A few days after posting the UFO radio encounter tale, I wondered if I’d already posted all my most unusual experiences here. It occurred to me that there might others that I couldn’t think of and that later they would come to mind. Sure enough, after reading a post on out-of-body experiences by Marcus Anthony on his fascinating blog, an exotic dream experience came to mind. So here it is.
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It seems there’s a fine line between OBEs (the sense of leaving your body) and lucid dreaming (the feeling of being completely awake in a dream). I guess my few experiences have been the latter, since I don’t have any recollection of lifting out of my body and flying off. Instead, I’m wide awake, but aware that I’m dreaming, and I’m fully in control of my faculties.
However, the experience is so thrilling that within seconds I zip right back into bed. Yet, even though the experience was brief, I feel very elated for days. However, I do recall one longer experience. I found myself wide awake in the desert with a group of people who were involved here with a famous person. We were sitting in a circle. It was night and we were around a fire. Either my awareness was just tuning into the part of me involved in this adventure that had been going on for some time, or I had suddenly appeared in this group. I’m thinking the latter might be the case. So I was somewhat of an intruder. It was a group that was working with Carlos Castaneda in the dream state.
For some reason, I questioned something Castaneda said. It seemed to me there was no room for independent thinking. He took it as a criticism and immediately confronted me and rudely kicked me out of the group. I still recall his scornfully comment as he banished me: “You are stuck in eleventh dimension kindergarten.”
With that, I woke up in my bed and was confused about why I was at home and not in the desert any more. It took a few moments before I realized that I had been dreaming. I had read all of Castaneda’s books at that point, and couldn’t recall him saying much, if anything, about dreaming. He usually just walked with his mentor don Juan, or one of the other brujos, into an alternate reality. So I found it interesting that in my lucid dream he was dealing with dreaming.
Several weeks later, I was attending the American Booksellers Association (now called Book Expo) where publishers display books that will be published in coming months. I was walking down an aisle in the huge auditorium when I stopped in my tracks. Directly in front of me was a poster for an upcoming Castaneda book. It was called: Being in Dreaming. Of course for me, that was a startling synchronicity.
Up to that point, I’d had a pretty positive image of Castaneda and thought of him as a very unusual person, and a sympathetic character. Much latter, after his death, I learned that the way he acted toward me was typical behavior on his part. In other words, you were with him all the way, or you were out. He could act very much like the ‘little tyrants’ he made fun of in his early books.
My experience wasn’t real in the normal sense, but it was an alternate reality.
I began the post by wondering if I was out of stories. But even now, as I wrote this post, another related experience came to mind. That is, my encounters over a couple of years with one of Castaneda’s exiled brujas, who has written a couple of books on her own experiences. So later on, I might delve into the strange story of the inimitable Merilyn Tunneshende.
Rob
Butternut (love the name 🙂 ), what jumps out at me is that first you say you have 'Mommy chores' so you disregard your dreams… and then that you dreamt of prostrating yourself to a chosen child. Maybe the prosaic waking chores and the spiritually intense dream are not so separate?
I've just received Stephen Aizenstat's Dream Tending in the post, where he talks about interacting with dream images as living beings. Can't wait to get stuck in.
Wow, butternut. Remember this dream! Maybe this connects somehow with that dream you had during one of your very early trips to Nepal.
Excellent Dream!
I find that I have really intense dreams that I have to completely disregard come morning because I have so many Mommy chores to do. I spent last night with the Dalia Lama. His successor was revealed to me and I found myself in a full prostration to the chosen child with my peers greatly amused, as if I had missed something very important.
WV: hipides
Hey Guys. Great story, Rob! I've had lucid dream encounters with discarnate entities that I've known were reality in some dimension and were not actually dreams, yet my physical body apparently was inert. Love that eleventh-dimension kindergarten! That must be some wild place! More, please!
Funny story, Sig. Sounds like a nightmare.
Gate elevendy-seven? That cracks me up as back in 1989, I worked for the Clerk of the Ga. House of Reps. and was tasked with reading the proposed local legislation on the rostrum each morning. After one particular night of some lobbyist funded revelry, I wasn't entirely myself the next morning. When I came to a bill sponsored by the honorable gentleman from the twenty-second district, I found myself linguistically unable to cope – it came out as "the secondy-second district", I repeated it at least three times, "the secondy-second, the secondy second?" I knew it wasn't quite right somehow but couldn't get past it – all this being wintnessd by the full House, and the audio being monitored in all administrative offices under the gold dome. People were practically rolling on the floor laughing but I can assure you the Clerk of the House was not amused. Needless to say, I was not asked back the following year, for some unknown reason – Politics – go figure.
Thank God I have not had occasion to revisit that moment in a dream.
Great dream/book synchronicity. I have had a few lucid dreams, where there is no doubt part of me is wide awake and experiencing whatever is going on. They are not the norm, however.
Can't wait to hear more about Merilyn Tunneshende.
What a great story / dream.
I've had a few instances of being 'awake' in a dream. I can remember saying to myself, in one case, that there was no need to worry as it was just a dream.
I've never been able to have these dreams to order though – they just happen sometimes.
Anyone who experiences lucid dreams every night deserves a doctorate in dreaming from the 11th dimension School of Dream Immersion.
I think the degrees are available at Gate Elevendy-seven.
😉
Your story brings back memories of when I was a bit younger and very into the Castaneda books. We did a lot of "research" with mescalin, self-guided tours into other realities. And now so many years later, lucid dreams come every night and I have such a difficult time awaking each morning – I am saddened each morning to leave my dream existence and start another day in the "real world". So many people say they do not dream – I never know what to make of this. I tell them "Oh, you dream, you just don't remember…" How can they not remember? Are some of us experiencing a separate reality in our dreams while others actually do not? I may be stuck in 3rd dimension kindergarten – but I sense I am beyond that. Carlos was never anyone to judge, one way or the other. Perhaps we all can only be journeymen shaman while tied to flesh & bone. Or, is lucid dreaming proof of an advanced degree in consciousness?
oh, geeezzee – well, just an example of how our mind reads reality in its own way!!! to me, it was such an appropriate remark for you to have made to someone throwing you out for having a differing opinion – and we can only hope for first grade with castaneda, i guess! terrific dream, though –
wv=broth??? 😉
Gypsy, no, he made the scornful comment to me. I'm the one in 11th dimension kindergarten. But maybe I've graduated to first grade by now. LOL.
great story, rob! i can just see you there with the others round the campfire in the desert night – and then when castaneda has you leave, as you walk away, turning your head toward him with your haughty comment of 11th dimension kindergarten! loved it – anyway – very neat story – and isn't it wonderful how one "something" can be the trigger for our memory recalling such moments that otherwise are stored in shadows at the time – one can't help but wonder of personalities such as castaneda's and how they "really" are, as you experienced and later learned – and to follow up your dream reality with the expo poster, fantastic – so there you have it, wondering and finding – can't wait for the saga of tunneshende!