Technique of imagined rotation

lucid dreamingr tries to imagine that his body is rotating along his head-to-toe axis. The end goal is to replace imagined sensations with real ones. Rotation may generally take place on any plane, but one shouldn’t try to visualize it or try to see oneself from the side, as the main emphasis is on one’s own vestibular sensations.

Technique of real rotation

lucid dreamingr tries to rotate the sensation of his physical body along his head-to-toe axis. In this case, the process need not be visualized or imagined. You should start off from real sensations, although the plane of rotation may be changed at will.

Swing-set technique

lucid dreamingr tries to feel that he is riding a swing-set, or that his body itself is rocking with the same range of motion. The primary goal is to achieve the realistic sensation of swinging and try to make 360o revolutions.

Along with all the positive experiences and sensations that may be enjoyed in lucid dreaming, experiences of a painful nature may also manifest. Punching a wall in a deep lucid dreaming state will cause the same pain as if a wall had been struck in physical reality.

Some actions in lucid dreaming may unavoidably cause unpleasant feelings of pain; therefore, it is necessary to know how to avoid painful actions. Focusing on an internal confidence that pain will not result from an action will alleviate the problem. A practitioner may experiment with this type of focus by pummeling a wall while resolving that there is no pain. If the experiment succeeds, then obtaining the same result will never again require the same level of effort; thinking that lucid dreaming is painless will suffice.

New York, USA

I wake up to slight consciousness and I’m unsure if I have moved or not. My first thought is to go back to sleep, but then I decide to try to enter lucid dreaming. I apply forced falling asleep and immediately start to feel vibrations. They fluctuate between strong and mild and I start to feel them subside. I then remember what I always tell myself: if I get vibrations, then I’m already in lucid dreaming. So I try to roll out of my body… There is resistance, but I am able to do it.

I stand up in my current apartment and it is completely dark. As I am walking to the front door, I try to put my right index finger through my left palm to make sure I am in lucid dreaming. It works, and so I open the door to the hallway but it looks nothing like my actual hall. It is still very dim and there is another gentleman there. I point to different areas and say the word “lights”, and sure enough, one-by-one they come on. I keep touching things to engage the senses as I am walking. I walk into a room with a young boy in it and he is watching TV. I think about my plan of action and remember that I wanted to try the teleportation technique in SOBT. I had previously been teleporting by melting through the floor but it was unreliable and I would end up in darkness sometimes. I had read in Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming that closing your eyes in a dream can cause you to wake up, but I figured that if Michael does it all the time then this isn’t fact.

I ask the boy where should I go… to a football game? He says yes, but then I figure that since I have never actually been to a football game, I should go to a basketball game instead. I close my eyes and concentrate on where I wanted to go. I start to feel movement and even get the feeling you get when going down a huge drop on a rollercoaster. When the movement stops, I open my eyes. It has worked, and I am standing in the middle of an arena while a basketball game is going on. I take a step onto the court and immediately the referee blows the whistle to stop the game and get me off of the court. I go sit in the stands and began talking to one of the prettier girls. I don’t remember what we were talking about, but after a short while she wants to exit the main arena and go towards the concession stands and bathrooms. You can guess where the rest of the experience went.

London, UK

After an eventful day at the park with our children, Stacey and I went to bed around 12:30 am. I’d had a glass of milk and a couple of chocolate digestive biscuits before going to bed. I was so tired that it didn’t take me long to fall asleep. I woke up at 3.50 am to use the bathroom. My sleep inertia symptoms were strong and it felt like the perfect opportunity for an out-of-body excursion. I lay down feeling like a dead weight and just relaxed. Soon I entered a familiar state of clarity and the hissing pulsation returned. I remember thinking that perhaps the “pineal engine” had ignited and was revving up to a rollercoaster of rushing sounds. What followed was a sensation of detachment from everything, but I was still conscious of lying in bed without visibility.

Suddenly, I could hear voices as though a radio had been switched on in my head. I couldn’t understand what they said, but somehow the audio focused on a particular female voice which spoke as though it were delivering a lecture (M.R.: no separation). The subject-matter appeared to be consciousness itself, and a sentence stuck out to me: “The ‘I’ is the center of consciousness; therefore we are all centers of consciousness.” The voice then proceeded to divulge a deep secret about reality that made me experience an epiphany, and yet I don’t recall what was said. The voice turned into a whisper and was drowned out by orchestral music and clapping. This was followed by a vibrational surge, and subsequently I appeared to have separated from my body solely by willing myself out.

Vision was hazy, but I could distinguish my bedroom environment (M.R.: no deepening). I shifted in midair into the hallway and towards the mirror on the wall, which looked grey and absolutely non-reflective. I glided through it as I wished to see Marge, Stacey’s deceased grandmother. What is unusual about what followed is that I was not traveling through a dark void as is typical when I plunge into the hallway mirror. Instead, I was zooming past treetops, rooftops, roads and vehicles. When I came to a halt, I saw that I was at ground level, skittering through an alley littered with rubbish in broad daylight. The colors of the environment were dull and I tried to make them brighter with my mind, but to no avail. Involuntarily, I teleported to another setting.

Initially, it was hard for me to see where I was because I kept laterally zapping from surface to surface, unable to fixate on a particular location. I managed to slow down my movement near the ceiling of what looked like a large bathroom. I saw a little girl, who appeared to be eight or nine years of age, in a tub full of dirty water, and her groggy face was barely sticking out. I could see her swallowing water and lots of hairs until her head was completely immersed. A scowling man entered the room. He was tall, stocky, and his hair was short, dark and spiky. Wide-eyed and in a frenzy, this character drowned the child by pressing her head further down using a plunger. Neither characters took any notice of my presence. The intensity of the experience was alarming and I was literally in fight-or-flight mode as I witnessed that crime.

My perspective changed galvanically and I appeared to be in the tub now. The room was the same but the lighting was different. The same scowling man came in and proceeded towards me. In a reflex action, I ascended to the ceiling and, when I looked down, I observed a naked boy in the tub, screaming in sheer horror. Mercilessly, the man drowned the boy, and, as he did so, he blamed the child for what was happening to him and accused him of being the reason why he was a monster. He growled and shook the boy underwater. The child’s efforts to break free were futile. I moved about the room uncontrollably as I attempted to see what else was going on.

I regained physical awareness in sleep paralysis, hoping that what I had experienced was imagined. My head hissed again. I heard more voices in my head as though they were engaged in dialogues with classical music intervals. I separated again, but this time, into a dark void. I wished to see Marge and felt hands gripping me on either side and leading me somewhere. I saw light ahead and found myself in a crisp environment. Sharp colors defined a surreal scenery composed of what appeared to be Roman ruins in a forest. I set out to look for Marge there but encountered a bald black man instead. I asked him who he was and he told me his name was either Simão or João Figo. We spoke in Portuguese. I asked him where we were and he told me that we were in the same place all the time. The conversation then became more vague and dreamlike. At times I had the impression that he could say what I was thinking and vice versa. It was as if we were somehow connected. I was unsure whether I could at times control his speech, or if the fact that I was thinking what he said at times was coincidental.

As I regained physical awareness, I heard mild showers in my head and my body felt cold. It was 7:30 am.

This technique is difficult because it requires an unstable lucid dreaming space caused by a strong desire to translocate to another location. Whereas during teleportation by flight with eyes shut the practitioner disentangles himself from the current location, that is not the case here. Therefore, this technique should be used only by experienced practitioners who are confident that they are capable of remaining in lucid dreaming.

As far as implementing the technique is concerned, the practitioner simply needs to stop and concentrate on the thought that he is already present in the desired location and focus on its image. It is important to not stare at or touch anything during the thought. Surrounding space will dim, blur and then disappear during this time, and then the intended location will gradually start to appear. The rate of space metamorphosis depends on the degree of desire to reach the required location.

If concentration is weak or lucid dreaming depth is poor, then after space destabilizes, it might not be restored – and a return to the wakeful state will occur.