NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/alt/dreams/4523

Text File | 1992-12-30 | 3.0 KB | 65 lines

Newsgroups: alt.dreams
Path: sparky!uunet!tcsi.com!hermes!miket
From: [e-mail] (Michael Turner nmscore Assoc.)
Subject: Re: More subtle reality checking...
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail]
Organization: Teknekron Communications Inc.
References: <[e-mail]>
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1992 22:56:24 GMT
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In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Olaf Titz) writes:
>Recently I've come across the experience that a more subtle way of
>reality checking could perhaps achieve more. If you follow the
>instruction, "just ask yourself, am I dreaming, the whole day long",
>this sounds so silly, it'll be hard to remember continuously.
>
>But I've reached lucidity recently by recognizing certain
>inconsistencies in the environment that caught my attention "by
>themselves". E.g. I went to the football arena and after the match had
>begun, I suddenly was inside of a big hall - they had relocated the
>match to indoors :-) This was weird enough to get me aware of the fact
>I was dreaming. Now the important thing is that I was not actively
>checking for such things, but rather have sharpened my attention to
>such weirdnesses so that I can recognize them even while dreaming.
>Maybe this is easier to learn, but I'm not sure.

I think this is part of why meditation helps with lucid dreaming.
With most meditation techniques, one thing they start you out with
is paying attention to whether you're paying attention.

Another technique suggests itself from the discussion of dream characters:
people feel that they often communicate telepathically with people in
their dreams.  Maybe one helpful thing might be to try to do this in waking
life -- or at least notice that you aren't sucessful.

I've had at least one lucid dream in which the cue was getting a whole
lot more meaning out of a strangers's mere glance than I ever get in
waking life (usually, anyway).

--------

On a tangent, here: I'm reading a collection of biographical essays about
the poet Gary Snyder.  It has some accounts of his time in Japan, with
his Japanese counterpart, Nanao Sasaki.  While the Beat/Hippie scene was
coalescing over here, there was another, smaller formation going on in
Tokyo.  These people adopted a collective slogan: "There is a dream
dreaming us."

In this book, there is a quote from a letter from Snyder when he
was studying Zen, commenting on the low regard for Zen in Japan among
the intelligentsia of the time (50's and early 60's).  In this letter
he predicts (tongue partly in cheek, I'm sure) that the Japanese won't
start getting interested in their own spiritual traditions again until
they've become fully Westernized.

Then a few weeks ago, I read a column in the Wall Street Journal talking
about how the Japanese, who are dealing with their extended first period of
slow-growth and/or recession, are turning to meditation and other spiritual
pursuits -- including the study of dreams, forming dream-groups, etc.

I guess they're doing their own "subtle reality check".
---
Michael Turner