let on.

In esoteric psychology some dreams can be termed “dramatizations of the soul” in which the soul is trying to assist the mundane being. You can’t get more inner inner-tuition than that.

Statistically INFJ is the least common personality type. If you know one hundred people then only one of them is INFJ. {Of course, INFJs cluster in certain professions}. Many of us report problems fitting in with society and the square peg in a round hole is a depiction of the INFJ. There are lots of different visualisations of INFJ because INFJs often like metaphor and allegory.

Because INFJs are interested in things like psychology, then it follows that many may have an interest in passive nocturnal and active lucid dreaming.

Some dreams are internal dialogue and daily angst carried into sleep. I’ll suggest that at certain depths dreaming is a form of inner-tuition or intuition. There are similarities to heightened meditative states and conscious nocturnal dreaming.

The trick is learning how to remember your dreams and transfer them into the so-called waking “reality” of life quotidian.

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Commentary on my Tibetan Themed Dreams

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The first thing to say is that one cannot un-have dreams of high vividness. They make an impression on life and in a sense, they change one. The dreams collected under this category were all markedly vivid.

My dreams have pointed to a possible three Buddhist incarnations, one Indian, one Japanese and one Thai. In one case there is a named individual. An incarnation of said individual has been recognised by the Tibetan Buddhists in exile as a tulku incarnation.

 What, if anything, does one do with these dreams and that “knowledge”?

I’ll speculate that if anyone sits down and reads all these dreams in one go it will have a weird effect on them, it will twist their melon so to speak. I’ll speculate that I am probably unique in having dreams about Vajrayana, quantum and patents.

In 2009 I gave a short course at “The Academy of Dreams”, a venue run by a psychotherapist. There I met a young man Charlie Morely who is interested in Lucid Dreaming. He invited me to talk at the Kagyu Samye Dzong in London, which I did. I subsequently attended two group empowerments by Chöje Akong Rinpoche in White Tara and Padmasambhava, Guru Rinpoche. To my eyes they were fairly shamanic rituals.

I had the Bakula dream before any physical plane contact with Tibetan Buddhism. I had not heard of Bakula nor the sixteen arhats. Being an ex-academic, I discussed this dream with an academic Buddhist scholar monk in Germany and a monk at the local Thai forest Buddhist centre. I sent it off to a senior Tibetan Kagyu person. The return comment was that it was a nice dream, end of.

Although the search for Tulku incarnations within the Tibetan community employs dreams and visions, they come from within the Sangha and not without. I am not in the club.

All of this is preceded by a dream with Djwhal Khul in it. He is supposedly the author behind many of the Alice Bailey books and therein he says he is an abbot of a lamasery near Shigatze Tibet, from time to time.

“Don’t worry it was just a dream…”

To me these dreams seem significant and point at something of a perhaps wider import. However, my prediction is that any outcome is extremely unlikely. A hairy arsed Welshman in Brittany is somehow wrong and not malleable.

I have had numerous other dreams which say that I will not be believed. Aside from the theme of “somebody else’s huge mess” it is right up there, near top, in the recurrence rate.

So far, I have had no dream or vision of me in a Tibetan life. But I am dreaming in senior and important figures in Tibetan Buddhism. In particular I feel affinity for the relative anarchy of Chögyam Trungpa.

I cannot rule a Tibetan life out, yet. The likelihood is low in my estimation. In ~2005 I had a series of visions of me as a Buddhist monk/priest with Om Mane Padme Hum tattooed in Sanskrit on my arm. {The Tibetan script is now more prevalent than the Sanskrit on the internet, I checked and it was Sanskrit.} I was however unable to see the colour of robe. They were a waking dream. I even gave lectures on Chemical Reactions Kinetics to around 100 students whilst having them in perceptual overlay.

To discuss this with university physical science academics at the time would have had a lead balloon effect and perhaps a recommendation for prompt psychiatry. Past-life recall is considered a tad whacko in that peer group.

My current hypothesis is that I will eke out the rest of this life here doing gardening and perhaps a bit of blogging. I am no big cheese and although I have had the phenomena of these dreams in practical terms there is little that I can do with them. Their impact remains upon me and the wife.

Any dreams incoming may change that hypothesis. I am currently working with a dream from March which suggests that I have a human puzzle to solve before anyone will listen to me…