Today I remembered a dream. It was the first time remembering in a couple weeks, and so it was a special thing. Not the dream itself, but remembering it was the special thing. And perhaps because it was special, I also remembered how I woke up.

Looking back on the days when I remember my dreams, I can see a pattern. It appears that if I wake up slowly (without an alarm clock), this seems to have an effect on my ability to remember my dreams. As in, I’ll just lay in bed quietly, sort of ‘adjusting’ to being awake without thinking about much of anything. This may seem like a small thing, but if I could do this every day I think I would remember a lot more dreams. 

Just laying in bed without immediately getting up and going about my morning routine gives my mind a chance to recall what I was doing in the Subtle World just before waking up. If I give my body tasks to perform, my mind seems to track along with those tasks and I’ll forget everything. Or, if right away I start thinking about the upcoming day and the list of things I need to accomplish, the same thing happens - no dream recall. 

So it looks like the ‘just laying in bed for a little while’ part is just as important as the ‘being awake without thinking about much of anything’ part. This got me thinking about how we wake up in the morning, and how much that matters. 

Have you ever owned a drugstore alarm clock? You know, the one that sounds like the raging screed of a very pissed off, meth-addled Godzilla going off every .5 seconds next to your head? Many of you may not be old enough to remember such things. Since the advent of cell phones and their various utilities such as built-in alarm clocks, many of us (mercifully) don’t recall such things. But if you do remember, you know what I’m talking about! I can remember actually flinching so hard I threw my back out a couple times. I even used to get anxious when I would hear any alarm clock sound that remotely resembled my own, like when I was watching TV. Short of being doused with a bucket of ice water and simultaneously having your leg hair removed with duct tape, it was the worst way to wake up, ever. 

The. Worst. And it was every day!

All this got me thinking about how we wake up, and how we should wake up. 

We all know that some of us are very deep sleepers, and some may require having an alarm sound that is loud, brash, so annoying that nothing could possibly sleep through it. To these folks I say this: I get it. It’s totally understandable, and if you need this to get out of bed and get to work on time, then use what works. If you are interested in more dream recall, I might suggest trying out different sounds to wake up to, maybe on a weekend when it doesn’t matter if you oversleep. Keep in mind that we need to be able to trust our alarm clocks to wake us up, otherwise the anxiety over whether or not we’ll be awake on time will cause us to actually lose sleep. So definitely experiment and test out new things over the course of a few nights - just make sure what you settle on will do the trick.

Anyway, please read on!

If you don’t have a cell phone, or don’t use one as an alarm clock, I would guess that you use a proper alarm clock purchased anywhere from a drugstore to Amazon. Try listening to the sound your alarm clock makes (when you are already fully awake) and take a few notes. What does the sound remind you of? How does the sound make you feel? What kinds of thoughts does it trigger in you? If the notes you take reflect predominantly negative feelings, perhaps you should look into changing the sound it makes if it has several to choose from. Or if it doesn’t make any sounds that you like, maybe it’s time for a new alarm clock.   

Note: The long-term effects of cell-phone proximity have not been studied. Nor have the effects of cell-phone proximity ever been studied in relation to human sleep cycles. This article does not explore these issues.

Lots of people use cell phones to wake up in the morning. It sits beside the bed and does its thing at the appointed time. Obviously the same questions apply as with the store-purchased alarm clock: What does the sound remind you of? How does the sound make you feel? What kinds of thoughts does it trigger in you? Again, take a moment for self-reflection and decide whether you should change the sound you use as an alarm. If your cell phone doesn’t have one you particularly like, maybe purchasing a new alarm clock with more pleasing sounds would be best, since getting a new cell phone is a major purchase for most people. 

I don’t consider myself to be a deep sleeper, and nor do I consider myself a light sleeper. But over the years I have found that it doesn’t take an ear-piercing racket to wake me up. In fact, quieter, soothing sounds can do the same job and it’s been great. 

I’d like to make one more point with regard to how we wake up. Here are a couple things that I take as facts because my experience has confirmed them (your experience may vary but I think these things are pretty universal):

• Dream recall is best when the body is in nearly the same state as when asleep
• Dream recall is best when the mind is in nearly the same state as when asleep
• If upon waking the mind is kept on the task of remembering dreams without being dispersed in several directions, then dream recall is better
• Alarm clocks that jar us awake with the use of annoying or otherwise displeasing sounds tend to hurt our chances of remembering our dreams (and really, it’s just not a great way to start the day)

With these points in mind, I would suggest that an alarm that begins as a soft sound (that you could just barely hear) and gets louder over time would be best. It should be a sound that you don’t feel unnerved or upset about when you hear it, and yet it should effectively wake you up. The reason I think this would be best is that our consciousnesses would then be slowly moved from the awareness we have in the Subtle World to the awareness of the physical. This in contrast to an unpleasant shock that disturbs the mind in such a way that it cannot hold onto the dream-like state and loses all memory of it.  

Once awake (snooze alarms will be covered in a later article - stay tuned!) one should avoid thinking about any minor concerns (grocery lists, getting the kids to soccer practice after work, etc.) for a little while. Maybe give it five minutes and just hang out in bed…and see what you can remember from your time in the Subtle Realm! 

I do not endorse any product or retailer, but below are a couple links for “gentle-awake” alarm clocks that I found after a quick internet search. If you find something that works for you, please don’t hesitate to post a comment and link to it. Tell us what kind of a difference it’s made in your life and in your ability to remember your dreams!

http://nymag.com/strategist/article/best-gentle-wake-alarm-clocks.html

https://www.amazon.com/slp/gentle-alarm-clocks/czmvzs9jowzb4p8

I JUST FINISHED READING AND WRITING A REVIEW of Jean Campbell's Group Dreaming - Dreams to the Tenth Power.

It occurs to me that if people were able to pursue and develop some capacity for group dreaming this could have effects that are global in their reach. For instance all of every single person's communications within his or her country are regulated by the limitations of their infrastructure. This infrastructure is under constant pressure by commercial interests to not only monetize and control every single aspect of the world wide web but it also leads to major commercial and politically motivated infringements on the rights and privacy of every single user.¹ On a larger scale communications between individuals in different countries are not only monitored but also controlled and in some cases outright prevented from occurring. This is not without push-back of course.² But in many cases governments -- in addition to their in some instances already considerable intelligence capabilites -- are also going after major browser providers such as Google³, or major social media such as Facebook⁴ and requesting data on private citizens. Motivations include not only prevention of interference in democratic processes by foreign interests (US and Russia for instance) and go so far as to prevent some technologies such as cell phones from being allowed into markets where backdoor keys in software present security risks that could make possible remote information collection -- essentially spying.⁵ 

Development of group dreaming if successfully developed presents a possible means of interaction between any two individuals -- no matter where they are located -- which can neither be prevented by any government nor infringed on by any commercial interest. This provides the basis for citizen-to-citizen exchanges that rely only upon the characters abilities and inner natures of those who are conversing and interacting.

This of course is an opinion based on an extreme long view as it would require the awareness self-cultivation and commitment of individuals to forge in themselves the clarity and strength of consciousness that makes such things as lucid dreaming possible. This turns out to be a lifetime pursuit and dependence on individual development of skills turns out to be a self-regulating and naturally limiting factor; this is understood by anyone familiar with the literature. But such human abilities hold the potential to minimize the physical and ideological constraints imposed by often irresponsible commercial enterprises and governments of all kinds. The greatest impact I see is a potentially enormous growth of consciousness, and of global awareness and engagement as the human family breaks down unnatural barriers and attains to a planet-wide solidarity.

--------------------------------------------------

References:

1 https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/actually-most-countries-are-increasingly-spying-on-their-citizens-the-un-says/276614/

2 https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/opinion/protecting-citizens-and-their-privacy.html

3 https://transparencyreport.google.com/government-removals/overview

4 https://transparency.facebook.com/government-data-requests

5 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0004cgm

OVER THE YEARS I HAVE HAD A NUMBER OF DREAMS of being with friends and acquaintances to whom I related the events afterwards in the waking state only to find they had experienced the same thing. This means they found themselves in the same dream environment I had, in which the circumstances were the same and in which events were commonly observed or experienced. I discovered we also often reported to each other the same buildings climate or objects. And they took place during the same night.

This of course raises many questions and potentially has many implications. How is such a shared experience possible? Is this just a variation of some anomalous shared awareness that occurs like a sort of empathy at a distance (telepathy -- or should we term it “telempathy”)? Is there an undiscovered aspect of our environment to which consciousnesses in the dream state have easy access and by which transmission and reception of impressions and mental constructs and meaning readily occur? In that case a mutually shared construct would constitute a sort of mutually generated and reinforced idea which we in dream state take for real even though it doesn’t reflect some physical reality. But this still relies on some means of exchange whose mechanism is thus far undetected in laboratory investigations. This is no simple question.

However a further step could suggest that environments may exist and events take place in them that are thus far inaccessible to the waking consciousness nor detectable through none but the crudest of measurements by detectors and instrumentation. In this case the human consciousness and nervous system may be the only instrumentation currently available to us. When I say the crudest of measurements by instrumentation I am suggesting that from the plethora of particles discovered throughout the development of modern physics there may be various combinations capable of binding together in coherent and stable ways which would in no way be detectable to either the waking senses of the person on the street nor to any of the arrays of detectors used in particle physics experimental beamlines.  Such condensed or concatenated matter is not what these systems have been designed to detect. Objects consisting of “clumps” of such matter may simply be undetectable at least at this time. We certainly have a strong argument for this emerging in modern physics in the concepts and theories about dark matter.

This suggests the possibility that mutually observed objects in shared dreams may have an existence independent of the dreamers. They may have existed before a shared dream occurred, and could therefore continue to exist after the experiences of the dreams. The condensation of non-concatenated particles such as in the formation of ice crystals from gaseous water to create snow or in the condensation and crystallization of chemicals of minerals in a hot gaseous state into solids such as rock crystals are two familiar examples. Currently there is no theory to suggest this may not also occur in dark matter.

Other questions arise. How stable are those objects? How durable or resistant to change under the influence of external forces and effects would such objects be? And in a realm where altered consciousness (e.g. the dream state) functions how susceptible might such substance be to the influence of human thought and consciousness itself? Would human consciousness be capable of affecting such matter in a free or gaseous state so as to gather and fix it into stable objects observable in dreams?

It may be possible to extend experiments in lucid dreaming to include an investigation into the properties of matter. What might we discover?

Something interesting happened to me this morning.

I dreamt of meeting up with an old friend that I haven't seen for over 5 years. We were very coridal in the dream, saying things like, "Wow, when was the last time we saw each other?" And recalling the get together at his house 5 years prior. 

That was the last dream I had before waking. When I went to check my phone, I found that I had been added to a group chat with this individual.

So, after 5 years of not having heard from this person, then suddenly a dream and then a real-life connection. 

Can it be just a coincidence? If not, then how is something like this explained?

I would really like to know.