Lumi's Dreaming Thread; Dreams of Moon

[Tewi]

I remembered all of my dreams last night, but only remembered. I can only remember vague scenarios now. The habit currently is to quickly go through them until there doesn't seem to be much missing, and then go back to sleep. But I'm going to start working on memorizing them from now on. Not because I care to memorize them, but because the act of committing them to memory will be increasing our dream recall further.

 

In case some of you still haven't caught the invisible link, I'll just post the video now. Know that you could've seen it nearly three weeks earlier though, or six days ago when Lumi posted it again.

"It" being my favorite song. I don't feel like explaining why however.

[video=youtube]

[Tewi]

Day 64: Not much has changed since day 1, or day -1095. This surprises nobody. Aside from the whole trying-is-progress-quitting-is-failure thing.

(Remembered dreams last night etc. etc.)

I need to push myself a lot harder to meet my own standards for something so important. I've got no excuses not to. See you tomorrow.

[Tewi]

As I thought of posting in this thread hours ago while lying in bed: "Nothing's working, I don't know what to do."

As I of course refused not knowing what to do, today I'll be reality checking constantly. Always remembering to remind myself I could be dreaming.

 

It's not going well enough so far, which sucks. Because the actual plan is to practice All Day Awareness, but I was really hoping I could consistently remember to reality check every 10-15 minutes or so through all situations. So far I'm being distracted for up to half an hour though. If I can't do it satisfactorily today, tomorrow I'll be attempting ADA.

 

We've never done it before. Lumi did it once, years ago, for about 15 minutes sitting on a bus, before he was very tired of it. ADA is extremely mentally taxing, I know that much for sure. What it means is: Take notice of the environment around you, survey your surroundings so to speak. Where is everything, what's there, notice details like color and relevance to you, just generally think about everything you're doing and interacting with consciously. People do this all the time when trying to gather information on their environment, like when they go somewhere they've never been before.

 

You know, usually for a few minutes tops, before your attention returns to your task or people around you, or... your phone, the murderer of attention spans. Anyways. ADA means you need to stay in that state all day. Doesn't matter that you're just sitting in your room at your computer, you need to stay consciously aware of what's going on around you. No immersion, you must recognize that you're staring at a screen. No getting super comfortable in one position and forgetting about sensing your body. Suffice it to say, I'm not sure many people are remotely capable of this. From what we heard on Dreamviews, the few people who had done it said it was extremely difficult for a while but afterwards it became more natural and had effects on their lives similar to routine meditation. I don't believe they're actually constantly aware of every stimulus around them, rather they're working at a higher level of conscious awareness than most. We've got a comparison for that, as Lumi used to see the world through a "filter of gray" associated with depression, that sort of dulls your senses and your overall mood. But you don't notice it at the time, that's just reality, until it changes and you realize how disconnected from everything you were. Wouldn't it be nice to go up another level even after that?

 

I don't really like a lot of the preaching self-help (or "personal development" if that term means nothing to you, I'm talking about non-shams) people do about levels of consciousness and all that. But, there's still something to what they say, even if it's not some magical stage of human development (Tolle even called it "human evolution"). You can definitely improve the efficiency and clarity at which your mind works. And given how often I'm not meeting my own standards right now, maybe All Day Awareness will be good for me.

[tulpa001]

That last song posted was really good. So were some of the others. I am thinking about adding some of them to my offline list. theta complex, phalaenopsis, hibernation, and Hello!

 

For this past week, we have been having terrible luck remembering our dreams. Just one short lucid dream.

 

All day awareness sounds like what detectives train themselves to do. It also sounds like what my host's mind naturally does when she's trying to concentrate and fails. How can you just ignore your environment?

[Tewi]

Having an ongoing sense of your environment is utterly different from what I'm talking about. We're so environmentally aware that we basically know what's going on in the house while we sleep, from the bits of time we're awake outside of REM sleep. I don't know how to explain it to you really.

 

Just kidding, from this moment to the one in a few where you now redirect your attention to your environment. There's background awareness and there's conscious awareness. Also, it's the difference in being immersed in what's on your monitor and seeing it as a screen displaying light. It's simply too much redundant stimuli that our brains tend to filter out for a reason. I like the detective comparison though I don't know if it's true outside of TV shows. Anyways, it's not fun, I'll tell you that much. Immersion is really important for enjoying things. Disallowing yourself to become immersed (and therefore less aware ((but not ENTIRELY unaware, sheesh)) of your environment) makes things like reading a book ridiculously lame. Of course you can keep a passive awareness of your environment while reading. Lumi used to read in class constantly during his let's-fail-everything years, and he had to switch between visualizing the story and closing the book often.

 

But that's not conscious awareness, at least not of the intensity I'm talking about. If what I'm talking about with ADA sounds feasible, you've got the wrong idea, because it's not. It takes a ton of practice and time full of slipping up/having lapses in awareness before you can sustain it for very long at all.

 

Also, glad you liked some of the music. We've only listened to phalaenopsis about twice outside of that day it was stuck in my head, and we didn't even link a song called hibernation. Nor an artist - Theta Complex is a circle actually, that song was Spirit the Atom. And if you liked it, you might like this very similar song also by Lv.4. It feels a little more active and less meditate-y to me.

[video=youtube]

 

Anyways, there were about three occasions where I forgot to reality check and/or be aware of my environment for over 45 minutes today. But a lot of the day I was able to remember consistently every 15 to 30 minutes. It absolutely does not feel like enough to have it take effect in our dreams. I was practicing the ADA type of awareness during those periods, and it only made me dread having to do ADA itself more. Not because it's so intensive it really affects me or anything, rather I scold myself whenever I forget something like that or mess up similar mental tasks. I'm not necessarily a perfectionist like Lumi, but I do hold myself to very high standards, and I know that I'll have a really hard time staying aware all day. So it'll be a day of being annoyed at myself for what I see as small failures.

 

Oh well, I feel that way for a reason. Positive reinforcement doesn't really work for me like it does Lucilyn, I'm never terribly motivated by success or pleasure. It's failing to meet the standards I set for myself that forces me to be efficient.

[tulpa001]

Edit: hibernation ruxia: Sleeping satellite.

[Tewi]

Alright, ADA isn't as strenuous as I made it out to be. It wasn't that difficult to keep it up for a few hours straight earlier, just sitting at our computer. Rather, and I knew this from the start, the difficulty is when you get sucked into something else. Playing games makes it pretty difficult. But I was more prompt with becoming aware again than I was with just reality checks. IE, playing a song in Osu and getting focused on it, but immediately remembering to "zoom out" my awareness from the game as soon as the song ended. That analogy makes a lot of sense to me. You kind of become aware of your peripheral vision again, the most obvious effect, though the most important is being aware of your thinking.

 

Problem was that it wasn't such a black and white thing as I thought it was, and throughout the day I felt like I was in-between being aware or not, especially when I remained "consciously aware" of what I was focused on, but not my surroundings. I think that's not such a bad thing, especially when you return to general-awareness right after. However, extended social interaction (not just standing and talking, actual interaction) made me forget more than anything else. I did pretty well up until that point a few hours ago. That's actually when I most value retaining conscious awareness though, because I hate stream-of-consciousness socializing. A lot. I hate when I realize I haven't been thinking about what I was saying for the past five minutes. Most people can do it well enough they aren't utterly brain-dead when not paying attention to what they're saying, but I don't like it myself. How I speak is another high standard of mine, one that most people on the forum don't really understand. I've had posts that I personally disliked described as "well thought out" pretty often.

 

Anyways. Because of the lack of a clear borderline between "aware" and "distracted/unfocused", I wasn't really scolding myself today like I thought I would be. Moreso taking notes on how it went and what to look out for/how to improve. Which seemed to go strangely well while I was relatively focused on awareness. It's been way too little time to say with any certainty, but it felt like my intuition was a lot stronger during those times. Instant mental maths and other basic problem solving skills, also with less doubt/need for double-checking than I usually have for things like that. For example, I usually do basic math in my head instantly but then double check by actually doing it, but today it felt like I was sure enough I didn't need to. Can't think of specific examples, but I'm talking about things like "Alright, it's 12:47 and I need to check this again in 150 minutes, so 3:17" in various formats.

 

To be honest, this suits me well. It's really what I was aiming for back when I was trying to quiet the mind (to put it lightly) and continuously stop extraneous trains of thought/thought processes, which I've given up trying to explain here. But the problem there was I was focusing on the wordiness of my mind instead of just being aware in general. If that makes sense. Even if it doesn't.

 

I'm not sure what I'll be doing from here. No more "challenge" to stay aware all day, but I do want to keep it up to see if it really is making the difference I now hope it is. I say all the time (to myself I suppose) that we're far old enough to stop worrying about explaining basic occurrences and experiences (think mental maths and leaving behind rudimentary methods, but applied to your mind's thinking processes instead of just math). What I experienced a bit today is exactly what I've been aiming for, ie efficient functioning based on intuition with no need to double check basic thoughts or observations. I honestly think the majority of the thoughts people have are redundant past a certain age, assuming they aren't still actively experiencing new environments and situations. The brain keeps using its processing power to do addition on its fingers when it's more than capable of moving past that. It can get out a pencil and paper when something actually difficult comes up.

 

 

That was less a stream-of-consciousness post and more a lot of text directed at no one, but were it more tangential it would be an example of the types of posts I make that I really don't like. Luckily, this is a Lounge thread designed to have us recount progress to no one in particular.

[Lucilyn]

ok Tewi let me play some Halloween TF2 with lumi's friends today and they were all gonna have a game night where we played cards against humanity and I was supposed to switch back with lumi I think but I forgot, and I do not regret that at all. It was pretty fun at first and I won three games in a row, but then it got crazy with a lot of cards we've never seen before, and we all pretty much lost it. But I really lost it, like three rounds in a row almost all the cards were absolutely hilarious and I was crying I was laughing so much. It made my throat hurt (that laugh when you don't got any more air to laugh with will do that) and I feel a little dizzy now like an hour later, but that was amazing, that's the most fun I've had in a long time. (I had my own running gag of playing blank cards with "my overwatch rank LOl xd ;(" making fun of our friend who's top 100 in overwatch rn, it was amazing every time)

 

 

ANYWAYS what I was actually supposed to write, Tewi suggested I try to keep up the awareness thing which I thought I could do but it was kinda annoying. She literally managed to make like, a permanent mental alarm clock you could only Snooze to keep reminding her/us to be aware again. So that kept coming up and every time I was like ugh OK. But then I forgot (or, you know, chose to ignore it) because being immersed in the game was more fun. That was TF2 btw not CAH that was later. Uhm. Yeah idk I don't really want to do it, I feel like it takes some of the fun out of fun things IMO. But it doesn't bother her so she can keep doing it I guess.

 

Jeez, I'm gonna go to sleep. That was so much fun.

[Luminesce]

I'm really happy to see she had that much fun, that's absolutely alright with me.

 

I kind of forgot to do the awareness thing most of the time, because I never really established intent to do it in the first place. I do think I could keep it up for a while, but I can't live it like Tewi. I pretty much "rest on my laurels" when it comes to the improvements I've made to my mindset and overall awareness. I guess I was trying harder a few years ago, and stopped when I got to an OK place. Anyways, I have no complaints about her influencing our mindset to be more generally aware (since she questioned if she should do something like that without consulting us).

 

As if I wouldn't be okay with anything they did.

[Luminesce]

I wasn't in a good mood literally right before writing that and going to bed last night, but tonight my head hurts and I just want to sleep. May be giving control back over to Tewi soon I guess.

 

Yeah that's it, having some weird/interesting dreams but nothing special.