Mark Forstater's Blog

A Cultivator’s Diary – Part 4 (from my journal 2007)

December 23, 2013 at 10:18 am Leave a comment

January 26, 2007

Last night I decided to try Lucid Dreaming, as taught by Liu Ming. He explained that to get to the point of perceiving yourself falling asleep, you should lie on your back in ‘sleep’ meditation, visualise or allow white light to gather in your head, and then send it down to your liver. This I did and had the following experience:

As I lay there breathing, taking the white light down to the liver, after a period of time I became aware of images and their voices infiltrating my consciousness. My eyes were closed, so my mind was not in communication with the visual world, and the house was silent, so no sounds entered either. I tried to ‘look’ inward, to allow my eyeballs to sink into their sockets, so that the energy that came in on an in breath was felt in the 3rd eye area entering into the back of the head and then travelling down to the liver. While doing this I tried to relax my muscles as much as possible and I also held my breath for long periods of time.

I had just read Master Nan who said if you control (hold) your inbreath then the chi in your body will naturally take over. Indeed there were gurglings and releasing sounds in my belly, chest and kidney area when I did this. After some time I realised that I was ‘seeing’ a figure and having a conversation with someone. The realisation was my conscious mind, my waking state, becoming aware that I had entered the twilight zone, that time/space/mental state between waking and sleeping, while dream elements started to encroach on my waking state and take it over.

As I continued in this state, more images and voices seemed to come in, a real confusion of noises and sights. It felt like what a mental patient might experience, what would be called a ‘deluded’ state. This is also a disturbing state to be in. When you dream the pictures seem to be in your head front and centre. You must ‘place’ them there because of the habit of vision – using the eyes to see what is in front of us.

But these ‘deluded’ images seemed to appear from the side of the head as if emerging from behind me. Was it that they were coming from another place in the brain and that the mind had to give them a ‘spatial’ aspect that made sense- or are these ‘hidden’ images that one can only come out once one enters this twilight zone?

It seems that there are two types of sleep- Nrem and Rem. There are 4 stages to Nrem and the first 2 stages could well be the twilight zone where there are ‘hypnagogic hallucinations’. With many people there is fear associated with these hallucinations. and also the fear of death. Presumably the practise aspect of this type of dream practise must be to go into these images and sounds without fear and without fear of death. This is to learn to exist happily in a strange death-like state, and also to learn to be comfortable in both waking, dreaming and intermediate states.

Entry filed under: My Old Journals. Tags: dreams, hypnagogic hallucinations, Liu <img, Master Nan, Nrem, Rem, twilight zone, visions, whitle light.