Actively dreaming in non-literal reality?

I’ve been re-reading Dreamgates by Robert Moss and I’m finding it very interesting. All of this is related to my exploration the old Romantic notion of the imaginal realm, or non-literal reality. Non literal reality, as I’ve explained elsewhere, is basically the dreamworld, it’s the place we drift off to when we’re not paying attention, it’s the place we enter when we dream at night, and the place writers can draw upon in writing their prose or their poetry. There’s also a long standing mystical tradition that it’s also the place we drift off to when we die, that it’s the mythical underworld, or the afterlife. It is a place that appears to be entirely inside our heads, and is most often rationalised as something we simply make up. However, another explanation is that it’s actually a dimensionless realm we can view through the faculty of the mind, that it is a real place and that we can make our way in it, if we know how.

What I want to do here is describe a way of entering this subliminal realm, of entering a dream while being fully awake and simply observing the run of it. You can do it too, and make up your own mind regarding the validity of the so called non-literal realm. The technique I used was the very first exercise in Robert Moss’s book, which is only meant as a light hearted thing to get you warmed up for the later deeply shamanic stuff, but which none th eless yeilded a surprising experience.

If you close your eyes and cover them with your palms, shutting out as much light as you can, you start to see patterns: lights, colours, swirls. If you observe these thing in a detached though objective frame of mind, you’ll see how these phantom patterns seem blended with your now hidden reality. Stick with the experience for long enough and the chaotic patterns will begin to condense out or crystallise into shapes. They’ll take on detail and they’ll move. When I was a kid these visual phantoms confused me and I remember lying in bed in the small hours trying to catch them in my hands. What the hell were they? Where did they come from?

Well, obviously they come from inside your head but appear before your eyes, as if seen by another kind of eye in the same place as your physical eyes, but it’s a vision that is somehow subliminal. If you watch them for long enough the details condense out so much they fill your field of vision, and you then become a passive observer of a different kind of reality altogther, like watching a movie you haven’t seen before, a world that moves and flows of its own accord. But you’re wide awake! And you don’t need to be stoned or drunk or hypnotised to experience it. Anyone can do this. It’s just that most of us have forgotten how.

The pioneers of this territory are what we nowadays call Shamans, though in other cultures they may be called Witch doctors or medicine men. These are individuals both feared and revered by their own cultures for their ability to enter the twilight realm and use the knowledge they gain from it to alter reality, to apparently receive visions of the future and to heal. One of the tools of the Shamans’ trade is the drum. The shaman beats his drum, quite rapidly – about 200 beats a minute or 4.5 Hz if you want to be scientific about it. It’s not exactly a relaxing rhythm and listening to it feels more like running, but the theory is that if the brain’s own rhythms can be entrained to this same frequency it will enhance the “shamanic experience”, it will sever the link tying you firmly into literal reality and allow you venture more freely into the non-literal realm.

Brain waves in this region are known are theta waves and are associated with trance states, with hypnosis, and with the borderline hypnagogic (leading into sleep) and hypnopompic (leading away from sleep) phases of the sleep cycle. Theta waves are also associated with lucid dreaming – dreams where you’re asleep but also fully conscious and aware that you’re in a dream. Theta then is beyond relaxation. Theta induces a liminal state associated with high strangeness, half dream, half reality.

I didn’t use a drum for my own experiement, because my neighbours would think I’d gone nuts and I didn’t want an ASBO. What I used instead was an app on my iPod Touch that delivers something called a bin aural beat, in the shamanic region of 4.5 Hz. I suppose I could have listened to a drumming tape or something, but I didn’t have one and I didn’t want to fork out £7.99 for one either from a New Age Emporium.

So, you tune in to the beats and you close your eyes and let the visual patterns emerge of their own accord. You don’t try to influence them in any way, you take a purely passive role, just letting yourself go with whatever comes. The first thing that materialised before my eyes was a desert region with sandstone mountains set against a startling blue sky. There was a dust storm blowing up in the distance, and there was this character walking towards me, walking out of the storm –  a Victorian gentleman,  in a top hat and an overlarge coat. It was quite a detailed vision. He seemed to be on the verge of talking but I’d set a timer on the iPod app, which faded the beats out  at the crucial moment and delivered me back into ordinary reality.

This was an impressive opener. I’ve used a technique for actively guiding my imagination in the hypnogogic state, probably all my life, but this was different. This was letting go of the controls, and the experience was vivid, detailed, colourful. The difference between it and a dream was like the difference between a black and white movie and HD.

Encouraged, I gave it another try.This time I found myself surrounded by a lot of Alice in Wonderland imagery. There was Alice in her blue dress with black and white stripey socks, there were rabbits, and then my Victorian gent came through again, a sort of prototype Mad Hatter? I wrote all of this down because it was fascinating stuff and completely off the wall. I mean, for pity’s sake the Mad Hatter? where did he come from?

And the punchline? Well,… that night I was doing something else, surfing for information online when suddenly, and totally unrelated to my search, there popped up an image of the Mad Hatter. Coincidence? Maybe. Still spooky though!

As with all things on the edge of reason, we should keep an open mind, weigh the evidence, expose ourselves critically to the experience, but take care not to let our brains fall out.