Lucid dream or Desire dream ?

I had read a lot about lucid dreaming but never experienced it or made an effort to do so. However on once occasion, I was experiencing a normal dream and suddenly I realized that this was a dream and I decide to have some fun. I was standing by a road side, so I thought to myself, since this is just a dream, I cannot die in this, and stood in the middle of the road, waiting some vehicle to hit me !! Unfortunately none come along and I awoke from the dream.
However recently I have begun to realize, that on several occasions, during the past several weeks, I am experiencing different kind of ‘lucid dream’. It usually happens in the morning when I am about to wake up. I would call it a lucid dream created purely by my suppressed/unconscious/latent desires – a Desire Dream
For instance one of my passions, as a child and teenager was to become a dancer. I would often dance behind closed doors and imagine getting a big applause from an imaginary audience!! I am still fond of dancing, and do indulge in it sometimes in the privacy of my home.
Recently I dreamt that I was with someone, not sure who it was, I was filled with a desire to dance, and next I was wearing an attractive dress and dancing, I wanted someone to watch me, and the next moment there were some people looking at me with admiration. I was half awake during this entire experience, the conscious mind then took over, became got slightly embarrassed by the self-indulgence of this ‘desire self’ and the ‘dream’ ended. I think that this is different from the lucid dream I had about the road, because this dream was created and spurred on purely by desire with no thinking brain involved. It was very spontaneous, as if I was thinking into existence what I desired. Almost like magic !!

Effects of the moon, earth's magnetic field and nakshatra on Hypnogogia

About a two years ago I read somewhere that the moon and its phases influence human imagination and consciousness. This made me wonder if the moon influences hypnogogic experiences. I then began to make of note of the position of the moon in its lunar mansions (nakshatra) and the phase of the moon in my dream diary. I have given below some of these jottings:
8th Feb, 2006, four days before full moon, moon in Taurus, Mrigshirsha nakshatra - Just before falling asleep I was very exhausted and my knees were aching – I was in the courtyard of some kind of an ancient stone temple. The stones were darkish metamorphic type. I was looking at a small waterfall flowing down stone steps at the center of the courtyard. I was filled with a feeling of deep serenity.

March 4th/5th day after new moon, afternoon nap – Saw the face of an old man with a beard, long narrow nose, probably European, the hair and beard style appeared to be from the Renaissance period. The whole image seem to be immersed in some kind of a yellowish glow.

8th March, morning, six days before full moon – Woke up with the following words in my head:
‘Madwaana historic consciousness of Mankind’.

I later checked the internet and found a Mt. Madwana in northern Canada among native Indian reserve area. It could also be an acronym for Mt. Damawand in Iran. This mountain is of great importance in Persian mythology.

9th March morning, five days before full moon – A sentence ringing in my head, could not fully recall but it ended with ‘ St. Minohnah/Minonah.

It is probably a Jewish word and also the name of a lake in the USA.

Yesterday (moon in Cancer, Nakshatra-Aslesha) one day before new moon) I was sleeping in East-West direction with my head towards the East, not intentionally, but our sofa happened to be aligned in that direction. And just as I was waking up the following sentence arose/entered my head -’ We have yet to see the reversal of many rivers’.
For the past few days the TV was full of news of how the Kosi river in the state of Bihar (I live in India) had changed it’s course spelling havoc by floogind large tracts of land. Also, just before falling asleep I was thinking over the various theories related to hypnagogia. Now the question is whether the above sentence has a symbolic or literal meaning.
However, I experienced no hypnogogic experience today (moon in Leo, nakshatra - Magha, new moon) during my afternoon nap, instead I woke up with a headache !!

Could this be because my head was towards the west instead of east today ? Does the magnetic field of the earth effect hypnogogic experiences ? Does the Moon effect hypnogogic experiences ? After reading the paper, quoted below, I think that there is a possible connection. I now plan to make a note of these things and see if any such relationship exists.
In a recent article titled, ‘ Hypnagogia - A bridge to other realities’ the writer, Yu -Wen Shaw, mentions :
“A possible physical explanation for Hypnagogia is rooted in the discovery of magnetite crystals in cells of the brain and meninges. It has been found that there are five million magnetite crystals per gram in the human brain, and twenty times that number in the meninges . These ‘biomagnetite crystals’ are oriented in the brain in a manner that maximizes their magnetic moment, thus allowing the crystals to act as a system, and marking the ability of the brain to sense energy fields . These crystals could very possibly be the cause and explanation behind psychic abilities, as well as the feelings of intuition during states of hypnagogia.
Let us further explore how this phenomenon may be possible. Studies that show the proximity of the crystal-containing brain cells to the pituitary and pineal glands, have led researchers to propose that these glands may use information from the earth’s magnetic field to regulate the release of hormones in the brain, thus directly controlling conscious awareness levels .”

It is possible that there are several parameters, both within the human mind/consciousness and environmetal/cosmic forces which influence hypnogogic experiences. A systematic and scientific study spanning various individuals over a long period of time needs to be done before any conclusions can be drawn.
Notes:
Nakshatra: A nakshatra or lunar mansion is one of the 27 or 28 divisions of the sky, identified by the prominent star(s) in them, that the moonpasses through during itsmonthly cycle, as used in Hindu astrology.

Hypnagogics Diary: Hypnogogia and light sleep

While I have been keeping a dream diary which mostly includes my hypnpgogic/pompic experiences (hence forth referred to as hypnogogic to include both gogic and pompic), I have decided to put them up on my blog as well.
As I look back i realise that I used to indulge in a lot of day dreaming during my childhood days. In addition, as mentioned earlier, I used and continue to have very vivid dreams, some of which I used to note down.
Several years later, when I was in my 30s I began to note a subtle change in the kind of dreams I had at night during deep sleep and the kind of half awake visions and impressions I would get duing my afternoon naps. My naps were, and continue to be, restricted to 20 minutes to half an hour, and are rearely deep sleep states. When I first noticed this change, unlike the normal dreams I had during the night, the afternoon ones were like a string of conscious thoughts trailing off into visuals in my mind of unfamilar places and locations. This continued for several years. However duing my early fortys when I had to shift to Delhi with my two sons and was under a lot of emotional and physical stress that I began to experience really vivid hypnogogic imagery, again, during my afternoon naps (some of these have been describe in my previous posts).
After years of experience I can now conclude that majority of my hypnogogic images and words occur duing my afternoon naps and a few, mostly related to words or sentences, when I wake up in the morning.

Hypnopompia and Hypnogogia diary -I

After a perod of several days I have begun to experience hypnopompia and hypnogogia during my afternoon naps.
Two days ago I heard ' Raaze takhta bafazaa' This is Persian but the meaning is not very clear. I checked the dictionary and it means something like - a secret plate/board/writing/ in the air/space.

Yesterday afternoon when I was half awake the following words were ringing in my ears - 'Deep among the trees so deep, a tearful drop down let her slip/sleep...'
Today afternoon I saw the face of a young man (probably Caucasoid) wearing a baseball cap. The face seem to be on a T.V screen and the foreground seem to be covered with some writing in English.

Was blessed and could bless

This often happens to me when I am roaming alone in a new city. The last time it happened was when I was roaming alone in the streets of Amsterdam as a tourist, taking photographs. It began with a feeling of complete well being, child like curiosity and joy as I walked around looking at the quaint shops and houses, which, coming from India, was very new and interesting for me. Slowly I was engulfed in complete stillness and peace, my mind was almost void of any thoughts, I wanted this mood to last forever, the feeling is indescribable, no where close to our everyday feeling of what we call ‘happiness’ or ‘joy’. But as soon as I realized that I had run out of film role, I was thrust back into everyday reality. It was almost like falling into a pit after having flown over mountains and valleys. Such moods come and go. Making the mundaness of everyday reality more and more unbearable and I am reminded of a poem by Yeats:
While on shop and street I gazed/ My body of a sudden blazed/ And twenty minutes more or less/ It seemed so great my happiness/ That I was blessed and could bless…

Everything has an essence

Every person and place has an essence, a kind of sum total of its personality, what it emanates….One can often sense it at the first encounter….the first impression, so to speak, before the thinking mind comes into action and clouds one’s perception and intution. This essence cannot be described, only felt like the drops of rain on your face…..

The journey within

What happens in the outside world is of little consequence as compared to the journey you have to make within yourself. The outside world and events are part of a script written by someone else (your past karma’s ?), over which you have little control.

At the mercy of our Minds

Most of us are at the mercy of our schizophrenic minds -which consists of shifting moods and states - an everchanging perspective of our circumstances and the people around us. Once in a while a flash of objectivity descends on us and we realise how easily we slip into our reactive, petty selves.

Auras ?

Just out of curiosity, I read about auras on the internet and tried to see if I could see mine while sitting in a dimly lit room, in front of a white background with the mirror in front of me. After some practice at defocussing and concentrating on my peripheral vision I was able to make out a very faint whitish outline around my head and shoulders. With practice the outline became clearer. Could this be an optical illusion or a double image? However I am not able to see any colours in this ‘aura’. I can also make out very pale luminiscent ‘auras’ around trees when the sky is not too brightly lit and also in the night time, especially on moonless nights.

Energy vortex ?

When I stand out in the sun and close my eyes, I see numerous blackish dots rushing towards a kind of a vortex. Like energy particles rushing from lower concentration to higher concentration, which is in contradiction to conventional laws of physics. I see this against a bright, deep red background.

Multiple consciousness ?

There is another ‘weird’ feeling that I get sometimes, usually when I am sitting quietly in my garden looking at the trees, plants and stones around me, are in a bus riding through unknown streets lined with houses and shops. I can almost ‘ identify’ with the plant, or a stone or a quiet shady corner of the garden as if I could enter into the existence of a lonely stone, or a plant or a balcony overlooking a street, as if I could touch these ‘inanimate’ things with my consciousness, perhaps a kind of multiple consciousness. It is very difficult to describe this feeling/awareness in words.

Antenna of the unconscious mind

My experiences with the prophetic power of hypnogogia leads me to believe that everything in the lives of ordinary people like us is pre-determined according to the law of karma. As mentioned earlier in a previous post, I often dream of minor everyday things like a word or an image which I then come across in the course of few days in real life. Only last night I dreamt about Niagra Falls, saw a visual image of it, and today while watching TV, I chanced upon a programme on Zone Reality channel, it was titled ‘hunting legends’ or something, in which an American - Mason Whinefield was investingating paranormal phenomenon in western part of New York State, and the site in question was in the proximity of Niagra Falls and according to Mason, the Falls might be one of the reasons for the presence of strong spiritual/psychic current in that area. I had never watched his programme before, nor did I have a pre-knowledge of such a programme being aired on Zone Reality.
So the question which comes to mind is whether even the minutest things in our lives are pre-determined ? And whether it is just a question of being able to tune into the right kind of frequency to be able to forsee our future ?
Is it also possible that due to my deep interest in the spiritual and occult, my unconscious mind is able to tune into, and inform the conscious mind about things/people/events that are related to this area, that I will chance upon in the future ?
During the course of my study of occult and spiritual subjects, there have been numerous co-incidences, which are too many to be called ‘chance events’ where I would come across the books/websites/references related to my interest with hardly any effort or search. Perhaps the unconscious mind does have some kind of an antenna which leads us to the things/people that are related to the thoughts and feelings that pre-occupy our hearts and minds……

Spritual Springs

I mentioned in an earlier post that every person and a place has an essence. One can sense this very deeply if the person/place in question is giving off a very strong, due to lack of a better word, I would say energy or waves.
I have been going occasionally, since childhood to old temples and ruins in India, and I could always sense something different in their environment. How ever during my recent visit to an ancient Hindu temple in Madurai, South India, I felt an overhelming sense of peace and well being among its walls. I also got this uncanny desire to spend hours staring at the ancient sculptures, and it seemed to me that if I stared long enough, I could tune into the past !! One of the local guides informed me of a tradition in South India, where visitors to such temples would sit down inside the temple to spend quiet moments of contemplation. They believe that the location of the temple is aligned to tune in with certain geomagnetic fields and cosmic currents which have a beneficial effect on the human spirit. My next visit was to the Kanyakumari, the southernmost tip of India,where three oceons are believed to converge. Here too, inspite of the noise and the crowd, I could feel an underlying sense of peace, and a keen desire to spend more time here. However I do not get any such feeling when I visit some of the modern temples in India.
Perhaps there are certain places on the surface of earth, along water bodies, mountain tops, underground currents, which give off spiritual energy /waves.

Precognitive dreams

I also have occasional precognitive dreams. Nothing dramatic- just small events in my everyday life. For instance, I mostly see words during hypnopompia and I later come across them during my writing or research. For instances, I recently saw the word ‘Dadu’. At that time I did not know what it meant and later during my research on the saint poet Kabir, I came across a reference to the sect of Dadu Panthis who are followers of Kabir. On another occasion, I saw a bright pink saree during hypnogogia and later I came across a photo of one of my relatives wearing the same saree !! The photo was taken recently so the possibility of my having seen the photograph some time in the past and then dreaming about it is ruled out. Recently, I accidentally discovered that I could see a bright golden aura like globes around lighted candles in a dim room. I could not see this earlier.

Orgone or Human Aura ?

Gradually I also began to see luminescent dots of light darting about in the air. These were different from floaters. Floaters are supposed to be suspended particles in our eye fluid. Many people can see them drifting in front of their vision when they look towards the sky and defocus their eyes. I can see the luminescent darting dots more clearly when the sun is closer to the horizon and the sky is not too brightly lit. I can see them even when it is raining. There movement does not seem to be effected by the weather. However their visibility to the human eye seems to be effected by light conditions. There are various theories on the inter net about these luminescent dots. Some say it is orgone energy – the building blocks of life on earth. Some think that it is a kind of optical illusion that is related to migraine aura. But I can see them even when I am not having a headache.
I later came across the following account from the book ‘ The Human Aura’ by Swami Panchadasi on the Project Gutenberg website : ……‘Another peculiarity of the prana-aura is that it is filled with a multitude of extremely minute sparkling particles, resembling tiny electric sparks, which are in constant motion. These sparks, which are visible to persons of only slightly developed psychic power, impart a vibratory motion to the prana-aura which, under certain conditions is plainly visible to the average person. This vibratory movement is akin to the movement of heated air arising from a hot stove, or from the heated earth on a mid-summer day.’
This is exactly what I have been seeing.

Past life memories ?

“Both you and I have taken many births, I remember them all, O Arjun, but you do not remember.”
- Shri Krishna to Arjun in the Bhagavat Geeta

The phenomenon of visual hypnogogis gradually became less frequent and I begun to experience something else. Just before I fell asleep scenes, sometime with people in them, begun to ‘pop up’ randomly in my mind I use the word ‘pop up’ for a lack of a more appropriate word. The difference between this and hypnogogia, was that while hypnogogia seemed as if I was sensing something outside of me, these scenes seem to come to the surface from somewhere deep within me, like some long lost memories. However they were strange to me because I did not seem to have any conscious memory of having visited those locations or having met those people. It was almost as if somebody else’s memories had been put in my head !! On one occasion I saw a child climbing some dimly lit staircases. He seemed to be wearing modern western clothes. In another occasion I saw a young man riding a motorcycle across a field. He seemed to have western features. On another occasion I was a young boy sitting on a ramshackle bridge which overlooked some kind of a big dug out pit. On another occasion I was a small child with a woman who appeared to be my mother. We were sitting atop a dome shaped building, and some kind of a commotion seemed to be happening below us. When I recollect, from the look of the people around me, it was probably a time period of 18th century. On another occasion I was a young man (westerner) named Illad, there was a radio in the room, this model was in use during the period of the Second World War. Somebody seemed to be calling out my name and was backing against the wall in fear. There are numerous such instances and I have written them down in my diary in detail, sometimes with sketches. In a lot of these scenes I seem to be an outsider looking at the scene and in some, as in the above mentioned case, paradoxical as it may sound, I was both the character and the onlooker. So I was both Illad as well as someone who was looking at this scene from ‘outside’. As if my consciousness was at two places at the same time!! The question is are these past life memories?

Hypnogogia and Hypnopompia

I began to grow more sensitive to the world around and within me at the age of 44. This was also a period when I had begun to suffer from severe anemia and chronic fatigue. I do not know whether this was a mere coincidence or a trigger for the latent abilities to begun to develop in me. It was not all like the dramatic accounts of sudden development of clairvoyance among people, which we come across in books and other media. It was slow and gradual, and in bursts. During this period I was living alone in Delhi with my two sons. My husband was away on a foreign assignment. So apart from the health problem there were other stresses and tensions that I had to deal with. It started with very vivid visual hypnogogia and hypnopompia (please see the Appendix page for explanation of these terms). I would see outdoor locations, landscapes, inside of houses. One incident of hypnopompia that I can still visualize in detail was an old European- mansion like building. I seem to be looking at it from the top, as if my consciousness was floating above it and I could look at it from various angles. The image was crystal clear and life like. In fact it would not be an exaggeration to say that it appeared more real than real life!! I started seeing these images quite often - almost twice or thrice a week. There was no pattern to it. Nor was it under my control. Sometimes it would seem as if I was looking through or telescope/tunnel. Sometimes the images were in miniature. Some times strangely illuminated faces seem to materialize in front of my closed eyes just before I fell asleep.

My background

As a child I have always had very vivid dreams. I would often write down the interesting ones in my diary. Apart from a single attack of claustrophia, when I was about 3 or 4 years old I have had a fairly normal childhood. I am not able to recollect much about this incident apart from the fact that I was lying in my mother’s lap crying and saying that I felt suffocated while the walls of the room seem to be caving in on me. I grew up in a Hindu Brahmin family in Delhi, India. Mine was not a very religious family, fairly modern and moderate in views and attitudes. I grew up with an open mind, with no set beliefs or prejudices.

The occult beliefs and concepts written and 'studied' profusely by Madam Blavatsky's Theosophical school of thought are well known. While i have great regard for some of the luminaries who belonged to this school and thier dedication to the subject of Occult is noteworthy, I have often felt that some of thier concepts are oversimplified or sometimes a bit far fetched. I personally believe that the subject of occult/paranormal phenomenon can only be studied objectively if you are without any perjudice of harbour any preconvieved notion. Secondly and more importantly, in order to have some belief in the existence of these things, you must have a first hand experience of it. In my 'study' I have tried to collate my experiences and instincts with those of others who have had similar experiences and all have different explainaitons and beliefs for it. Afcourse, as human we are all conditioned and programmed by our environment and the kind of people and thought we are exposed to throughout our lives, hence some bias is boud to creep in and cannot be entirely avoided.

Occult : the hidden forces of life

All that transpires on earth and all beyond
Are parts of an illimitable plan
The One keeps in his heart and knows alone.
Our outward happenings have their seed within,
And even this random Fate that imitates Chance,
This mass of unintelligible results,
Are the dumb graph of truths that work unseen;
The laws of the Unknown create the known.
Absorbed in routine of daily acts,
Our eyes are fixed on an external scene;
We hear the crash of the wheels of Circumstances
And wonder at the hidden cause of things.
Our conscious movements have sealed origins
But with those shadowy seats no converse hold;
No understanding binds our comrade parts;
Our acts emerge from a crypt our minds ignore,
Our deepest depths are ignorant of themselves;
Even our body is a mystery shop;
As our earth’s roots lurk screened below our earth,
So lie unseen our roots of mind and life.
Our springs are kept close hid beneath, within;
Our souls are moverd by powers behind the wall,
In the subterranean reaches of the spirit
A puissance acts and recks not what it means;
Using unthinking monitors and scribes,
It is the casue of what we think and feel…….

- Shri Aurobindo