Hello everyone, Soon we will begin to explore the varieties of dreaming consciousness - those curious and strange phenomena that can occur during dreams. These include out-of-body experiences, dream telepathy and shared dreams. Such phenomena not only represent the range of possible experiences during lucid dreams, per se, but also the range of possible experiences in life itself. Exploring these experiences can help us understand and contextualize lucid dreaming. What experiences am I talking about? Here are some examples:

Hypnosis, meditation, yoga, martial arts, divination, breathwork, visualization, music & lights, dancing, psychedelic states, everyday synchronicities, telepathy, sensory deprivation, neurofeedback... and the list goes on.

Clearly there are more than enough to work with, and I'm guessing everyone has experienced one or more of these. How can we approach such experiences with respect to lucid dreaming? Perhaps it would help to simply compare them with LD along such dimensions as:

Subjective characteristics (e.g. quality of sensations, emotions); Sensory contraints (usually either yes/no); Scientific research (psychology, biochemistry).

How can we map these experiences in the greater context of consciousness? Which ones overlap with dream states/fields, and which inhabit separate dimensions? What can they teach us about the nature and potential of LD? Are there specific techniques (e.g. breathwork) that could be applied to LD induction and research? Any thoughts?

I just got back from the Mindstates conference in Berkeley, and the topic of lucid dreaming was frequently injected into talks and discussions. It seemed that people had a pretty good understanding of what it means...

http://mindstates.org