A Taste of Everything

Consciousness Exploration Journal
6/12/2013

I woke up at 5:15am to meditate. I was in and out of various hypnogogic blips the whole time. I was struggling too much to maintain my awareness, so I took off the headphones and just let myself drift off. I repeated, "now I am out of body" as I fell asleep. At some point later, I suddenly became fully aware. I had the impression that "I" had just asked the question, "who am I." The answer that I was getting back was something like, "you are everything." I briefly found myself engulfed in what I might describe as white fuzz - it was a feeling of being a very powerful and active energy. The feeling was amazing and exhilarating, but at the same time, overwhelming. After only experiencing this briefly, I heard a yell as if somebody was falling off a cliff. The voice sounded like my own - and one that I have heard during sleep paralysis. The experience quickly ended after that. I am trying not to make any assumptions about the experience - I can only say that it felt very, very good. It seems likely that "I" was frightened by the sensation of loosing my identity (the yelling voice). Hard to say. I tried to settle into the experience again, but eventually drifted back to sleep. 

Naturespace Audio and a Lucid Dream

I have been using custom binaural beats as part of my daily meditation routine for around a year now. I was looking around the web for some nature sounds to add to my binaural beat tracks and came across naturespace.com. They have some really amazing 3-D audio. They also provide a free iPhone and iPad app that allows you to listen to seamless loops of the various tracks. The app comes with some great free audio experiences, but you can also purchase others for around $1 or $2 each. The few that I have purchased have been well worth a few dollars. I highly recommend checking out their website with a good set of headphones.

So, yesterday morning my dog woke up needing to go outside. Many of my more interesting and profound experiences have occurred in the early morning hours after waking up and then returning to bed. When I returned to bed yesterday morning, I decided to listen to "Riverwind Dreaming", which is one of the tracks that comes with the Naturespace iPod app. I listened for a bit and slowly drifted off to sleep. I have had a large number of lucid dreams, but this was the first time that the dream actually began while I was already lucid. I was fully aware as the dream scape materialized around me. I found myself standing in front of a friend. He was really wanting to talk about sports. I was hoping to take full advantage of my lucidity so I informed him that I would prefer to talk about our existence. He smiled and gave me a, "Yea, that figures" sort of look. We shook hands and moved on our separate ways. The dream continued for some time. I interacted a bit with a person that I knew from high school, but otherwise it was a pretty standard lucid dream. The key part of course is that I was lucid and aware as the dream began. It was a very interesting process.

Though I do not think that the Naturespace audio was the direct cause of the lucid dream, it certainly played a role. The 3-D nature of the audio has a high potential to help one shift focus from this reality to another. I look forward to adding some of the Naturespace audio to my binaural beat tracks for meditation.

The Jerk

I was meditating today. I started to get some small vibrations (similar to those I have experience with nighttime out-of-body experiences). I tried every method I knew of to "exit" my body, but nothing was working. I got the impression that I was not ready to exit this way yet. A little frustrated but also trying to be a little funny, I expressed something like, "I promise to stay calm and keep any fears at bay. So just yank me out already."

A few minutes later, I was on the verge of "clicking out" and starting to get those random dream like thoughts and images. Suddenly my left arm shot straight up in the air and dropped like dead weight right back to where it was to begin with. Now I can't say for sure if it was my actual arm, but all of the sensations (including the noise) were real. It felt exactly like somebody jerked my arm up and then dropped it. It startled me pretty good.

"Point taken" was my reply.

We are no doubt our own biggest obstacles.