Reddit mentions of The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness

This was discussed in detail in a really great book called "Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness." Recommended!

• Most people that have never heard of lucid dreaming, and are taught what it is, have a lucid dream that night.
  
  
• The best way to lucid dream is to become more conscious of your surroundings in real life. If you teach yourself to always be looking around you and wondering "am I dreaming? Is this a dream?" eventually you will start to ask those questions while dreaming, allowing you to notice you're dreaming.
  
  
• A big help are reality checks. When you're awake and you're wondering if you're dreaming, you can do a reality check. One good reality check is holding your nose and trying to breath in through it. If you're awake you'll be unable to breathe in, if you're asleep you'll still be able to breathe even though you've held your nose. As in the previous point though, you have to keep doing these reality checks in real life, until they're so imprinted into your routine (and subconscious) that you'll do them in a dream too.
  
  
• Are you dreaming right now? Possibly. But here's another reality check for you. Read this paragraph again, is it any different? In dreams you can't read the same piece of writing twice, it changes.
  
  
• Once you realise you're in a dream, don't stop and think. You'll wake up. Dreams are narratives that you follow through forward momentum. If the narrative stops, then you stop dreaming. One tip is when you realise you're dreaming, start running (or spin around really quickly) and this keeps the dream going. For reals.
  
  
• Lucid dreaming is different for different people. Personally I can't suddenly create a number of lesbians in front of me, because to do this I have to stop and concentrate, which breaks the narrative and makes me wake up. Instead I've learnt to use expectations to create something. For example, I may expect something to happen if I run around the corner. So I run around the corner and there it is. So I can't create lesbians, but I can expect them to be somewhere, and when I get there, they're already there. Hard to explain really.
  
  
• If you want more information on lucid dreaming, the best book to read is anything by Stephen LaBerge, who is considered a lucid dream expert. This one in particular is good: Exploring The World of Lucid Dreaming
  
  
• If you want a great, easy to read book about the different stages of human consciousness and cool things our mind can do, then I suggest reading The Head Trip which contains a huge chapter on lucid dreaming.

A very interesting book I read that talked exactly about this was "The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness" by Jeff Warren.


amazon link

I read about this in the book. You know that optical illusion with the hole on a grid which disappears when you line up the hole with the blind spot in your eye? Things like that happen all the time, and expectations are a part of the "fabric" of reality as you know it. The different during dreams is that expectations don't have sensory reality to keep it in check, so you end up shuffling through existing patterns of thought.

No, it's not that unusual. But it's not in the average, "HAY GUISE!" category. I do think it is weird, tho--imo, it's more fuck-with-your-mind than just a normal [crazy] dream.

And I don't know what reality-testing you're doing, but it sounds, to me, like you're doing it wrong? I mean, I can't imagine how I would ever be able to materialise a sandwich in front of me in my waking life. Unless you're saying you can't materialise sandwiches in your dreams because of this, I guess--I can see how that would be possible. What about reading written material, then looking away, then re-reading it? Does it stay consistent? That would be highly impressive to the point of nigh-unbelievable [to me personally] if you said you could do that in a dream.

Tbh, if you want to know more about it, you should read some books or even talk to people in /r/LucidDreaming; I'm not an expert. What I can say from my personal observations is that there do seem to be correlations between different personalities and the kinds of dreams people have.

The best example I can come up with off the top of my head that I didn't just make up: Researches have found memory & dreaming are somehow related. I've read it hypothesised that dreaming might be a mechanism which assists in memory storage. Also, psychopaths are known to both have poor memories as well as, for the most part, actually not experience dreams, or have very weak/pale ones. This is highly unusual, as you may already know, since even though many people can't remember their dreams this is not an indication of them not having dreams; everyone dreams, so it is said. However, psychopaths aren't considered to have the most normal personalities, anyway. (Iirc, these tidbits were cherry-picked from The Head Trip & The Psychopath Test.)

So anyway, as a lay person, I make wild personal speculations about how whatever it is that gives rise to personality also gives rise to types of dreams & dream experiences, but it's just for my own amusement & I haven't looked into it deeply enough to make some kind of insightful statement to you about this kind of "uncanny valley of waking consciousness" dream. But I guess usually that kind of thing seems to pop up when one's life is highly routine..? So perhaps trying something new & breaking out of your comfort zone could be in order?

I mean, if you like.

I have a book called the head trip which is not strictly about lucid dreaming. But it does have a chapter on it. It's very well cited so it will give you a lot of jumping points on other books to read. On top of that it just has a very interesting view point on various states of consciousness you go through during the day, While still having a rational approach.

I think you'd really enjoy this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Head-Trip-Adventures-Wheel-Consciousness/dp/1400064848

After reading the chapter on lucid dreaming I had a lucid dream that night. Now it only happens rarely but the book does give you some tricks that help make it happen more often. Way interesting stuff even if you don't lucid dream.

The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness - By Jeff Warren

At first is sounds like some kind of new-agey spiritual garbage. It's actually a science book about the human brain. I bought it in a clearance bin and LOVED it.

It's a non-fiction, soft science book. I say "soft science" because it's not concerned with presenting detailed figures, or numbers. It's a lot like "A Brief History of Time" in the way that it represents complicated scientific ideas in really understandable ways.

It's about the human brain, and the various "states" it can be in. Stuff like your normaal alert state. Stuff like REM state while sleeping. Stuff like hypnagogia when you're on the verge of falling asleep and start having weird disjointed thoughts.

Or that dreamy state when you naturally wake up in the middle of the night.

Or when you "zone out" after driving on the highway for 4 hours.

Or lucid dreaming.

Really, really interesting stuff. I think the title of the book caused people to misunderstand what it is so nobody bought it. It's really enlightening and interesting stuff.

But I feel like everyone is going to list the usual classics here and this will get buried. Ah well. If one person reads this book I'd be overjoyed.

Amazon Link