How To Lucid Dream: #5 (with minor setbacks)
Day 79: red ink, Forn parts and bad spelling
I got ahead of myself again for a moment. If you glance up at the subtitle you’ll notice that it says Day 79. I gleefully wrote it as Day 80 and was about to dive into a load of what would’ve been codswallop about how quickly it’d come around and who’d have thought I’d have managed to write 80 articles in 80 days. As it is, I was wrong and am now having to backtrack which has, I suspect, burst the bubble for what might’ve been tomorrow’s joyful announcement of the same. Ah well, never mind, eh?
Normality is slowly returning now we’re back from ‘Forn Parts’, as my younger daughter used to write it back in the day’s of free writing storytelling in school. I never quite got used to poor spelling and bad grammar although intellectually I figured it was a brilliant concept. My school days at that age were about neat handwriting, spelling and grammar corrections and the near daily enjoyment of deciphering what the angry red ink was doing all over my carefully written work.
Free writing, as I recall, was about being able to just write. To be creative without the constraint of having to stop every few seconds to check spelling or trying to remember the correct grammar. On top of all that, neat handwriting was the basic requirement so trying to be creative within to confines of multiple rules and a contorted hand desperately attempting to pull it all together makes actual creativity nigh on impossible. Perhaps I was a little jealous of what might’ve been.
Mind you, there’s always been a part of me that still wants to play the grammar nerd and whip out the mental red biro to strip away bad grammar, incorrect spelling and poor word choice.
I wonder if that’s why I’m enjoying writing these essays for you. (Are they essays or articles? Stories or chats?). It gives me freedom to just write. The restrictions I give myself for these are, as you know, a strict timescale, minimum word count and limited editing. It means I can’t overthink anything. Indeed oftentimes I can’t even just think. The words appear and I type. Sometimes creativity is even more creative when it has to work around an inconvenient starting point, like drawing an intricate swan around a crease in otherwise flawless paper.
Keeping in mind that you might well read this one day seems to build in a sense of flow. It really does seem as though I am just talking to you whilst I sit here on my lonesome in the garden trying to ignore the Guinea Fowl from next door who do their level best each day to mimic squeaky wheeled rusty barrows.
I manage my first decent meditation since returning from holiday two days ago. Up early, (for me, at least), and down the garden, freshly showered to sit quietly on the bench that has become a favoured spot for cross legged pondering.
After a good twenty minutes of attempting not to fall asleep, (that’s a guess as I wasn’t timing it and might’ve actually fallen asleep without realising…), I managed to jump into a Jhana meditation. I’ve come to the conclusion that Jhana is pronounced ‘Jana’ and not ‘J-Hana’ based on the fact that it comes from a Buddhist tradition, and hence is a Pali based word where ‘h’ isn’t aspirated as in ‘Bhudda’, rather than being of Hindu tradition and based on Sanskrit where ‘h’ is aspirated…, (and I have completely forgotten any word that I could use as an example - if one turns up, I’ll come back and drop it in. (Editor’s note: it didn’t and I couldn’t be arsed to go look for one either)).
a distinct sensation of being on that beach on a warm windswept day looking back towards the town and the hills behind, the rhythmic waves running up the sands behind me
By the time I found myself at a point where a lucid dream attempt might be on the cards, time had marched on a little as could be told by the fact that not only had my left foot gone to sleep as is usual, my left buttock was getting pretty damn achy and distracting like hell. A good test of meditative skill, methinks.
Nevertheless lucid dreaming was attempted and with some success although perhaps a step back from before. I was able to glimpse being where I was, sitting in the garden but with eyes open, (they weren’t), and looking around at the planets and flowers and insects, (I wasn’t). Memories of the previous attempts whilst on a Greek beach came back and I was able to flip things across to Barmouth beach and had a distinct sensation of being on that beach on a warm windswept day looking back towards the town and the hills behind, the rhythmic waves running up the sands behind me. There’s a big old church, the lifeboat station and the smaller church cum chapel cum performing arts type place where, rumour has it, Catherine Zeta-Jones first stepped on stage.
Again, these were fast, fleeting glimpses through the fog of a tired and distracted mind learning a new trick. But I’m convinced there is something there. It’s highly likely I’ll keep playing around with this, especially as it makes the next steps in the Jhana series a little easier.
Levels 1-4 are all body and body sensation based. You are very much ‘in your body’. These are known, I am lead to believe, as the ‘Material Jhanas’. The jump to steps 5-8 takes you out of your body and as such are called the ‘Immaterial Jhanas’, (usual caveats on pretentious sounding titles apply).
Any jump from inside your body to ‘imagining’ your ‘self’ being outside the body requires a little mental jiggery pokery and a mind that can lucid dream is well equipped to handle such matters. It’s less that I think the Immaterial Jhanas are a lucid dream and more that the capacity for lucid dreaming is good ‘training’ for the Immaterial Jhanas in the same way the the Jhanas themselves are supposedly a good training ground for ‘proper’ insight meditation.
Anyhoo. Time’s up and that’s all folks until tomorrow.
Given that today is the first day that these essay/articles get emailed out as soon as they’re published, it’ll be really interesting to find out what changes both in terms of view count, (well overinflated, probably) and engagement, (likes and comments - this is the one that matters I think). I’ll be very surprised if it doesn’t trigger a flurry of unsubscribes over the next few days too. Hopefully you won’t be one of those 🤞.
See you tomorrow?
Photo by Birger Strahl