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Comment by dana321 | Hacker News Reader

I've had my own dreams while awake, the key is to stay aware while you are going to sleep..

Everyone knows the state between sleeping and awake, its great.

But to go to sleep while still conscious, is like advanced meditation. I've had similar experiences during meditation.

The world around you merges into a dream-like state, but it all seems to feel more real than the world we usually experience while awake.

Dreams are more of a direct experience than reality, the feelings and emotions are always much more powerful for me than real life.

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Great book by Jennifer Dumpert about how to do this! She coins the technique "Liminal Dreaming" http://liminaldreaming.com

If you need that dream state while being awake, low dosages of mescaline will take you to that place. San Pedro cactus & peyote is the easiest to get as the stuff grows everywhere.

I make my own dried San Pedro powder to consume now. It's great. Two to six tea spoons of this stuff will give you more than 10 hours of dream state. Be sure to fast from the day before. Go out in nature if you can, it's great!

In my "personal mystique" i have a hypothesis where the mind is really the stuff that our universe are made of. As in the universe is the product of something imagined, and giving we have the same medium that can navigate and permeate the universe we can become one with it, because in reality we are not apart from it, we just believe it and dont even try to advance into this reality where we can navigate the universe with our mind.

Im kind of shy to say this out loud here on HN with such a distinct crowd of people who really study those subjects, but given is more of a personal believe, i guess i can be forgiven if it sounds stupid or even a uninformed point of view.

Its the sparks between the neurons, its the quantum-connected microtubules.. I get you.

One often mentioned trick is to look for stuff to read if you think you are in a dream - street signs and other text tend not to make a lot of sense (the brain falls behind GPT2 in that regard).

That's not exactly like this, this and other "tricks" are described in great details in Stephen LaBerge's books on Lucid Dreaming

What part did I miss out on for this particular technique?

You're likely thinking of dream induced lucid dreaming, in which you've trained yourself to run routine reality tests such as looking at text carefully, and if the test fails, you are triggered into greater lucidity from within the dream.

OP was talking about falling asleep in such a way that you never lose waking awareness, you just watch as your sense of the world as it was is replaced by a dream world, and then you can explore the dream world as you like. Also known as Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming.

>and then you can explore the dream world as you like.

Not sure I understand the difference, you can as w ell start exploring from inside the dream. At least this is how it happened to me, without any prior plan I would realize I'm dreaming and start experimenting. That's kinda funny because I thought everyone is doing it, until much later when I started sharing this experience :D

A bit late but still, the thing about reading in a dream is if you briefly look/read something your brain will makeup the meaning, simulating reality. But if you look at each individual character you will only see some primitive lines and circles because the language is a complicated thing and the part of the brain related to it is off during sleep.

In other words you will see something like this |\-oo\-- and your mind will say "ok this means train station is this way". The key to this and all other tricks is attention, just think how many times a day you pay attention to exact shape and font of letters? Usually it's not much :)

Yeah, its the meaning.. Words express the meaning but the words or symbols aren't the meaning. I've thought about this a while ago, but you reminded me about it.. thanks!

If there is no text around, just look at your fingers.

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