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one less body in its metaphysical baggage compartment. THE ONE BODY TECHNIQUE 1. Relax completely After awakening from a dream, lie on your back or right side with your eyes gently closed. Tighten and then relax your face and head, neck, back, arms, and legs. Completely let go of all muscular and mental tension, and breathe slowly and calmly. Enjoy the feeling of relaxation and affirm your intention to consciously enter the dream state; let go of all other thoughts, worries, and concerns. 2. Focus on your body Now focus your attention on your body. Use the 61-point re-laxation exercise (page 54) to pass your attention from one part of your body to the next, recurrently going through all points. As you do, notice how your body feels at each point along the way. Watch for signs of strange sensations, vibrations, and distortions of your body image. These are the harbingers of REM sleep paralysis. Eventually you will experience sensa-tions like those described above which will rapidly develop into complete paralysis of your body. At this stage you are ready to leave your paralyzed body behind, and to enter the dream world. 3. Leave your body and enter the dream As soon as you feel that your physical body is in a pro-found state of sleep paralysis, you are ready to go. Remember that the body image you are currently ex-periencing as a paralyzed physical body cannot move (in mental space) because sensory information is telling your brain that your physical body is motionless. When sen-sory input is cut off (when you go deeper into REM sleep), there will be no information (except memory) indicating that your body is still in the position it was before. Now you are free to feel movement of your body image or dream body without any contradiction from your sensory systems. Your body image can move without reference to the actual position of your physical body, as it does naturally in dreams. file:///H|/KaZaA%20Lite/My%20Shared%20Folder/((lucid)%20dream...0Stephen--Exploring%20The%20World%20Of%20Lucid%20Dreaming.htm Moreover, if you are experiencing sleep paralysis, you can be sure that inhibition of sensory input cannot be far off. Simply imagine that your body image can move again. Imagine you are somewhere other than sleeping in bed: anywhere else, in any other position or situation. Once you experience that your dream body is out of bed, you will no longer feel the sensations from the pa-ralysis of your physical body. Commentary The same caveats apply for the one body technique as for the twin bodies procedure: As soon as you step out of bed, you should recognize that you are dreaming. Remember that you are moving in your dream body and that everything around you is a dream thing too. Every-thing you see is your dream. (Adapted from Tholey28 and Rama. 29) One body or none? Of course, even the one body (image) we were left with in the last technique is the product of naive metaphysical realism. Your body image is your brain s model of your Physical body. Your body image acts as if it is your physical body while you re awake. This is because your body provides your brain with sensory information about its position and condition; from this sensory information your brain constructs a model of the current status and arrangement of your physical body. Finally, you experience your brain s model of your body (that is, the body image) as if it were your body. This all makes good sense if you are trying to keep track of what your physical body is up to: your brain needs to keep a carefully updated model that correctly represents how things stand with your physical body, so that you can act without tripping over your own feet. Let s consider a very different state of affairs REM sleep In this case, your physical body is providing virtually no useful sensory information about its condition to your brain. As a result, the brain cannot properly update the configuration of its body model to match that of the physical body. The brain in a sense, has lost the sleeping body. So the body image travels through dreamland blissfully unaware that if the brain were in sensory contact with the physical body, the dream body wouldn t be going anywhere! file:///H|/KaZaA%20Lite/My%20Shared%20Folder/((lucid)%20dream...0Stephen--Exploring%20The%20World%20Of%20Lucid%20Dreaming.htm Now, let s take a radical look at the brain s body model. If it isn t representing the position, activity, or condition of the physical body, why should it need to maintain a model of the appearance, functionality, topology, or form of the physical body? As Tholey puts it, The experiencing of one s own body in a dream is merely a phenomenon transferred from the waking state and is essentially expendable. 30 This allows us to throw overboard even more metaphysical baggage and re-ally travel light: we ve gone from the twin bodies technique to the one body technique; the last step is the no body technique. THE NO BODY TECHNIQUE 1. Relax completely After awaking from a dream, lie on your back or right side with your eyes gently closed. Tighten and then relax your face and head, neck, back, arms, and legs. Completely let go of all muscular and mental tension, and breathe slowly and calmly. Enjoy the feeling of relaxation [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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