Dreaming while fully Awake

[shoshoni]

This is my first post to this forum. I am in search of answers. I am a very rational person and I am a mentally stable person. But when I experience something that I have never experienced before, I want to find out answers. Let me clarify that I had not been drinking, taking any kind of drugs or medication when this event occurred.

Some years back, I was taking a trip with my family. The sun was getting low in the sky, so low in fact that my visor would not block it. So, since my husband was driving, I decided to shut my eyes and relax. The sunlight peaking in and out of the trees flashed on my eyelids. After a while the flashing faded and I began to see bright colors swirling around. I just sat there and enjoyed the light show. Then the colors went away and I was dreaming, yet I was still fully conscious. The place that I was in was a place I have never been to before. I was excited to explore this waking dream. But before I had a chance to, one of my children asked me for some help, so I opened my eyes and left the dream behind.

On the way back from this same trip, my husband was again driving and the sun was low in the sky. I shut my eyes and this time without the flashing lights or the swirling colors, I was right back in the waking dream, exactly where I left off. This really intrigued me, especially since it was so easy to get back there this time. I couldn't wait to explore, but again before I had a chance to I was interrupted. My husband wanted me to take over driving. I was happy to help out, because now I knew how easy it was to get back into this waking dream. I got a drink of water and some fresh air so I would be alert when I was driving. It took my husband about 10 minutes to find a place to pull over and I took over driving. While I was driving, I had a weird pulling sensation and a hole opened up in my vision. I knew that if I looked at it, I would be pulled back into the dream. I was terrified. I kept my eyes moving, but would not look at where I felt this pull. Up until then, it hadn't occurred to me that this waking dream could be dangerous. But now I could see the danger. If it could pull me into it without my will while I was fully conscious and my eyes were open, then I was putting my family's life and my own at risk. I never allowed myself to go back even though I was so curious about this phenomenon.

Does anybody know what it was that I experienced? Do you know of any information on the subject? Some one else that has experienced something similar? I would like to discuss this with someone who has an understanding of what this was all about.

Thanks

[MiBeloved]

I would be interested to get a few more details:

did the experience reoccur after that?

How many hours were you awake before the experience happened?

The last question is important, if you can recall if you were awake for sometime before that experience took place.

[shoshoni]

The only times this occurred were the two times mentioned above. I would not put myself in a situation where I would allow it to happen again. I was too afraid that if it happened so easily the second time and it was trying to pull me back in while I was driving, it could only lead to disaster if I ever allowed it to happen again.

In both instances I had had a full night sleep the night before and had been awake about 12 hours or so when it occurred. I had been awake all day and never fell asleep. The dream was very vivid and real feeling but I was not asleep. I knew I was sitting in the car with my family and could hear them there. The two incidences were about 4 days apart and on the same stretch of road, but probably about 60-100 mile apart.

Again I will state that I had my eyes shut but I never went to sleep.

[MiBeloved]

I surmised that it was the case that you were up for many hours.

Here is my take on this:

This happened because your subtle body needed to separate from your physical body. Your physical body needed rest.

A similar thing used to happen to truck drivers who did what was called the long haul. Nowadays there are Interstate regulations which prohibit truckers from driving for many hours and so it does not happen as often.

Let me explain something. The physical body when it is awake is actually composite of the physical body and the subtle body. This subtle body is sometimes called the astral body. After these bodies remained fused for some hours, they must separate. In other words, that is a law of nature. No human being or animal no matter how powerful that person is, can keep those two bodies together awake forever without sleep. Eventually the physical body will fall asleep and when it does, the physical system goes into repair mode, which we interpret as sleep or as dream and sleep or as astral projection, dream and sleep.

After being awake for some time if one does not take rest, then one begins to doze off. But if one does not doze off and sleep as nature requires, one may enter into an hallucination. This hallucination is usually interpreted to be just, mental nonsense but in fact it is actually vision of other realities.


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Here is what happens:

As the life force in the body takes actions to put the physical system to sleep, and as the person resists that sleeping tendency the subtle body begins to separate anyway and as it does, the person’s attention is shifted over to the subtle side, the psychic side. That person then begins to perceive the subtle or psychic existence and sees into a dimension which is subtle.

Note that the same process takes place if the person were to lie down and sleep, if the person decided to do so, but the difference would be that there would be no perception of the subtle world. The person’s mind would skip that experience, because of not resisting the dozing off tendency.

A fear of these experiences is not really a solid conclusion because if one were to enter into that hallucination, you would not remain there and you would return again to the physical system as soon as the life force which keeps it alive during sleep, requires your presence. In other words, you are already going through that experience every time you sleep and you come back into your body and wake up as the social you. The same thing would have happened; except for one small detail that if you were driving a car, then of course if you doze off the car would crash like happens to anyone who falls asleep at the wheel.

But the death of the body then would not be because you could not get back into the body. It would be because you were shifted into another existence by the life force in the body. It would be because when you dozed off, your physical body was no longer being controlled by your active mind.

There is no need to fear coming back from such experiences because you are having those experiences every time you sleep except that you do not recall the experiences. Astral projection and lucid dreaming really means conscious astral projection and conscious lucid dreaming with stress on the word conscious. We are having those experiences but we are not recalling them usually because our objective mind is usually out of touch when those experiences take place.

I would suggest that you take up meditation and that you experiment to bring back those experiences by doing this:

Just as when a person needs rest, and if they keep driving or whatever, they will doze off and have hallucination (which I said were actually real experiences of other dimensions), so a person can have astral experiences when taking a second rest or nap after a full rest.

Get a full rest, and then lay on your back with your eyes closed or covered with a dark cloth or in subdued lighting, and in a quiet place. If you are lucky your astral body will separate and you will experience astral projection consciously or you may have a lucid dream experience.

But by all means get rid of the idea that you will not come back, because that is the most natural thing that the life force is sure to do, just as it conducts our breathing without our help most of the time, and just as it causes us to wake up as our physical selves after resting on a daily basis for so many years. It is very reliable for this one thing. In fact we live only because of that reliance that we will wake up after sleeping. Everyone one of us has faith in that.

[Pando]

I just wanted to add that my father had the same experience around 2 years back. He was driving and it wasn't particularly too sunny. Somehow he started thinking of Krishna (a Hindu God) and he described that in the middle of him driving....the clouds parted ways. Shining through the clouds was a beam of strong sunlight that seemed to take over the whole environment and kind of blind him. He felt overcome by that light for quite some seconds to the point where he couldn't see where he was driving. It felt like a light that permeated his body...not just his vision...and he felt like he was...somewhere else. He realized that he was driving and snapped out of it...scared that it would cause him to have an accident. So yeah something similar.

[MiBeloved]

Krishna is for real even though many religious people misuse and misrepresent Krishna.

There were many cases of persons who had transcendental experience with Krishna.

There was a case of Sri Aurobindo, a yogi saint in India who was once taken to court, while there during the trial he said that he saw Krishna assume the identity of every person in the trial, the magistrate, the prosecuting attorney, Aurobindo himself and every one else.

[Pando]

MiBeloved: That's very interesting. Is Sri Aurobindo the same one who opened up Auroville in Southern India? So can we say that Krishna shared the same Subjective Reality as Steve does so in his blogs? That we are all projections of one consciousness? Is Krishna known just to be a name for that supreme consciousness or was he a real person who became very good at identifying with the supreme consciousness?

[MiBeloved]

Auroville was established by Sri Aurobindo as you mentioned.

In regards to Krishna and Aurobindo's vision, it is related to Krishna's Universal Form (Vishvarupa), which Krishna displayed to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. The story is told in the Bhagavad Gita which is part of the Mahabharata which is a history of Arjuna's brothers, who were known as the Pandavas.

Krishna and the Pandavas were historic personalities in dynastic ruling families in a warrior age in India but people claim that some of the stories told about them were myth. In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna declared himself as the Supreme Person and claimed that he was underscoring everything in existence, so when Arjuna asked to see how that was, Krishna showed a universal form.

This was seen in part by Aurobinda, according to his description of a supernatural experience he had.

[shoshoni]

mibeloved,

Thank-you for your in depth explanation. I wasn't even sure if I came to the right place to ask about this experience. You are right, I was feeling tired at the time, but I have driven when I was much more tired than this without such an experience.

My fear was never about not coming out of it, but that it could potentially pull me into the dream state when I was not prepared. Such as when I was driving, potentially putting myself and all those around me in harms way.

If reaching this state just a few times makes it easier to achieve the next time, then if I continued to allow myself to experience this, wouldn't I be putting myself at greater risk to slip into this state when I am not prepared?

[shoshoni]

Pando,

That sounds like quite an experience that your father had! It is lucky that he came out of it when he did and did not get into an accident! I am just curious, is your father Hindu? I imagine that if he saw a Hindu God, he would not have known who he was looking at if he were not Hindu or at least had a lot of knowledge of the religion.

[MiBeloved]

If you follow the suggestion to practice this state after being fully rested you will not have a problem. But if it happen while you are driving a car, then sure it is dangerous if not down right stupid to do it then.

After all the US Department of Transportation have put laws into effect to protect truck drivers and all potential victims who would be killed if a truck drove and drove with one cup of coffee after another or taking uppers, and then crashed because he fell asleep at the wheel, but of course on this side of existence we would have no idea what sort of astral experience the trucker was having before his body was smashed up.