Tree Limbs, Stairs, & Dream Realm Dynamics

[dreamosis]

For about nine years I've been having lucid dreams in which I try to fly into sky, but I'm stopped by endless entangling tree branches. Or, if I'm in a city, I'm stopped by building that grow ever upward.

Recently I've begun having the opposite dream: I'm trying to get to the center of the Earth (or to the "UnderWorld") only to be stamping down endless flights of stairs.

I've had these dreams in times of stress and in times of great personal satisfaction. As the experiences are lucid, I've consciously investigated the phenomenon while still in the dream. For instance, I've slowed my ascent and watched the buildings or branches creep upwards along with me, or even appear out of thin air.

Every now and then I've been able to blast through the choking branches. I've done it simply by centering myself, calming, and then shooting myself upwards with a blast of certainty that I will break the barriers.

I've tended to think over the years that these dreams represent a personal block. However, that answer doesn't fit all the facts, nor has it felt intuitively right over time. The dreams aren't always associated with stress, nor am I particularly stressed or afraid when I confront the barriers. I've confronted them so many times (probably close to hundred times or so now) that my feelings are neutral.

The only reason I've held onto the "personal block" theory is that I've talked with so many other lucid dreamers who haven't had this experience.

Lately, I've noticed another pattern associated with these experiences, and have made a tangential, but perhaps important, connection with a similar dream experience.

The new pattern I've seen is that I seem to encounter the blocks whenever I'm leaving an still-unfolding dream behind. In other words, I'm in the middle of a dream, I become lucid, and decide to leave to dream in order to try to fly into outer space. Sometimes the dream I'm leaving behind is a stressful one, sometimes not. Maybe my subconscious prevents me from trying to leave the dream scene...

The connection I've made is with a lucid dream I had a few years back. I was in a futuristic city and decided to walk as far as I could, just observing, while staying lucid. After a few minutes I came to a wall (full of video screens). The wall ran to the left and right a long ways and I couldn't see another way around the wall. So I decided to go through the wall. I pushed my hands and body into the wall but I was magnetically repulsed backward. I tried several times to just walk through the wall (I'd done it many times in other dreams), but this time I couldn't make it work. I experimented for a while: bringing my hand up to the wall very slowly and I could begin to feel the magnetic repulsion from a few inches away. In the dream I decided that I was up against the natural barrier of a dream realm.

I've heard others talk and write about dreaming being organized into realms, that there are -- in some way -- discrete dream lands. There are, of course, all kinds of connecting "doors" between realms, and I'm guessing that if this theory is right, depending on the doors you take between realms, the transition looks and feels seamless.

But it may not be as simple as I'm describing, though. There's the question of personally-generated virtual realities versus collectively-creates ones, and hybrids, and the rules governing each may be different.

At any rate, I'm beginning to think that the experiences I'm having are similar to what it's like in a 3D videogame when the character comes to the edge of the programmed space and must turn around.

[lightningbug]

yes! someone who's been there and done that!

:D

when I first encountered the dream-walls, I thought they represented stress. Because I was going to school, and the walls prevented me from flying

but weird things started to happen. as if the walls were containing my dream entirely. as if no dream-stuff existed outside of the wall. I had hit a dream-barrier!

I would try to break through the walls, or fly hundreds of feet up over them, walk through them. what ever I could. my biggest frustration was that the new dream-scape behind the wall was still contained in a wall. though the new dream-scape was larger. the pattern repeats itself over and over

from a room, to a building, to a city, to the world contained in a glass dome

either way, for years I tried to IGNORE the walls, believing as others have told me, that they were only there because I was expecting them to be there. I'm not sure if that's true. I don't remember expecting to see the giant brick wall in the forest!! Or that the sky was a glass dome!!

But one dream challenged my view point of the dream walls.

I become lucid and flew out into suburbia. Now suburbia wasn't realistic. But abstract and weird. I flew up to the night colored wall containing suburbia. I started to shift through the wall to escape this dream-scape. But this wall was unlike any other wall I've shifted through!! It felt 8 feet thick!!

Once I pop out the other side, as expected the dream-scape was entirely different. But what was so refreshing, was how vivid and lucid it was. Weird and abstract. But vivid. I could feel the very pebbles beneath my feet. The rough stone as I slowly climbed the mountainside. I noticed that my body didn't feel like a dream body. It felt solid. It's dream wall felt so immensely thick. Just impenetrable. So instead I follow the river (which magically appeared) to a small cave. The cave transforms into some sort of train station. And I find it's glass wall.

At this point I hear a womans voice in my head "Turn right and take a boat". Well I had no where to go but a right. But now I am facing a large terminal in front of a glass wall. It was too dark to see outside the wall. I was conflicted, I could so easily just walk through the glass wall, but the voice told me to take a boat. So instead I stood in line for a four passenger boat. I was lucky number 5.

I go past the sliding door and now I can see what was veiled by the glass wall. A beautiful dark ocean with not a single artificial light to light it. Just the natural sky. This new dream environment past the glass wall was already more....real. There wasn't any boat to take, but a small jeep.

We all hop on the jeep, and transport into a night time rain forest. And nostalgia hits me! I know this place! It's puerto rico! As a lucid dreamer, I completely observe my environment, trying to spot what makes this a dream? But the truth is, I couldn't find anything unreal about it. Both the sounds of the rain forest as you drive past it, the singing coquis, and their voices falling in and out, the wheels against the road, the wind wooshing past us. To the people sitting in the vehicle, to my own body firmly planted in the vehicle. I was flabbergasted! There just wasn't anything about this scene that was fake!

I tried to ask one of the dream characters if I was in the astral. Since I don't remember any conscious projections to measure from. Do you know what he tells me? "I tried asking the bus driver the same thing, apparently, I'm just dreaming." His response goes way over my head until I wake up. Does he think I'm his dream character?

We realize were heading towards the other side of the island. But that'll take too long and I know I'm supposed to wake up soon! So I close my eyes and wisk myself there already. The beach is just beyond the hill. And I watch the sun rise over it. The actual ocean, was breathtaking. Usually in my dreams, those dream-walls screw up the ocean. There were no dream walls here. Only an endless expanse of blue. I dive in, and there's even fish in the water!

I begin to wake up, wondering if I just witnessed the sun rise over Puerto Rico

This dream was amazing for me on so many levels! The walls have taken on a new meaning. Directly relating to a state of consciousness. As every time I passed a wall, I became more and more aware. And the dream environment became less abstract, and more real. Until the point, I questioned the very nature of reality. I'm sure I have more mind barriers to go through :D

for one, I'm still unsure if I could call the last part an astral projection. at the hill top, I saw family members who at the time were awake. I also found out, the timing of the sun rising was slightly off according to Puerto Rico time.

but, if it was an astral projection, if at least a few of the dream characters were real conscious beings - this changes the dynamics as I understand! When I came to this forum, I was told you have to go back into your body from a lucid dream, to project out. That you can't just walk into the astral from a lucid dream.

But at no point did I go back to my body and project out. Instead, I crossed some sort of dream barrier :D

and the last wall I passed through, was a glass wall. as if it were nothing more but a veil. and...it wouldn't be the last time I pass through a glass wall, and wonder if I am still dreaming

[dreamosis]

One of my earliest encounters with the dream-barriers was in the sky. I fly up into the sky only to discover that the sky was an azure dome. However, I found a scaffolding and a man on it. He let me through a door in the sky. Beyond the sky-dome was a wonderfully realistic English garden. The garden was much more "real" than the dream sequence preceding it, from the slats of orange light across the grass to the different scents, and so on.

Sometimes if I succeed in breaking through the dream-barriers I wake up. For instance, I remember one dream set around a house in the mountains. I tried flying away from the house, but in whatever direction I went I was stopped by an invisible wall. And, as I got closer to the mountains they actually looked pixelated -- from a distance they were detailed, but close up they looked artificial. Finally, a tornado came into the valley and I decided to fly into the tornado and up through the funnel and into another dream. When I got to the top of the tornado, though, I found a fabric barrier with a zipper. I unzipped, pulled myself up into the blackness above it, and woke right up.

It makes intuitive sense to me that barrier-experiences lessen and perceptual clarity intensifies as you enter astral realms. In all of my uniquely astral experiences -- that is, times when I've consciously left my body -- the environments have had more cohesion than in dream-induced lucid dreams. And the environments feel more indepedent of me, whether that's true or not.

But changing dreams has made my lucid dreaming more and more intense. A year or so ago I experimented with Castaneda's so-called twin position technique in which you're supposed to lie down in a lucid dream in the same position that your sleeping body is in, close your eyes, and "wake up" into another dream. When I did it, my dream didn't actually change, but doing it definitely made my dream senses sharper (or my "lock," if you will, on the dream environment stronger).

I find it fascinating, lightningbug, that you've gotten around the barriers by following directions from a voice or taking a boat, etc. The boat experience, and the ocean that came after it, is classically like many people's UnderWorld journeys. I would say you were certainly in a shared reality.

Your description of the weird, abstract suburbia corresponds to many of my experiences, too. In fact, I've began to tentatively take my experiences with strangely arranged, large suburbs and cities as a confirmation that I've entered a layer of shared dream space. Whenever I'm in places like that, the responses I get from others are usually cogent and intelligent.