Tag Archives: out of body

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On Dreams and Architecture

Appian Way

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ‘Appian Way’, frontispiece for ‘La antichità romane’ (1756).

As I lay awake, I began to feel
that my body’s image from my body
had detached. It’s not entirely pleasant,
this sensation, yet tends to descend
only if I’ve slept too deep for too long
which, these days, is a sure-fire guarantee
I’m not affected by it too often.
This morning when it came – or, namely, when
the mind’s own notion of its body
had stronger than the body grown in strength,
with eyes shut I made an experiment:
moving the mental body a quarter-turn.
When this I’d done, it felt so fully real
(as if I’d made the movement actually)
another virtual quarter-turn I took,
so in my mind my head was resting now
where physically should have been my feet.
Set neurophysiology aside!
Always, in this state, imagination rules.
For of the brain, we have no direct sense;
but, of the mind, it is experience!
Far be it from my intent to argue
that ‘the soul’ departs to disport abroad;
or even that a portion of the brain
(the part, perhaps, that bears within itself
a picture of the body’s pose and motion)
has o’erstepped its mark at times like these,
assuming prominence more than usual.
All I know is this: that having turned about
in the bed an imaginary body,
I opened now imaginary eyes
and found a room not unlike that recalled
from childhood, where my younger sister slept
when we both were kids – excepting its size:
the ceiling high, the walls widely parted,
which – for a child’s room – gave a curious feel
of uncluttered and more than ample space.
A remembered room, so, remembered too,
its bigness perhaps by my childish eyes.
I knew full well that I was in a dream
and stared about in wonder, to discern
what light I saw by. I knew with eyes shut
in reality I lay. And yet I saw.
What kind of seeing is this, lit somehow
by lightless impressions from inside?
Of objects there are none within to see,
nor of reflected rays to see them by.
It is my habit now when in this state
to make a thorough survey of what’s sensed,
inspecting how this seeming-seeing fools
us with a semblance of solid things.
Under applied attention it unweaves.
Look for colour and you will find none; look
for touch, there’s none there either to be found;
nor taste, nor sound, nor smell; yet it presents
as something having each and all of these,
but in the nature of the thought of them,
rather than external things revealed.
In the mysterious night-world of sleep
seeming is semblance enough for being;
light’s mere concept is enough to see by;
memory’s furniture fills the void;
and body is surplus to requirement.
Needed only are body’s sensations
to make a sense of separateness between
impressions from one side or another.
Is mind a place? Milton’s Satan thought so
and built of it a Hell in Heaven’s despite.
But had he looked at what he took for mind,
and paused before assuming it as his,
he might have glimpsed the gaps between the weave
and grasped the awesome truth: that even here,
in our deepest, most interior recess,
we’re no more with ourselves than anywhere,
for self is God’s only, spending, spending,
promiscuously always and forever.

Interior of the Patheon.

Piranesi, ‘Interior of the Patheon’.

Architecture is human habitat,
but in imagination comes to speak
of what is given and of what surrounds.
Buildings in a dream perform no function,
need no plans nor labour of erection,
so, freed from all material constraint,
they can assume forms close to an ideal.
The cities of my dreams throng with structures
cleaving to imaginary purposes.
Gasometers or giant cisterns haunt
the skylines of these imagined townscapes.
Beneath a columned dome last night I walked,
with distant birdsong in autumnal light,
between funeral monuments interspersed
with landscaped gardens, waterfalls, fountains –
yet it was the quality of that light
which seized my heart tightest by its beauty:
golden radiance, seeming to collect
in the porcelain summit of the dome
then raining down, like diagonal mist,
onto the shining tombs and epitaphs.
I stared until light became thought only,
growing in beauty as it grew unreal.

Ruins of a sepulchre on the Appian Way

Piranesi, ‘Ruins of a sepulchre on the Appian Way’ (1764).

Thoughts by their nature arise un-unique.
To re-think is to think exactly again.
In dreams, place partakes of this nature.
On having woken, often there’s a sense
we visited nowhere new but returned
to an instance of a former idea.
‘The same place, but a different guise’ is
common in dreams, impossible awake.

There is a vast clock tower, its timepiece
long-broken, or sounding spasmodically.
With weeds the rusted face is overgrown.
Underfoot, debris crunches as we climb
mouldering concrete stairs to its apex.
The dim, dank air is musty with a scent
familiar, of old, abandoned spaces
that dates back somehow to the seventies:
a place in the old house, under the stairs,
where my parents hung coats and stored the shoes,
so much in use and never decorated.
Why the tower should smell like this inside
I cannot fathom, yet each time I dream
of it,in one of a myriad forms,
this odour is a constant that betrays
something hinting at commonality –
but what it might be lurks in mystery.

Ancient altar, with other ruins

Piranesi, ‘Ancient altar, with other ruins’.

There is one other place I’ve visited
so many times, I cannot hope to count.
So often and so many times, perhaps
of all the dreams I’ve dreamt this is the one
my mind tends towards above all others.
A dual place it is, of two clear parts:
linked cemeteries, one old, one new.
The newer one is bright and clean and fine.
The dead lie hidden, decently arrayed.
It’s modern, or else sometimes dating back
to the nineteenth century: regal, sombre,
melancholy – for sure – but well-controlled,
unlike its older twin, which breeds nightmares.
Ancient and decayed, the soil here threatens
to crumble, crack, like mouldy honeycomb,
exposing rancid vaults, mottled coffins,
or – worse – the putrid freight that hides inside.
This place, sometimes, deep-most at its core
resolves to an effigy of decay:
a hunk of oozing scalp, with hair attached;
or severed member, nothing else beside;
as if the place were pointed all at that.
Often, in the prelude, I am firstly
by the newer graveyard, where all is well,
except – already – a faint foreboding.
Inevitably, mischance will intrude:
a wrong turning, a moment’s confusion,
or sometimes an ineluctable pull,
collecting me into the old graveyard’s
slow-motion aura of threat and terror.
‘It dates back to the eighteenth century.’
Prosaic-sounding, yet inside a dream
details can unlock a store of horror.
A serif font ne’er did anyone harm,
yet in the chiselled script upon these stones
the evil genius of this place cavorts.
In curlicue and italic flourish
a brooding evil grins malevolent.
Duped by this place, or having stumbled
within its orbit by my own neglect,
the machine-like demon that here presides
let’s fly the shutter, and up it snaps,
and behold: oozing death and rank decay!
So predictable, that over the years
dreaming is become like recognising,
and as or just before the trap springs shut
often I wake myself by will alone.

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The Froth of Lucidity

I was arguing with someone last night who insisted that enlightenment entailed constant awareness during the dream state. That’s pants! I said. He’d based his opinion on assertions made by a Tibetan Buddhist nun. I’m wary of monastics. They have a lot of time on their hands. I suspect the best of them get enlightened after a few years, then spend the rest of their lives sitting around the monastery inventing stuff to do next.

Anyhow – that kind of chat before bedtime was like a red rag to a bull. I found myself in a snowy cemetery and marvelled at the dazzling brilliance of the ice and the detail on the tombstones and monuments, which changed their perspective as I walked, just as I’d expect in reality.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). Frontispiece: Ancient Intersection of the Via Appia and Via Ardeatina.

The last few occasions I’d been lucid the state had dwindled rapidly when I’d focused my attention closely on the sensations creating the illusion. This time I held back, and discovered as a consequence that the state became more stable. I continued to play with it as I moved forwards, and it became obvious there are things you should do in a lucid dream to make the state perpetuate itself.

Foremost among these: do not look at anything too hard. In the lucid environment, objects and settings morph or appear from nothing between one moment and the next. If you focus on a single point, or try to pin down what’s there and what’s not, then the fabric of the dream gets ripped, as if we were holding it too tight. Buildings appeared: large, ornate mausoleums, and – in the distance – a vast cathedral of white marble that I knew hadn’t been there a moment ago. The lucid world is similar to the phase of hypnagogic imagery that precedes sleep; leave it alone and it will restlessly throw up more of itself out of itself in a style both brittle and fluid. It reminded me of Piranesi’s drawings and De Quincey’s descriptions of opium visions:

With the same power of endless growth and self-production did my architecture proceed in dreams… The splendours of my dreams were chiefly architectural; and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as never yet was beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds. (De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater)

I pushed the state a little further now. I knew I wasn’t really in this fantastic landscape at all, but asleep, so as I walked I tried to feel the position of my body in bed. I figured that if I knew where my real body was then I’d be able to distinguish it from my astral body and then take the latter off on an astral projection.

But this is not a viable technique for getting into an out-of-body state from a lucid dream – or so it seems at the moment. First off, it was very difficult to feel the physical body. Dimly, I managed after a while to sense myself lying on my right side in the bed, but it simply wasn’t possible to hold both the physical and the dream body together in awareness to a significant degree. During an out-of-body experience we are vividly aware of both bodies, but this is not the case in a lucid dream because it seems to depend on impressions not being ‘pinned down’. Images bubble up and replicate in a rich and complex froth of impressions. Introduce anything into the mix that solidifies things – such as rigid attention, or sensations from the physical body – and its soufflé-like texture sags and tears.

If we’re looking for an out-of-body state, then it seems we must first exit the lucid state and find a separate state altogether. The two states certainly share characteristics, but – as other experiences have suggested in the past – they do not appear to be organised along a continuum.

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Some Notes on Technique

The art of lucid dreaming and out-of-body experience is grounded in concentration and will power. If you decide to do it, if you want to do it, and if you persist in your efforts to do it – then you will succeed. That said, there are certain factors that can influence the degree of success.

First off, your relationship to sleep. If your body is tired then it will take its fill of unconsciousness until it is no longer tired. There is little point in trying to attain the lucid state if you are mentally or physically exhausted. Conversely, if you go to bed with any problems or issues nagging your mind, it will opt for consciousness as a means to deal with them, rather than abandoning itself to sleep. There are occasional exceptions to both these sets of circumstances (especially when first starting out on practice), but for success in the long run it is important to approach this work with a fully rested body and mind.

A sure-fire way to ensure that you are fully rested and fit to try for the lucid state is to oversleep.

Make some time and have a lie-in for an extra hour or two. Or take an extra nap in the afternoon.

Some people – myself included – find the sensations that arise from oversleeping a tad unpleasant. I usually feel heavy, torpid and irritable if I’ve had too much sleep, yet I’ve never encountered any evidence that these symptoms lead to any lasting harm. It’s best to regard any effects from oversleeping as simply an occupational hazard. Their effects can be overcome by physical exercise and stimulating yourself mentally.

The art of lucid dreaming is a form of concentration meditation, or ‘shamatha‘, and it is advisable to practise straight-up shamatha in addition to lucid dreaming. To become good at shamatha it’s vital to learn patience and acceptance. There will be prolonged periods when lucidity eludes you. This is because it is in the nature of mind to frustrate the demands and expectations of the ego. Resist the temptation to become frustrated or disconsolate. Resist also the urge to focus on a perceived sense of failure. Rest the attention instead upon the object of your practice; upon what is, rather than your reaction to it.

As in concentration meditation, in which we re-focus the mind back on the object whenever we notice it has wandered, so in lucid dreaming practice we constantly abide with whatever arises, rather than identifying with our response. Lack of lucidity is simply that; it needn’t be the occasion for getting swept away in some self-recriminatory story.

To lie on the back whilst sleeping is very helpful; I don’t know why. So is learning to keep still in bed, not moving the limbs but keeping the attention focused upon bodily sensations, without opening the eyes. This can keep you ‘in the zone’ of the lucid dreaming state when it becomes difficult to sustain it, or when a dream ends and you’d like to begin another one.

A recent article in New Scientist (Ananthaswamy, 2009) described some research that suggested out-of-body experience is connected with activity in a region at the back of the brain, called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ).

This region seems to be concerned with spatial and proprioceptive awareness and the sense of embodiment (p. 35). Separate studies confirmed the activation of this region in people with neurological disorders that had resulted in sensations of disembodiment; but also in healthy subjects who had been set a task in the laboratory of merely imagining their body to be in a different position from its actual position (p. 36).

My own experience suggests that there is something very helpful in this research. Visualising yourself spinning around or falling backwards can help induce the lucid or out-of-body state, when done correctly. Your visualisation should focus on the bodily sensations that would arise from the spinning or falling, rather than the purely visual effects.

Even more effective, I’ve recently discovered, is simply to imagine (in the same way) as strongly and persistently as you can, whilst falling asleep, that your body is in a different position from its actual position.

If you are lying on your back, imagine that you are lying on your side or front, or are standing next to the bed. Each time the mind wanders or the visualisation loses its intensity, bring back awareness to it.

I made the unexpected discovery that, even whilst awake, persisting in this provokes unusually vivid mental images to arise quite automatically, alongside the physical sensations that are consciously being imagined. The look-and-feel of these visual images was strikingly like those of a lucid dream, even though I was still fully awake.

The intensity of the imagery increases as sleep approaches, until finally it is entered into entirely. But for some reason there seems a much higher chance of regaining consciousness in the dream that has arisen by this means, rather than from simply falling asleep naturally.

The scientific research has left the neurologists wondering: ‘how are the self and body related?’ (p. 36). I suppose this seems a valid question – if you’re a dualist! But perhaps what is happening is simply what it ‘seems’: our body-identity-world is a unity and will coalesce from any sensations to hand. If those sensations come from non-material images rather than physical sensations then we have re-clothed ourselves in a different mode of both world and being.

Reference

Anil Ananthaswamy (2009). The mind unshackled. New Scientist (10th October) 35-6.

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Bedroom Invader

In the night I heard the sound of a child and a woman’s voice. They had come into my flat. Groggily, I hauled myself out of bed and called: ‘Hello? Can I help you?’

My mind was sluggish, but I knew full well the door was locked and there was no way someone could come in. So I made a logical deduction: they must be spirits.

In case they were malevolent, I traced a pentagram with my arm and intoned the only words of power that would come to mind: SHADDAI EL CHAI.

A woman sat and stared at me from the dark corner of my bedroom. Evidently, she wasn’t evil – else my banishing would have done for her already.

By this point I’d started to realise that all of this must be happening astrally. Yet it seemed so real, I simply hadn’t understood I was in the lucid dreaming state.

The woman had a chaotic character and – as we spoke – she made demands on me that I tried at first to meet, but soon realised I would have to resist. Refusal didn’t offend her as much as I’d expected, but she continued to pressure me for what felt like a long time, yet became progressively easier to resist.

What is the status of ‘human’ figures encountered on the astral plane? They’re not as transparent to me as they once seemed. Sometimes they have knowledge that’s beyond my own: they can tell me ‘who’s in charge’, for instance. But sometimes they know as little as I do.

The woman who came into my room last night seemed different again. I wondered if she were the astral emanation of an actual person; one of my sleeping neighbours, maybe. Whatever she was, she presented not as a ‘passerby’ or the passive inhabitant of a visionary scene, but as an invasive entity, a palpably aggressive spirit.

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Vibes

I woke this morning before it was light to the sound of a vibration – from the fridge downstairs, perhaps, or maybe it was the bakery at the rear of the building starting up its ovens. Whatever it was, I noticed in my half-awake state a clear but subtle response from my mind to this vibration. It was as if the mind was echoing its pitch, harmonising to it by producing a mental image.

It’s often faint, but noticeable that when confronted with any type of significant vibration – environmental, musical, perhaps even the recognition of any temporal pattern, such as cars passing at intervals by a window – the mind responds in the same way. Or, at least, something responds, which is positioned very close to the boundary between what we usually mean by ‘mind’ and the body.

Now, someone may suggest I imagined this, or tricked myself into perceiving it. That’s fine. I’d agree, it was an imaginary response; something not quite physical, but which appeared to the mind as if it were a sound or a sensation. To call it imaginary is a good description, but this doesn’t mean it isn’t there or that it isn’t the mind responding with harmony to what it perceives.

At the same time as I caught my mind in the act of harmonising, I noticed a sensation in my lower belly that (from experience) I associate with activation of the stomach chakra (manipura). In my experiments with the chakras, this has been the latest one I’ve managed to ‘open’ and is by far the scariest.

It’s the most ‘existential’ of the chakras that I’ve experienced. When it’s active, my entire mind and body is felt winking rapidly in and out of existence. It gives the queasy impression of a power-source which, if it were switched off, would cause the physical body to vanish. (I really must work out a way to turn it off and check that out…)

The stomach chakra, too, seems another aspect of the body exquisitely attuned to vibrations. If you’re not buying the ‘chakra’ thing, just think of how it feels to stand near speakers blasting out music. And in my mind, at least, this chakra is connected with the sense of embodiment itself, as if being here in the physical were simply the maintenance of some kind of a particular frequency, which could change or be switched off.

People who talk about ‘vibrations’ in a New Age sense, or talk about spiritual people being on a ‘higher frequency’ irritate the tits off me. Because all this stuff about ‘vibrations’ has to be a metaphor. Yet I’m starting to come around to the view that it might at least be an unusually well-chosen one.

This morning I had an experience that suggested how vibrations play a part in shifting awareness from a physical to an imaginary level: a physical vibration elicited a response on the boundary of mind and body. It was an image: a tactile and auditory sensation translated from the physical onto the mental plane.

Think of the effects of chanting, of drumming, of flashing light into the eyes. These are ancient techniques for inducing trance; frequency and vibration are used to shift awareness from external perception to an internal, imaginal state.

Yet I think this principle probably applies to higher levels too. That strange but intense sensation of vibration which signals the onset of an out-of-body experience (OOBE) is very distinct, but has puzzled me for a long time. A few days ago, I found myself on the border of an OOBE and sensed my ‘astral body’ straining to get out. I felt wracked by muscular spasms, but was unable to achieve lift-off from the physical and move on. It was clear what was missing: the intense buzzing sensation that commences an OOBE. This was not a pleasant experience, but it seemed a salient lesson that no one gets to leave their body without the tooth-rattling waves of vibration that precede a successful OOBE.

But the experience of vibration before an OOBE isn’t physical. It can’t be. Believe me, if it were it’d throw your partner out of bed, shake the windows out their frames and knock all the pictures off the walls. No, it’s an imaginary sensation. It’s something that originates internally, but presents as if it were a physical sensation of vibration.

And so, we’re left with the intriguing idea that, experientially at least, it’s vibration which enables the shift from physical to imaginary, but also – in the case of an OOBE – between the levels above this, from imaginary to astral, because without that distinct imaginary sensation of vibration at the start of an OOBE it seems the astral body stays just right where it is.

The obvious question to ask next is whether there levels above the astral, and does ‘vibration’ enable us to access those as well. I’d hazard a guess that the same principle does indeed apply, but ‘vibration’ is unlikely to be as easily recognisable as such at levels above the imaginary.

When I experienced enlightenment I was asleep at first, and also – on waking, and for a long period afterwards – my stomach chakra became activated for the very first time. I’m wondering if this reveals anything concerning transitions to levels above the astral. Unfortunately I’ve not yet met anyone who has had a similar enlightenment experience to mine.

It’d probably be wise not to generalise too much from it. Yet.