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
