Anomalous, extraordinary, or otherwise interesting conscious experiences

[hypnagogue]

I've always been interested in unusual phenomena in conscious experience-- events in consciousness that are novel, surprising, sublime, or just plain strange with respect to the normal waking consciousness in which we are usually ensconced. In the interest of exploring this topic, I'd like for this thread to become an ongoing log in which us PFers provide first person accounts of such anomalous experiences.

The recounted experiences can range from the mundane to the profound, the transient to the enduring, the rare to the recurring. They can issue from sleeplike states; states of emotional stress; extraordinary circumstances; psychoactive drugs; meditation; unusual, degraded, or heightened physiological or psychological functioning; extreme sensory deprivation or excitation; or they can be tied to some other factor or simply be apparently unexplained, random occurrences. Essentially, everything is fair game. Please don't be shy; what seems mundane and not worth mentioning to you could be quite interesting to someone else!

Some good, general guidelines to be mindful of: Try to be as detailed as possible in describing the nature of your experience, such that others will have a good sense of what the experience was like for you (perceptually, cognitively, and/or emotionally) and why it was anomalous. Also, it would be illuminating to mention external or internal factors that might have been relevant to the occurrence of the experience (e.g. was conducting so-and-so form of meditation, or had ingested such-and-such kind of drug, etc.).

[hypnagogue]

I'll start things off by relating some unusual auditory experiences I've had. I'm somewhat prone to experiencing quite vivid auditory hallucinations when I'm in a hypnagogic state, that twilight region on the border of waking consciousness and sleep. I recall one instance on a lazy summer day when I was watching a baseball game on TV and nodded off into sleep. Suddenly I heard a swift, quite loud and somewhat jarring crack as if a bat had just struck a baseball. The noise startled me awake, but when I checked the game nothing of note was happening.

At the risk of sounding insane, a few times in the hypnagogic state (with no other circumstances of note, as far as I know) I have also heard spontaneously generated voices in my inner ear. Qualitatively, these voices sound similar to my inner speech; they do not sound as vivid or real as speech coming from the environment. The voices assume something of a personality, with a distinct emotional valence and exaggerated, almost caricature-like vocal features and styles of speech to match. When this has happened, I've been fully aware that the voices were just hallucinations occurring on the way to a full-blown dream state, but nonetheless the voices were generated spontaneously and were generally immune to any attempts at suppression. That proves to be unfortunate, since usually the voices have been irritating with a mildly negative emotional charge. The last time this happened, there were two independent voices chirping annoying or undesirable things (the exact contents I can't recall), and it was a bit of a nuisance that I was just trying to ignore and ride out until I fell asleep. After several minutes of this, another voice (spontaneous, not of my own volitional control) chimed in with something like "Oh, shut up already!" I believe it mostly cleared up after that.

I experienced another interesting auditory hallucination one time when I tried out a sensory deprivation tank. In the tank I was assuming an essentially meditation-like mindset, focusing my attention on my breath (which sounds almost thunderous in a sensory deprivation chamber!) and letting thoughts come and go, observing them without becoming absorbed in them. After some time of this (I would guess about 30 minutes), I noticed a faint musical strain coming to me as if from a very distant location. It was a reggae-like tune in the style of Bab Marley. What makes this especially strange is that I'm not a particularly avid fan of reggae or Bob Marley, and the song was definitely not a parroting of some song I had heard in ths past (or at least, I recognized it not to be, with a high degree of confidence)-- it was a novel musical composition being put together by my brain somehow, spontaneously.

[Smurf]

At the risk of sounding insane, a few times in the hypnagogic state (with no other circumstances of note, as far as I know) I have also heard spontaneously generated voices in my inner ear. Qualitatively, these voices sound similar to my inner speech; they do not sound as vivid or real as speech coming from the environment. :confused: That's supposed to help you not seem insane? :rofl: :rofl:

[honestrosewater]

I've had something similar happen, but it's familiar music playing. It will be a song that I have recently been listening to and usually happens after using headphones. It isn't my inner voice singing the song; It sounds just like the normal song - whoever's vocals and the instruments, only much fainter and a bit fuzzy. It seems like the sound is coming from the environment (the first time it happened, I thought the radio was broken), but I don't experience the same sensation in my ear. It usually keeps repeating the same short snippets. I'm not in a 'special state' when this happens; It just needs to be quiet enough for me to notice the faint sound. I figure my brain is just doing something funny. And who knows how often it happens without me noticing. Could you be experiencing the same thing, only conversations instead of songs? You're sure the sounds are entirely new and not just memories?

[gurkhawarhorse]

I've had something similar happen, but it's familiar music playing. It will be a song that I have recently been listening to and usually happens after using headphones. It isn't my inner voice singing the song; It sounds just like the normal song - whoever's vocals and the instruments, only much fainter and a bit fuzzy. It seems like the sound is coming from the environment (the first time it happened, I thought the radio was broken), but I don't experience the same sensation in my ear. It usually keeps repeating the same short snippets. I'm not in a 'special state' when this happens; It just needs to be quiet enough for me to notice the faint sound. I figure my brain is just doing something funny. And who knows how often it happens without me noticing. Could you be experiencing the same thing, only conversations instead of songs? You're sure the sounds are entirely new and not just memories?

i have experienced this too. the songs of Pantera, Metallica, Linkin Park come again and again in my ear. the sound is ditto to the song.
just listen to dave mustaine's guitar and go to sleep and there it is. tinng. zzzing. and buzzing and, skdl;hfdgoreeorh;uf.

sometimes when my migraine headache starts i listen chinnn...ing sound in either of my ears.

[matthyaouw]

I've had odd experiences when drifting off to sleep. I've been known to dream, but be concious enough to incorporate things I hear or in one case see into my dream. I can't remember any specific examples of what I was dreaming however.

[Smurf]

Sometimes I hear little beeps like it's coming from just outside my ear (usually left ear). This hasn't happened in a while, it doesn't seem to happen at any paticular time or state of mind though.

[Grizzlycomet]

I've been trying to teach myself Lucid Dreaming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dreaming), conciously perceiving that you are in a dream. A common way to try to induce a lucid dream is WILD, Waking induction of lucid dreaming. Basically you try to keep your mind awake while your body goes to sleep. The key is the hypnagogic state, which often induces both auditory and visual hallucinations. So no, I don't think you're insane for hearing things before you go to sleep :biggrin:

[Locrian]

The other night I woke up and couldn't remember anything. It was just like when you arm goes to sleep and you have to just flop it around until it wakes up again, but it was my memory. I had no idea who I was, where I was or what to do. For the first few moments I just sat there, perplexed, but I gradually began to feel a little afraid. This was exacerbated by the fact that I slowly became aware (a strange phrase indeed) that I was not alone in the building, but that there was someone upstairs.

In the course of another 60 seconds I remembered that I was downstairs, that I had fallen to sleep on the couch, and that it was my wife who was upstairs, asleep.

It was a rather uncomfortable experience.

[Smurf]

I'm often aware that I'm dreaming but don't have perfect control. Whenever I change something I wake up a little bit untill it's at the point that I'm just lying with my eyes closed making pictures in my mind. Not really dreaming.

[Smurf]

The other night I woke up and couldn't remember anything. It was just like when you arm goes to sleep and you have to just flop it around until it wakes up again, but it was my memory. I had no idea who I was, where I was or what to do. For the first few moments I just sat there, perplexed, but I gradually began to feel a little afraid. This was exacerbated by the fact that I slowly became aware (a strange phrase indeed) that I was not alone in the building, but that there was someone upstairs.

In the course of another 60 seconds I remembered that I was downstairs, that I had fallen to sleep on the couch, and that it was my wife who was upstairs, asleep.

It was a rather uncomfortable experience.
I've done that too! A couple times, it seems to happen when you fall asleep ... Or rather, it happens when you wake up in places you don't usually wake up in or are unfamiliar to you. I think they're quite cool.

[gravenewworld]

I experiene Deja vu all the time. For example I will be walking some place I have never been before, but before I even go around the corner I already know what I am going to see and where I am going to walk because I experienced it in a dream before. I know it sounds far fetched to believe but I have had things like this happen to me many times.

[honestrosewater]

I've done that too! A couple times, it seems to happen when you fall asleep ... Or rather, it happens when you wake up in places you don't usually wake up in or are unfamiliar to you. I think they're quite cool.Yep, me too. The first one I remember was when I was 6. We had recently moved to a new house, and I fell asleep on the floor in the livingroom watching TV. I woke up in the middle of the night and panicked immediately, didn't know where I was or how I got there for several minutes. This happened other times when I used to go out partying with friends and we would end up passing out at someone's house (alcohol, marijuana). I didn't forget who I was - just massive confusion and panic.

[Smurf]

Yep, me too. The first one I remember was when I was 6. We had recently moved to a new house, and I fell asleep on the floor in the livingroom watching TV. I woke up in the middle of the night and panicked immediately, didn't know where I was or how I got there for several minutes. This happened other times when I used to go out partying with friends and we would end up passing out at someone's house (alcohol, marijuana). I didn't forget who I was - just massive confusion and panic.
:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: I remember the first time I went to a punk show. I got so smashed, first time I tried marijuana too. Crashed at someone's house, in their attic, in a hammock, surrounded by 4-5 other people laying in sleeping bags and on inflated matresses. I had no idea where I was. Not sure how much of it I should attribute to the alcohol :biggrin:.

I don't panic though, I'm not the panicky type.

[zoobyshoe]

Just a few weeks ago I was at stop light and noticed the truck in front of me had a flat on the right rear tire. I couldn't believe the driver was ignoring it, and was baffled. I thought I might see if I could pull up next to her at the next red light and warn her.

Strangely, as we took off and proceeded to the next intersection, her flat tire "disappeared".

I think what happened was that the sun was at such a position, and at such an angle that the first tire I looked at cast shadows on each side of it that resembled the bulging folds of a flat tire.

Having "observed" that tire was flat, though, I saw it's counterpart on the left as fully inflated, despite the fact it had about the same shadows. In other words, I saw what I expected to see: if the first tire I noticed was flat, the other must not be.
I discounted these shadows as shadows, and "saw" the left tire as fully inflated, despite having been fully persuaded by the illusion of flatness on the right tire.

A short way down the road, with the sun at a somewhat different angle, they suddenly both revealed themselves to be fully inflated.

I was over tired, having only gotten about four hours sleep the previous three nights. What bothered me the most was that I had almost warned someone about a flat they didn't have.

[hypnagogue]

I've been trying to teach myself Lucid Dreaming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dreaming), conciously perceiving that you are in a dream. A common way to try to induce a lucid dream is WILD, Waking induction of lucid dreaming. Basically you try to keep your mind awake while your body goes to sleep. The key is the hypnagogic state, which often induces both auditory and visual hallucinations. So no, I don't think you're insane for hearing things before you go to sleep :biggrin:

Have you had any successes yet? Anything interesting happen?

I was fairly dedicated to trying to induce lucid dreams during a summer several years ago. I was using WILD techniques advocated by Stephen LaBerge (http://www.mavericksofthemind.com/lab-int.htm), including the rather cumbersome process of arranging to wake yourself up before getting a full night's sleep, staying up for about 20 minutes and then going back to sleep using some of the mindfulness techniques you mention. I didn't have great success inducing lucid dreams (I managed to start them off several times but they never lasted very long), but I did have some strange things happen.

In the most vivid and remarkable occassion, I was lying on my bed doing WILD, and had a subjective sense that I was making good progress. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I felt an enormous sensation of energy pulse through my body. The best way I can describe it is to say it felt something like a great current of electricity shot through me, although it wasn't unpleasant at all, except perhaps for the sheer intensity of it. My memory gets a little fuzzy here, but I believe this event precipitated the occurrence of another interesting event-- possibly a lucid dream or a brief, subtle out of body-ish experience (see below)-- but it didn't get very far. I think what happened was I got too excited that something extraordinary was happening and I lost my mental concentration, and with it went the experience.

Using WILD I've also had experiences where my body subjectively feels like it has sunk deep into the bed, as if I'm lying on a soft mattress that yields about 3 feet when I lie on it. Sometimes accompanying this experience is a subtle loss of the sense of my body boundary, such that it's difficult to tell where my body ends and the bed begins-- they feel almost like they continuously merge into eachother. Once or twice when this has happened, I've also experienced a slight out of body kind of feeling, where it seems like "I" am hovering just a few inches over where my body actually is. I've experienced similar "sunk into the bed" feelings (though nothing out of body-like) while deep in self-hypnosis, another mind altering technique I've dabbled in.

[Smasherman]

At all times I see what looks like infinitely small dots everywhere. They seem both black and white at all times but not quite. They don't impede my vision at all and are present in total darkness, light, with my eyes closed, and in twilight. Occasionally the dots seem to form shapes, but the shapes don't stick to the same part of my vision like "light stains" do when I glance at the sun or a bright light. I can control the shapes to some degree, but barely.

Once I was travelling to my dad's house on the other side of California and I felt a great sense of dread. I told my dad to be careful numberous times. After a while I started seeing a kind of blurry color in my inner eye. After a while I could see others as well. About 3 hours into the trip it felt like something was lodged in my chest. I imagined/saw a piece of metal in my inner eye. About 4 hours into the trip we came upon a HUGE car wreck exactly where I saw the first color.

I have a lot more, but I can't remember them all right now.

[hypatia]

As a kid I had flowered wall paper in my room, and as I fell asleep, the flowers would begin to dance. Well I called it dancing, mostly movements in circles and waves.
To me it was very natural, and was suprised when I found out that others don't see this.

[hypnagogue]

As a yound child (I would guess around 5-7 years old) I sometimes experienced what, in retrospect, is an odd sort of mental imagery when I closed my eyes. I would see a constellation of dimly lit points of light, somewhat as if seeing stars in outer space, and my perspective would zoom through the field as if I were traveling on a very fast space ship. At regular intervals on the order of seconds, the zooming would abruptly stop (I believe the points of light would actually jiggle back and forth a bit as if the abrupt stop had caused a reverberation), and then it would continue again in another direction. This occurred spontaneously, but I recall being able to initiate it intentionally if I so wished. I usually experienced this when lying down to go to sleep, but I don't recall being very sleepy when it would happen. It seems an odd sort of thing to happen in retrospect, but at the time it felt quite natural and not out of place to me.

[hypnagogue]

I've had something similar happen, but it's familiar music playing. It will be a song that I have recently been listening to and usually happens after using headphones. It isn't my inner voice singing the song; It sounds just like the normal song - whoever's vocals and the instruments, only much fainter and a bit fuzzy. It seems like the sound is coming from the environment (the first time it happened, I thought the radio was broken), but I don't experience the same sensation in my ear. It usually keeps repeating the same short snippets. I'm not in a 'special state' when this happens; It just needs to be quiet enough for me to notice the faint sound. I figure my brain is just doing something funny. And who knows how often it happens without me noticing. Could you be experiencing the same thing, only conversations instead of songs? You're sure the sounds are entirely new and not just memories?

I sometimes experience something like this. Sometimes when I have a song in my head, all of a sudden the song will go through a sort of qualitative phase change and sound quite vivid and clear, as if I am actually listening to it (although it still seems very much 'in the head' as opposed to coming from the environment). This effect usually lasts for several seconds with no conscious intervention on my part, but then fades.

[Gza]

I've done that too! A couple times, it seems to happen when you fall asleep ... Or rather, it happens when you wake up in places you don't usually wake up in or are unfamiliar to you. I think they're quite cool.

sounds like a typical saturday morning for me after a crazy friday night :smile:

[matthyaouw]

About 3 hours into the trip it felt like something was lodged in my chest.

Were you sleeping/snoozing at the time? A feeling of pressure on the chest is a common symptom of sleep paralysis.

[Smasherman]

No, I was wide awake.

[EnumaElish]

As a kid I had flowered wall paper in my room, and as I fell asleep, the flowers would begin to dance. Well I called it dancing, mostly movements in circles and waves.
To me it was very natural, and was suprised when I found out that others don't see this.That's really neat, and cute!

Here is a personal "ghost story." (Not really scary, just weird.)

I used to live in a high-rise building. An elderly lady who served at the front desk used to live in one of the apartments and we'd chat every once in a while. Then I moved to a nearby place but continued to talk to some of my previous neighbors. One day I learned that that woman had fallen ill and was hospitalized. As she stayed in the hospital, some of our common neighbors used to visit her in the hospital. I never went myself but sent my well wishes and was told that she remembered me.

At around that time, I started to get the feeling that there was a "presence" in my new place, usually during the evening hours. I never felt a threat, just a weirdness. I stopped sleeping in the master bedroom where I thought that was happening, and started sleeping in the small bedroom where I thought it didn't happen.

Days went by until one dreadful winter night when I got home very tired and dragged myself to the master bedroom to go to sleep. There was a winter rainstorm, with a wind that was shaking trees to their roots, and a rain coming in lashes. I was so tired that I thought I couldn't sleep. Then a heaviness descended upon me, and I dreamily thought that something was covering and weighing over me, so that I could sleep despite being so tired. My last memory before I fell into sleep was how the wind was sounding like a wild laughter as it howled and whistled through the branches and dry leaves of the trees nearby, and for some reason I imagined a couple of sisters' ephemeral spirits laughing as they ran wildly along the wind. Then I fell asleep.

That weekend I heard from an ex-neighbor that the woman in the hospital had passed on, during that stormy night, and at around the time that I thought I had heard a couple of sisters laughing in the wind.

It took me a while to make the connection, especially to the passive "visits" during the evening that coincided with the time that she was in the hospital. I now think that she was letting herself wander at night, in the neighborhood that she had lived and worked last. And that, during a stormy night, she was invited by an older sister to come and join her and to laugh with the wind.

P.S. Animist stories can be found in almost any culture; e.g. the Irish have their black bird (a crow?) that signals someone has deceased. What I posted above is the only such event that I personally experienced, to my knowledge.

[Grizzlycomet]

Have you had any successes yet? Anything interesting happen?

I have had a few interesting experiences. I have reached the hypnagogic state many times, and have seen plenty of interesting images in my "mind's eye", and also had auditorial hallucinations such as bangs, knocks, voices, and sometimes bits of music. Sometimes I have also felt as if I was floating, not "hovering above my own body" as you mentioned, and as I have read a lot of people feel when they try these techniques, but rather floating in the same posistion, as if the bed wasn't there, but the air still supported me in the same place.

I have not yet succeeded in taking the last step and actually achieve a lucid dream, but hopefully I will in due time. :approve:

[HiPPiE]

I want to try lucid dreaming sometime.. I just don't feel like I have enough time right now :eek:

So.. yeah I also get deja-vu a lot, but one time sticks out in my memory.

I used to be a bit of a gamer. I was online on Warcraft III, observing a game, which we used to do a lot back in the day. The observers just talk to each other and watch etc. Then something happened in the game, and I said to myself, haha I remember this! Now, this person is going to say the following, (I forget what the actual line was but it was long and nothing standard like 'lol' that I could have predicted), and then to my shock and awe the person said exactly what I had foretold.

I guess it was some lapse or delay of something in my brain or SOMETHING, I really don't know, but I do know that I predicted speech with exactness.

[Mk]

This lucid dream thing you are talking about, it comes completely naturally to me, about 80% of my dreams are of the lucid.

Wow, this is so weird, as I'm reading this Wikipedia article, its like I'm reading about me. The more I learn the more I found out I knew! Maybe I'll describe some of this to you. Wow, I am befuddled, astounded, mystefied.

Reality testing is a common method that people use to determine whether or not they are dreaming. This method involves performing an action with results that are difficult to re-create in a dream. An example of a reality test is to read some text, look away, and read it again, or to look at your watch, and remember the time, look away and look back. Observers have found that, in a dream, the text or time will often have changed. In the real world, the text will not change and the time will not change by more than one minute.
Another form of reality testing involves identifying one's dream signs, clues that one is dreaming. These can be anything such as a pink elephant on parade to a talking cat. Dream signs are often categorized as follows:
Action - The dreamer, another dream character, or a thing does something unusual or impossible in waking life
Context - The place or situation in the dream is strange
Form - The dreamer, another character, or a thing changes shape, or is oddly formed or transforms; this may include the presence of unusual clothing or hair, or a third person view of the dreamer
Awareness - A peculiar thought, a strong emotion, an unusual sensation, or altered perceptions.

I don't use any of these techniques, I just know. I just know. But I do use Action, Context, and sometimes, almost never, Form.

Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreaming (MILD) is a common technique used by lucid dreamers to induce a lucid dream at will. This method involves setting an intention to recognize dream signs while falling asleep.
I can do this, but the opposite, kind of. I can ahead of time, decide what I will NOT have my dream about, which is helpful, every once and awhile.

Waking induction of lucid dreaming
Waking Induction of Lucid Dreaming (WILD) is one of the most common induction techniques used by lucid dreamers. In this particular technique, a person goes directly from being awake into a lucid dream. The key to this technique is recognizing the hypnagogic stage. This stage is within the border of being awake and being asleep. If a person is successful in staying aware while this stage occurs, they will eventually enter the dream state while being fully aware that it is a dream.
I many times, and can only "wake up" into this "hypnagogic" state. And it is actually very calming and peaceful, a place I would love to go to sometimes in life. But only in the morning when I oversleep, around 9 am, to 11 am, I am able to control if I can stay awake in the hypnagogic state long enough for me to enter the dream state. After doing this WILD thing, the lucid dreams I have are different from other ones. In these dreams, everything is fainter, like I'm imagining it, but while I'm in the dream everything is just as real, and in these, once I have control, I have full control, of everything I do, of everything I see.

Other phenomena associated with lucid dreaming
False awakenings: In a false awakening, one suddenly dreams of having awakened. If the person was lucid, he/she often believes that he/she is no longer dreaming, and may start exiting their room etc. Since the person is actually still dreaming, this is called a "false awakening". This is often a nemesis in the art of lucid dreaming because it usually causes people to give up their awareness of being in a dream, but it can also cause someone to become lucid if the person does a reality check whenever he/she awakens.
I have not, and believe I never will have a "false awakening." Although When I'm having a WILD dream, I am many times simultaneously in my lucid dream, and somewhat aware of my real surroundings.
Sleep paralysis: During REM sleep the body is paralyzed by a mechanism in the brain, because otherwise the movements which occur in the dream would actually cause the body to move. However, it is possible for this mechanism to be triggered before, during, or after normal sleep while the brain awakens. This can lead to a state where a person is lying in their bed and they feel like they are frozen. Hallucinations may occur in this state, especially auditory ones. People also generally report feeling a crushing sensation on their chest (possibly because they try to consciously control their breathing). People trying to lucid dream sometimes try to trigger this state, or accidentally trigger this state, while using a waking induction of lucid dreaming (WILD) technique to enter a lucid dream directly when falling asleep.
This is absolutely the scariest thing I have ever experienced, I use my alternative MILD technique to stay away from it. I remember it almost every night I lay my head on the pillow. It happens almost only when I am lying face down in my pillow. You don't get as much air as you need because A) You're not sleeping you're awake! (at least partially) and B) You're trying to breath through a pillow. And I just discovered why I am completely incapable of opening my eyes! Because I'm in REM sleep! Its terrible. You are trying to breath but you can't after many many tries (you get a tiny breath of air in almost every try), you do you're best to muster up all of your body's energy into your right arm, while you are dying, but the thing is you have no energy. You are sleeping. But you don't know you're sleeping, you think you are awake, and suffocating, and its you're fault. I just can't decribe to you the torture.

And I guess I'm one of the lucky ones!


Most common:
Vividness
Fear
Common:
Sensing a "presence" (often malevolent)
Pressure/weight on body (especially the chest)
Impending sense of doom/death
Fairly common:
Auditory hallucinations (often footsteps or indistinct voices, or pulsing noises)
Visual hallucinations such as people or shadows walking around the room
Less common:
Floating sensation (sometimes associated with out-of-body experiences)
Seemingly seamless transition into full hallucinations or dreaming, also associated with out-of-body experiences
Tactile hallucinations (such as a hand touching or grabbing)
Rare:
Falling sensation
Vibration

I can't imagine my fear if I was struggling for breath and had tactical hallucinations and auditory hallucinations. I guess they have their eyes open, if they can "see."

Transformations: Some people believe (after some practice) one could transform their dream-selves into real or fictional animals, and claim to have tried sensory experiences not normally achievable while awake, such as 360 degree stereo vision, sonar (bat) vision etc.[/quote]
This sounds interesting. I'll practice it. Too bad I don't know how.

I do have this one dream, though. I happen to willingly jump off a cliff. The scenery is just like New Zealand, in the hills. But the cliff must be miles high. I hit terminal velocity in only a few seconds and the feeling is amazing, something that can't be felt here on planet Earth, there's nothing I can compare it to. Its like what the 6th dimension looks like. There's no possible way to.

Lucid Dreaming is quite often hard to achieve with most people. The inability to experience lucid dreaming is often because they cannot trigger the thought of "this is a dream" and therefore, their dreams are uncontrollable.
All in all, I no know, after some goosebumps, butterflies and gasps for air, I know now that I well... I am one of the few that have this power of lucid dreaming, and I would like to learn as much as possible about it. But right now, its 1 am here, and I am done.

Tell me more, and I would ABSOLUTELY LOVE to be supplied with more information on this. Maybe I'll check out that book by Stephen LaBerge.

Thank you so much, all.

[hypnagogue]

Thanks for sharing, Mk! It seems you have a truly unique gift, and you should definitely try to cultivate it. If you'd like to learn more about lucid dreaming, The Lucidity Institute (http://www.lucidity.com/) is definitely where you want to be. The institute was founded by Stephen LaBerge and I imagine it has the most authoritative and extensive information about lucid dreaming. On the site you can find a FAQ about lucid dreaming, excerpts from books, scientific studies, forums where you can communicate with other avid lucid dreamers, and more.

[Grizzlycomet]

Thats awesome Mk! With time, mostly anyone can learn to have lucid dreams by practicing, but very few are natural lucid dreamers such as you. :smile: As Hypnagogue suggested, the lucidity institue would be a good place to start exploring how to develop your gift further. LD4all (http://www.ld4all.com) and their forums (http://ld4all.com/forum/index.php) might also be worth checking out.

[Mk]

Thanks a lot for the Lucidity Institute (which happens to be a incorporation).

Those studies revealed that lucid dreams have two ways of
starting. In the much more common variety, the "dream-initiated
lucid dream" (DILD), the dreamer acquires awareness of being in a
dream while fully involved in it. DILDs occur when dreamers are
right in the middle of REM sleep, showing lots of the
characteristic rapid eye movements. We know this is true because
our dreamers give a deliberate prearranged eye-movement signal
when they realize they are dreaming. These signals show up on our
physiology record, so that we can pinpoint the times when
lucidity begins and see what kind of brain state the dreamers
were in at those times. DILDs account for about four out of every
five lucid dreams that our dreamers have had in the laboratory.
In the other 20 percent, the dreamers report awakening
from a dream and then returning to the dream state with unbroken
awareness -- one moment they are aware that they are awake in bed
in the sleep laboratory, and the next moment, they are aware that
they have entered a dream and are no longer perceiving the room
around them. We call these "wake initiated lucid dreams" (WILDs).
That hits the spot! Why wasn't the DILD thing in the Wikipedia article?

I think these definitions of various related issues of lucid dreaming are very, well different. The more I read, the more my understanding changes, or I get confused. Like where the Lucid institute describes WILD as waking up, then returning to your lucid dream. Whereas Wikipedia describes it as going straight from laying your head on your pillow to dreaming, but with a further look into Wikipedia's description, you find that WILD is a technique used by those who want to lucid dream, and it is like staying conscious while you are falling into a dream state, through the hypnogogic state, halfway between awake and adream. I am extremely familiar with this state until I read on LD4All that when in the hypnogogic state you see dots and shapes and complete images sometimes. It is very akin to an LSD trip. This state I have never experienced before.

After a much better understand of lucid dreams, I would have to say ALL my dreams are lucid. I figure I started lucid dreaming around 9 years old.

In every dream I have a small element of concurrent control, and for several weeks have been trying to predetermination control, with no success what so ever. But I know I can do it. This is what I was talking about before, when I could make sure I do NOT dream about something.

If I learn how to do anything interesting, I'll update back!

Thank you once again to PF, and all its dedicated members!

[Evo]

I have always done what I call "directed dreaming", I am always aware that I am dreaming and I "direct" my dreams like a movie director. If I decide I don't like something I am dreaming, I rewind it to a suitable spot to change the direction it was going. I am rarely in my own dreams as myself, I am usually someone else or just observing others.

Some of my dreams are like epic movies with casts of thousands and intricate plots and subplots. I love going to sleep just so I can dream.

I can also "create" my dreams. Before I go to sleep, I start imagining what I want to dream about and will continue it when I fall asleep.

[Mk]

How many of your dreams can you direct? Do you know this hypnogogic state where there's colorful shapes, patterns and images?

[Evo]

How many of your dreams can you direct?I'd say I'm aware of directing maybe 90%. Sometimes I'm not aware I am in control until the dream starts to be unpleasant, then I stop it, rewind and change the ending.

Do you know this hypnogogic state where there's colorful shapes, patterns and images?No, I haven't read anything about it.

Have you ever heard of opthalmic or ocular migraine? I've had two of those. really bizarre, the second one was "classic", like this. The first was black and white and really fascinating. There is no headache, just designs.

http://www.eyeguys.net/ocular.jpg

http://www.eyeguys.net/ocularmigraine.html

[Mk]

Have you ever heard of opthalmic or ocular migraine? I've had two of those. really bizarre, the second one was "classic", like this. The first was black and white and really fascinating. There is no headache, just designs.

http://www.eyeguys.net/ocular.jpg

http://www.eyeguys.net/ocularmigraine.html
If I had one of those I'd be REALLY freaked out. Thought I was going to lose my vision, which I my favorite of all senses!! I'd have someone drive me to the emergency room immediately!

[EnumaElish]

Have you ever heard of opthalmic or ocular migraine? I've had two of those. really bizarre, the second one was "classic", like this. The first was black and white and really fascinating. There is no headache, just designs.I wonder to what kind of an influence many undiagnosed persons with this condition have attributed their visions throughout human history.

[Mk]

Insanity probably had to do with it. "You can't see the dots? What? They're right there! See?! They follow me around where ever I go."

[zoobyshoe]

I wonder to what kind of an influence many undiagnosed persons with this condition have attributed their visions throughout human history.
See: The Visions of Hildegard, chapter 20 of Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.

[Mk]

I just realized something... most times other people aren't aware they're in a dream!

Gosh, It must be terrible to face a "real-life" situation like some of the dreams I've heard. That's why I never have nightmares, I just change it around. Once I was against a foe I have long forgoten, I and it were at my old elementary school. In a time of inevitiable loss, I conjured up a RPG-7V1 for myself (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPG-7), and a small army of ten Operation: Desert Storm M1 Abramss. Whatever it was, I don't think I even finished the dream before moving on to the next, it was easily defeated, before shots were fired. :approve:

[Rabid]

This isn't as weird as some of the other experiences here, but it's something that freaks me out.
From time to time I will wake up in the middle of the night and I won't be able to move, it's like I'm paralized. I can open and move my eyes and hear, but that's it. I eventually shut my eyes and am able to fall back asleep. This is definitely not an enjoyable experience.

[Mk]

This isn't as weird as some of the other experiences here, but it's something that freaks me out.
From time to time I will wake up in the middle of the night and I won't be able to move, it's like I'm paralized. I can open and move my eyes and hear, but that's it. I eventually shut my eyes and am able to fall back asleep. This is definitely not an enjoyable experience.
This is called awareness during sleep paralysis, I described it to the best of my ability a few posts above:
Quote:
Sleep paralysis: During REM sleep the body is paralyzed by a mechanism in the brain, because otherwise the movements which occur in the dream would actually cause the body to move. However, it is possible for this mechanism to be triggered before, during, or after normal sleep while the brain awakens. This can lead to a state where a person is lying in their bed and they feel like they are frozen. Hallucinations may occur in this state, especially auditory ones. People also generally report feeling a crushing sensation on their chest (possibly because they try to consciously control their breathing). People trying to lucid dream sometimes try to trigger this state, or accidentally trigger this state, while using a waking induction of lucid dreaming (WILD) technique to enter a lucid dream directly when falling asleep.

This is absolutely the scariest thing I have ever experienced, I use my alternative MILD technique to stay away from it. I remember it almost every night I lay my head on the pillow. It happens almost only when I am lying face down in my pillow. You don't get as much air as you need because A) You're not sleeping you're awake! (at least partially) and B) You're trying to breath through a pillow. And I just discovered why I am completely incapable of opening my eyes! Because I'm in REM sleep! Its terrible. You are trying to breath but you can't after many many tries (you get a tiny breath of air in almost every try), you do you're best to muster up all of your body's energy into your right arm, while you are dying, but the thing is you have no energy. You are sleeping. But you don't know you're sleeping, you think you are awake, and suffocating, and its you're fault. I just can't decribe to you the torture.
I seem to suffer of a different kind of sleep paralysis after reading more, others can move their eyelids and look around the room, and hear things. I can't do any of them.

Hmm... it could be a "false awakening" - I think I woke up but actually I'm dreaming this torture. :eek: Next time if I can get a hold of myself (which I won't be able to) I'll try to make something or change it to get myself out.

[Rabid]

Thanks, I have a habit of skipping forward while reading. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v386/insidiousprole/dunce.gif

[loseyourname]

Okay, hypnagogue asked me to describe what it's like to drink absinthe. Unfortunately, for the most part, I don't really remember. I've only drank it once, and I actually made a concerted effort not to drink too much. I played the role of instigator that night, daring and prodding those who had drunk too much into performing outrageous actions that they would otherwise never do, largely so that I could photograph them and have something interesting to write in my journal (I was in the middle of a road trip and documentation was the word of the day).*

The strongest feeling I can actually remember is that of disconnection. I didn't seem to be participating in any directed way in what I was doing, or what was going on. I experienced things as an observer rather than as an actor. One thing I would like to say about this is that this may not be a typical effect of absinthe. It seems likely that what happened is that the absinthe simply intensified a sense of disconnection that I often feel in awkward social situations to begin with. I've always had a tendency to experience life as if it were a novel, a story that I was either writing or reading. In this case, I was the reader rather than the writer, and some other part of me took control of crafting the narrative, a part whose motivations I have no access to in my memory.

The other notable quality of the experience is the complete lack of fear. Absinthe is alcoholic, and alcohol already lowers one's inhibition level, but this did it to the extreme. I had the sense of being in a reality without rules. It wasn't like I could violate the laws of physics or transcend my physical limitations or anything that profound; it was simply that I had the feeling that the social rules which normally dictate human behavior were gone. All of us were reduced to the level of primal beasts, literally becoming the monsters that lurk just beneath the surface of the knowable psyche. Consider the situation of Caligula. As Emperor, there were no real consequences to his actions. He could do whatever he wished to do and get away with it. Moreover, he seemed to reach the point where morality no longer made any difference to his decisions; it simply seemed to no longer exist in his world. It was something like that.

*I realize this might make me sound like somewhat of a sociopath, but whatever.

[hypnagogue]

Thanks LYN for your articulate report. Can you compare the general subjective feel or background/fringey aspects of the absinthe experience to any other sorts of experience?

I find your remark about experiencing life as a novel or story interesting as well. It's not uncommon to read in the psychology literature that we experience life as an extended sort of narrative (and I've heard anecdotal reports along these lines as well), but I personally don't find much resonance with this portrayal. I'm not sure if it's because this metaphor just doesn't click with me conceptually, or if it's something to do with the way I actually experience life. Could you expand on your remark on life as a narrative a bit (if there even is any substantive expansion to do)?

[hypnagogue]

Have you ever heard of opthalmic or ocular migraine? I've had two of those. really bizarre, the second one was "classic", like this. The first was black and white and really fascinating. There is no headache, just designs.

I experienced something like this this morning. At the time I had been sitting and reading at the computer for some time, was somewhat tired, and had a kind of heavy-headed feeling (not quite a headache, and not painful, but something along those lines).

Suddenly I experienced a brief flash of light (on the order of a split second), as if someone had momentarily turned on some bright lights behind me. I suspected quite strongly that it was something internal but was still compelled to look behind me to see if there was some external cause (as I expected, there wasn't) because of the intensity of the experience. I experienced a similar thing, with less intensity and slightly briefer duration, two more times in the span of about 10 minutes.

It's difficult to get a handle on what it was like since each experience was so brief. But it seemed like there was a horizontal strip of white light along the upper periphery of my visual field, perhaps somewhat concave and jagged, but my overall impression of the shape is rather ambiguous. On the first occurrence, it seemed like the light lit up much of the visual field, but on the second and third occurrences this lighting effect did not occur, and the experience was limited to just the strip of light itself.

The second and third time it happened I noticed that it seemed like my visual field discontinuously jumped very slightly up and to the left for the split second over which the experience occured, as if the experience was associated with a brief saccade such that the eye movement registered in conscious experience. (If this was a form of occular migraine, perhaps this visual displacement was caused by an occular spasm.) When this happened my overall visual experience was somewhat fringey and peripheral, as if I very briefly lost the higher degree of detail of visual experience that comes with foveal vision. The momentary loss of foveal vision and the apparent conscious registration of a saccade seem to be consistent with an involuntary occular spasm. (The brain takes some brief time to effect visual attention and foveal vision following saccades, and the jumpy visual displacement caused by saccades is normally not noticed in visual experience unless the saccades are not caused by normal visual guidance mechanisms in the brain.)

The brief visual experiences seemed to be accompanied with a strange, barely felt and ambiguous overall body sensation that lasted a few seconds, although this might have just been caused by a psychological reaction to the anomolous visual experience rather than being a similar perceptual distortion sharing the same root cause as the visual disturbance.

[hypnagogue]

A few days ago I was walking down the street and was rather strongly emotionally distressed by some in-family friction over financial matters. As I suppose is somewhat typical for depressed emotional states, I experienced spontaneous, fleeting suicidal thoughts (although, of course, I was not consciously choosing to entertain these thoughts and was not genuinely suicidal). The thought soon occurred to me that I might actually be in the process of dying from a suicide attempt and that my immediate perceptual environment might merely be a strong hallucination arising from an impaired brain.

What is interesting here, in the context of this thread, is not this train of thought in itself. What is interesting is that upon having this last thought, it momentarily seemed convincing, or rather entirely and thoroughly plausible in an immediate, felt-in-the-bones sense that I was indeed just experiencing a massive hallucination, that my perceptual world did not correspond to the real world. Normally one might have a kind of abstract appreciation that yes, we could just be experiencing a mass hallucination (e.g. in brain in a vat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat) thought experiments), but not feel any particularly strong experience of unreality while entertaining such thoughts and ultimately take a dismissive attitude towards them. However, in the moment I have been describing, I did indeed experience a quite strong emotional/perceptual sense of unreality to, or disconnect from, my environment. It seemed more like a vivid fantasy or dream than the "real world." This sensation lasted about 10 or 20 seconds or so before fading away.

It's worth noting here that I have previously experienced similar feelings that have been brought on by clear, voluntary thought rather than emotional distress. For instance, upon being introduced to the philosophical concept of solipsism as a freshman in college, I took the solipsism worldview for a 'test ride,' imagining that solipsism was true and that mine was the only real consciousness, and all the world was just a fabrication of my mind. I became quite engrossed in the thought and for some time, maybe about 5 or 10 minutes, felt a distinct and somewhat powerful (and not-too-pleasant) sense of unreality about my perceptual environment.

Both experiences were probably a brief manifestation of depersonalization or derealization symptoms. DSM III describes depersonalization disorder as "an alteration in the perception and experience of the self so that the usual sense of one's own reality is temporarily lost or changed. This is manifested by a sensation of self-estrangement or unreality, which may include the feeling that one's extremities have changed in size, or the experience of seeming to perceive oneself from a distance. ... the individual may feel 'mechanical' or as though in a dream. Various types of sensory anesthesias and a feeling of not being in complete control of one's actions, including speech, are often present. All of these feelings are ego-dystonic (self-alien)..." And further, "derealization is frequently present. This is manifested in a strange alteration in the perception of one's surroundings so that a sense of the reality of the external world is lost."

The Jospeph F. Smith Medical Library (http://www.chclibrary.org/micromed/00045600.html) describes depersonalization and derealization as follows:

Depersonalization

Depersonalization is a dissociative symptom in which the patient feels that his or her body is unreal, is changing, or is dissolving. Some patients experience depersonalization as being outside their bodies or watching a movie of themselves.

Derealization

Derealization is a dissociative symptom in which the external environment is perceived as unreal. The patient may see walls, buildings, or other objects as changing in shape, size, or color. In some cases, the patient may feel that other persons are machines or robots, though the patient is able to acknowledge the unreality of this feeling.

Depersonalization and derealization are known to be brought on severe stress, such as car accidents or strong pain, anxiety, or depression, consistent with my experience related here. These symptoms can also be brought on by thought reform or brainwashing that strongly challenge deeply held thoughts and beliefs, which is consistent with my solipsism 'test drive' in college. (The medical library cited above also remarks that depersonalization (as a symptom, not a disorder) is "quite common in college-age populations," perhaps lending to the relative ease with which my strange experience occurred.)

[Evo]

I experienced something like this this morning. At the time I had been sitting and reading at the computer for some time, was somewhat tired, and had a kind of heavy-headed feeling (not quite a headache, and not painful, but something along those lines). <snip>Yes, that could be a mild form. I actually would like to see another, since I know they are harmless and temporary. :redface: The first one I experienced was so incredible with the designs and the changing of direction and the spinning. I was under extreme stress at the time, which is probably what brought it on. It is so amazing what the brain can do.

[loseyourname]

Could you expand on your remark on life as a narrative a bit (if there even is any substantive expansion to do)?

This is definitely one I can expand on somewhat. It has mostly to do with the way I feel about events that occur in my life, as well as my motivations for bringing about certain events and avoiding others. Typically, or at least I get the impression that typically, people are pleased by generally good events and angered or saddened by generally bad events. While I do often feel the same way in regards to an immediate emotional response, I do not always, and oftentimes I do not feel these ways even in the immediate response. Instead, I feel the way a writer does when crafting a story. If a certain events moves the plot forward or reveals a particular aspect of character development, or even seems to make a metaphorical point if looked at from the outside, then it pleases me. If it does not, then I am not satisfied. I have to note that I do not always feel this way, particularly with regards to my immediate responses to events, but when I do, my interactions with people can become rather awkward, as the way I feel about what is going on becomes completely different from the way they feel, and I would even say that my experience of the event as being in context with a fuller narrative is probably completely different from the other person's experience. My experience is artistic rather than visceral.

If you consider the difference between watching Romeo after killing
Tybalt to actually being Romeo at that time, you can get an idea of what I mean. Romeo cries out that he is fortune's fool, in a moment of absolute despair. I would venture the guess that he probably feels nothing but despair. A viewer of the play, however, is moved by a different set of emotions, an appreciation of how fate is playing out to construct what is a beautiful tragedy. In many ways, I would rather lead a beautiful life than a happy life.

Where this manifests most explicitly is in the way I make life-decisions. Most people will simply do what makes them happy, or what they think will bring them success. But a stable home life, meaningful relationships, and material success have never been particularly important to me. When I decide what to do on the large scale of overarching plans (choosing a partner, school, job, whatever), I always take into consideration first and foremost how it will contribute to the story of my life. Does it take the plot in a new and interesting direction? Does it make any kind of artistic statement? Or, more pedestrianly, does it make for a good read?

[honestrosewater]

I sometimes look at my life as if it were a story, in order to gain some perspective on things, but it's more in a quiet, reflective way; It's not always on my mind.

I do have something that's a bit strange. When my anxiety problems first started, I realized that I could intentionally imagine that there was some dangerous object in my environment, and though I knew that I was only imagining it, I would still flinch or such when I imagined that it approached me. The key was to move my eyes as if I was watching the object. I was also aware of what object or scenario I was imagining, but this alone didn't produce the same result (it had other effects though).

I first noticed this when my eyes happened to move along the carpet as if I were watching a snake slither across the room. When my gaze shifted towards myself, I jerked back reflexively, as if some part of my brain thought there was really a snake there. I played around with it, making the images more vivid and elaborate and trying to resist flinching, but it was quite strong.

[zoobyshoe]

What is interesting here, in the context of this thread, is not this train of thought in itself. What is interesting is that upon having this last thought, it momentarily seemed convincing...
You pretty much proved the basis of Cognitive Therapy: our thoughts cause our emotional state. The way we talk to ourselves, and what we talk to ourselves about, creates our moods.

[hypnagogue]

You pretty much proved the basis of Cognitive Therapy: our thoughts cause our emotional state. The way we talk to ourselves, and what we talk to ourselves about, creates our moods.

It's undoubtedly true that thoughts influence moods (and vice versa), but I think this particular experience owed most of its occurrence to the general mood and mindset I was already in, sort of like the gun powder to the thought's flame. That is, the primary causal flow was probably from emotional stress to dissociation, with the particular thought I had merely facilitating that flow. I certainly don't get a powerful sense of unreality every time I entertain thoughts about mass hallucination, even when I do so deeply, but here just the mere spontaneous entry of the thought into consciousness was enough to automatically set off a strong derealization experience.

[zoobyshoe]

That is, the primary causal flow was probably from emotional stress to dissociation, with the particular thought I had merely facilitating that flow.
You were already stressed out about the money issues so the thought was particularly potent at that time. The degree to which a thought affects our moods is a somewhat separate issue. Had some exceptionally pleasant thought occured to you instead you would have have run just as far with that, but in the other direction. The depth of the reaction is different for different people, and different for the same person under different circumstances, depending on the general strength of your emotions at the time, their general volume. The thought itself steers the direction the emotions take, not necessarily the strength of those emotions.

Our pre-existing emotional state does, indeed, prime us to explore certain kinds of thoughts via a confirmation bias. This is what you mean when you say there was a "flow" from stress to dissociation already in progress: you had fallen into the habit of calling up negative thoughts in response to the negative emotions precipitated by the previous negative thought. It actually does run in chains like this, and the solution is to notice what you're thinking, and to correct the distortion of thought. The emotions follow suit.

[Simetra7]

In my late teen years and early twenties i was a rather heavy user of marijuana. At that time i enjoyed the whole altered state of awareness feeling that it gave me, and just went with the flow. I found that when i was high my brain seemed to operate on a completely different level and I experienced a deeper understanding of all the spiritual practices i was learning at the time such as meditation and visualisation. At around 24 or 25 a different kind of altered state started to creep in. At first just subtle changes but eventually a whole new and scary state took over. I would find myself unable to control my thoughts and i would imagine that people around me were plotting against me. I realise that paranoia is fairly common in drug users, but this went beyond that. Because i had become quite proficient at visualisation, and was able to manifest many things in my life with this technique, i started to believe that my paranoid state was going to somehow manifest these terrible situations and that i was not going to be able to stop this from happening. It was as if my mind had been completely taken over and when one plot ran it's course without consequence another more elaborate plot would take over. Needless to say i stopped smoking the dope altogether but it took a long time for my mind to come back to the level it had been at before all this started. Now, thankfully that is way in the past and things are relatively normal.
About lucid dreaming; I have been trying to become lucid in my dreams for a long time and have only managed it a couple of times and only for a short duration. A strange thing that does happen sometimes is that i'll be dreaming about someone who i am close to, and all of a sudden i will get the feeling that he/she is the one who is dreaming and that i am in his/her dream. I tell them so but they don't believe me. They tell me that it is my dream not theirs but even then it doesn't really register that i may be lucid, and the dream just takes it's own course while i am still quite sure that i am in someone elses dream.

[Ivan Seeking]

It seems that on at least a few ocassions, for some period of time during which I was under tremendous pressure and got very little sleep, I walked the three-hundred feet from the house to my office, worked on various parts of an engineering project including high voltage circuits, walked back to the house and went to bed, never to remember a thing. Only later did I realize what must have happened through circumstantial evidence - e.g. work done by either me or elves, and I'm guessing that it wasn't elves.

The first real clue came when Tsu got up one night and I was gone. I had no idea where I had been!

What do you mean "where was I"???? :surprised :surprised :surprised

[Ivan Seeking]

Oh yes, this is a great story from another system's integrator.

Having worked something like a week on hardly any sleep, and I mean something in the neighborhood of eight hours of sleep over a period of five days, which can happen in my line work, Leonard was working away somewhere on the factory floor when a large piece of equipment fell from high above, landed right next to him with a huge crash, and nearly killed him. Leonard thought to himself how funny it was that he didn't even jump. He just kept working as if nothing had even happened. A little while later another engineer walked up to discuss something. When leonard started to tell his co-worker about the near miss and looked over at the fallen machinery, nothing was there. He had hallucinated the entire episode.

[Ramster5678]

I was sleeping then i would wake up, and i would see a penny, lying at the tip of my bed, and i tried to grab it, but it went right through my hand! That same night, i had this same experience except with a pencil box. I go to swip it off the bed, but my hand goes right through it. I don't remember how i got out of this incident, i might have just gone back to sleep or it just went away as i (with no success) tried to get it off my bed. This, though, only happened once.

[matthyaouw]

A strange experience I had when I was about 9 (i think)
I was at school. I remember leaving the classroom, and on my travels, I took a look out the door, and saw a group of older children that seemed to be getting ready for a group photo in 3 rows. The back ones must have been standing on a platform of some kind. I didn't stray far from the door, but on the way back, there was no one there. They didn't come through the door, and there was no evidence that they'd been there at all- no platform the back row could have been standing on, nor could I think of a reason why they'd be there in the first place. I still don't know for certain whether they'd really been there at all.

[cotarded]

I don't even know where to begin in this thread. I have had, or still have, experiences relevant to so many of the topics discussed here. Just a few minutes ago I posted in the "Stuck in REM sleep" thread about an incident where my dream world decided to stowaway when I crossed into reality and I was robbed of a real sleep/wake transition (full hallucinations while I wrote on my desk). I also share loseyourname's artistic life perspective completely (although I'm far less articulate so I'll keep my two cents to myself concerning that idea) and generally think I'm more inclined to a narrative worldview because I don't have any eidetic (visual) or much emotional recall at all. My past is inert and verbal, although wordless (if that sounds like a contradiction, it feels like when somebody tells you about a concept by contrasting two words - before he comes up with a final word or you say "I understand", that verbal but unarticulated substance is my memory).

Anyway, what I thought I'd share was the change in headspace that persisted for some time after a really foolish phase of experimentation with nitrous oxide. Note for those who haven't played with the stuff, it's my opinion that it's surprisingly and insiduously(sp) addictive, not to mention destructive. For those who don't know, it tends to exhibit reverse tolerance in the beginning, intensifying each time you hit it. After some time, for reasons that are unknown to me, and about which I'm extremely curious, the effects diminish to the point of being undesirable. Coinciding with this qualitative change in the high is a change in the comedown. For the enjoyable interval (those times before the acute effects disappear), the comedown is almost better than the actual intoxication, leaving you feeling inspired, generally quicker, and excited. The only thing I can compare it to is the way I feel after I recovered (30 mins or so) from a hard, and successful cross country run (which makes analyzing the source of the effects difficult, as you're combining accomplishment with hypoxia/blood ph change/deranged blood sugar levels/enkephalins etc.).

Anyway, the last few times I did whippets, about a half to a day later I would become completely depersonalized and anhedonic. To the point where the entire world would seem completely fake and pointless. It's a hell of an experience - when you can't feel any emotive response, there's no reason to do anything! Maybe I'm the only one that would find this obvious result counter-intuitive in experience. I'd sit and think, do I want to talk to so-and-so, and feel nothing, do I want to x, nothing, do I want to think, nothing. So after going into a frenzy to evoke feedback, I eventually acquiesced into a state of heavy inertia until my beloved carrot and stick came back and provided reason for living. It was inconcievable how even logic wasn't sufficient to maintain me, because the assumptions were based on emotion, and no matter how many times I demonstrated to my desperate, apathetic self that this or that logically followed, it didn't mean anything.

Last little tidbit that I'll leave out here just to see if anyone is interested:
I experimented with 5-HTP at one point, out of sheer boredom (terrible reason to do anything to your mind, I know, but this was after the preceding and no argument was compelling - I was exhausting habits and impulses since the tried and true wasn't true anymore as far as feedback), thinking it would have no effect, and was met with a very, very unusual change in consciousness. Normally I can never say with confidence that I've been "unconscious" because it may just be that I don't remember (i.e. I could have been thinking all night but not remember it - even if those thoughts were handicapped into incoherence by being memory deprived), but in this case I fell into lapses of non-subjectivity where I felt like a deterministic, inanimate object (in retrospect, at the time I felt nothing) then returned to consciousness with full memory of the events after a second or two.
Tidbit that was.

lates,
cotarded.

[fuzzyfelt]

This is pretty mundane after the last post, but I’ve got a thousand things I should be doing and don’t feel like doing, so thought I’d share a hypnagogic hallucination that seemed to take hours once when I was 17yo art student, as a reason to procrastinate. I was using, as I do (easier than thinking!) the hypnagogic state as a kind of tool.

I went to bed, meditated, then rolled to one side facing in and felt some movement about my exposed ear so rolled over facing out across my large room, reassured by a small shaft of light I was now facing as the door on the other side of the room was slightly ajar. (This house has a lot of family history, some may be considered spooky:eek: )

As I lay looking at the light I became aware that it was moving, or rather I was moving down the bed. I felt that if this was going to be a proper out of body my awareness should not be still attached to my body, and felt I should relax more and wait. Nothing changed, and I was becoming increasingly concerned that my head was slowly en-route to collide with the wooden bed-end. So I struggled to free the paralysis but couldn’t and my movement down the bed was unrelenting. I awaited the collision.

However, in the instant that my head was due to receive a pummelling from the bed-end, I was flipped upwards, and at a furious pace found myself flying head first, my arms still glued to my sides, around the room- the air racing passed my ears was noisy, my hair blown right back and I could feel the speed on my skin, like when you stick your head the window of a fast moving car. I couldn’t orientate myself in the darkness. I was dreading other, more brutal collisions with the three external brick walls, windows and hard furniture. It felt totally out of control, seemed to be endless, and I was wondering how it would stop.

Then at some point I noticed a pattern in the movement - my feet were remaining much in the centre of the room, whilst my body was sweeping out a large circle that wavered up and down, although above the furniture and below the high ceilings, which was some relief.

It occurred to me this could mean something had control of my feet- had pulled my stiff body down the bed and still had them as it swung my seized body around. I felt that it was important to try to see my feet, and so, possibly, what it was that was doing this to me. It wasn’t that I was certain that there was a malevolent force present, it was more that I had to rule that out, or see it if it existed, otherwise I would always wonder. As I mustered the strength, and courage, to twist my neck to look back at my feet, again, in the very instant that I managed to twist, my newly flexible body was forcibly thrown back on to my bed with a loud thud, I think my sheet fell on top of me then too, and there was silence,.... and everything was back to normal. It all felt real.

[Dayle Record]

I once went to a Junior High assembly, a musical assembly at my daugther's school. I realized that I was slipping into a bad migraine headache, and there wasn't much I could do about it. Then the "orchestra" (all stringed instruments), was set to play a melody. There were only about a dozen players, and they were terribly out of tune. I have perfect pitch, and the sawing of the instruments in their out of tune state, gave me the effect of worms crawling on my scalp. It was the oddest thing, and that is the only way I can describe it. I was in so much pain I found it laughable, and then when the orchestra started up, it was as if my scalp wanted to leave the room.

[selfAdjoint]

I once went to a Junior High assembly, a musical assembly at my daugther's school. I realized that I was slipping into a bad migraine headache, and there wasn't much I could do about it. Then the "orchestra" (all stringed instruments), was set to play a melody. There were only about a dozen players, and they were terribly out of tune. I have perfect pitch, and the sawing of the instruments in their out of tune state, gave me the effect of worms crawling on my scalp. It was the oddest thing, and that is the only way I can describe it. I was in so much pain I found it laughable, and then when the orchestra started up, it was as if my scalp wanted to leave the room.


Did anybody at the pary seem to react to you? In the evidences of Padre Pio's bilocations, presented as part of his case for canonization, he was said to have bilocated from his friary in Italy to one in, I think, Brazil, and people there who knew him personally said they had heard his voice in the corridor, but not seen him.

[selfAdjoint]

I once went to a Junior High assembly, a musical assembly at my daugther's school. I realized that I was slipping into a bad migraine headache, and there wasn't much I could do about it. Then the "orchestra" (all stringed instruments), was set to play a melody. There were only about a dozen players, and they were terribly out of tune. I have perfect pitch, and the sawing of the instruments in their out of tune state, gave me the effect of worms crawling on my scalp. It was the oddest thing, and that is the only way I can describe it. I was in so much pain I found it laughable, and then when the orchestra started up, it was as if my scalp wanted to leave the room.


Did anybody at the party seem to react to you? In the evidences of Padre Pio's bilocations, presented as part of his case for canonization, he was said to have bilocated from his friary in Italy to one in, I think, Brazil, and people there who knew him personally said they had heard his voice in the corridor, but not seen him.

[Dayle Record]

A Junior High School musical assembly is something that should be banned under the Geneva Accords. I was just sitting in a row, smiling with tears starting to form from the pain, and wearing an amazed expression, since it was such an awful performance, amplified by inexplicable neurological effects of migraine. I think the soul of my scalp, did transmigrate to Jamaica at the time, and dred lock motility has taken off as an art form since.

[cotarded]

fi said:
"I was flipped upwards, and at a furious pace found myself flying head first, my arms still glued to my sides, around the room- the air racing passed my ears was noisy, my hair blown right back and I could feel the speed on my skin, like when you stick your head the window of a fast moving car. I couldn’t orientate myself in the darkness. I was dreading other, more brutal collisions with the three external brick walls, windows and hard furniture. It felt totally out of control, seemed to be endless, and I was wondering how it would stop."

I have had an identical experience, though it was coming out of sleep. I hinted at it in my post in the "stuck in rem sleep" thread, but didn't really do it justice. The story is long and convoluted and also includes other hypnopompic hallucinations, even ones that followed me into my waking state, but there was a stage where I tried to get out of bed and I simply fell out of my body and into an intense sort of discarnate rollercoaster that is very much in accord with your description here. I found mine a little disconcerting but mostly exhiliarating(sp) - I wish I could feel that sense of acceleration again, as well as the awesome, pervasive sense of wind resistance all over my body, like I was moving so rapidly through the air that the viscosity became that of water (at first it seems that this is a long-winded way of saying I felt like I was swimming, but air is dry, so it's actually a pretty ineffable sensation).

lates,
cotarded.

[fuzzyfelt]

I have had an identical experience, though it was coming out of sleep. I hinted at it in my post in the "stuck in rem sleep" thread, but didn't really do it justice. The story is long and convoluted and also includes other hypnopompic hallucinations, even ones that followed me into my waking state, but there was a stage where I tried to get out of bed and I simply fell out of my body and into an intense sort of discarnate rollercoaster that is very much in accord with your description here. I found mine a little disconcerting but mostly exhiliarating(sp) - I wish I could feel that sense of acceleration again, as well as the awesome, pervasive sense of wind resistance all over my body, like I was moving so rapidly through the air that the viscosity became that of water (at first it seems that this is a long-winded way of saying I felt like I was swimming, but air is dry, so it's actually a pretty ineffable sensation).
lates,
cotarded.
Thanks, cotarded, it is reassuring to hear of similar experiences, it makes it seem less wierd! I described mine as an hypnogigic hallucination because that seems most plausible. However, my gut feeling is I would have had an out of body experience had I let myself disengage my awareness of body, and the motion and lack of control was some attempt to shake that off. Afterwards, I had a feeling I'd been a bit of a failure, that I should have let go and felt more exhillerated, less frightened of smashing into something, and then something greater would have been achieved. So it is also reassuring that you don't mention feeling worried about bodily consequence, and that you were exhillerated, and that that still was the extent of the experience. Your post has made me feel less of a failure and more happy to believe it was an hypnogogic hallucination. You say you'd like to feel it again, personally I'd like to avoid it, but do you meditate? If not, perhaps that would help.

[-Job-]

I once walked outside at night in my sleep. If you've never sleepwalked before, it feels like an acted out dream, the next morning you may remember a couple of things (and feel really guilt for whatever reason) or you may not. Generally it's not a big deal. Mostly it's stuff like if i have nightmare i'll instinctly run to the bathroom and then go back to bed. What is interesting is that if i'm walking around in a sleep state and i see or hear something unexpected i'll just go on a wild tangent and think something else is happening. Three times it has happened that this has produced a scenario where i thought the building was either on fire or being demolished by a bulldozer. These situations feel completely real, so i just panic extremely, run to the closest window and start banging at it trying to break it. While doing this i usually either wake up myself or someone else and one time i was caught halfway out the second floor window, the other times i couldn't get out because the mosquito net got in the way. When i wake up my heart is racing and i feel really stupid and guilty. I'm as afraid of this happening again as the real thing, it's quite a scary thing.

[Mk]

If I learn how to do anything interesting, I'll update back!

Thank you once again to PF
Sucess! After over a month of dreaming, I have finally achieved the goal of... having sex!!! YES! I win!

[CosminaPrisma]

Mk achieved his subconscious desires!! ::high five::

[Mk]

Ooops, I forgot to add that I had sex in a lucid dream, not that I have been dreaming of sex and have been trying to get laid.

[CosminaPrisma]

:rofl:

Hahah Mk!!!

[PIT2]

Ooops, I forgot to add that I had sex in a lucid dream, not that I have been dreaming of sex and have been trying to get laid.

Tell us all about it, how was it?

Here are some of my weird experiences:

Ive heard a few weird noises and voices similar to what hypnagogue described in his second post, usually when falling asleep. Has happened about 6 times and the noises were twice a 'boing' noise(like u hear in cartoons), someone saying my name, and i forgot the other ones.

One time i had a weird experience where a friend asked me a question to which i could not have known the answer("guess who i saw downtown yesterday"). However before he had finished the question i had already answered him without even thinking about it, it blurted out. Also, not only did i know the answer, i had a memory of where he saw the guy - down to the exact meter where it happened (it was a politician waiting at a streetlight)and what the politician was doing (phoning and holding a newspaper under his arm). It was all as if i had been there myself and seen it. It didnt feel weird, it felt like remembering any other event that one has experienced, but i know i couldnt have known these things. In short, the famous nonexisting telepathy happened to me.

[Mk]

Tell us all about it, how was it?
Well, I won't get into it, but it wasn't better than normal.

[Alkatran]

When I go to sleep I sometimes 'trick' myself into thinking the bed is tilting. It's weird because I can almost feel myself slipping.

Usually after going to a theme park I'll feel like I'm still on the egg-beaters and spinning in bed (which is an AMAZING feeling).

Sometimes I'll suddenly feel like I'm being pressed very strongly into the bed. I can stop this whenever I want, but the sensation is pleasant because I know it's only in my head... and there's no pain involved.

[AngelShare]

This is all really interesting.:smile:

Hm, let's see...one of the oddest things I've experienced while sleeping is being asleep but being awake. I'm fully aware that I'm asleep but I can't move, talk, or anything...I don't even think I can wake myself up. BUT, I can hear people talking very clearly. Once, I figured I was just imagining this so I asked my Mom something that pertained to something she was supposedly talking about earlier. Turns out, I was right, she had been discussing said topic. It doesn't happen often but it's a really odd feeling.

When I was about eight, my Grandfather died and my Mom and Dad had a huge falling out. As a result, sleeping arrangements were shifted so that my Mom and Dad could be separate. On one particular occasion, I slept with my Mom in her room...but I couldn't remember where I was the next morning. It was still dark so I couldn't see...I knew my Mom was on my right but I wasn't sure what was on my left. Open air? A wall? If it was a wall, it was my Mom's room...if it was open air, it was either my room or my brother's room. I layed there for at least an hour, too afraid to move, thinking, "Where am I? Why can't I remember where I fell asleep last night?" Eventually, my Mom woke up and, by that time, I was pretty freaked out so I just up and asked, "Mom where are we?":rofl:

Oh yeah, I had a pretty unnerving dream about three or four years ago as well. I dreamt that our Beagle dog, Susy, was bleeding from her mouth. Not a lot but enough that I could see it. I was standing, for no apparent reason, in the doorway of my Dad's basement office (Where I'm at now- we keep the computers here.) when she started slowly and rather weakly walking towards me. I looked down at her and she looked up at me...then I woke up. I was then alerted to her having passed away...I took a close look at her and found that there was some blood on the floor not far away from where my dream took place and that it had come from her mouth. Everyone assumed she died from old age but I still wonder where the blood came from...

I would definitely like to explore this topic more as I wonder what some of these experiences would feel like first hand...I'll have to hang around this thread for a while.:wink:

[Mk]

This thread is very interesting to read.

[AngelShare]

Yes, it is.:smile: I'd like to try controlling my dreams but, so far, they've all been out of my control.:rofl:

[Mk]

I figured out I need to apply it to my real life, that's what works best for me. In a dream, I either a) think its real or b) are lucid dreaming and don't really care. In a dream a few weeks ago I was flipping through the tv channels and was reminded of oneironauting, and then made the *full* realization that I was in a dream. I jumped up many levels of lucidity. The higher your level or degree of lucidity, the more
*awake you are
*understanding you are of the situation
*clearer you think
*perception of the vibrancy of the world around you

Oneironaut comes from the Greek for "dream sailor," like astronaut comes from "star sailor." Sailor as in explorer.

What has really helped me, is to ask yourself as frequently as possible "am I dreaming," and reading up on the capabilities and things to do. Read about oneironauting experiments at http://lucidity.com.

[scott_alexsk]

Occasionally I go to sleep and then feel like I wake up the next day and do something stupid. Then I really wake up and think was I dreaming, since I feel regret. On several occasions I have had to convince myself that what I dreamed did not happen at all, since it seemed so real like I had just gone through another day. Would this be considered lucid dreaming? I have no idea.
-Scott

[Mk]

Occasionally I go to sleep and then feel like I wake up the next day and do something stupid. Then I really wake up and think was I dreaming, since I feel regret. On several occasions I have had to convince myself that what I dreamed did not happen at all, since it seemed so real like I had just gone through another day. Would this be considered lucid dreaming? I have no idea.
-Scott
Closely related to lucid dreaming, this is a typical case of a false awakening. You think you woke up, maybe move around, get up and get a glass of water, then you really wake up. I don't like them. I know I can never tell that its still a dream. Somehow if I "wake up," I take it at face value like normal people do in their dreams. I never, ever think twice.

[scott_alexsk]

It is really strange with those dreams I have had. Whenever I have them I wake up feeling regret, then I remmeber the dream. In turn I feel bad until I convince myself that it did not happen. Perhaps I have more dreams like this, but the emotion of regret may change how I feel so I remmeber it in the morning.
-Scott

[Mk]

I have spasms a lot, well, I think its more than other people, I've never really been somebody else, so I don't know for sure.

I was just watching my arm two nights ago. One of my biceps was twitching quite a bit. I could see it hitting against my loose white T-shirt.
What I mean is that, like:
1. put your left hand on the keyboard, with your fingers on the "home row," touching the asdf and space keys.
2. Tense all the muscles in your arm, while watching the sleeve of your t-shirt, or make a muscle, or whatever your fancy while keeping your hand pinned to the same location on the keyboard, and your arm pinned to the same location on your shoulder.

Yeah, like that.

I think my muscles get very tense when I am exited. When I go to live music concerts, I always have to sit down. The suspense builds, I am more and more anxious, and feel the uncontrollable urge to tense and relax all my muscles. If I don't, I watch my feet, legs, and arms spasm. If I am immersed in very exiting movie or book it happens.

I think its anomalous or extraordinary, I've never seen anybody else experiencing this type of thing.

Can anybody tell me something about it?

[Mk]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination
This is awesome1!!

I asked about this before in this part of the forum, and found no answer, but browsing about Wikipedia I've found it!!

KLASFJKLSGJKLS@!!!! I'm sooo happy!! :biggrin: :biggrin:

Closed eye hallucinations or closed eye visualizations (CEV) is a term used to describe a distinct class of hallucination, which generally only occurs when one's eyes are closed, or one is in a darkened room.
These are dots I was talking about before dancing on the walls. Comparable to a visual static, but it is not seen if you try and "focus" on a part of it.

Level 1: Visual Noise
The most basic form of CEV perception that can be immediately experienced in normal waking consciousness involves a seemingly random noise of pointillistic light/dark regions with no apparent shape or order.
Ha! See! Its like white and dark little things, like on the white and black static you get on tv.
This can be seen when you close your eyes, but try to actively look with your eyes at the back of your closed eyelids. In a bright room, a dark red can be seen. In a dark room, blackness can be seen. But in either case it is not a flat unchanging redness/blackness. Instead, if actively observed for a few minutes, you become aware of an apparent disorganized motion, a random field of lightness/darkness that overlays the redness/blackness of your closed eyelids.
The redness comes from the redness of the blood in your eyelid I think? The eyelid is very thin. In bright light I skip Level 1 completely.

For a person that tries to actively observe this closed-eye perception on a regular basis, there comes a point where if you look at a flat-shaded object with your eyes wide open, and try to actively look for this visual noise, you will become aware of it and see the random pointilistic disorganized motion as if it were a transparent overlay on top of what is actually being seen by your open eyes.
Uhm... that sounds weird.
Level 3: Patterns, motion, and color
At a sufficiently deep level of relaxation, the noise becomes highly organized, taking on complex geometric patterns and shapes, as if it were a field of tiny stars, squares, or diamonds, floating over and under each other in ribbons and fields.
Couldn't be said better. Sometimes I just like to close my eyes and watch.

This level is relatively easily accessible to people that smoke marijuana, and appears to be what most people refer to as the colorful visuals.
I've never smoked pot before.

However, this is also accessible to people involved in deep concentration for long periods of time, such as doing complex math or geometry problems in school. When lying down at night and closing the eyes, right before sleep the complex motion of these patterns can become directly visible without any great effort.
Yeah, sounds like me.

Level 4: Objects and things
This is a fairly deep state, typically only accessible through psychoactives or people who have practiced meditation for a long time. At this level, what you are thinking becomes visually manifest as if it were a real object or environment. When this level is reached, the CEV noise seems to calm down and fade away, leaving behind an intense flat ordered blackness. The visual field becomes a sort of active space where what you think is what you get. A side component of this is the ability to feel motion if your eyes are closed. For example thinking of moving down may cause the interior of an elevator to manifest in the CEV field, along with the distinct perception of physically moving downward.
Well that sounds right to me except for the motion. After the moving geometric patterns and shapes, "real" things appear, such as wildcats and owls. Sometimes they can get scary, there is no reason why though.
Opening the eyes returns one to the normal physical world, but still with the CEV object field overlayed onto it and present. In this state it is possible to see things that appear to be physical objects in the open-eye physical world, but that aren't really there.
Uhm... noooooooooo.
Level 5: Overriding physical perception
This is the point where it appears to the outside world that a person is either unconscious or insane. The internal CEV perceptions and think-it/feel-it perceptions become stronger than physical perceptions, and completely override and replace open-eye physical perceptions. This can be a somewhat dangerous state if a person is still mobile while literally off in their own little world, but by this time most people are motionless on the couch and as such, are not likely to do something hazardous to themselves or others.
This is the point where most hallucinogenic references say it is a good idea to have a "sitter" present to watch over the person using the chemicals, and keep them from accidentally harming themselves or others while deep into their own world.
Wow, insane-o... I can get it to override physical perception if I woke up but never opened my eyes. This is what I aim for every morning. I try and wake up with my eyes closed, so I can go over the dreams I've been having, because they are quite interesting and some may want to be remembered. I keep them closed and create a fantasy world, sometimes after long enough, and if I'm calm enough, I can fall asleep into the fantasy.

Nobody else has these??? :surprised

Come to think of it, I hallucinate a lot by comparison to other people I think. If I'm in a darkened room, and am calm, I will see the flashing black and white visual static, and when looking into the edges of where the ceiling and wall meet, it will appear for them to move. :surprised If things are very dark, and are very hard to distinguish from their surroundings, they will appear to move. All three of these hallucinations are alike in that if I try and focus on a region the whole thing will stop. Does anyone know a person I can contact about all these weird things?

[Lars Laborious]

I've had a few wicked experiences a few days after drinking too much. Once, when I was resting with my eyes open, I started seeing dreamlike clouds in the room. I realized I could control them and soon I made a really vivid man taking form. Then I closed my eyes since it was starting to freak me out a bit. It all disappeard when I opened them again.
Annother time I woke up (after dozing off for about 15 min) by a man grabbing my chest and squeezing hard. The first thought that hit me was "Jeez..., it's the Moral Man... I really got to cut down on drinking." He to dissapeared after I "shaked" him off like a dream.
I've also had some "clear dreams" were I know that I'm dreaming, and can control much of what's happening. This one time I tried to "confront my fear" by walking down a hall to meet whatever might hide in the shadows at the dark end. Even though I was fully aware that it was all just a dream, I simply couldn't do it. I didn't dare walking into the darkness. I still wonder if I would have died of fear if I had done it.

[Mk]

I've also had some "clear dreams" were I know that I'm dreaming, and can control much of what's happening. This one time I tried to "confront my fear" by walking down a hall to meet whatever might hide in the shadows at the dark end. Even though I was fully aware that it was all just a dream, I simply couldn't do it. I didn't dare walking into the darkness. I still wonder if I would have died of fear if I had done it.Called lucid dreaming, welcome to the club! Eh, you just gotta do it. Do it before thinking too much about it, because you know you are dreaming.

[Tsunami]

Okay, hypnagogue asked me to describe what it's like to drink absinthe. Unfortunately, for the most part, I don't really remember. I've only drank it once, and I actually made a concerted effort not to drink too much. I played the role of instigator that night, daring and prodding those who had drunk too much into performing outrageous actions that they would otherwise never do, largely so that I could photograph them and have something interesting to write in my journal (I was in the middle of a road trip and documentation was the word of the day).*

The strongest feeling I can actually remember is that of disconnection. I didn't seem to be participating in any directed way in what I was doing, or what was going on. I experienced things as an observer rather than as an actor. One thing I would like to say about this is that this may not be a typical effect of absinthe. It seems likely that what happened is that the absinthe simply intensified a sense of disconnection that I often feel in awkward social situations to begin with. I've always had a tendency to experience life as if it were a novel, a story that I was either writing or reading. In this case, I was the reader rather than the writer, and some other part of me took control of crafting the narrative, a part whose motivations I have no access to in my memory.

The other notable quality of the experience is the complete lack of fear. Absinthe is alcoholic, and alcohol already lowers one's inhibition level, but this did it to the extreme. I had the sense of being in a reality without rules. It wasn't like I could violate the laws of physics or transcend my physical limitations or anything that profound; it was simply that I had the feeling that the social rules which normally dictate human behavior were gone. All of us were reduced to the level of primal beasts, literally becoming the monsters that lurk just beneath the surface of the knowable psyche. Consider the situation of Caligula. As Emperor, there were no real consequences to his actions. He could do whatever he wished to do and get away with it. Moreover, he seemed to reach the point where morality no longer made any difference to his decisions; it simply seemed to no longer exist in his world. It was something like that.

*I realize this might make me sound like somewhat of a sociopath, but whatever.

Wow.


So is this the absynth you can buy in a local supermarket, or the now forbidden kind that was popular in Parisian artistic circles?

[Tsunami]

This is definitely one I can expand on somewhat. It has mostly to do with the way I feel about events that occur in my life, as well as my motivations for bringing about certain events and avoiding others. Typically, or at least I get the impression that typically, people are pleased by generally good events and angered or saddened by generally bad events. While I do often feel the same way in regards to an immediate emotional response, I do not always, and oftentimes I do not feel these ways even in the immediate response. Instead, I feel the way a writer does when crafting a story. If a certain events moves the plot forward or reveals a particular aspect of character development, or even seems to make a metaphorical point if looked at from the outside, then it pleases me. If it does not, then I am not satisfied. I have to note that I do not always feel this way, particularly with regards to my immediate responses to events, but when I do, my interactions with people can become rather awkward, as the way I feel about what is going on becomes completely different from the way they feel, and I would even say that my experience of the event as being in context with a fuller narrative is probably completely different from the other person's experience. My experience is artistic rather than visceral.

If you consider the difference between watching Romeo after killing
Tybalt to actually being Romeo at that time, you can get an idea of what I mean. Romeo cries out that he is fortune's fool, in a moment of absolute despair. I would venture the guess that he probably feels nothing but despair. A viewer of the play, however, is moved by a different set of emotions, an appreciation of how fate is playing out to construct what is a beautiful tragedy. In many ways, I would rather lead a beautiful life than a happy life.

Where this manifests most explicitly is in the way I make life-decisions. Most people will simply do what makes them happy, or what they think will bring them success. But a stable home life, meaningful relationships, and material success have never been particularly important to me. When I decide what to do on the large scale of overarching plans (choosing a partner, school, job, whatever), I always take into consideration first and foremost how it will contribute to the story of my life. Does it take the plot in a new and interesting direction? Does it make any kind of artistic statement? Or, more pedestrianly, does it make for a good read?


Paul Ricoeur: Life is a story in search of a narrator.

or: We become the narrator of our own lives, but never its author.

[complexPHILOSOPHY]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination
This is awesome1!!

I asked about this before in this part of the forum, and found no answer, but browsing about Wikipedia I've found it!!

KLASFJKLSGJKLS@!!!! I'm sooo happy!! :biggrin: :biggrin:


These are dots I was talking about before dancing on the walls. Comparable to a visual static, but it is not seen if you try and "focus" on a part of it.


Ha! See! Its like white and dark little things, like on the white and black static you get on tv.

The redness comes from the redness of the blood in your eyelid I think? The eyelid is very thin. In bright light I skip Level 1 completely.


Uhm... that sounds weird.

Couldn't be said better. Sometimes I just like to close my eyes and watch.


I've never smoked pot before.


Yeah, sounds like me.


Well that sounds right to me except for the motion. After the moving geometric patterns and shapes, "real" things appear, such as wildcats and owls. Sometimes they can get scary, there is no reason why though.

Uhm... noooooooooo.

Wow, insane-o... I can get it to override physical perception if I woke up but never opened my eyes. This is what I aim for every morning. I try and wake up with my eyes closed, so I can go over the dreams I've been having, because they are quite interesting and some may want to be remembered. I keep them closed and create a fantasy world, sometimes after long enough, and if I'm calm enough, I can fall asleep into the fantasy.

Nobody else has these??? :surprised

Come to think of it, I hallucinate a lot by comparison to other people I think. If I'm in a darkened room, and am calm, I will see the flashing black and white visual static, and when looking into the edges of where the ceiling and wall meet, it will appear for them to move. :surprised If things are very dark, and are very hard to distinguish from their surroundings, they will appear to move. All three of these hallucinations are alike in that if I try and focus on a region the whole thing will stop. Does anyone know a person I can contact about all these weird things?

Ingest some triptamines or entheogens and you will experience a level of consciousness that you could NEVER imagine.

[eeka chu]

Lots of the visual effects people mention, like static, can be caused just by how your eye works on a mechanical level.

Dead cells float around in the liquid core of your eye and will show up on your vision as they float past the retina. You can also see things like the back of your own eye as a reflection, and I'm sure I've actually seen blood flowing in my retina, or somewhere else in my eye, before now.

Some of the strangest things I've experienced have been just on the edge of going to sleep. Quite often I hear things, but vividly as if someone is actually making that noise in the room I'm in. It was happening last night and has done quite frequently these last few nights. It's usually just a word or two, like my name. Or sometimes it's a few notes. But it's very clear. I think at least once I've actually replied to these sounds thinking someone was calling me.

But complexPHILOSOPHY is right, all of this is nothing compared to what you'll experience with the help of something like magic mushrooms.

I remember cycling home after eating some psilocybe truffles that hadn't worked very well (they'd been in storage for a while and the psilocybin had obviously started to break down). It was funny actually, I was, without thinking, repeating Hoffmann's own psychodelic bicycle ride home. :biggrin:

Along the way I heard crystal clear sounds as if there was a group of people chatting around the corner I was about to go round (it was dark and being a cyclist I'm always listening out for people who I might be about to ride into at a corner). But the weirdest moment was as I came towards my house I went by a car that was emitting a noise identical to that which you'd get when you tune a radio into some kind of satellite, the computery encoded sound. It sounded very glossy and almost like music. It was so weird and interesting I stopped my bike and backed up to investigate, but it had stopped by then.

However, that's not much compared to the hour or two I spent totally naked one night lying on my bed occasionally waving to faces I was watching appear on the ceiling.

[Tsunami]

So, a couple of days ago, I noticed that I heard a high, constant tone in my head. This tone hasn't gone away since.


This is seriously freaking me out, considering that this is very likely to be a symptom of ear damage. So, first off, as a question unrelated to the topic: is there anything I can do to stop this damage from becoming permanent? I think I might have caught it because of the high frequency buzz of my tv channel when I link it to my laptop; if not, it's a tone from my laptop itself. I'm now working on it, with my headphones on (of course, with no sound coming in through the headphones, I use it for protection from outside sound).

Anyway, there are some odd things I noticed.

1) It's a background sound. An hour ago, I went out in the street, where it was raining, and the sound of the rain completely blacked out the high tone. When I came in, I heard it again.

2) It can resonate. Whenever my laptop or the tv sends out the same sound, I hear the tone being reinforced.. sometimes I even noticed beating, when the frequencies are very similar.

3) Not sure about the beating though ; there's something that seems like beating, when I try to analyze the sound, with no other sounds in the proximity. It seems like a constant tone, but when I imagine a sine wave, it seems as if the tone starts to oscillate as well.

[Mk]

Dead cells float around in the liquid core of your eye and will show up on your vision as they float past the retina. You can also see things like the back of your own eye as a reflection, and I'm sure I've actually seen blood flowing in my retina, or somewhere else in my eye, before now.
Its not floaters.

But complexPHILOSOPHY is right, all of this is nothing compared to what you'll experience with the help of something like magic mushrooms.
Oh, no way man! This is very subtle, and it is so subtle that its almost like you're not seeing it... because you're not. But I doubt that shrooms could bring you up to a level of consciousness parallel to some lucid dreams I've had.

I remember cycling home after eating some psilocybe truffles that hadn't worked very well (they'd been in storage for a while and the psilocybin had obviously started to break down). It was funny actually, I was, without thinking, repeating Hoffmann's own psychodelic bicycle ride home.
What was that?

1) It's a background sound. An hour ago, I went out in the street, where it was raining, and the sound of the rain completely blacked out the high tone. When I came in, I heard it again.

2) It can resonate. Whenever my laptop or the tv sends out the same sound, I hear the tone being reinforced.. sometimes I even noticed beating, when the frequencies are very similar.

3) Not sure about the beating though ; there's something that seems like beating, when I try to analyze the sound, with no other sounds in the proximity. It seems like a constant tone, but when I imagine a sine wave, it seems as if the tone starts to oscillate as well.
Does anyone else here a sometimes very annoying "hum" that you hear when it is ALL quiet? TOTALLY quiet, the hum comes in, it can be quite loud. It is not a hum... but akin to the sound of moving air in a conch shell. In fact, that is probably what it is.

For you, how high is it? Very high? Somewhat high? What tone?

[Tsunami]

Well, it resonates with my tv when it's on dvd channel, so it's pretty high.


When I was a child, I used to have that hum sometimes.. it's been a while though.

Anyway, I'm going to see my doctor about it, I don't think it's healthy anymore (three days really is too long).

[PIT2]

There was a documentary about people with 'sound shock syndrome' (something like that, i cant remember the name). They showed a guy who was in a band, and one day they decided to let their audience hear a shotgun sound. The sound was too loud for the singer near the speakers, and the following days he noticed that he started feeling weird (he didnt know why). He ended up with a constant very loud hum/beeping noise in his head, and he couldnt sleep anymore. His ears werent damaged, but his brain was confused by the sound.

Other examples in the show were people who had listened to music or other noises for too long. Their ears/brains had adjusted to the sound and when the sound was removed, the ear would still give off signals to the brain.

[PIT2]

I forgot to write it down here, but a few weeks ago i had what i think may have been an OBE, but it could aswell have been a dream.

Here is what happened:

I was asleep and dreaming, and somewhere along the dream i thought: "im dreaming... im dreaming... hey im dreaming!". So at that point it was a lucid dream (also my first, or perhaps second one). Almost instantly when i realised i was dreaming, i thought it would be interesting to see if i could leave my body. As soon as i thought this, i started hearing static noise (like radio or tv), the dream was gone and replaced by my normal room, and i felt that i was being pulled/pushed out of my head. Then i felt/heard a *pop* and it felt as if i had exitted my body and was now floating somewhere in my room.

I was aware that my eyes were closed, so all i experienced was darkness, a loud static noise, a feeling of floating around, and a feeling of being in an open environment. However i was too scared to open my eyes and check if i could really see the environment. I wanted to check if i was experiencing something real, but i just didnt feel safe. Picture urself getting up in the middle of the night and walking outside in the rain completely naked into an unknown place, and then u can imagine how it felt. I mention the rain because that is what the static noise reminded me of - rain hitting the roof and giving off a noise, or perhaps it was really raining at the time. The situation felt unsafe because i thought if i opened my eyes i might see a sleep paralysis demon walking around the room. I didnt feel any presence, it was just my mind remembering that people had said they sense beings while in sleep paralysis situations. I would not have thought of any demons if i hadnt known about SP.

Because i didnt feel safe and was scared, i almost instantly ended it all (by just willing it to stop). The whole thing happened in a timespan of maybe 20 seconds, so it was very short. After i ended it, i was briefly awake and thought "wow did i just have an OBE? I should remember this", then fell back asleep.

So i dont know what this was: an OBE, a lucid dream, a normal dream, or a sleep paralysis episde, or a combination of all four, and i wish i had opened my eyes too see if the environment was real.

[Rader]

Has anyone ever had the experience of reading in 3D. What I mean is, while your reading, all the letters on the page can be focused in on like a necker cube. The letters have depth like you see sometimes on the big movie theatre. Its possible to look around the sides of the letters as if they were houses and by moving my head to one side or the other or from the top or bottom. This has happened to me three times and lasted one day then dissapears. When it happens I can remember the feeling is like when I go inside those 3D hidden pictures. It feels good.

[Mk]

How anomolous, extraordinary, or otherwise interesting, Rader.

[quantumcarl]

My totally conscious experience that defies conventional ones is as follows.

I had finished a climb of about 600 vertical feet and was rewarded by a bluff overlooking a large straight of ocean between me and a large island that was 21 miles to the west where I was looking.

I was standing and admiring the vista when I noticed something small and hovering at my eye level. At first I thought it was a bug until I focused my vision and attention on the object.

After carefully watching this eye level object I could discern that it was actually about my size but about 60 feet away from me, 600 ft over the ocean below. As I inspected what I now accepted as something the size of a miniture helecopter cockpit I began to make out its content. It was a humanoid form yet it was transparent like the cockpit is was inside.

After realizing the nature of the hoovering object my heart-rate rose and my adrenalin did what it normally does to my body and brain. The object then rather subtley began a backward retreat while remaining at my eye level.

It steadly, with a slight waver up and down, made it back to across the straight to the large island west of me in 20 seconds or so.... this means it was traveling approximately a mile a second since the distance was 21 miles. I watched it till it became a dissappearing speck.

Not sure if this is the type of thing you wanted for this thread, but, its true and there ya go!

[fuzzyfelt]

I was going to ask this in the hallucination thread, but this gets a little off track. I’d like to know about the difference between hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations. I have heard with no great authority, that the former is artistically helpful, and the latter, scientifically so.

I’ve also just read this, about whether or not dreams are useful to problem solving – “ Morton Reiser, a psychoanalyst at Yale University ….says ‘ How do you explain that so many scientific breakthrough ideas have been portrayed as dream imagery?’ (as cited in Schulte, 1998, p.3.)”. http://www.asu.edu/clas/english/linguistics/Joanfinalpaper.DOC
I wonder if this is the case and if this is related to hypnopompic experiences.

I wonder about the differences between states of hypnogogia, because I’ve had a lot of (not drug, but otherwise self-induced) hypnagogic experiences, mostly artistically helpful, but only one hypnopompic experience that I recall, and it didn’t seem scientific.

It was recent, early December, and involved the appearance of an astral traveller who was doing me the honour of visiting. I would say it would qualify as a hallucination because there was no distinction between sleep and waking. I had been aware of some movement and noise, but in identifying them as the 6:30 alarm and my husband waking beside me, the wonderful vision standing in our room, regrettably, was gone. However, I’m not science minded and so am unlikely to think scientifically. I’m also not a morning person, and find I’m not too good with hypnopompic experiences myself, but would like know more about them.

[complexPHILOSOPHY]

I embrace the activation-synthesis theory of dreams (random patterns of neurons fire and are percieved by certain cortices) and consolidation or mental-housekeeping theory.

Activation-synthesis explains incoherent, fragmented dreams while consolidation theory describes coherent, story-like dreams. Neither theory can explain all dream related phenomena but together help to explain a lot.

I really have not seen any convincing empirical research which indicates that problem-solving theories have any validity. Although, I am interested in your thoughts.