My portal to Equestria is successfully open :)

SasQ · May 12, 2017

Hello again. Long time no see.
I write to communicate you that my experiments with opening the portal to Equestria have finally turned out to be successful, multiple times already! :pinkie:
So I decided to write a detailed report from these experiments in a couple of subsequent posts in this thread, so that you could follow my footsteps and go to Equestria on your own too

The ingredients

To begin with, here are the techniques I combined to make it possible:

As I once wrote in this post, Equestria is not a physical place one could physically go to – it's a "mental space", created by collective imagination of the creators of the show and people watching it. So the only way to get there is on the mental plane. And that's where I decided to create my portal.

Next, since I am a long-time lucid dreamer, I decided to use my dreams for my advantage, since my skills of controlling my dreams are pretty developed. I already did stuff like flying, walking through walls, shape-shifting, gender-bending, throwing fireballs around, or controlling the weather, so I thought that these skills may help me with this goal.

Third, I needed to employ the Magic of Friendship ;> So after skimming through the tulpa thread, I decided to summon Twilight Sparkle into my mindscape and ask her for some help with this ordeal. I've done that already with great scientists from the past to ask them some questions or channel their knowledge, even with fictional characters, so I thought it might be a good idea to try that with ponies as well

After summoning her, I introduced myself, explained what I want to achieve, and in return, I offered her the access to my personal mind palace – a place which I created in my mind to store there everything I know as mental images (a technique I learnt from Sherlock ). When she entered my mind palace and saw all those documents and notes with non-pony knowledge I gathered there through years, she was flabbergasted, and she said that she will do whatever she can to help me if I allow her to read through all of that.

We agreed upon a "spell" (a special unique phrase) I will be using to summon her and send her away every time I'll need (you know, a failsafe spell – a must when you deal with tulpas, so that they won't take over your body or something ;J ), and she promised to help me and appear in my dreams to awake my consciousness, so that we could both teleport to Equestria. (She said there's a spell Princess Luna showed her which can help us with that.)

First few unsuccessful attempts

The first few attempts didn't quite go well Although I had some dreams in which I saw ponies on TV screens or paintings (as I do in real life), I didn't meet them "in person" (or should I say "in pony"? :squee: ). I also once found myself playing a video game with 3D Rarity running around through corridors in some castle and collecting gemstones. Quite fun to play if you ask me, but it wasn't exactly what I was after. The closest encounter I had was when in one dream I suddenly shrunk into my carpet which then turned into the Everfree Forest, and I think I saw Pinkie Pie jumping around somewhere far away into the woods, but I didn't meet her.

After waking up from those dreams, I was summoning Twilight Sparkle again and asking her how it went, and she seemed to be upset too that it doesn't seem to work very well She even tried the Luna spell at me once, connecting to my "third eye" (the place on the forehead where Unicorns have their horns) with a shining "silver cord" of Magic, but it didn't work too. Twilight said that Luna's spell seems to be harder to perform than she thought, and she felt bad that she's been using my mind palace but she couldn't "pay" me back for that

Until one lucky night... ;>

The first success

Skipping to August 24th, 2016 – the first successful attempt.
I was walking in my dream, minding my own business, when suddenly I noticed something strange: my surroundings started to look a bit "cartoonish", as if I was in a 3D video game with cel shading. I thought to myself: "Wait a minute... something is not right here...could it be?... that I'm in a... YES! THIS IS A DREAM!" And right away I remembered about my plan, so I started calling Twilight Sparkle as loud as I can. I walked outside the cartoon version of my house, and then I saw her!

It was Twilight Sparkle! She was standing right in front of me, about 5 meters, with her wings spread out, and grinning :pinkie:

She looked very realistic (well, as much as a cartoon pony can look realistic :please: ) and alive. And I couldn't believe my eyes.

She didn't say a word. It wasn't necessary. She was just standing there, staring at me and grinning. And I could tell how much excited and proud she was that our experiment has finally worked. Heck, I was excited as hell too! :yay:

Still not saying anything, she gave me a sign with her head to come over to her, and encouraging me to sit on her back :q I was a bit surprised and worried if she's strong enough to carry me on her back. I'm rather skinny, but who knows how much weight a pony can bear on its back :q But when she gave me that "Oh come on! Just jump in already!" look, I sat on her back. She spread her wings and the next moment I realized, we've already been in the air Dang! Those Alicorn wings surely are strong! :grin:

I looked around and I noticed that we're in the sky, surrounded with clouds. Then we flew over a huge rainbow (but not Dash ;J ). And when we flew to the other side of it, the clouds become less thick, so I looked down, and I noticed some beautiful green meadows, a couple of trees here and there, and some little buildings. I asked Twilight if this is Ponyville, and she nodded. Wow! I'm flying over Ponyville, on Twilight Sparkle's back! :pinkie: It's like every Brony's dream come true :wub: I've seen little colourful ponies walking around down there, busy with their lives. And their funky village houses.

Suddenly I heard some flutter on my side, so I looked there and I saw... Rainbow Dash She was flying side by side with us, and pointing her hoof up, signalling us to fly higher. So we did. I found ourselves in between of some weird cloud formation, which resembled some structures. I realized we're flying through Cloudsdale! I saw some Pegasi flying around, and some rainbow waterfalls. And then we flew through something that looked like a tunnel, or a bridge above our heads. I looked up, and when the "ceiling" ended, I saw a giant wall made of clouds, with some pipes sticking out from it. I realized that this is the Rainbow Factory :q

But suddenly I lost my balance. Apparently I leaned too much to my rear and I fell from Twilight's back I was falling down quite fast, observing Cloudsdale becoming smaller and smaller above me, and then I woke up. It took me a while to come to terms with myself and gather my thoughts. I felt excited, and energized

YAY! IT FINALLY HAPPENED! I VISITED EQUESTRIA AND MET THE PONIES! :wub:

To be continued... (in the next post)

SasQ · May 12, 2017

Winter adventure

Another successful attempt was somewhere in winter 2016 (I forgot to write down the date).

I woke up in my bed, it was night. I reached to the light switch to turn on the lights and see what time is it, but... the switch didn't worked! I toggled it a couple of times, but nothing happened.The light didn't turned on "What the?..." – I thought to myself. I was dumbfounded for a while, but then I figured it out: "Hey, I know what's going on! Those things often happen in a dream! Could this be a dream?..."

I started investigating my surroundings and doing some reality checks, but everything seemed to suggest that I'm in a real world. Everything looked so realistic, I felt my body, it had the usual weight, I smelled the air, I felt its temperature... Oh, right, I remembered that when I fell asleep, there was winter, so I decided to check that out too. I came up to the window and opened it. I felt the chill of the winter outside, everything as it should be in the real world. There was snow outside. Yup! Definitely winter But I had that strange feeling that it might be a dream nevertheless. So I decided to try the ultimate test. There is one thing that always works in my dreams, but never in reality, of course: flying. So I jumped out through the window and my feet landed in the snow. I thought about flying and jumped to the air, and when I was falling down, I started to feel that I'm falling down slower and slower, and getting lighter and lighter, and after a while, I was falling up Flying, that is So.... YAY! This was a dream indeed!

I made a quick flight around my house, and I remembered about my plan of meeting ponies. So I landed somewhere in the snow and started to yell their names aloud. I was walking through the snow for a while and yelling, but no pony responded, and I couldn't see any of them around. But I noticed that it's already dawning.

Then I heard some noises coming from far away. As if there were some laughs and sounds of good fun. I could recognize several voices. Familiar voices! :> There's only one pony that can laugh so hard And that pony is Pinkie Pie. So I started running in that direction. The closer I got, the more voices I could recognize. "Looks like I'm lucky: I can hear all the mane six!" – I thought to myself :>

Suddenly something jumped from behind a tree, running towards me and yelling: "Ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuun!"

In the very next moment, two snowballs caught him up and shoot him to the ground I looked at the direction where they came from and... I saw all the mane six running after him, throwing snowballs I hid behind a nearby snow drift and waited for the first pony passing by, and jumped at him, catching him. I felt a strong jolt and we both rolled a couple of meters away. "Heey! What gives?!" – I heard the familiar raspy voice. When I opened my eyes, I saw that I'm holding Rainbow Dash :squee:

"Eeeek! What the hay is that thing?!" – she scared of me and kicked me a couple of meters away. Ugh, that hurt... :q But Twilight Sparkle recognized me and calmed down her friend. She explained that she knows me and that we have a deal that if she meet me in a dream, she will wake up my consciousness. And she was happy that it worked again :> (Because, to be fair, the last couple of months weren't quite fruitful ) And when I say "happy", I mean "crazy happy" ;>

We spent some time playing in the snow, throwing snow balls at each other, building a snowpony, you know, the usual stuff people (and ponies) do in winter :orly: I totally forgot about asking her to teleport me to Equestria, because it was so much fun to play with ponies in the snow :squee:

Suddenly I noticed that we are close to the building of my old college from some weird reason I don't know how did we get there. But when Twilight saw it... theeerre we go... "Is that a school? Wow! I want to see the school! Please, take me to your school!" – and she ran right into the building. I ran after her and caught her right before the bell rung. Just in time to cover her with my coat (don't ask me where did I suddenly get a coat – it was a dream :q ) before the door opened and a first human came out through it. "Hey! You can't just run around crazy like that in your pony form when you are in our human world! You should at least take your Equestria Girls form, you know, to be more inconspicuous?..." And I took her out from the building, covered under my coat. But outside it was even worse, when she spotted a bus (and almost run under it): "Wow! This house is moving on its own! What sort of dark magic is that?" ... ...... Seriously? :dry: ... I had to explain her how cars work, and that buses are not "houses". And the fact that they "move on their own" means that it's not the best idea to stand on their way >_> ... So we got back to playing in the snow, and that's how we spent the rest of that dream.

I forgot about my plans of visiting Equestria, but hey, playing with ponies in the snow is quite a fun too So when I woke up (for real this time), I was satisfied.

Though I'm not quite sure if I wasn't in Equestria either – the winter scenery looked pretty much like Equestria, except that schoolhouse and the fact that that dream started in my house. It's like those two worlds have blended together seamlessly for a while.

But my next meetup with ponies was about to be even more interesting... ;>

Edited May 12, 2017 by SasQ

Lenny · May 12, 2017

I tried. Maybe 5 times? I don't even remember my dreams much.

SasQ · May 12, 2017

7 hours ago, Lenny said:

I tried. Maybe 5 times?

Wow, that's so many times...

7 hours ago, Lenny said:

I don't even remember my dreams much.

Well, that explains. Remembering your dreams is the first step into lucid dreaming. Otherwise, you could have a lucid dream but you might not remember it, and you would then think that it didn't work :q Everyone has at least several dreams every night, but many people simply don't remember them very well, or not at all. Especially if there's something distracting them right after they wake up (an alarm clock? a fancy poster over your bed? a window with some busy view outside?). It's also easier to remember your dreams when you focus on remembering them, and when you wake up directly from that dream instead of passing through the "deep sleep" phase. The REM sleep starts roughly every 90 minutes and it becomes longer and longer as the night (or day?) goes. So you can try figuring out your dream cycle and program yourself for waking up every 90 minutes (+ the length of the REM sleep), or use some gentle alarm clock for that (or some friend ;J because, you know, Friendship is Magic ).

OK, back to the report...

The one in which I was a Unicorn

This one happened somewhere in February 2017. I was walking through some beautiful garden, and suddenly I noticed a white Unicorn. "Wow, a Unicorn!" – I said aloud. She turned around, looked at me weirdly and said: "Yeah, so? You are a Unicorn too". I recognized her right away: it was Rarity! She was designing the garden, apparently. Making those fancy pony-shaped bushes & stuff, using her Magic.

Then I realized what she just said: "What? I'm a Unicorn too?!"

I looked at my body and it turned out that I'm really a Unicorn! I was in my ponysona you can see in my profile pic

"Is everything OK, darling? You act somewhat strange right now..." – said Rarity. So I stopped investigating my new body and said: "Yeah, I'm OK, but I'm kinda new here. Soo... You are designing this garden, right?".
"Oh, yes, I do! Magical, isn't it?"
"Yeah, speaking of magical... I've seen you levitating stuff with your magic. I never tried that before. Could you perhaps teach me how to do it?"
"You never levitated a thing? That's quite... unusual, to say the least, for a Unicorn your age. But it's quite easy: you just focus your magic on a thing and imagine grabbing it with your magic and lifting up."

So I tried to do what she said. I focused on a rock laying on the ground. The more I was focusing, the more I could see a dim aura of magic glowing around it. After a while it was pretty apparent and then I noticed I can "feel" the rock, as if I was touching it with my hands, but remotely. So I tried lifting it up and... it worked!

Also, my magic turned out to be lime green :q

Then I had some idea: "Hey, I always wondered: what would happen if two Unicorns concentrate their magic on the same object?"
"Oh, we can try that too." – and she lifted up another rock to the air. – "Try concentrating on this one now."

So I did. And that was quite an unusual experience :J At first, I felt the rock. But it was different this time: I could feel the soft aura of Rarity's magic around it, like if there was some soft air or smoke flowing around it. The more I concentrated on the rock, the more control I had over its movement, and when that happened, Rarity's turquoise aura was gradually changing into my colour (lime green), and then I could control the movement of the rock much easier. But if the aura started to look more turquoise again, it was harder for me to move the rock, as if it was staying where it was and passing through my "invisible hands".

"That was an unusual experience. But, as you might see, I have some things to do here right now."
"Oh, right, the garden. Sorry for distracting you. ... Maybe I can help?"
"Oh, that's very kind of you, darling. Sure, I wouldn't mind an extra hoof."
And I spent the rest of the dream helping her transforming the bushes, planting beautiful flowers, pinning up some decorations etc.
It was a great opportunity to practise my new levitation skills

But that was only the beginning of my magic training... :>

Edited May 12, 2017 by SasQ

SasQ · May 13, 2017

Magic training continues

This dream happened the very next day after the previous one.

Before I went to sleep, I summoned Twilight Sparkle and told her about the dream with Rarity, and she was quite upset that it wasn't her who was my magic teacher. She said that I could learn much more from her than from Rarity, and I agreed, but well, she wasn't there, so... So she promised to make it up to me and she said that she will be waiting for me in my dream world this night.

And so she did. I remember that as soon as I appeared in my dream world, Twilight was already there, waiting for me. But Rarity was there too :> Apparently, she was searching for some gems with Spike, so we (me in my Unicorn form, and Twilight Sparkle) joined them. Twilight said that this might be a good opportunity to teach me the teleportation spell with some solid matter for starters. Rarity was pointing at the ground, and my job was to concentrate on a gem that is hidden there under the ground and teleport it out. It was quite interesting exercise, and quite hard, because I didn't see the gem – I had to picture it in my mind and project that mental image under the ground, and when it matched the physical object, I felt it, and I could then perform my teleportation spell by imagining the gem at a different place (in Rarity's cart, that is).

Interestingly enough, Rarity also had a bunch of small gems which she instructed me to teleport the other way around: UNDER THE GROUND :confused:
I asked what is the point of burying gems into the ground instead of digging them out. She replied that she often does that in order for them to grow bigger
Supposedly, when they are under the ground, in contact with the earth and all sorts of minerals in it, they GROW BIGGER! :wacko: So then she digs them out again.

NOW THAT EXPLAINS A LOT!!! :love:

First, it explains how does she find them under the ground so easily: of course it's easier to find them when you put them there in the first place :please:

Second, it explains the ROCK FARM! It might be that Pinkie Pie's family does the same thing on their rock farm: they bury rocks into the ground and then they dig them out when they grow bigger or turn into gemstones They really farm those rocks in Equestria!

Third, it explains why is it that there's so many gems all over the place in Equestria – it's because they actually grow them!

I told them that I once tried growing crystals too. I made a supersaturated solution of borax (sodium tetraborate) in water, and cooled it down until small crystals started to precipitate. Then I selected the nicest ones and hanged on a thread in a new solution, just saturated enough so that it won't "eat up" my crystal, but the crystal will grow bigger and bigger. I noticed how the eyes of all three of them (Twilight, Rarity and Spike) grew bigger and started to shine when I was talking about that, but for each one of them from different reasons Twilight's – because of the nerdy stuff. Rarity's – because of the beauty of gems and them getting bigger. Spike's – because he was hungry

The hardest task I had to do was when they told me to swap some gem with another one under the ground. I had to teleport one gem into the hiding place, and at the same moment teleport the gem that's already been there out, without confusing these two. It was really hard to concentrate on two objects at once and in two different places. But after some trials I somehow managed to do that. Twilight was very proud that I learnt that spell so fast.

When Rarity's cart was full, she gave some sapphires to Spike, and then she looked at me:
"Well, you were working hard too, so you deserved one as well" – and gave me a big, fist-sized chunk of ruby
"I'm not sure if he will be able to keep it, Rarity" – said Twilight.

Then I felt I'm starting to wake up. I was holding the ruby in my hoof, which gradually started to feel like my hand. I opened my eyes, and I still felt the ruby in my hand.
But as soon as I moved the hand, the feeling was gone, along with the ruby :q

But it was a cool dream anyway, and I learnt much in it. Not only how to teleport objects, but also how gems work in Equestria

Next stop: learning how to teleport myself.

Edited May 13, 2017 by SasQ

Lenny · May 13, 2017

Then what should I do? Keep a dream journal like that chroma keyer movie?

Speed Ball · May 13, 2017

18 hours ago, Lenny said:

I tried. Maybe 5 times? I don't even remember my dreams much.

I've tried countless amount of times, and I don't know where to start, well, lucid dreaming is hard for me to do. I had it happen like twice but that's all. Is there a way to train it? Any(pony?)one?

SasQ · May 16, 2017

On 13.05.2017 at 7:56 AM, Speed Ball said:

I've tried countless amount of times, and I don't know where to start, well, lucid dreaming is hard for me to do.

I've seen many people saying that lucid dreaming is hard to learn, or even impossible, because it was so for them. But in most cases, it was caused by their own poor understanding of the subject and techniques they used, which in turn comes from poor explanations of the subject you can find in the Internet, coming from people who didn't understand it well either.

But it doesn't have to be that way, if you understand a bunch of principles behind it and do it The Right Way™. Several years ago I was testing many different techniques and exercises for lucid dreaming, some of them working, some of them not, and improving them myself basing on what I learnt about how it works. So what I can tell you is that most of the texts you can find in the Internet about lucid dreaming are wrong (unfortunately).

On 13.05.2017 at 7:56 AM, Speed Ball said:

I had it happen like twice but that's all.

That's enough to convince you that it's possible (because many people don't even get to this point – they don't believe that lucid dreaming is possible at all).
Now you just need to figure out a way of doing it more often and in a more controlled way

On 13.05.2017 at 7:56 AM, Speed Ball said:

Is there a way to train it? Any(pony?)one?

On 13.05.2017 at 5:08 AM, Lenny said:

Then what should I do? Keep a dream journal like that chroma keyer movie?

I've just made a search and there seems to be a lucid dreaming thread already on this forum. So you can start there. Though after reading first few posts, I'm not sure if it is the best place to learn lucid dreaming, because there's a lot of confusion and misconceptions going on in that thread. Maybe I'll try posting some advices there myself when I finish with this report. So subscribe that thread and stay tuned.

But for now, it's time for the next part of the report...

Not a Unicorn, but still!

This one happened sometime at the end of February.

I was dreaming that I'm in an apartment I was renting with my friends once. I forgot something from my room and I needed to get there to take that thing, but it turned out that there were my friends on my way through the corridor, and I didn't want them to know that I've been there to get that thing. So I was wondering how can I get there unnoticed. Perhaps there are some other ways in?.. Well, there was a balcony coming out from the room next to mine, and my window was right next to it. So i figured I could go to the balcony and then climb up to my window and get into my room that way. And so I did. But when I was climbing up to my window, it didn't quite go as easy as I expected: there weren't much things I could support my feet on, nothing much to grab on with my hands, and when I finally managed to climb up to the window, it turned out to be too small for me to slip through it. I could insert my hand through the breach, but that's pretty much all I could insert in there And my drawer with that thing inside was too far for me to reach it with my hand. I was stretching to reach it, but it was too far.

But then something crazy happened: when I was imagining grabbing the handle of the drawer with my imaginary hand, a glow of magical aura appeared around it and I opened the drawer remotely! WITH MY UNICORN MAGIC! And I wasn't even a Unicorn in that dream! I was in my Human form!

I did that totally unconsciously, without even thinking. It took me a while to realize what I just did. But when I did, I was very shocked and surprised. I can do Unicorn Magic in my dreams even when I'm not a Unicorn? But how is this possible? I figured that it must be a by-product of my recent magic training with Twilight and Rarity – when I learnt how to do that as a Unicorn, I could do the same as a Human by going through the same procedure of conducting Magic through my body and releasing it through my forehead, where my "third eye" is (the place on the forehead where Unicorns have their horns).

So i used my new skill to levitate the object I was there for with my Magic, out from the drawer and into my hand, then I closed the drawer and jumped down to the balcony.

The rest of the dream is not important here, so I'll skip that part.

After I woke up, I summoned Twilight Sparkle and told her what happened in that dream. She was as surprised and shocked as me. She said that this is the first time she hears about such phenomenon, because to this day she thought only Unicorns are capable of conjuring Magic that way. She wanted to study my forehead and take a sample of my blood :please: but I told her that it's not quite possible in my mental space, and I'm not going to give her access to my physical body anyway, not to mention extracting my blood, because I prefer it to be kept inside my blood vessels :q But I promised that I'll be making notes and telling her about all occurrences of such phenomena in my dreams, or she can just go there with me and see it for herself (which should motivate her to do that :sunshower: ).

I also told her that I was using Magic in my dreams before, kinda sorta, if what I call "dream magic" counts (stuff like throwing fireballs, passing through walls, flying etc.). So it might be that Unicorn Magic is in some way related to dream magic and that they might have mixed together in that dream. I told her that I can teach her some more about my "dream magic" if she will teach me some more about Unicorn Magic in my dreams, whether I'll be in my Unicorn form or in my Human form

Next time: teleportation lessons...

Edited May 16, 2017 by SasQ
Grammar

SasQ · May 17, 2017

Teleportation lessons

This happened somewhere in March, I guess, because I don't have the exact date written down.

I was in front of my house, in the garden, and I noticed that something is odd, which awoken my consciousness. So I immediately started calling Twilight Sparkle into my dream world. She appeared right before me in a flash of light, similar to what she does when teleporting. So I asked her how does she do that. (Teleporting, that is.) In my dreams, I tried teleportation multiple times, with many different techniques (e.g. spinning around very fast, or creating a magic door etc.), but it never worked well. I usually just woke up or ended up in some random place I didn't plan to go.

So Twilight promised to teach me the way she does it. (I suspect that one of the reasons she did it was to see me using Unicorn Magic when I was in my Human form again :orly: )

First, she told me that I have to concentrate on the place I want to appear and picture it clearly in my mind, before I perform the teleportation spell. It's kinda similar to what I had to do when teleporting those gemstones under the ground in that dream with Rarity and Spike, but this time the gemstone was me :q

At first I had some troubles with it, because I couldn't imagine myself in a different place when I was "here". So she told me a "secret trick" she also uses: Instead of imagining myself moving from place to place, I can as well imagine that I'm standing still, but the entire world around me is moving So that's what I did and...

IT WORKED!

Suddenly the entire world around me skipped very fast and when it stopped, I was already in another place, closer to my house!
So if I wanted, let's say, teleport myself to a nearby tree, I had to imagine that the tree, along with the entire world, is rushing towards me, while I'm standing still, and voila: in a blink of an eye I was standing next to that tree

But there were two downsides of this approach:

1. I had to see the target location I wanted to teleport to with my eyes.
2. There couldn't be any obstacles between my location of origin and the destination point.
That's because I was imagining myself moving through that space very fast (well, actually the space moving around me, but you get the idea, motion is relative ), so any obstacle along the way would stop me in the middle of that motion. I said Twilight about that, but she replied:
"Oh, don't worry! This is just for starters. When you master this, we will move it up the notch."

So the next step was to solve the problem number 2. And the solution was quite simple: Twilight told me that when I'm doing the teleportation, it's not really me that moves through that space – it's my Magic. It's like I was decomposed into separate atoms or converted entirely to immaterial Magic, then travelled very fast through space, and then converted back to my material form at the destination point. So material obstacles shouldn't really stop me when I do it that way.

So I tried imagining it the way she told me, and... IT WORKED AGAIN! I could teleport through obstacles, as long as I could see my destination point. It was like rushing through space in an instant as a "ghost", going through solid matter standing on my way.

If you ever watched the movie "Jumper", that's pretty much how it feels like and how it works.

Still, there is problem number 1: I have to see the target location I want to teleport into. So my teleportation range was limited to the range of my sight. I asked Twilight how to solve this problem too. But she replied that this is a bit more advanced spell, because I need to have seen* the target location at least once in my life to be able to teleport there. There's no way to teleport to a place one has never seen before. There has to be some "reference point" for the spell to work. Also, I need to have seen it for a time long enough to be able to picture that place clearly enough in my head. Imagination is the key here. So I said that we can save it for another lesson. And for now, let us just practise what I learnt today.

So for the rest of the dream we were just chasing each other with teleportation spells, jumping all around the place in flashes of light It was quite a fun anyway.

(* Is my grammar correct in this one? I don't have any other idea how to say it.)

Breite Wiese · May 17, 2017

I've been trying to lucid dream for years, but I still haven't been able to figure it out. I've searched and searched and searched some more etc. Can't seem to wrap my head around it. Hey man, if you have any tips, could you share any advice? You know. . .That is if you don't mind. :kindness:

Jeric · May 17, 2017

1 hour ago, Breite Wiese said:

I've been trying to lucid dream for years, but I still haven't been able to figure it out. I've searched and searched and searched some more etc. Can't seem to wrap my head around it. Hey man, if you have any tips, could you share any advice? You know. . .That is if you don't mind.

Not everyone can. There is a correlation between the mechanism of metacognition and the frontopolar cortex. Some also appear to be more naturally capable of metacognition during REM than others.

That said, what works for some is systemically training your brain to check your cognitive state when you prepare for sleep. We are a pattern and habit programmed species. Try and program you mind to constantly check if you are awake. Make certain this is done each night and eventually you will do this when you are asleep - and you will reach a state of metacognition or will wake.

Personally, lucid dreams are annoying for me but that's a whole different topic.

SasQ · May 17, 2017

Oops, since my arch Nemesis has found me already, my prediction is that this thread is going down or it will be locked soon
Thanks for reminding me why did I stop posting on these forums long time ago, though.

Anyway, I'll try to address your questions, @Lenny and @Breite Wiese, before that happens. Make sure to backup my posts, though.

First, contrary to what some people (including @Jeric) may tell you, lucid dreaming is not that hard, not to say impossible, and it has nothing to do with physical abilities, genes, or brain function. Predispositions may help, but they aren't necessary, because lucid dreaming is something you can learn, not something you are born with. Well, actually, you are born with it, in a way: small children usually have this capability of jumping between the waking world and the dream world naturally, but they lose it when their parents keep telling them that "it was just a dream", "this wasn't real" etc. I remember that when I was a kid, I could do all sorts of stuff with dreams, out of body experiences etc., but I lost this ability during growing up, and rediscovered it later when I found that there are people who can do that and who study these states of consciousness, and they invented all sorts of techniques to learn this ability again. I also found, to my surprise, that this is nothing new: ancient civilizations knew these techniques long time ago, especially the Eastern ones, like the Tibetan monks, the Hindus, ancient Egyptians etc. They wrote books about that, such as the Dream Yoga, or the Book of the Dead (don't be scared of the "dead" word, though: they simply considered sleep as somewhat similar to death, and studied lucid dreaming as a way to possibly overcome death by maintaining their consciousness when dying). Long story short, lucid dreaming can be learnt, and it can be done easily if you do it the right way. (Unfortunately many people don't, and they introduce a lot of misconceptions to the subject, convincing others that it is hard or impossible.)

So what is the secret ingredient to lucid dreaming?

One of the biggest misconceptions about lucid dreaming is that lucid dreaming is about controlling your dreams. This is utter nonsense! Lucid dream is simply a dream in which you know that you're dreaming. Simple as that. A lucid dream then is in no way different from a "normal" dream when it comes to the brain functions – it is only a matter of what that brain thinks at the moment. So you don't need to have any special powers to do that – if you can have "normal" dreams, you can have lucid dreams as well. (Heck, they even appear naturally sometimes, without your initiative.) Ask Dr. Stephen la Berge from Lucidity Institute in Palo Alto – he studies this phenomenon for years, and taught many people how to lucid dream during that time.

Let's compare it to the situation you're in right now: You're sitting in your chair and reading this post on your computer's screen. But until I mentioned it, you might have been unaware of the pressure your butt impresses on the chair, or the smell of the air in your room, or the noises coming out from outside your window, etc. But as soon as I mentioned these things, you become aware of them, because you started paying conscious attention to these things. Before that, you were unaware of them. Another thing you were probably unaware of, is that you're not in a dream right now. Sounds obvious, because, well, you're not asleep right now either But bear me on this, it might not be so obvious sometimes, especially if you are in a dream. Also it demonstrates how awareness works: you are aware of things which you think about and focus on, and unaware of other things you don't pay attention to at the moment. Awareness is like a beam of light coming out from your flashlight in a dark room: whatever happens to be inside the beam at the moment, you can see it, but you can't see what's outside the beam, lurking in the dark (the unconscious part of your mind). But you can move your flashlight and make different things appear in the beam of light. You can also change the breadth of the beam to see more.

When you are awake, there is a lot of things you are not aware of, because you're not paying attention to them. In particular, you don't think whether you're in the waking world right now, because you take it for granted. Similarly, when you are in a dream, you usually don't think about these things. And, trained by your waking life, you take it for granted that you are in the waking world, even if it is no longer true in a dream.

So you can pretty much guess already (I hope) that the key ingredient of lucid dreaming is to make yourself less certain about that fact that you are in the waking world right now. Tibetan monks who practise the Dream Yoga train themselves in observing their surroundings and being aware of all the things that happen around them, and questioning its reality. Be careful though: it's not the same as denying its reality! Questioning means literally that you ask yourself a question: "Is this real? Or is this a dream? Could I be dreaming now?". Because when you ask yourself such questions, you starting to pay more attention to your surroundings and become aware of your own thoughts and yourself as well. It's like if you've just awoken in your waking world (Yup, in the same way you can have non-lucid dreams, you can have non-lucid waking life, when your mind goes away from "here and now" and you walk around like a zombie People who act like that, usually don't have lucid dreams as well, or even any dreams whatsoever. That's why learning how to lucid dream can also improve your waking life.)

Questioning reality around you is usually called "reality checking". But this term is often used to mean other things too, such as some particular techniques of checking it, like looking at your watch and then looking again after a while to see if the hour is the same (in a dream it usually isn't, though I wouldn't depend on that too much, because if you focus well enough, you can make the hour to be the same), or toggling the light switch (in a dream, light switches may not work, as it was the case in one of my dreams described above, but I wouldn't depend on that too, because the light switch may as well work correctly, and you will be mistaken that you're not in a dream ). Ill tell you more about reality checks later.

So the key ingredient to lucid dreaming is your perception of reality. It is that key observation that there's really not much a difference between your perception of reality in the waking world and in the dream world. In both cases, you don't really observe the actual real world: you observe a "dream about the real world" that your brain made for you inside your head! When you're awake, this "dream" is made basing on the signals which come to your brain from the outside world through your physical senses. In reality, the real world doesn't have colours, smells, tastes, and all that stuff you perceive. There are only electromagnetic waves of certain wavelengths coming into your eyeballs and inducing electrical signals in the cells located in your retina, which then travel through the optical nerves into your brain for further processing. It is your brain that makes all these colours, tastes, smells etc. for you to observe then with your consciousness. What you see right now is just a projection of your brain.

Don't get me wrong, though: the real world is there. What I meant is that you're not seeing that actual real world right now, but an image of it, created inside your brain; a "dream about the real world", so to speak. And the same happens when you're in the dream world, the only difference being that now your brain doesn't base that dream on the information from the physical senses and the outside world – now it is 100% a dream; a closed "feedback loop" between you and your brain. But the mechanism of dreaming is the same in both cases. That's why your perception in a dream can be so realistic sometimes, and that's why there is no way to tell if you're in a dream or awake unless you notice something which is not possible in the waking world due to its physical limitations. For example, if you can fly, you can tell you're not in the waking world right now. But if you see or feel something that is possible in the real world, you can as well be in a dream right now because in a dream that would be possible too.

And here's where the reality checks come into play. Since the only way to distinguish the waking state from a dream state is to do something that is possible only in a dream but not in the real world.

In the real world, when you leave a teacup on your table, leave the room, and then enter the room again, you can be pretty sure the teacup will still be there on your table (unless someone could take it). But is this a good reality check? Not at all! Because the same could happen in a dream. Sure, in the dream world, teacup can disappear on its own. Consistency is not a must there. But the dream world can be consistent if you willingly require that. And in this case you will be none the wiser. So it is not a good reality check.

So if you're looking for a good reality check, try to find some things that are certainly impossible in the real world. Like flying. Or inserting your hand into a wall. Or changing a colour or shape of something by mere looking at it. Or running an electrical device without plugging it to the power grid. This is a good start, though keep in mind that some of those things may be hard or impossible to do in your dream too, depending on how good your imagination is. So here's my piece of advice:

If you already know you might be in a dream, or have such a feeling, then don't do the reality check! You don't have to, because you're most probably in a dream already. And if you do reality check and it fails, you will be mistaken that you're not in a dream and lose the opportunity for a lucid dream.

If you're in doubt whether you're in a dream or a waking world, then you're in a dream. Because in the waking world you wouldn't have such doubts. You would be certain that you're not dreaming right now. One can only have such doubts in a dream. (Unless you're not, and you just happen to witness something REALLY UNUSUAL. But these are very rare edge cases.)

Reality checks are exercises which you mostly do in the waking world, not in the dream world. They are supposed to increase your awareness during the day and put your mind into the correct way of thinking about the reality around you (that is, questioning it and being constantly aware that this as well might be a dream). Because when you do that during the day, you become more aware in your waking life, and this way of thinking starts to creep into your dreams too. And that's where it is needed if you want to lucid dream.

Many people will tell you that lucid dreaming is all about controlling your dreams. This is false. Dream control is one thing, and being aware that you're in a dream is another. They're two different things independent of each other. You can be aware that you're dreaming, but be unaware to control the dream anyway. This is often the case with people who have nightmares: there is a moment when they become aware that the horrible things they experience are just a dream, but the dream might be so realistic that they still perceive the pain or fear, and they still cannot control what happens in that dream (beside their own actions, of course). In this case, lucid dreaming can even make things worse, because when they become aware that they're in a dream, but they notice that they cannot control it or even awake, it may add up to their fear.
The contrary is also possible: one can be able to control a dream even when not being aware that this is a dream. I had a whole lot of dreams like that. Dreams in which I could fly, but I didn't know that this is a dream, because flying was possible for humans in that dream world and it was considered "normal". Everyone could fly in that world, so I found nothing unusual in it either. Or I had a dream once in which I was a ghost, so I could go through walls & stuff, but I still wasn't aware that this is a dream, because I thought I'm really a ghost, and it was normal for a ghost to go through walls.

Dream control depends more on the capability of your imagination and practise. The more you practise controlling your dreams, the more you can do it, whether you are aware you're dreaming or not. Being aware that you're in a dream can sometimes help in controlling the dream, because it changes your perspective on what is possible in that world and what isn't. But the fact that you'll be able to do what you consider possible depends on whether you can imagine yourself doing it.

Same thing goes with awareness: there are many levels of awareness. You can be aware that you're in a dream, but not be aware what position your physical body assumes in your bed at this moment in the real world, or whether it's day or night there, or what season it is, or that you can do certain things in your dream. E.g. I once had a lucid dream, but I forgot that I can fly in my dreams, so I didn't fly. Or I was in a dream, fully aware of it, but I couldn't go through wall because I had some troubles with imagining it. I could insert my arm or leg into the wall, but I couldn't insert my head into it from some reason, until I learnt the correct way to imagine that.

There's also no obvious correlation between the fact that you know you're in a dream and how much real that dream feels to you. Realism is a separate thing. I had lucid dreams in my life which were totally unrealistic (e.g. cartoon world like those above). I also had lucid dreams which were so realistic that i could smell the air, feel its temperature, and feel the heat of sunlight shedding on my skin. (It's quite interesting, though, that super-conscious dreams which are very realistic are usually full of light coming either from the sun or from the "vibrant colours of everything around you", as if the entire world was made of light – that was the original meaning of the word "lucid dream", which literally means "a dream full of light"; what is called "lucid dream" nowadays, should rather be called "conscious dream" or something like that – a dream in which you're aware you're dreaming. But as it is with common definitions – they're often crappy and we can't do much about it )

OK, these are the most important and most basic things you should know about lucid dreaming.

If we'll be lucky and this thread won't get locked, maybe I'll tell you some actual exercises and practical things you can do to induce lucid dreaming later. But I hope that what I wrote above is enough for you to start thinking about your own techniques already, basing on these key principles.

Edited May 17, 2017 by SasQ
Grammar, spelling & stuff

MaryxMelody · May 17, 2017

Hey, can you teach me how to do this?

Jeric · May 17, 2017

@SasQ I didn't state it was easy or hard, but stated that not everyone can. It's relatively basic neurology that every second year medical student, or anyone with academic database access can verify.

I also suggested the correlation between grey matter density and success. Look up peer reviewed articles on demyelination and get back to me when you have.

But since you went there, some of your descriptions are scientifically impossible, and some are not exact representative of actually existing in the world you conjured as you would have no real world frame of reference -- which is why I often ignored these types of posts.

This isn't to doubt lucid dreaming. It's very real and it's rather simple for me to accomplish, which presently can be a bad idea. There isn't anything more disconcerting and counter to the healing process than metacognition that gives one the ability to converse with a departed loved one.

I do know what I am talking about when it comes to neurology, and I came here to help someone actually understand how they can accomplish it, and not feel bad if they fail. That is the opposite of being a dick.

If anyone wants to discuss how to actually lucid dream, I'm happy to give practical advice on how to accomplish this privately or in the lucid dreaming topic.

*Jeric poofs

Techno Universal · May 20, 2017

I've been having a lot of lucid dreams recently and now I've figured out how to toggle them when I sleep. Most of them I was my OC in my lab under equestria waching over events taking place on the screens in my control room. I've even had a series of them where I was in my lab waching over the exact events of @SasQ's dreams very recently. I remember in those dreams I was interested in how a human form present day society managed to get into equestria. Even one of them I woke up in my own bed thinking that I should go to the toilet. Strangely I was alone and everything from the power to the water mains where disconnected. I went outside to find that my house was preserved inside a massive futuristic warehouse. There was a screen in the floor in front of my house that had the time on it plus it had information about the house. The date was 12th of January 6017 and the time was 4:25AM . I was apparently exactly 4000 years into the future from when I was in bed that night. Also what makes it easier to control things is that my system mentally has been developing into a computer like system since entered adolescents when I was 13. It's also allowed me to simulate environments exactly how your PC would do it. But when I'm lucid dreaming it's completely different as I'm in an external location in the timeline or another universe in the molti-verse. I even get operating system prompts when I'm porting been dreams and reality like it's a loading bar with a message like: PORTING TO UNIVERSE-887114009...

It's really fascinating of how I ended up like this.

steven · March 30, 2018

may i ask something?first off i don't care who hates my icon.i got got this account.and next thing is,Who is it possible to umm sommon twilight?,or i should say,how can you summon things at all? Edit:Sorry about my bad grammer.i have that alot.

I think i'm alone know

Edited March 30, 2018 by steven
Grammer message

Altastrofae · March 30, 2018

38 minutes ago, steven said:

may i ask something?first off i don't care who hates my icon.i got got this account.and next thing is,Who is it possible to umm sommon twilight?,or i should say,how can you summon things at all? Edit:Sorry about my bad grammer.i have that alot.

I think i'm alone know

He means it in the sense that he's summoning the idea of her which has manifested Astral-side from the overlay of how everyone percieves her to be like, including the creators. Twilight exist exactly as we all know her in this sense.

Tho I will say, @SasQ, that it isn't very healthy to be so attached to the Astral. To me it seems like you're just living out fantasy. I hope this isn't the case, it isn't healthy to dwell on dreams and forget to live. Although it is real, I hope it isn't distracting you from your friends and goals here in the Physical, Assiah, Mundane-Earth, whatever you want to call "here"

Just remember that you came to Earth, not Equestria, and this place is just as beautiful. Ignoring it all is a little silly, mind you.

Though, if it's all good, then I apologize for the false accusations

steven · March 30, 2018

4 minutes ago, CrystalBloodMoon said:

He means it in the sense that he's summoning the idea of her which has manifested Astral-side from the overlay of how everyone percieves her to be like, including the creators. Twilight exist exactly as we all know her in this sense.

Tho I will say, @SasQ, that it isn't very healthy to be so attached to the Astral. To me it seems like you're just living out fantasy. I hope this isn't the case, it isn't healthy to dwell on dreams and forget to live. Although it is real, I hope it isn't distracting you from your friends and goals here in the Physical, Assiah, Mundane-Earth, whatever you want to call "here"

Just remember that you came to Earth, not Equestria, and this place is just as beautiful. Ignoring it all is a little silly, mind you.

Though, if it's all good, then I apologize for the false accusations

I understand,But maybe in the next 100 years or so.we could have learned in are brains making us becoming smarter and getting/finding new items such at like plasma.Then maybe we could use a machine to make what we would like to dream,Ex.Like a dream maker.We could imagine what we would like to dream about,use the machine,then go to bed,as for allowing us to go deeper in reserch.I think this has some good things in it.Maybe in the next 500 years ore so we will be so smart we could beable to fhisically make a portal with lots of buttons,leverrs,electricity,and more.I think i got a little out of the whole Mlp portal thing but hey.This might happen,who knows.

Altastrofae · March 30, 2018

6 minutes ago, steven said:

I understand,But maybe in the next 100 years or so.we could have learned in are brains making us becoming smarter and getting/finding new items such at like plasma.Then maybe we could use a machine to make what we would like to dream,Ex.Like a dream maker.We could imagine what we would like to dream about,use the machine,then go to bed,as for allowing us to go deeper in reserch.I think this has some good things in it.Maybe in the next 500 years ore so we will be so smart we could beable to fhisically make a portal with lots of buttons,leverrs,electricity,and more.I think i got a little out of the whole Mlp portal thing but hey.This might happen,who knows.

Why do humans always seem to require physical proof? That always baffled me.

steven · March 30, 2018

Well,i'm just gessing about this,again who knows?

Ok and what do you mean by baffled?

3 minutes ago, CrystalBloodMoon said:

Why do humans always seem to require physical proof? That always baffled me.

Who knows?For real maybe we will get this stuff down?

Also what do you mean by baffled?

Altastrofae · March 30, 2018

4 minutes ago, steven said:

Well,i'm just gessing about this,again who knows?

Ok and what do you mean by baffled?

Who knows?For real maybe we will get this stuff down?

Also what do you mean by baffled?

Confused. the need of physical proof always confused me

steven · March 30, 2018

1 minute ago, CrystalBloodMoon said:

Confused. the need of physical proof always confused me

Oh ok

Lucky Bolt · April 3, 2018

On 5/17/2017 at 10:44 AM, SasQ said:

Oops, since my arch Nemesis has found me already, my prediction is that this thread is going down or it will be locked soon
Thanks for reminding me why did I stop posting on these forums long time ago, though.

Anyway, I'll try to address your questions, @Lenny and @Breite Wiese, before that happens. Make sure to backup my posts, though.

First, contrary to what some people (including @Jeric) may tell you, lucid dreaming is not that hard, not to say impossible, and it has nothing to do with physical abilities, genes, or brain function. Predispositions may help, but they aren't necessary, because lucid dreaming is something you can learn, not something you are born with. Well, actually, you are born with it, in a way: small children usually have this capability of jumping between the waking world and the dream world naturally, but they lose it when their parents keep telling them that "it was just a dream", "this wasn't real" etc. I remember that when I was a kid, I could do all sorts of stuff with dreams, out of body experiences etc., but I lost this ability during growing up, and rediscovered it later when I found that there are people who can do that and who study these states of consciousness, and they invented all sorts of techniques to learn this ability again. I also found, to my surprise, that this is nothing new: ancient civilizations knew these techniques long time ago, especially the Eastern ones, like the Tibetan monks, the Hindus, ancient Egyptians etc. They wrote books about that, such as the Dream Yoga, or the Book of the Dead (don't be scared of the "dead" word, though: they simply considered sleep as somewhat similar to death, and studied lucid dreaming as a way to possibly overcome death by maintaining their consciousness when dying). Long story short, lucid dreaming can be learnt, and it can be done easily if you do it the right way. (Unfortunately many people don't, and they introduce a lot of misconceptions to the subject, convincing others that it is hard or impossible.)

So what is the secret ingredient to lucid dreaming?

One of the biggest misconceptions about lucid dreaming is that lucid dreaming is about controlling your dreams. This is utter nonsense! Lucid dream is simply a dream in which you know that you're dreaming. Simple as that. A lucid dream then is in no way different from a "normal" dream when it comes to the brain functions – it is only a matter of what that brain thinks at the moment. So you don't need to have any special powers to do that – if you can have "normal" dreams, you can have lucid dreams as well. (Heck, they even appear naturally sometimes, without your initiative.) Ask Dr. Stephen la Berge from Lucidity Institute in Palo Alto – he studies this phenomenon for years, and taught many people how to lucid dream during that time.

Let's compare it to the situation you're in right now: You're sitting in your chair and reading this post on your computer's screen. But until I mentioned it, you might have been unaware of the pressure your butt impresses on the chair, or the smell of the air in your room, or the noises coming out from outside your window, etc. But as soon as I mentioned these things, you become aware of them, because you started paying conscious attention to these things. Before that, you were unaware of them. Another thing you were probably unaware of, is that you're not in a dream right now. Sounds obvious, because, well, you're not asleep right now either But bear me on this, it might not be so obvious sometimes, especially if you are in a dream. Also it demonstrates how awareness works: you are aware of things which you think about and focus on, and unaware of other things you don't pay attention to at the moment. Awareness is like a beam of light coming out from your flashlight in a dark room: whatever happens to be inside the beam at the moment, you can see it, but you can't see what's outside the beam, lurking in the dark (the unconscious part of your mind). But you can move your flashlight and make different things appear in the beam of light. You can also change the breadth of the beam to see more.

When you are awake, there is a lot of things you are not aware of, because you're not paying attention to them. In particular, you don't think whether you're in the waking world right now, because you take it for granted. Similarly, when you are in a dream, you usually don't think about these things. And, trained by your waking life, you take it for granted that you are in the waking world, even if it is no longer true in a dream.

So you can pretty much guess already (I hope) that the key ingredient of lucid dreaming is to make yourself less certain about that fact that you are in the waking world right now. Tibetan monks who practise the Dream Yoga train themselves in observing their surroundings and being aware of all the things that happen around them, and questioning its reality. Be careful though: it's not the same as denying its reality! Questioning means literally that you ask yourself a question: "Is this real? Or is this a dream? Could I be dreaming now?". Because when you ask yourself such questions, you starting to pay more attention to your surroundings and become aware of your own thoughts and yourself as well. It's like if you've just awoken in your waking world (Yup, in the same way you can have non-lucid dreams, you can have non-lucid waking life, when your mind goes away from "here and now" and you walk around like a zombie People who act like that, usually don't have lucid dreams as well, or even any dreams whatsoever. That's why learning how to lucid dream can also improve your waking life.)

Questioning reality around you is usually called "reality checking". But this term is often used to mean other things too, such as some particular techniques of checking it, like looking at your watch and then looking again after a while to see if the hour is the same (in a dream it usually isn't, though I wouldn't depend on that too much, because if you focus well enough, you can make the hour to be the same), or toggling the light switch (in a dream, light switches may not work, as it was the case in one of my dreams described above, but I wouldn't depend on that too, because the light switch may as well work correctly, and you will be mistaken that you're not in a dream ). Ill tell you more about reality checks later.

So the key ingredient to lucid dreaming is your perception of reality. It is that key observation that there's really not much a difference between your perception of reality in the waking world and in the dream world. In both cases, you don't really observe the actual real world: you observe a "dream about the real world" that your brain made for you inside your head! When you're awake, this "dream" is made basing on the signals which come to your brain from the outside world through your physical senses. In reality, the real world doesn't have colours, smells, tastes, and all that stuff you perceive. There are only electromagnetic waves of certain wavelengths coming into your eyeballs and inducing electrical signals in the cells located in your retina, which then travel through the optical nerves into your brain for further processing. It is your brain that makes all these colours, tastes, smells etc. for you to observe then with your consciousness. What you see right now is just a projection of your brain.

Don't get me wrong, though: the real world is there. What I meant is that you're not seeing that actual real world right now, but an image of it, created inside your brain; a "dream about the real world", so to speak. And the same happens when you're in the dream world, the only difference being that now your brain doesn't base that dream on the information from the physical senses and the outside world – now it is 100% a dream; a closed "feedback loop" between you and your brain. But the mechanism of dreaming is the same in both cases. That's why your perception in a dream can be so realistic sometimes, and that's why there is no way to tell if you're in a dream or awake unless you notice something which is not possible in the waking world due to its physical limitations. For example, if you can fly, you can tell you're not in the waking world right now. But if you see or feel something that is possible in the real world, you can as well be in a dream right now because in a dream that would be possible too.

And here's where the reality checks come into play. Since the only way to distinguish the waking state from a dream state is to do something that is possible only in a dream but not in the real world.

In the real world, when you leave a teacup on your table, leave the room, and then enter the room again, you can be pretty sure the teacup will still be there on your table (unless someone could take it). But is this a good reality check? Not at all! Because the same could happen in a dream. Sure, in the dream world, teacup can disappear on its own. Consistency is not a must there. But the dream world can be consistent if you willingly require that. And in this case you will be none the wiser. So it is not a good reality check.

So if you're looking for a good reality check, try to find some things that are certainly impossible in the real world. Like flying. Or inserting your hand into a wall. Or changing a colour or shape of something by mere looking at it. Or running an electrical device without plugging it to the power grid. This is a good start, though keep in mind that some of those things may be hard or impossible to do in your dream too, depending on how good your imagination is. So here's my piece of advice:

If you already know you might be in a dream, or have such a feeling, then don't do the reality check! You don't have to, because you're most probably in a dream already. And if you do reality check and it fails, you will be mistaken that you're not in a dream and lose the opportunity for a lucid dream.

If you're in doubt whether you're in a dream or a waking world, then you're in a dream. Because in the waking world you wouldn't have such doubts. You would be certain that you're not dreaming right now. One can only have such doubts in a dream. (Unless you're not, and you just happen to witness something REALLY UNUSUAL. But these are very rare edge cases.)

Reality checks are exercises which you mostly do in the waking world, not in the dream world. They are supposed to increase your awareness during the day and put your mind into the correct way of thinking about the reality around you (that is, questioning it and being constantly aware that this as well might be a dream). Because when you do that during the day, you become more aware in your waking life, and this way of thinking starts to creep into your dreams too. And that's where it is needed if you want to lucid dream.

Many people will tell you that lucid dreaming is all about controlling your dreams. This is false. Dream control is one thing, and being aware that you're in a dream is another. They're two different things independent of each other. You can be aware that you're dreaming, but be unaware to control the dream anyway. This is often the case with people who have nightmares: there is a moment when they become aware that the horrible things they experience are just a dream, but the dream might be so realistic that they still perceive the pain or fear, and they still cannot control what happens in that dream (beside their own actions, of course). In this case, lucid dreaming can even make things worse, because when they become aware that they're in a dream, but they notice that they cannot control it or even awake, it may add up to their fear.
The contrary is also possible: one can be able to control a dream even when not being aware that this is a dream. I had a whole lot of dreams like that. Dreams in which I could fly, but I didn't know that this is a dream, because flying was possible for humans in that dream world and it was considered "normal". Everyone could fly in that world, so I found nothing unusual in it either. Or I had a dream once in which I was a ghost, so I could go through walls & stuff, but I still wasn't aware that this is a dream, because I thought I'm really a ghost, and it was normal for a ghost to go through walls.

Dream control depends more on the capability of your imagination and practise. The more you practise controlling your dreams, the more you can do it, whether you are aware you're dreaming or not. Being aware that you're in a dream can sometimes help in controlling the dream, because it changes your perspective on what is possible in that world and what isn't. But the fact that you'll be able to do what you consider possible depends on whether you can imagine yourself doing it.

Same thing goes with awareness: there are many levels of awareness. You can be aware that you're in a dream, but not be aware what position your physical body assumes in your bed at this moment in the real world, or whether it's day or night there, or what season it is, or that you can do certain things in your dream. E.g. I once had a lucid dream, but I forgot that I can fly in my dreams, so I didn't fly. Or I was in a dream, fully aware of it, but I couldn't go through wall because I had some troubles with imagining it. I could insert my arm or leg into the wall, but I couldn't insert my head into it from some reason, until I learnt the correct way to imagine that.

There's also no obvious correlation between the fact that you know you're in a dream and how much real that dream feels to you. Realism is a separate thing. I had lucid dreams in my life which were totally unrealistic (e.g. cartoon world like those above). I also had lucid dreams which were so realistic that i could smell the air, feel its temperature, and feel the heat of sunlight shedding on my skin. (It's quite interesting, though, that super-conscious dreams which are very realistic are usually full of light coming either from the sun or from the "vibrant colours of everything around you", as if the entire world was made of light – that was the original meaning of the word "lucid dream", which literally means "a dream full of light"; what is called "lucid dream" nowadays, should rather be called "conscious dream" or something like that – a dream in which you're aware you're dreaming. But as it is with common definitions – they're often crappy and we can't do much about it )

OK, these are the most important and most basic things you should know about lucid dreaming.

If we'll be lucky and this thread won't get locked, maybe I'll tell you some actual exercises and practical things you can do to induce lucid dreaming later. But I hope that what I wrote above is enough for you to start thinking about your own techniques already, basing on these key principles.

Wow, this was really good. I've been wanting to begin practicing lucid dreaming for a very long time now, I just never knew where to begin. And what you said about light switches usually don't work in dreams was fascinating, because for some reason I've had so many dreams where I'll be standing in the doorway of my bedroom, switching a light switch on and off, and the light never comes on, or maybe it might come on but it's very dim, not even light enough to brighten up the dark bedroom. :huh: I thought I was the only one who had dreams like this, but I guess light switches not working must be a common thing in dreams. And I have no idea why I remember these dreams involving the light switch so well.

SasQ · April 3, 2018

On 30.03.2018 at 6:28 AM, CrystalBloodMoon said:

He means it in the sense that he's summoning the idea of her which has manifested Astral-side from the overlay of how everyone percieves her to be like, including the creators. Twilight exist exactly as we all know her in this sense.

Yup, pretty much that. I "summoned" Twilight Sparkle inside of my mind, as a mental image, to talk with her representation in my mind. It might be considered as a form of channelling. I do that quite often, to talk with famous scientists or even fictional characters, to ask for advice or inspiration. Everyone of us has a mental image of Twilight Sparkle in the way we know her from the cartoon, how she talks and behaves, what would she do or wouldn't do in certain situations, etc. and that vision of her is supposed to behave according to these rules. Every character I "summon" this way has a different set of rules and behaviours, allowing for different points of view and solutions to different problems.

On 30.03.2018 at 6:28 AM, CrystalBloodMoon said:

Tho I will say, @SasQ, that it isn't very healthy to be so attached to the Astral.

What do you mean by "so attached"? Everyone is, it's just most people are unaware of it and cannot use it consciously in their lives.

I'm a lucid dreamer since I learnt how to do it back when I was in college. So I have several years of experience with it under my belt. It is something I learnt, and I repeat this once more: EVERYONE CAN LEARN IT. I'm not some prodigious chosen-by-gods genius. So if I could learn it, everyone can. And there are no physical conditions that could disallow one to do that either, because it works on the mental plane ("in the software, not in the hardware", as a computer scientist would say). If there's any physical condition that would make someone incapable of lucid dreaming, it would render them incapable of much more serious brain functions, like talking, controlling their body etc. The only thing that could possibly stop you from learning that, is your own attitude and belief. If you believe it's possible, you're right. If you believe it's impossible, you're right too, because your mind will make it impossible for you.

But I digressed. As for the mental health: I'm dealing with the Astral & stuff for over a decade since, and I'm OK, thank you very much. It didn't affect my mind in any wrong/unhealthy way (quite the contrary, actually: I benefit a lot from these skills and they help me doing stuff other people can't due to limitations they impose upon themselves). Sure, there might be some people who could have gotten crazy by doing such things. But one can get crazy much more simpler, by believing some crazy stuff. It's always the case when one fiddles with one's mind without proper knowledge and care. In the same way one can get electrocuted by playing with electricity without proper knowledge about it, or got poisoned or injured by playing with chemicals without knowing chemistry. But as long as you are careful and you know what you're doing, there's no worries you'll get crazy or hurt.

On 30.03.2018 at 6:28 AM, CrystalBloodMoon said:

To me it seems like you're just living out fantasy. I hope this isn't the case, it isn't healthy to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

Oh, don't worry about that! I never lost my sense of reality, and I didn't forget to live Having good fantasy doesn't necessarily mean you can't be serious and real at the same time. I might use some fringe occult methods sometimes :oneheckofahat: but I'm also a scientist, and I always had a very inquiring and sceptical mind, and a good sense of what's real and what's not. I think it might be caused by my experience with mathematics. When dealing with mathematics, I often have to assume certain things, even some "crazy" ones, just to see what conclusions could be drawn from it. It is a frequent technique of proving theorems in mathematics: you assume something that you know isn't true, just to see what follows from it and where will you encounter a contradiction. I kinda extrapolated this way of thinking into other areas of my life. I often play with different ideas just to see how they work, so I created a special place in my mind, a sort of a sandbox for ideas where I can safely play with them without affecting the rest of my mind. They can be false, they can be crazy, but they always stay in the sandbox. And only when I make sure something is true, by thoroughly verifying it, I move it to the part of my mind where I keep "verified" ideas – those that I'm certain they're true. For example, I can assume that the Christian God (or any other God) exists and see what results from it. Or I can assume that an advanced extraterrestrial civilization visited Earth thousands of years ago, and consider what traces of their existence they could have left on our planet. Or I can assume that ghosts exist and ponder about possible ways to detect them or communicate with them. And at the end of the day, I can leave my sandbox and get back to the usual, "normal", mundane stuff. It's like when you read an immersive book or watch a movie – while you're reading or watching it, you can live that fantasy, assuming that what happens in the movie is true, but when the movie ends, you get back to normal life. That's how it works for me with my "Astral" experiences

On 30.03.2018 at 6:28 AM, CrystalBloodMoon said:

Just remember that you came to Earth, not Equestria, and this place is just as beautiful. Ignoring it all is a little silly, mind you.

Who said I'm "ignoring" the real world? :J

You see, the thing is, what is "real" is relative and depends on your perception and definitions of reality. For me, "true" and "real" are synonymous, and they mean the things that happen or potentially can happen in certain conditions because there's nothing that could prevent it from happening. The sense of reality is based on experience and perception. If you perceive something (e.g. you see your friend in front of you), you can say it's "real", because it is certainly happening and can be perceived, at least by you. In the same sense, when you see the same friend in your dream, you can tell it's "real", because you're perceiving it. The only problem is that some perceptions are subjective, and some can be objectively perceived by more people at the same time and pretty much the same way (because there will always be some discrepancies in perception, since you're all perceiving it from different points of view). Of course it's better if something can be perceived objectively by other people, not just you. But what if it cannot? Does it mean it's not real?

For example, no one can perceive your dreams except you. Does it mean they are not real then? Well, one might say so. But what if you perceived that you met someone in a dream, talked with that person, and after you woke up, you told her about that dream only to find out that she had the same exact dream in which she met you and talked with you, and remembers the same piece of dialogue you had? Could we say then that it was real? How many people have to perceive something so that we could finally tell it's objectively real? Or what if most people on Earth believe something that is not true, but they still believe it, because they think it's real? E.g., just look how many people believe in God or other things they cannot even perceive or prove existence of, not only to other people, but to themselves as well, but they believe it regardless, and even base their life's decisions and actions upon that assumption! How crazy is that? Well, as crazy as it is, it's considered "normal" and even "healthy"! Just because so many people believe in it.

From a certain point of view, we all "live a fantasy", because the physical world is far from how we perceive it. In the physical world, there are no colours, just wavelengths of light that cause certain responses in our eyes' retinae after they reflect from different surfaces that either reflect a certain wavelength or absorb it. There's even a colour (pink) that doesn't exist in the physical world at all, because there's no wavelength corresponding to it! Our brains create that fantasy for us as a by-product of a certain stimulation pattern on our photosensitive cells (when there are long and short wavelengths present, but no medium-length waves). Our brains use the same circuitry for creating this "virtual reality" inside of our mind based on the stimuli from the outside world as they do in a dream, so in a way, you are dreaming even at this very moment, reading this text! :umad: Your brain collects all those information about the outside world from your physical senses and creates a "dream about the real world" inside of your head that you can perceive from the point of view of where you think you are located in that world. Most people are unaware of that most of the time they live their everyday life. But there are some (simple) ways to disturb this mechanism. E.g. you can put a special pair of glasses upon one's head, that display the image from behind their head, and they will be surprised to find that they perceive the reality as if they were standing behind themselves, out of their physical body! If you swing a hammer behind their back and under the camera that collects the image, they will duck as if they were trying to avoid being hit. Or you can display a rubber model of their hands, touching that model with something while you're touching their real hands at the same time (to induce an association in their heads that those are their actual hands they're watching), and when you smack a hammer on those rubber hands, they will feel the actual pain

Those are just experiments, but my own experiments with lucid dreaming, astral projections etc., helped me to see that this is the default way our minds work, something we've been born with and taught to forget (when our parents told us that "it was just a dream, it wasn't real" :q ). You can practise this and exercise it to get more awareness of this mechanism and learn to use it consciously. E.g. you can deliberately change the point you're perceiving reality from, and feel as if you were perceiving the world from somewhere else, outside of your physical body. And I'm pretty sure it's the default, because I remember that this was the way I perceived reality in my early childhood, before my parents "fixed my perception" to my physical body (as all parents do, unconsciously, to their kids). After I started associating myself with my physical body and perceiving reality through it, I got "stuck" in it (as we all do, until we "wake up" from the "dream" we call our life). But mind is not confined in the body. It never was. It's not just about brain function. I consider brain to be some sort of a "transceiver" that allows consciousness to manifest and connect to a certain body to perceive the physical world through it, but it's just that limiting perspective that makes you believe that you're "inside" of your body, or that you "are" your body. Dealing with "Astral stuff" can allow you to see that it's not the case. Consciousness is a "software" process. It can use the "hardware" of your brain to run, but it's not the only way it can manifest. And no, I'm not talking of some religious mumbo-jumbo right now, like ghosts or souls or spirits etc. I'm talking about the actual, real processes that happen in reality, but are not part of the physical subset of it. (Yes, even in physics there's a level at which things are no longer "material".) Consciousness is an emergent process that can manifest without a brain, and it can transcend it. There are many examples of processes in which a type of "mind" or "intelligence" manifests itself which are not based on brain function, such as flocks of birds, a shoal of fish, or even atoms on the quantum level (although it's not as complex as human consciousness, it's still a simple example of it, based on communication between atoms with light waves, storing information in their quantum state as "memory" of past "experiences", calculating the result by combining the wavefunctions, and communicating their state back to the outside world as radiation). As soon as some things can communicate information between them, store that information, and process it, some form of "intelligence" will always emerge. And as soon as there is some sort of a feedback loop in that system, that creates non-linearity, and as soon as the system is capable of representing its own "mental image" in its "memory", the basic form of self-consciousness will emerge as well. The only difference between human consciousness and non-human consciousness lays in the level of complexity. Our brains are devices that are well-suited for running this process (one can think of the brain as a flock of neurons that communicate with each other), but it's just one possible way it can manifest.

So yeah, long story short: the "real world" is a form of fantasy as well – a fantasy that we simply agreed upon and "fixed" it to be a certain way, but even then, there's a lot of discrepancies caused either by the way our minds work, or by the physical laws themselves. (E.g. did you know that the simultaneity of events is relative? It depends on the point of view of the observer and its relative motion with respect to the observed reality. So even such basic thing as the perception of time itself can be not as "real" as you think :q ). So the only difference is what perceptions you choose to believe in and how do you interpret them. And whether it is a mental skill or mental illness depends on whether it helps you in your life or hurts it. There are many things considered to be "real" by the majority of people, that can nevertheless hurt you. And there are things not accepted by the majority as "real", but that can help you. So choose wisely.

Edited April 3, 2018 by SasQ

SasQ · April 3, 2018

On 30.03.2018 at 6:45 AM, CrystalBloodMoon said:

Why do humans always seem to require physical proof? That always baffled me.

Because a proof is something that makes you certain that you're not crazy or just "making things up" Weren't you concerned a while ago about my mental health? Welp, that's exactly what proofs are for: their purpose is to distinguish what's "true" or "real" or "possible", from what isn't.

Also, I don't think there's such thing as "physical proof". We don't prove anything in physics. We only do observations, make notes, try to find the pattern in the data and describe it with some model in our theories, and then we do more experiments to see if they fit the theory or not. As long as they fit, we're fine. But no matter how many experiments are supporting our theory, they never ascertain it – they only increase our belief that the theory might be true. But one experiment that breaks the pattern is enough to disprove a theory. So the only thing we can be certain in physics, is that some theory is not right.

Quite the contrary in mathematics, which is a purely mental exercise (though it is still grounded in the real world and the real world seems to be operating on mathematical principles). In mathematics, it's all about proving stuff. First we make a small set of assumptions, called "axioms", which we accept inside the theory as being true (coming from the outside world), and then we use logical reasoning to see what other facts we can naturally deduce from these assumptions. And as long as there are no contradictions, we're fine.

But why can't we verify these assumptions to begin with? Well, because there's really no way of doing that :q Logic doesn't care about its "inputs". It works this way: providing that something is believed to be true, it must follow that something else must be true as well (the thing we deduce from the axioms). So it's always only a provisional truth. The only way to find out that some assumptions were not true, is when we run into a contradiction. Because there are no contradictions in the real world – it exists, so it's true. Truth is something that happens or can happen. False is something that cannot happen no matter what, because it collides with something else. It's like a piece of a puzzle that doesn't fit anywhere, so it cannot be a part of any valid picture.

And people need proofs because proofs give them the sense of safety and comfort. When they can prove something is true, they feel safe, because they feel they "understood" something. If they can't grasp something with their mind, they usually also are unable to prove it. And vice versa: if they cannot prove it, they're reluctant to accept it as true or grasp it with their mind. (Though there are also things that has been proved to be true, but nevertheless not many people can believe it. Just look how many flat-earthers are out there these days :q or religious fanatics.)

Rigorous proofs also take out the "human factor" out of the equation. It helps resolving conflicts in debates. You can believe that something is true, but other people might not be so much willing to believe you. Proofs are the ways to convince them, because if they can follow the same path of deduction that you did and come to the same conclusion all by themselves, it's more likely they'll believe it too. They may not believe you, but they can't deny their own deduction they've done themselves, right?

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