I figured I’ll write about how my beliefs, expectations and opinions have changed because of my lucid dreaming experiences.

When I was a little kid, I’ve had a very close relationship with the dream world, but I can’t say anything like “lucidity runs in my family.” I wish I could, lol. However, when I was a kid, I could restart a broken dream and continue where I left off, like if I woke up too soon in the morning. Also, I could make myself dream on a theme by thinking of a theme and visualizing/fantasizing about it before falling asleep. I used to love dreaming on the themes I’d pick while lying in bed when I was a kid. So this isn’t quite lucidity, but I think this kind of attitude toward dreaming predisposed me to lucid dreaming later in life.

However, when I was a kid I had not the slightest idea of the hidden potential of dreaming. I thought dreaming was just dreaming, and this is how naive I was. I didn’t look deeply at the implications of dreaming. I just enjoyed dreaming in a consumer fashion.

This brings me to my old beliefs. I used to think that dreams were very distinctly qualitatively different from waking. In my mind waking experience and dreaming experience were so distinct and recognizably different, that there was no way for me to confuse the two. And this went along nicely with my materialist hangover. If the world was material, so I thought, it made perfect sense that my waking experience was solid and clear and my dreams were wispy, ephemeral, evanescent, fluid, and strange. It made sense because material objects were supposedly absent in dreams, and so this explained lack of stability and solidity in dreams. I was never 100% sold on this view, but somehow I believed it 99% or so, even if I had an occasional doubt when prompted to think about it, which was at first rare. Ignorance is not bliss, lol.

At the same time I’ve never been 100% satisfied with materialism. Firstly, when I was a little kid I have always felt like I lived before. This feeling of living again, as opposed to for the first time, would never leave me until I grew up some. It was like “oh, so it’s this again” feeling. It’s like I knew what to expect because I’ve been a baby before numerous times or something like that. It’s hard to put the “oh, so it’s this again” feeling into words. And there were other problems with materialism, like that it didn’t jive with my experience of my own mind. I just couldn’t for the life of me reconcile my own mind with the idea of material existence.

So this has led to a situation when during my early 20’s I started heavily exploring spirituality. And it was during this time I’ve come upon “The Art of Dreaming” by Castaneda. It was a fascinating book, but really the book had two big takeaway points for me: a) sorcerers do everything by intent, and b) everything might be a dream.

The point a) came to dominate my life and contemplation later on, but point b) grabbed me immediately. I was thinking, “holy shit, so this all might be a dream!!! Why didn’t I think of that before???” I was both excited and angry with myself. I was excited to have this thought but also angry that I didn’t think of it myself and needed some stupid book to remind me. I always feel like that about great ideas, lol. I feel ashamed that I didn’t already know them on my own, how dare I not know them? Luckily or unluckily I didn’t get to feel like that too many times in life.

But still the notion that my waking life might be a dream was a very remote and very theoretical thought to my mind. At that time I hadn’t been lucid dreaming yet. I still thought that dreams are just wayyyyy too different to be comparable to waking. In my mind there was a huge gap between how dreams felt and how waking felt. I was excited by the idea, but doubtful.

So I taught myself to lucid dream. And then shit hit the fence in all sorts of ways. So many of my old assumptions got broken by my lucid dreaming experiences. The most important assumption that was broken pretty soon was the idea that dreams were qualitatively different from waking.

This blew my mind so hard that in many of my lucid dreams I’ve spent what felt like hours just wondering around the dream worlds and touching everything and looking, in utter shock. I’d touch the dirt in my dreams and feel how dirty and dusty it was. It was staggering just to feel dirt. I would spend long time looking at my own skin over and over. I just couldn’t believe it. I could see hair follicles, wrinkles, it looked so goddamn real, I was convinced there was not a iota of experiential difference between dream skin and waking skin. I’d look at the palms of my hands and see the usual lines and the fingerprint-like textures, and this was fascinating. Then I have spent huge amounts of time looking at shadows and light behavior in general. I’d notice how light refracted and how optically perfect everything was. I’d pick up a plastic container in my dream and just stare at it. I’d look at it from different angles. I was so stunned by how real it looked. I’d lift the plastic box up to look at it against the sun’s light in my dream, and I’d see tiny tiny rainbow-like glints where the light refracted off the box, it just looked flawless, with all the “physical” nuances I’d expect from a “real” box during waking.

And then I had this mind-blowing thought, “How in the hell do I know what physically perfect refraction of light looks like?” Obviously I did know, or didn’t I? Either way the implications were huge and world-shattering. If I knew it, I always knew it. So this would explain why during dreaming I’d be able to recognize flawed light behaviors if such were present. If I didn’t, I always didn’t. This means even during waking since I don’t know shit about what refraction should look like, a pile of turd or a stick or a pink elephant might look like light refraction to my mind during waking, since well, I wouldn’t know any better and couldn’t distinguish it reliably. Huge implications either way!

Then I also discovered that my idea of being unable to feel pain in dreams was wrong too. When I’d pinch myself, I’d feel pain.

And I also used to think that dreams were always magical, but then I’ve had a few dreams where I seemed to have no dream powers whatsoever, dreams which also looked “physically” perfect.

One by one all my assumptions about the differences between waking and dreaming were disappearing fast. My dream experiences since I’ve learned to become lucid were very eye opening. My dreams showed me that previously I had too narrow of a view about them.

But it didn’t stop there. As if this wasn’t enough, my mind was blown even further numerous times by experiences like false awakening and false insomnia. I think everyone has heard of false awakening, but false insomnia is seemingly rare. I don’t know anyone who talks about it besides myself. What’s also potentially interesting is that I only had one false awakening, but more than one false insomnia experience.

My one false awakening experience felt so real, it really blew my mind in a huge way and in a way I was terrified by this experience. I was very worried that I might never be able to wake up! This was also a huge, huge insight! Because of this fear I realized how attached I was to the experience of waking solidity! All this time I’ve been reading about “attachment, attachment” but it was all theoretical to me. But here it was practical! I could now see a practical implication of the attachment to conventional phenomenal reality and I could see why such attachment was bad, because I couldn’t relax and enjoy the false awakening experience for one, but rather, I was disturbed by it and wanted it to be over ASAP.

And false insomnias are the most mind-blowing things ever. Here’s what an episode of a false insomnia feels like. I go to bed and I can’t fall asleep. I am laying in bed, completely awake, thinking about my normal stuff from planet Earth, nothing weird at all. There is absolutely no change in consciousness. I don’t get tired or drowsy and I am even slightly irritated that I am not falling asleep at all. I am even thinking maybe I should get up and stop pretending to be trying to fall asleep. Then I realize, wait, my night stand is not where it should be?! What the fuckity fucking fuck??? Then I wake up!!! WHAT THE FUCK!!! So somehow I was sleeping??? I mean my insomnia was just a dream??? WTFF??? Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. What. The. Fuck. This has happened to me more than once. But weirdly for some reason I was never terrified by one of these experiences.

All my lucid dreaming experiences and especially false awakening and false insomnias have shown to me in no uncertain way that experientially there is zero, and I mean this 100% wholeheartedly, ZERO inherent difference between waking and dreaming. Dreams can sometimes seem different from waking, but apparently nothing keeps them that way at all. The contents of a dream experience can be as real as anything I think is real during waking experience. In fact, I have no way of distinguishing dreams and waking at all, other than like by faith. So like right now I have faith I am awake. That’s it. Outside of this faith I have nothing I can go by, not touch, not smell, not optics, not pain, nothing I can go by to distinguish this experience from dreaming.

I’m not telling you everything here, but this post is already long. I hope someone had as much fun reading as I had writing. Ciao for now.