Entering Dreams
One thing I want to try with this blog is to move away from established jargon, which is full of acronyms and terms that are inaccessible to people from outside of lucid dreaming communities. Many are, frankly, unnecessary. So let's see where that leads.
One of the most common term in the lucid dreaming communities is “WILD”, which stands for “Wake-Induced Lucid Dream”. The term implies that you start awake and from there enter a dream. So far so good, but – it occurs to me that this framing can lead to a particular assumption, which is that you are still awake while doing it.
And that is not what usually happens.
I remember one occasion where it felt like I went from being awake to dreaming within 30 seconds. While still awake, I heard a friend moving in the other bed next to me, then turned around myself, immediately fell asleep, and started a lucid dream.
One occasion. Possibly the only time in 19 years that I got the impression of entering a lucid dream directly from a waking state.
But was I awake? I could just as well already have been asleep; the sound of my friend could have been part of a dream, or it could have been an actual sound that just happened to get integrated into my dream. The bed I lay in – was it real?
When I enter a dream, I generally don't do it from a waking state. I enter from a state of in-between, where I am already mostly asleep – or even technically asleep from the perspective of a sleep scientist looking at a graph. I just happen to not experience a proper dream yet. What's missing is really only the experience of a body being in a place that is not a bed.
Over the last few years, I gradually moved towards the framing of “having two bodies”: One that lies still in bed and one that's moving around in a dream. While being in-between, I often feel both at the same time; the trick is to do something with my dream body that forces my mind to focus on it and forget about the (now irrelevant) sleeping body sensations.
I'm always suspicious of the in-between states afterwards. How do I know that the sleeping body I feel is not already a simulated body in a dream? Occasionally I have evidence for this to be true, as I feel myself sleeping in a way that is inconsistent with the physical reality, such as being in the wrong bed, the wrong room, a presence or lack of another person in my vicinity.
Additionally, the most common occasion for me to use this technique is when I had already been in a dream and am in the process of waking up.
It occurs to me that it might be better to just drop the framing of “wake-induced” altogether, and simply talk about entering dreams. Then you could even practice it while dreaming – just lie down anywhere, close your eyes and wait for another dream to appear. It's a useful skill to change places which I have occasionally needed when I got stuck in a particular boring dream.
I'm not sure if practising while dreaming actually translates to the same skill – but it might be worth a try. It certainly helps to have a good first-hand experience of the ways that dream scenes start and end, particularly when they do it slowly. (You can't exactly do much if a loud BANG wakes you up instantly. It sucks.)
So there we go, that's ED, if you want an acronym.^^
Note:
The lucid dreaming pioneer Paul Tholey (1937-1998) used the term Körpertechnik or body-technique of entering dreams. He distinguishes between two-body-technique and one-body-technique; whether one leaves behind the body and moves into the dream in a different body (two-body) or makes the sleeping body movable again (one-body). From his description, I'm not quite sure where I fall; I assumed to be closer to two-body-technique, but most often my second body starts in an identical place as the sleeping one, so it could also be framed as “one-body-technique”. Tholey derides the idea of a second body as unnecessary remnant of esoteric beliefs. To me, this distinction doesn't seem to matter, unless you want to turn around in the dream and study a fake sleeping body, which I don't see much point to.
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