State of the Mind said:
I
I would like to know other peoples experiences with this and their thoughts on the subject.
I had this bad relationship with my father, who was short tempered and not good with children. This is around the time I was six. We had this room in our house that he spent a lot of time in, and it had this big plush chair with square angles to it. Over this chair was thrown a blanket with an image of a lion in tan and brown.
I had this dream where I was in the hallway next to the room and I needed to get to the front door, which was across the room. I had to go into the room to leave the place I did not want to be, but the reason I did not want to be in this place was because in that same room was this dangerous lion. It was unpredictable and terrifying, it was in many ways my father and the blanket on the chair combined in dream into a single horrific obstacle.
I had this dream many times over a year, maybe 30 times, and it was always so realistic. But I started to recognize it, while I was in it. I thought to myself "I have been here before, and it was in a dream, so I must be dreaming"
As I began to understand it was a dream the lion became less and less frightening, the idea of going outside through the room didn't scare me anymore. I knew that the lion was not real, that none of it was.
Then over time I would have the same dream in terms of how it started, but knowing that I was dreaming allowed me to explore the dream, to do what I wanted.
I learned to do things in my dream, not god like things but I could fly, fight, converse with dream figures who claimed to be dead people meant to teach me, travel in strange ways like instant travel, etc. I have had many adventures and travels, interactions and experiences in dream.
Lately my dreams have had songs in them, songs I have not heard outside of them, often with lyrics. I don't dream as much anymore, but when i do it is a combination of my dream self and a specific dream environment that i can interact with in an amazing way, but i do not choose the form it takes in any determined way.
I am not sure if what I experience can be considered lucid, but it is very interesting.
One of the odd things... i have been lost and unable to navigate many many times in dreams because i flew too high and too far and was not able to navigate by city(s) below. When i would go back down to the street level i found find myself in an unfamiliar area, like a neighborhood or industrial park and I often have to wake myself up to get back to my body.
Once I was in the Andes and flew down a canyon all the way to the sea and then up the coast and found a city made of light where everyone wore white clothing and most of the people were brown people. It had strange buildings and architecture and was built atop some stone cliffs overlooking the sea. The only way to get to it was to fly as I had done, you could not visit it or see it in a physical sense.
Once i went to this giant tree where there were hidden stairs inside the trunk and on the stairs was a thin waterfall on either side, it was always running. I did not fly to this location, I had an appointment. At the top of the stairs was a door, on the other side of the door was a waiting room, with a secretary! She confirmed that I was to consult the "doctor" but it was part of the dream that the doctor was like a spirit, but not a dead person or one that lived as we do, he was adjacent to but not part of our world, he was also like a seer or sorcerer or something like that. He presented to me a box, inside it were two swords, he then told me that I was going to have to choose one of them, it was clear that I could not choose both.
I sensed them and one of them looked very much like european sword, it was inside a black scabbard. The other one was naked and was a katana. The purpose of the appointment had to do with a real life friend I had who had become deeply involved in the occult and things had started getting strange. I have always had these strange experiences where I can feel people I know in odd ways, including if they are nearby. I had this feeling a few months back for example that my girlfriends ex was at the house and i told her he was here, a moment later he knocked on the door. This friend of mine who was involved in the occult could drive to my house in the middle of the night and I would know she arrived and wake up and go meet with her. Other things like this have happened for most of my life, and I can see auras if i want to but usually ignore them, oddly I've been able to show them to many people too and think that everyone sees them all the time.
Anyway I was considering getting involved in the occult, as in ritual magick, which I had been studying but not practicing for many years. In the dream with the doctor in the tree my appointment was about a path to follow, and the sword in the scabbard represented ritual magick and it gave me a very uncomfortable feeling. The katana was more like the warriors path, but not the same as that, it did not hide the edge, being a naked blade in the dream and it did not give an uncomfortable feeling. In the dream it was known that the swords were symbols and I was not meant to choose one there, rather that i had a choice in life, so to speak and that I needed to consider this in a different way. I knew that the sword in the black scabbard, the ritual magick path, was not for me.
I woke up and knew that my path would soon part from that of my occult involved friend, and it did through circumstance alone.
So much of the doctor in the tree dream was lucid and realistic, but it was not a lucid dream per say.
I have had multiple dreams where people I did not know appeared to me, sometimes took me places but often just stayed with me, and they taught me, they also identified themselves as dead people, in one case a person taught me who said he was named something a lot like Immanuel (that sounds close but is not the same, there are 2 glottal stops and a slightly different vowel sounds), but that we called him Noah. Sometimes it was not just one person but many. they all wore white clothing, often robe like, and they all had brown skin, including 'noah'
This was all while I was fairly young.
My wife had dreams where a black winged angel appears to her and teachers her, not wings with feathers... and 'he' does not flap them to fly. he appeared over and over across many years. He told her strange things, that she was like an angel too, that she had a throne and a position and that she would return to it at some point, but it wasn't like she was god or gods wife or anything like that. He told her about her and I, and our children, that she was meant to prepare me (for what?) and to be a mother to our children, who were special, that these things were part of her mission in life, but that there was more as well.
Dreams can be strange indeed.
