kiwibonga
27th February 2007, 08:01 PM
Howdy...
I've been working on something for a few weeks now... Well, it's more of an idea at this point since I haven't started recording anything yet... I've been playing around with the idea but never got around to it... I figured writing about it would probably motivate me :p
One of the big problems with projection is that we lose consciousness if we go too deep while trying to induce it. A good way to go into trance is to forget about your surroundings, visualize a scene, let yourself drift into it and end up in a lucid dream. Once you're anchored firmly, you kind of "snap back" and find yourself in sleep paralysis, ready to project.
The brain is really awesome... You create a story, even if it's just with words, and images automatically follow. As long as you keep time consistent with reality and slowly let your imagination become a world of its own, you are guaranteed to have an unusual experience. But it's extremely difficult to remain focused on the visualization that leads up to the lucid dream.
In order to keep going with the visualization, you need to make use of conscious thought. But conscious thought keeps reminding you that you are in your body, trying to have an experience, it breaks the trance, causes your physical senses to come to the foreground. You stay on the lookout for anything that might happen. The fear of falling asleep instead of remaining conscious sets in and you completely lose the ability to drift into dream world.
For this reason, I've been contemplating the idea of making a guided meditation tape, with no binaurals.
One thing that seems to have triggered Monroe's experiences is the frequent use of "sleep learning" tapes, where you listen to a tape while asleep and see if you managed to learn the content in the morning. These tapes are monotonous and have natural pauses in between each sentence. The sound will keep you half awake for hours, but it won't be something that is unpleasant to the ear, or causes your survival instincts to kick in like a loud noise would. What happens is a part of you "remains on the lookout" and processes the noise while your physical body is asleep.
A few people have come forward recently (on Astral Pulse and Astral Society forums) mentioning how hypnosis tapes have caused them to have lucid dreams or OBEs. One of them was using a hypnosis tape to quit smoking when the OBE happened, imagine that!
This phenomenon, where a "non-threatening" sound causes you to remain half awake in the sleep state, is something that I have observed when I used alarms to try and trigger projections in the past year. At first, each alarm would wake me up violently, and I would get more dream memories, better control, but nothing really major -- no full-fledged OBEs, anyway. Later on, I became "immune" to the alarms, I had no memory of them ringing once I woke up in the morning.
It's when I started writing down my dreams at each sound of the alarm that I realized something. I actually heard every single alarm. The thing is, there is a part of me that says "it's just the stupid alarm, go back to sleep!" What I lacked was willpower. Once you fall asleep, you forget what you wanted to do. Your body just wants to stay idle, and you follow it. Too often, we fail to project not because we lose consciousness, but because we lose the intention ; we forget that we wanted to project in the first place.
So what I want to make is a sound track where there are "non-threatening" sounds and suggestions, something that will wake your mind up but not your body.
Here's a basic layout of how it's gonna sound:
0:00 - Full body relaxation ; the voice makes you visualize yourself on a very comfortable bed, with numerous hands massaging every part of your body, toes, calves, shins, knees, thighs, hips, arms, hands, shoulders, neck, face, one by one.
3:00 - Breathing exercises. From this point on, sounds of crashing waves are played in the background to help follow a breathing pattern. It will go something like this:
Breathe in...
... And release ...
... Now hold ...
... And breathe in ...
And so on... After a few breaths, the voice will ask that you open your eyes briefly in between the in and out breaths -- this is a trick to relax your face and make your eyelids heavy.
For the next few minutes, the breathing pattern will slow down, until breathing in takes about 5 seconds, breathing out 3 seconds, and the breath is held for about 3 as well. I was thinking of making the breathing even slower, but I don't think everyone would be able to keep up (myself included!).
8:00 - Again, the voice will do a full body relaxation routine, from the toes to the head. Waves are still in the background to follow the breathing pattern.
10:00 - "I will now count to 10 and you will progressively dwelve deeper and deeper towards sleep. Let yourself drift into unconsciousness."
There will be a count from 1 to 10, with 7 second pauses in between each number. As the count increases, the volume of the voice will decrease.
12:00 - "Sweet dreams!"
Of course, the person probably won't feel asleep. Hopefully they'll be in a light state of trance, but that is not really a concern.
Now I have several ideas for what to do next... I might do different tapes.
#1 is for dream recall.
It will have a rythmic background sound... Probably the waves with a very low volume... Every 15 minutes, the voice will ask that you become conscious, wake up, and write down something.
It will be something like:
(Very low volume) "Get ready to wake up."
(Low volume) "Get ready to wake up."
(Low volume) "I will now wake you up."
(Normal volume) "Please wake up. You are now awake and alert. Awake and alert. Pick up your pen and write the word "..." (word will change each time). If you experienced anything while you were asleep, please write it down as well. Go back to sleep when you're done. I will call you again for the next retrieval."
#2 is for "spontaneous" OBE induction.
It will be almost identical to the dreaming one, except that you will not be required to wake up. Instead, there will be suggestions.
(Very low volume) "Get ready to become conscious."
(Low volume) "Get ready to become conscious."
(Low volume) "Hello? It's me, hi! I just wanted to let you know that you are asleep right now. This is your cue to become conscious in your sleep. Do not move or get up. Simply perceive what is around you. You are now free to exit your body." (etc...)
#3 is for conscious OBE induction through WILD (very similar to phasing)
This will make use of visualization scenarios. It will ask the listener to picture things happening and "become" the scenario, to forget about everything around him and really believe that he is in the story, basically phasing out of reality and into dream world.
Each scenario ends with an opening so that you can continue the visualization without voice assistance. An alarm will ring after 10 or 15 minutes to wake you up, allowing you to recall the experience before it's forgotten.
The trick with these tapes is to learn to fall asleep while you are listening... There's really not much more to it...
I've been working on something for a few weeks now... Well, it's more of an idea at this point since I haven't started recording anything yet... I've been playing around with the idea but never got around to it... I figured writing about it would probably motivate me :p
One of the big problems with projection is that we lose consciousness if we go too deep while trying to induce it. A good way to go into trance is to forget about your surroundings, visualize a scene, let yourself drift into it and end up in a lucid dream. Once you're anchored firmly, you kind of "snap back" and find yourself in sleep paralysis, ready to project.
The brain is really awesome... You create a story, even if it's just with words, and images automatically follow. As long as you keep time consistent with reality and slowly let your imagination become a world of its own, you are guaranteed to have an unusual experience. But it's extremely difficult to remain focused on the visualization that leads up to the lucid dream.
In order to keep going with the visualization, you need to make use of conscious thought. But conscious thought keeps reminding you that you are in your body, trying to have an experience, it breaks the trance, causes your physical senses to come to the foreground. You stay on the lookout for anything that might happen. The fear of falling asleep instead of remaining conscious sets in and you completely lose the ability to drift into dream world.
For this reason, I've been contemplating the idea of making a guided meditation tape, with no binaurals.
One thing that seems to have triggered Monroe's experiences is the frequent use of "sleep learning" tapes, where you listen to a tape while asleep and see if you managed to learn the content in the morning. These tapes are monotonous and have natural pauses in between each sentence. The sound will keep you half awake for hours, but it won't be something that is unpleasant to the ear, or causes your survival instincts to kick in like a loud noise would. What happens is a part of you "remains on the lookout" and processes the noise while your physical body is asleep.
A few people have come forward recently (on Astral Pulse and Astral Society forums) mentioning how hypnosis tapes have caused them to have lucid dreams or OBEs. One of them was using a hypnosis tape to quit smoking when the OBE happened, imagine that!
This phenomenon, where a "non-threatening" sound causes you to remain half awake in the sleep state, is something that I have observed when I used alarms to try and trigger projections in the past year. At first, each alarm would wake me up violently, and I would get more dream memories, better control, but nothing really major -- no full-fledged OBEs, anyway. Later on, I became "immune" to the alarms, I had no memory of them ringing once I woke up in the morning.
It's when I started writing down my dreams at each sound of the alarm that I realized something. I actually heard every single alarm. The thing is, there is a part of me that says "it's just the stupid alarm, go back to sleep!" What I lacked was willpower. Once you fall asleep, you forget what you wanted to do. Your body just wants to stay idle, and you follow it. Too often, we fail to project not because we lose consciousness, but because we lose the intention ; we forget that we wanted to project in the first place.
So what I want to make is a sound track where there are "non-threatening" sounds and suggestions, something that will wake your mind up but not your body.
Here's a basic layout of how it's gonna sound:
0:00 - Full body relaxation ; the voice makes you visualize yourself on a very comfortable bed, with numerous hands massaging every part of your body, toes, calves, shins, knees, thighs, hips, arms, hands, shoulders, neck, face, one by one.
3:00 - Breathing exercises. From this point on, sounds of crashing waves are played in the background to help follow a breathing pattern. It will go something like this:
Breathe in...
... And release ...
... Now hold ...
... And breathe in ...
And so on... After a few breaths, the voice will ask that you open your eyes briefly in between the in and out breaths -- this is a trick to relax your face and make your eyelids heavy.
For the next few minutes, the breathing pattern will slow down, until breathing in takes about 5 seconds, breathing out 3 seconds, and the breath is held for about 3 as well. I was thinking of making the breathing even slower, but I don't think everyone would be able to keep up (myself included!).
8:00 - Again, the voice will do a full body relaxation routine, from the toes to the head. Waves are still in the background to follow the breathing pattern.
10:00 - "I will now count to 10 and you will progressively dwelve deeper and deeper towards sleep. Let yourself drift into unconsciousness."
There will be a count from 1 to 10, with 7 second pauses in between each number. As the count increases, the volume of the voice will decrease.
12:00 - "Sweet dreams!"
Of course, the person probably won't feel asleep. Hopefully they'll be in a light state of trance, but that is not really a concern.
Now I have several ideas for what to do next... I might do different tapes.
#1 is for dream recall.
It will have a rythmic background sound... Probably the waves with a very low volume... Every 15 minutes, the voice will ask that you become conscious, wake up, and write down something.
It will be something like:
(Very low volume) "Get ready to wake up."
(Low volume) "Get ready to wake up."
(Low volume) "I will now wake you up."
(Normal volume) "Please wake up. You are now awake and alert. Awake and alert. Pick up your pen and write the word "..." (word will change each time). If you experienced anything while you were asleep, please write it down as well. Go back to sleep when you're done. I will call you again for the next retrieval."
#2 is for "spontaneous" OBE induction.
It will be almost identical to the dreaming one, except that you will not be required to wake up. Instead, there will be suggestions.
(Very low volume) "Get ready to become conscious."
(Low volume) "Get ready to become conscious."
(Low volume) "Hello? It's me, hi! I just wanted to let you know that you are asleep right now. This is your cue to become conscious in your sleep. Do not move or get up. Simply perceive what is around you. You are now free to exit your body." (etc...)
#3 is for conscious OBE induction through WILD (very similar to phasing)
This will make use of visualization scenarios. It will ask the listener to picture things happening and "become" the scenario, to forget about everything around him and really believe that he is in the story, basically phasing out of reality and into dream world.
Each scenario ends with an opening so that you can continue the visualization without voice assistance. An alarm will ring after 10 or 15 minutes to wake you up, allowing you to recall the experience before it's forgotten.
The trick with these tapes is to learn to fall asleep while you are listening... There's really not much more to it...