Before I give an example, let me say a word about dreaming, as taught too Carlos Castaneda, a UCLA anthropology professor who studied Yaqui shamanism through immersion.
There is something the Yaqui call the assemblage point, which moves extra-dimensional and controls human perception. In a waking state it is rigidly fixed to a single location, and all human beings have there assemblage point at the same location when awake. When you fall asleep it moves. If it is wavering then your dreams are vague and amorphous. If it is rigidly fixed then your dreams are so solid that it is hard to tell if you are dreaming, even if you are well aware that you could be dreaming. These kinds of dreams are amazing, and there is a set of practices to make your dreams more solid.
It begins by finding your hands in your dreams. Once you can do this it is a trigger to help you know that you are dreaming. The key is “darting glances”. If you stare at anything you get sucked in so to speak, and your assemblage point starts wavering. The Yaqui call this loosing your dreaming attention. So you dart your eyes around, glancing at different things. It is good to do it cyclically, repeatedly look at three different things, one being your hands, for example.
That’s it. If you can do that, you can solidify your dreams. Here is one I had. This one is awful, thought it was extremely accurate. I have very good ones too of course, but this one is the single most striking.
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On 9/4/2001, exactly seven days before 9/11, I had one of the most unusual and intense nightmares that I’ve ever had. I never have nightmares usually, but this was utterly gut wrenching. I woke up fives times in a row from this dream, utterly exhausted and soaked in sweat. I use to never fall back asleep easily, but this time I did, and I never fall back into the same dream, but this time I had the same exact dream six times in a row. Here is the dream:
I see one of the towers on its side. I don’t recognize it, or even know that it is a skyscraper, it seems like a long straight building with a roof just like the sides. Because it happened so repeatedly I can vividly remember the cross-hatched X’s on the superstructure that superimpose the grid of the windows, that were so distinctive and unique too the Twin Towers. It was made out of a material that radiated like B&W TV’s. The radiance hurt my head and made my stomach sick, like watching too much TV.
I am getting dragged at a constant rate up and down the length of this building, like the light on a Xerox machine. There is a point somewhere in the middle where I am suddenly filled with terror and overwhelming doom. Every inch further that I go feels like a mile between life and death. As I’m dragged in the other direction and pass this point I’m suddenly filled with relief, breathing a sigh of relief that everyone past this point is going to live.
Every time I woke up I shook my head to clear it and asked myself, what could this building possibly have to do with mass death? It’s just a stupid dream, clear your head, you’re exhausted and get some real rest. After the sixth time I realized that I just wasn’t going to get any rest, and forced myself to get up so that I wont go back into this dream.
I have dreams about the future all the time, but this was one of the most vivid.
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A month prior I had a dream about sitting in a demolished car with Conan O’Brian in which he was so despondent and depressed that he was almost catatonic. I was vigorously trying to cheer him up, I had gone through a spell of watching him every night in the month or two before, and so I was telling him about my favorite gags and bits of his. Each time I would think of a new bit I would slap him on the shoulder vigorously in an extremely animated fashion that would have been obnoxious in most contexts, but it was like I was slapping life into him. At the end of the dream he finally moved, slowly lifting his head. He still looked obliterated, but the fact that he was moving seemed like a tremendous improvement.
When he first came on the air after 9/11, he gave a 20 minute speech about how he just didn’t think this was going to work, it was too early. His voice was drained and emotionless, he didn’t sound like he was going to make it at all. I was aching for him, as I’m sure were most of his viewers. But when the first guest finally came on it was a woman that I really like from “This American Life” on NPR. She was able to tell her own story in a manner that was both very tasteful and yet hilarious, about her overwhelming helplessness as a comedian living in NY, who could do absolutely nothing to help, comedians were a useless commodity in the first few days. It spoke extremely precisely to Conan’s own dilemma in a manner that made him laugh at himself and in no time flat his voice had inflection again, he had suddenly snapped out of it. By the middle of the week he was doing his comedy routines with a manic intensity. If not for his first guest I could easily have seen him having an emotional breakdown and going off the air.
There is something the Yaqui call the assemblage point, which moves extra-dimensional and controls human perception. In a waking state it is rigidly fixed to a single location, and all human beings have there assemblage point at the same location when awake. When you fall asleep it moves. If it is wavering then your dreams are vague and amorphous. If it is rigidly fixed then your dreams are so solid that it is hard to tell if you are dreaming, even if you are well aware that you could be dreaming. These kinds of dreams are amazing, and there is a set of practices to make your dreams more solid.
It begins by finding your hands in your dreams. Once you can do this it is a trigger to help you know that you are dreaming. The key is “darting glances”. If you stare at anything you get sucked in so to speak, and your assemblage point starts wavering. The Yaqui call this loosing your dreaming attention. So you dart your eyes around, glancing at different things. It is good to do it cyclically, repeatedly look at three different things, one being your hands, for example.
That’s it. If you can do that, you can solidify your dreams. Here is one I had. This one is awful, thought it was extremely accurate. I have very good ones too of course, but this one is the single most striking.
============================================
On 9/4/2001, exactly seven days before 9/11, I had one of the most unusual and intense nightmares that I’ve ever had. I never have nightmares usually, but this was utterly gut wrenching. I woke up fives times in a row from this dream, utterly exhausted and soaked in sweat. I use to never fall back asleep easily, but this time I did, and I never fall back into the same dream, but this time I had the same exact dream six times in a row. Here is the dream:
I see one of the towers on its side. I don’t recognize it, or even know that it is a skyscraper, it seems like a long straight building with a roof just like the sides. Because it happened so repeatedly I can vividly remember the cross-hatched X’s on the superstructure that superimpose the grid of the windows, that were so distinctive and unique too the Twin Towers. It was made out of a material that radiated like B&W TV’s. The radiance hurt my head and made my stomach sick, like watching too much TV.
I am getting dragged at a constant rate up and down the length of this building, like the light on a Xerox machine. There is a point somewhere in the middle where I am suddenly filled with terror and overwhelming doom. Every inch further that I go feels like a mile between life and death. As I’m dragged in the other direction and pass this point I’m suddenly filled with relief, breathing a sigh of relief that everyone past this point is going to live.
Every time I woke up I shook my head to clear it and asked myself, what could this building possibly have to do with mass death? It’s just a stupid dream, clear your head, you’re exhausted and get some real rest. After the sixth time I realized that I just wasn’t going to get any rest, and forced myself to get up so that I wont go back into this dream.
I have dreams about the future all the time, but this was one of the most vivid.
==========================================
A month prior I had a dream about sitting in a demolished car with Conan O’Brian in which he was so despondent and depressed that he was almost catatonic. I was vigorously trying to cheer him up, I had gone through a spell of watching him every night in the month or two before, and so I was telling him about my favorite gags and bits of his. Each time I would think of a new bit I would slap him on the shoulder vigorously in an extremely animated fashion that would have been obnoxious in most contexts, but it was like I was slapping life into him. At the end of the dream he finally moved, slowly lifting his head. He still looked obliterated, but the fact that he was moving seemed like a tremendous improvement.
When he first came on the air after 9/11, he gave a 20 minute speech about how he just didn’t think this was going to work, it was too early. His voice was drained and emotionless, he didn’t sound like he was going to make it at all. I was aching for him, as I’m sure were most of his viewers. But when the first guest finally came on it was a woman that I really like from “This American Life” on NPR. She was able to tell her own story in a manner that was both very tasteful and yet hilarious, about her overwhelming helplessness as a comedian living in NY, who could do absolutely nothing to help, comedians were a useless commodity in the first few days. It spoke extremely precisely to Conan’s own dilemma in a manner that made him laugh at himself and in no time flat his voice had inflection again, he had suddenly snapped out of it. By the middle of the week he was doing his comedy routines with a manic intensity. If not for his first guest I could easily have seen him having an emotional breakdown and going off the air.
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