The Practice of State Testing (Video Transcript)
10.19.2011
Hi, my name is Jeremy Crow and in this video I'm going to explain a little bit about how to do lucid dreaming more often. If you aren't aware of what a lucid dream is, it's basically being in a dream and knowing that you're in the dream and usually this allows you to have a greater level of control over your own actions and also the environment and other dream characters.
It's quite exhilarating and you can do all kinds of different spiritual practices with this or you can just use it for wish fulfillment. But in order to accomplish this state you have to be able to recognize when you're dreaming and when you're not. So what a good practice to do is to get into the habit of asking yourself, "Am I dreaming?" because I think most people have experienced a dream or maybe several where it was just so, so real that even after you woke up you were just dazzled by the reality of the dream; how everything just seemed exactly as real as everything around you while you're awake. And even if you haven't experienced something like that, most people still don't realize they're dreaming while they're in the dream until they've woken up from it.
So if you can get into the habit of asking yourself, "Am I dreaming?" and really trying to figure out if you actually are dreaming or not, the more likely you'll do that habitual behavior while dreaming. And hopefully if you're asking the questions sincerely enough every time hopefully you will recognize something that tells you, "Yes, this is a dream! Holy crap!" A lot of times people will immediately wake up, like instantly as soon as they realize that they're in the dream. Some people say it's because of excitement. Other people say it's because it's hard to believe that it's even possible to be conscious and dreaming at the same time. Whatever the reason, it used to happen to me as well, but there's a trick. If you start spinning around like a whirlwind or Tasmanian Devil from the cartoon or something like that, usually that will stabilize the dream environment.
As long as you keep doing it for a bit you'll start to feel the dream environment starting to stabilize. And as soon as you don't feel like you're going to wake up anymore you can stop and explore the dream environment. Now my theory is that it's just because you're increasing the amount of sensory input from the dream environment itself that you're accepting or trying to generate. So it does make it seem a bit more real or more real than the information coming from your physical sense organs.
Now how do you test genuinely to see whether you're dreaming or not? A lot of... the classic example is, "Pinch me!" You know? "I think I'm dreaming" or something like that. But sometimes in a dream you'll feel pain. Like, I've felt pain in my dreams before. There are some dreams for sure where I've experienced, you know, blunt trauma. I remember falling out of the sky one time and just landing on the ground but didn't feel a thing. But other times you feel really intense pain in a dream. So it's not a very consistent.
Dream Sign: Now, speaking of dream sign, that's usually the word that I use to describe something that... it's personal to you, that you encounter a lot in dreams. This is something that you can determine by examining your dream journal. But if you encounter some of your own personal dream signs, like for me I used to and sometimes still find myself in my old High School or I would see something really bright in the sky that was moving around, like a UFO or something like that. And these are things that I can notice.
Other people might encounter a relative who's passed on. A lot, you know, things like that but some of the really good tests that I've done that have been successful for me is if you try and put your hand through something solid. If you can, then you're probably dreaming. Another one you can try is (this is a really good one) if you try to read text in a dream or a digital clock.
Now these are things that are notoriously unstable in dreams for almost everybody, the vast majority of the time. There are definitely experiences that you can have where you've read something in a book or on a sign or things like that but usually if you read something, you look away, and then you look back at it again it's different... sometimes you can't even read it the first time. It's just not making any sense or the words are changing before your eyes.
Now if you've experienced dream testing or state testing within a dream, I mean you'll probably realize how easy it is for yourself to be fooled. It's so... dreams feel so real that even when you're questioning, "Am I in a dream?" A lot of times when you do encounter anomalous behavior you'll rationalize it in some way. Like if you look at your digital clock or on your wrist watch and it says ab12?*, okay? You're gonna be like, "Oh, maybe it's something wrong with it." or "Maybe the battery's running out or something. That's happened to me before where that exact example has happen to me and other people that I've talked to as well.
But once you've experienced it a few times and you've been tricked by it a few times you start to realize just how hard you have to look for it and how you have to be willing to accept that you may be dreaming at any given time. And you have to put yourself in that mindset every time you state test because if it becomes a habit, where you're not asking sincerely when it does happen in the dream, when you habitually end up doing it at some point within a dream you'll just conclude, "No. I'm not dreaming" and then move on. And you might not even remember the dream later. But these are all ways you can help train yourself to start having more lucid dreams than normal. I hope that helps and if you liked this video you can subscribe to my channel and that's it!
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