Understanding the inner workings of the mind & the collective unconscious.
Dreams are beyond fascinating; they are the unexplainable inner workings of our mind that transcend space and time. When you dream your brain doesn’t know the difference between what is 'real' and what isn’t. Dreams have been studied by some of the most renowned psychologists and psychoanalysts of all time, such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Calvin Hall and Ian Wallace, in attempt to figure out exactly what part they play in our lives.
If you frequently remember your dreams, you have the capacity to be a ‘lucid dreamer’. In other words, you have the ability to awaken within your dreams and control them.
When you wake in your dreams, something inexplicable happens to your subconscious mind; it expands beyond its usual function allowing you to influence or manipulate your dream environment. For instance, you can possess the ability to fly, walk through walls, levitate, move things with your mind and influence other people’s behaviour in your dream.
"Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly... I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man." - Zhuangzi
If you can recall your dreams but have never experienced lucid dreaming before, the good news is you can train your brain to awaken within your dreams. An easy way to do this is to always keep some sort item or 'totem' on you. A totem is something small and personal to you. It could be a small rock, a piece of jewellery or a charm that has meaning. You must then ask yourself whenever you see or touch your totem throughout the day, “am I in a dream or is this reality?”.
Ideally, you want to be asking yourself this at least 12 times a day. Upon asking yourself this question, you perform a quick reality check by looking around at your environment to become certain that you’re well and truly awake and not sleeping. With enough repetition, this process will create a habit and a neurological pathway in your mind that gets strengthened each and every time you see or touch your totem. Eventually, this will also occur in a dream; you will see or touch your totem and realise that you are in fact in a dream and then awaken within that dream!
That’s when the magic happens! If you have seen the movie 'Inception' starring Leonardo DiCaprio, you will recall that he uses a spinning top as his totem to distinguish whether he is in a dream or not.
Lucid dreams typically occur in the first REM (rapid eye movement) phase of your sleep cycle, normally around 90 minutes after you’ve fallen asleep. There are other established methods that you can use to train your brain to lucid dream, these include training the mind to do a reality check when noticing the time (because when we look at a clock or the time in a dream it’s usually distorted) and when activating a light switch (because light switches don’t work in dreams!). These approaches however may take longer to master than the totem method.
Mastering the art of lucid dreaming varies from person to person, for some it only takes a few days until they’ve accessed the ability to become lucid within the dream realm, and for others, it can take up to 3-6 weeks. The most important thing is that you keep at it, because the method does work and before you know it, you’ll have the ability to do extraordinary things like taking flight and soaring over your dream world by just willing it. It’s an incredible experience and is some of the most fun and heightened pleasure that you will ever experience (without taking psychedelics or illicit substances).
If you think all of this sounds rather inconceivable, then what I’m about to share with you has the potential to change your life, forever. Before sharing it, however, let’s acknowledge this amazing instrument that is the human mind. For something that resides within a structure that weighs just 1.3 kgs/ 3 pounds, its ability to process information is happening at speeds upwards of 402kms/ 250 miles per hour and we still have yet to tap into its true potential.
Okay, here we go:
If we can learn to awaken in our dreams and create anything we want, then
we can also awaken in this so called 'reality' and achieve everything we want!
What do I mean by awaken in this reality? Well, we have been conditioned to believe that this reality is an external construct of matter and variables that are picked up by our senses, and rapidly filtered against the backdrop of our subconscious program. Our acceptance of this narrow dimensional version of reality has kept our capacity to access our creativity, imagination and utmost potential at bay.
There are in fact multiple dimensions that we cannot access via our senses but they are nevertheless omnipresent. For instance, our eyes can only see wavelength spectrums of light between 400 to 700 nanometres (ultraviolet light exists between 10 to 400 nanometres and cannot be detected by the human eye) and our ears can only hear between 20 hertz to 23 kilohertz (with other animals like dogs having a hearing range of almost double that), yet we still believe that reality is fixed to what our senses tell us.
The Law of Attraction
To awaken from this ‘reality' is to acknowledge that there are a multitude of external and internal constructs co-existing in space and time and that the law of attraction is at play as a basic universal principle. The law of attraction sees like energy, attract like energy and extends to our thoughts. Our thoughts emit a subtle frequency and attracts the vibrational energy in which they emit, in turn creating our respective reality. So negative thoughts will attract negative circumstances and positive thoughts will attract positively charged opportunities.
We have further been conditioned to believe that we're divided from everything and everyone on this planet, when in fact we're connected to everyone and everything in this universe. We're connected by virtue of the fact that we're all made of the same building blocks (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen) deriving from stars that exploded trillions of years ago.
Our physical body is only separate to other forms at our sensory level. Dark energy is now acknowledged as a form of energy postulated to oppose gravity occupying and accounting for most of the energy in the universe. By being aware that a rich tapestry of energy vibrating at various frequencies permeating this planet, we are able to tune into creation and link-in with the superhighway that is the cosmic collective consciousness.
If we arrive at this acknowledgement, then collectively, we can awaken from this so-called reality to attract anything we can imagine – to the point where we will one day be able to effortlessly manipulate our surroundings and move objects with our mind.
Someone once said that you have no soul; you are a soul who has a body. By surrendering to the notion that what we believe to be real and fixed is actually unreal and fluid and embracing this multi-dimensional miracle of life, then you are automatically coming from a place of curiosity and possibility in its purest form and it’s from this platform that your thoughts emit a positively charged frequency, that in turn culminates into action that transcends our conditioning, attracting like energy and manifesting a reality that is beyond what we thought is humanly possible!
In summary, we’re all a part of a rich and diverse universal tapestry that offers vast opportunity to create multiple realities and the life that we want. So go forth, attract what you emit and create your wildest masterpiece on this moving canvass that we call Earth.
If this article resonated with you and you’d like to learn more about how you can access the untapped potential of your mind, please reach out to us here at The Open Mind Institute.
Paul Pitsaras LL.B B.Int.Bus.
Managing Director, Speaker, Executive Coach
For further articles and research material on lucid dreaming, visit: http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com