I have begun to notice that in the subtle world, in my dreams, whenever I am talking to someone, I've stopped bothering to move my lips and try to make sounds.  I just communicate by thought.  Has anyone else noticed anything similar?

The person with whom I am talking always seems to understand and conversely, I "hear" them quite clearly, even though often times they don't use their mouths to talk either. 

The few times I become consciously aware in my dreams I usually start jumping high.  I find it fun.  if I'm even MORE consious, I'll suspend in mid air, or fly around a bit.

Lately I've wondered: how far can I go?  How high can I go?  William Buhlman says I can go to outer space, to other planets.  He's been there.  I'm beginning to believe that, if I get more serious about this whole thing, I too might possibly travel very very far away...

Over the past 2 months I’ve been working on consistently practicing some of the exercises I’ve read about in some of the books referenced by this site. The goal, of course, is having a fully conscious out of body experience when I lay down at night.

Suddenly, over the course of these last 2 months, I’ve had 5 “dreams” where I become fully aware that I am dreaming and that I am flying -or- having become conscious, I decide that I would like to fly, and I somehow begin doing so.

I’ve noticed a pattern that includes awareness, flying, and then the “vibrational state” that several authors referenced on this site say is an immediate precursor to an out of body experience. They say that the “vibrational state” is our experience of the subtle body’s vibration rate becoming out of phase with the physical body’s vibration rate. The next step is total dissociation and a “stepping out” (or floating out) of the subtle body from the physical.

Daily life (work, kids, etc.) certainly presents many challenges to the practice, but having flown more in the past 2 months than I have in the past 10 years is very exciting and satisfying. Each time has been an exhilarating learning experience.

I have a love/hate relationship with coffee.  

During the times that I am drinking it, I feel like I'm going really fast and getting a lot done.  My mind jumps from thing to thing and I make a bit of progress on one thing before moving on to something else -it's rapid multitasking.

At the same time, my dream life is all over the place.  I can easily have 4, 5, or more different sequences that have no logical transition or connection between them.  I just jump from one scenario into something entirely different with no notice ore forewarning at all.  It can get so random and chaotic that I don't even bother trying to remember -much less document- the experiences, since they seem to be so much noise and nonsense.  Sometimes it can be fun, but it can be exhausting trying to keep up.

At the time of this writing, it has been almost 2 weeks since my last cup of coffee.  I've gotten through the headaches and the overwhelming desire to fall asleep at my desk. Things are starting to change.  

Today at work I had one of the calmest days in recent memory.  I stayed focused on (only) 3 things all day long and completed 2.5 of them.  The best part was that I didn't feel anything pulling my attention away from what I was doing with that powerful (yet false) sense of urgency that I've grown accustomed to.  

In the Subtle World -in my dreams- things are becoming more steady as well.  The dream sequences have become longer and I've had clearer and more relaxed vision and more cognition.  I've been able to focus and think about what I was doing and what I was saying to people.  With the increases sense of presence and awareness, recall of my experiences has been easier as well.

Overall I am experiencing a vast improvement in both my waking and sleeping lives.  A poised and steady mind makes a world of difference in the quality of life.  

Disclaimer: During this same time, I have also added approximately 30 minutes of extra meditation time per day, so I cannot claim that caffeine elimination in itself is the cause of all these benefits... but it doubtlessly is a contributing factor.

Through this site -through working out my ideas here and bouncing some of them off the other people here- I'm starting to come to the notion that I am always at work.  I am always working on something.  That something is not what it may appear to be to an outside observer.  It is not the work project I'm doing, nor the house chores, nor the fixing of my car or the writing of a computer program.  No, it may only appear that those are the things I'm working on.  The real thing that I am working on on is my consciousness -the the lens through which I perceive my life experiences.  

I am going through some pretty challenging times in my personal life at the moment, and every day affords me ample opportunity to face fears and frustrations and to decide whether to face them in the same old ways or in new ways.  I've surprised myself many times now... sometimes on the positive side (as in, "wow, that went much better than I ever expected!"), and sometimes on the not so positive (as in, "really??  I still behave like that??").  Either way, I'm learning and growing a lot right now.  Through it, the biggest and toughest lesson I'm learning is to welcome the process of learning and growing.  

In that last sentence, I stalled on the word "welcome" for quite some time.  I had initially written "love", but honestly, learning and growing is very uncomfortable, and who loves being uncomfortable all the time?  Yet, I know that the change I so desperately want for myself and my life is on the other side of that discomfort.  The only way to free myself from the self-created, tortuous prison of my core beliefs about myself and the world around me is to push myself through those fears and discover them to be what they've always been: lies. 

In our dream life, in the subtle world, our fears can and do manifest as the objects, people, and/or situations we find in there.  A few times I have squarely faced down personified fears in my dreams and awakened the next day with a vary real increased sense of vitality and strength that stayed with me for days after the experience.  In other words, those subtle world experiences changed the lense through which I perceive my life experiences -i.e., my consciousness.

We all work on our consciounesses 24/7.  There's no escaping it.  So why don't we try to make the most of it?  Smile!