I am currently reading “Hacking the Out of Body Experience”, by Robert Peterson. Robert has been a lucid dreamer and out-of-body experiencer for over 3 decades. I plan to write a review for it in our reviews section once done, but I just finished reading something I couldn’t wait to share. It’s some insight into the importance of dream journaling that I’ve never heard anywhere else before. He writes:

“The dreams themselves are unimportant. What is important is that when you write them down, it reinforces a neural pathway in your brain related to “paying attention” to what happens while you sleep.

If you wake up and immediately forget your dreams, you’re basically telling your subconscious, “What happens over there (on the other side of the sleep barrier) isn’t important; flush it down the toilet,” and that trivializes and minimizes your potential OBEs.

When you write down your dreams, you’re telling your subconscious, “What happens over there is important to me,” and that implies dreams, lucid dreams, shared dreams, and out-of-body experiences. You need to reinforce that brain circuit that pays attention to what happens on the other side of sleep”

It is all too easy to wake up in the morning, or in the middle of the night, and tell yourself that you’ll do it later. But this attitude emanates a lack of care and of importance on the matter. As stated by this author and several other authors I’ve read, passion is of primary importance in this endeavor. No one will never succeed with a halfway attitude. The desire –nay, expectation– of leaving your body fully conscious at night, must thrill you and be on your mind continually throughout your day if you are to have any success.

To me, this little nugget is both insightful and motivating.

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This piece of writing makes my heart glow and my mind soar. Oh, the possibilities! Oh, how wonderful it would be to be so free from my daily troubles, worries, obsessions that nothing could bind me to this form, these thoughts, this name. All that would remain would be soaring through space with a heart full of love and joy. Enjoy!

IN THE LAND OF DREAMS

Each night, as my Spirit roams
In spheres of slumber vast,
I become a hermit and renounce
My title, body-form, possessions, creeds-
Breaking the self-erected prison walls
Of flesh and earthly limitations
I am an all-pervading Son of God,
No longer caged in brittle, dingy clod,
Nor tied by tangible cords of birth,
Or man-made smallness, social standing
And duty-shadows of earth.

There in sleep land's ether eternal,
I have no country, no homeland dear;
Nor am I Hindu nor Christian seer;
Nor Occidental nor Oriental,
Race-bound behind the bars of inheritance.
In Dreamland s limitless acres,
My Spirit revels in freedom-
Its only religion freedom-
Gypsying gaily there,
Pilfering, joy from everywhere.
There, no lording god o'er shadows me,
For there is none but Myself to rule myself.
Behold, the slave-god hath become the God!
The sleeping mortal, the awakened, deathless Lord!

An unseen, unheard God am I,
Drinking, breathing gladness;
Gliding in winged glory
Through the endless land!
Free from harming fears
Or possible crash and shattered skull.
No solids there to give me hurt,
No liquids to drown me deep;
No vile, dank vapors to choke me,
No fire my unseen form to burn.

Free from e'en the memory
Of a fragile body-dream,
O'er all space am I spread.
All things am I!
How, then, could aught
Dare injure me?
The heart of the big Myself
Would break
If it should strike
The little myself.
Unknown to others, but known to Myself,
I wake and walk and dream,
Eat and drink ang glide to Joy.
I Myself am the Joy which I so sought-

And I am that Joy which everyone seeks.
So little, ah, so little was I
When I dreamt in my sleepy-wakefulness.
Boundless big am I when I am awake
In my sleepless-wakefulness!

I just finished reading this article on the New York Times’ website: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/opinion/cancer-treatment-dreams.html (sorry, it’s behind a pay wall).

In summary, this young woman is highly distraught over finding out she had metastatic breast cancer. Because she was so young (36), the doctors had a hard time recommending chemo and radiation treatments to her, because of the known, long-term, harmful side-effects they generally incur on a patient. They told her that, if it were their decision to make, they would be “50/50”, which is a nice way of saying, “I don’t know”.

In this piece, the author presents 3 dreams she had over the course of her cancer episode that led her along down her course of treatment:

1. A dream of two helicopters crash landing on a freeway, directly in front of her. This dream convinced her that she aught to have a mammogram done to check whether a lump she had found 9 months earlier was cancer or not (doctors at the time had said it was a benign cyst).
2. In another dream, she was carrying 2 jugs with which to put out a fire in her apartment, but only 1 of those jugs had water in it, which happened to be enough to put out the fire. This dream convinced her to have a single mastectomy instead of a double mastectomy, because “one was enough”.
3. The last dream was one of all darkness except for the voice of an American man who simply said, “You must continue with radiation.” When a decision was needed to “boost” the strength of the radiation therapy to kill some potential metastasized cancer that came up on a scan, this dream convinced her to move ahead with that course of action.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of all this. Certainly, the conclusions drawn about dreams 1 and 2 may be her waking mind eagerly looking for meaning where there might not be any. I mean, she was emotional, desperate, and looking for answers. She could have read more into them than was there. Maybe she already had a gut feeling of what she should do, and these dreams gave her a sense of justification to move forward with that course of action. Maybe they were generated by her heightened state of anxiety. But, on the other hand, I have had situations where I was desperate to find the right course of action, and similar allegorical scenes in my dreams seemed to provide answers. Is there something deep down in our consciousness that responds to a deep and sincere plea for help?

The third dream leaves much less room for subjective interpretation. Where did that voice come from? From within? Or from without? The extra radiation did kill the cancer, but it left her with heart failure that she will need to treat for the rest of her life. What was the motive of the owner of that voice? Did this result in more good than harm?

I only have questions. I’ll keep working on my dreams in the meantime.

Please leave comments below.

I really didn't know what I was missing out on. Also, I'm glad I finally did it!

I got a new bed. It's a memory foam mattress and it is changing my (dream) life. No joke. 

I suffered with a bed that was too firm for 3 years! Part of the reason I persisted in keeping it, despite the tossing and turning and waking up 1-2 times a night to change positions, is that I had spent quite a bit of money on it in the first place; also, I always held out hope that it would eventually "break in" and be more comfortable. Oh, what a mistake that was! 

The worst part about having an uncomfortable bed is that I had a hard time settling into a state that promoted dreaming. Over the last 3 years, I really did not dream too much or remember them. I think the awareness of my physical discomfort while asleep kept my consciousness tied too closely to the physical.

With my new Novaform memory foam mattress, I feel like I'm floating on a cloud! I rarely -if ever- wake up in the middle of the night to get more comfortable. I usually sleep all the way through the night! And the best part: I have SO many more dreams now. It's as if I can forget my body more easily now and be more present in the dream state. The last couple of nights I've had more self-awareness and self-possession in my dreams than I have had in a very long time. I feel like my dream life is back!

Do you find yourself waking up in the middle of the night to roll over or turn on your side? Maybe it's time to try out one of these wonderful memory foam mattresses :)