REMspace

Testing Individual Effectiveness. Immediately after waking from sleep, remain motionless, eyes closed. Try to wiggle a part of the body for 3 to 5 seconds, but without using any muscles. If nothing moves during the attempt, try a different technique. If a sensation of wiggling occurs, even in the slightest, continue to employ the technique, striving to increase the range of movement as much as possible. This technique should be performed very aggressively, not passively. As soon as the range of movement nears or exceeds four inches – which may take just several seconds – the following situations may arise: one momentarily finds oneself somehow in lucid dreaming, or the wiggled part of the body begins to move freely. The occurrence of movement during practice of this technique allows the practitioner to transition to a separation technique and attempt to leave the body.

While practicing phantom wiggling, strong vibrations may occur, amid which separation may be attempted. Sounds also often arise, allowing the opportunity to practice listening in, which can lead to lucid dreaming entrance.

The phantom wiggling technique is not meant to produce an imagined movement by a phantom body. The point of the technique is to attempt the movement of a physical body part without using muscular action. That is, the focus should rest upon an internal intention of movement without physical action. When the sensation occurs, it differs little from its real counterpart and is often accompanied by heaviness and resistance. Generally, there is very little range of movement at first, but with concentrated effort the range of movement noticeably increases.

It does not matter which part of the body is used to exercise phantom movement. It may be the whole body or just one finger. Neither is the speed of the movement important. Increased range of perceived movement is the aim of the technique.

Training. To train the technique of phantom wiggling, relax a hand for several minutes while lying down, eyes closed. Then, aggressively envision the following hand movements, without moving any muscles, for two to three minutes each: rotating, up-down, left-right, extending the fingers and drawing the fingers together, clenching and unclenching a fist. No sensations will occur at first. Gradually, the sensation of muscular action will become so apparent that the perceived movement will be indistinguishable from real movement. During the first training attempts, practitioners are often tempted to open their eyes to see if actual movement is occurring – that’s how real the sensation feels.

lucid dreaming perception initially causes so much emotion and variety of experience that the practitioner is often not concerned with the question of how lucid dreaming might be purposefully used. The critical question of application becomes even more crucial as experience increases. Application of lucid dreaming becomes more vivid against the background of understanding how the phenomenon can provide a means of gaining information and new experiences.

Some approach lucid dreaming practice with a predetermined goal, uninterested in anything else. With a specific goal, the problem of where the goal came from might arise, as lucid dreaming phenomenon is wrapped in a thick layer of prejudices and stereotypes, which often have no bearing on the reality. The primary purpose of this chapter is to precisely separate reality from fiction. Its second purpose is to provide a detailed description of what may be obtained from the practice of lucid dreaming experiences.

Every proven and accessible practical application of lucid dreaming is based on three qualities: a) application founded on lucid dreaming’s ability to simulate any object and any space with any properties and functions; b) application based on the opportunity to connect with the subconscious mind in order to obtain information; c) application based on lucid dreaming’s ability to impact a practitioner’s physiology.

Most importantly, nothing described in this chapter is difficult to achieve. Any application may be achieved during the very first lucid dreaming if a practitioner manages to focus and apply the appropriate techniques for translocation or finding objects. Regardless of whether the practitioner adheres to a mystical or pragmatic worldview, a full range of access is inherently possible.

Possible applications of the phenomenon certainly exceed the scope of descriptions related through this chapter. It is possible that other applications simply have not been proven yet, and, so far, the correct methods of practicing these are still unknown. Only the practitioner may determine the limits of possibility within lucid dreaming. Of course, common sense should be applied – otherwise, it would be logically and psychologically difficult to disengage misconceptions. The goal of this book is to provide a real (though minimal) foundation that is firm and unyielding, whatever the circumstance. If the practitioner follows a strict approach to practice, it will be much more difficult to become lost during further practical and theoretical studies.

Out of all of the substances used for practicing lucid dreaming, only coffee is readily obtainable. However, it should only be taken by novices who sleep too hard. For everyone else, there’s no sense in using it, as one’s practice should be natural.

The essence of the this tactic is to use the deferred method in conjunction with taking coffee. For example: a practitioner sleeps for 6 hours, gets up, drinks coffee, and goes back to sleep with the intention of catching the next awakening in order to use indirect techniques or in expectation of becoming consciousness while dreaming. Thanks to coffee’s invigorating properties, one will be at a higher state of awareness during subsequent awakenings, and awakenings themselves will be more frequent. There will also be a high likelihood of becoming consciousness while dreaming.

While some hold it’s best to take a double dose of the drink, such things are purely individual, and everyone has to find what works for them. Some enjoy the same level of success when drinking black tea instead of coffee.

This is to be used in cases when some indirect technique has begun working, albeit quite weakly or insufficiently. Here, in order to bring the working technique up to the right degree of manifestation, the practitioner should begin to perform forced falling asleep in parallel to it, just as is done with backdrop forced falling asleep. That is, lucid dreamingr should try to seemingly fall asleep to the technique being performed. As a result, the partially manifesting technique will start to work much better right then, and allow for lucid dreaming to be reached much sooner.

This ability of ours has always accompanied us, influencing us all the while. But it wasn’t until now that we have looked in the right direction and finally seen this elephant in the room, a hitherto secret phenomenon confounding the minds of millions. Isn’t it time we recognized its due and logical role as the common denominator of a long list of phenomena that had until now always seemed unrelated? Wouldn’t the world become simpler, and wouldn’t we then understand ourselves much better?

As it turned out, certain commonalities of several completely different, but hitherto uncompared, phenomena became clear and straightforward to me, thanks to both my activities and personal experience in the field. I couldn’t but conclude that there was some common denominator at work.

Man has extraordinary ability to adapt and is constantly evolving. Although it’s hard to imagine now, just several thousand years ago our consciousness and self-awareness looked totally different. They simply did not exist in their now familiar form. What is going on today can be alternatively interpreted as either natural evolution or social (cultural) evolution.

It’s entirely possible that conscious awareness, once having developed and then having proceeded to consume our entire waking life, is actually evolving into those states of consciousness where it would seem to have been impossible: those occurring while our body is asleep. To put it bluntly, consciousness ran out of room in our waking mind and continues its expansion into the brain. There is only one piece of evidence of this process: half of all people report experiencing 100% conscious awareness flaring up into their dreams.

Meanwhile, another take on the origin of the out-of-body phenomenon looks to fundamental transformations in science and culture. Even three or four hundred years ago, the average level of intelligence was hardly one-half of what it is today. Thanks to modern education systems, enormous floods of information, and lightning-fast communication, our conscious minds have had to use their resources to their full capacities. Perhaps those capacities are not enough. Our craniums are overfull, and perhaps that’s why consciousness is overflowing to where it seemingly wasn’t meant to be or couldn’t have been. With the overloads introduced by modern society, it simply has nowhere left to go. That’s why spontaneous dissociation when awakening and throughout dreaming occurs increasingly often. It also happened in the past, but rarely. But now it’s taking on an incessant nature.

By all accounts, we are now at the breakthrough stage of a new era: the entrenchment of a new state of mind and consciousness, which has become the next logical outcome of human evolution.

Children, with their predisposition for out-of-body experiences, deserve special attention. Most adults simply forget that having out-of-body experiences was the norm for them during early childhood. I’ve met many people over the course of my practice who remember how often it happened for them at an early age. I’ve had the opportunity to speak with children who maintain that they were able to do it on command before they could even speak, but that later it started happening increasingly rarely with age and that they gradually forgot about it. This speaks either for the natural evolution of consciousness, or, conversely, for regression…

Either way, we may turn our attention to this new state of consciousness that we have. And it has possibly just begun to develop. If earlier we only had three primary and completely different states – wakefulness, REM sleep, and non-REM sleep – then now we have something in-between wakefulness and REM that includes features of both. The first steps in scientifically proving the existence of this state were taken by Stephen LaBerge at Stanford University in the beginning of the 1980s. A successful experiment was conducted regarding consciousness while dreaming. Meanwhile, today it is clear that the experiment’s result has implications for a far greater number of phenomena. It has become fully apparent that consciousness while dreaming is practically the same thing as out-of-body travel, but that it occurs as a result of different method. And we have already identified spontaneous exit from the body in a whole slew of phenomena.

However, when you see the word “dreaming” in the context of all of the above, don’t think that experiencing the phenomenon itself feels like being in a dream. We have identified a whole number of cases in which super-realistic sensations made people think that they were dying, seeing God, or encountering aliens. The term “hyper-realism” is often brought in to describe the experience: in most exits from the body, every sensation is so heightened that the physical world seems like a faint dream in comparison.

I have no interest at all in discussing where we actually go when we leave our bodies. My task is only to inform people of the opportunity to do so and to teach them how to take advantage of it. Meanwhile, practitioners can decide for themselves what is actually going on. Some believe that they are travelling in spirit form through the physical world. Others hold that their soul travels about parallel worlds. Still others consider it all to be only a mental state.