Lucid dreams and beyond...

Lately I have been interested in lucid dreams. These are dreams in which you are aware you are dreaming, and can manipulate the dream, and explore different corners of your own mind.

Entering a lucid dream directly from the waking state can be a frightening experience at first. It took me several months to train myself not to fear the onset and thus wake up. You start feeling weird vibrations, paralysis, and sometimes - and this is the scary part - feeling your heart ripped through your chest, and having your head stuck inside a jet engine, filling your head with the most awful noise imaginable. All these have no physical effect and can't hurt you, but your mind fears them just the same; Would this have been a real physical experience, your mind would be justified in wanting to run away. Once you get over the fear of this state and let it happen, you experience weird and wonderful lucid dreams beyond.

I have read interesting articles about the similarities of the state of the mind in lucid dreaming, out of body experiences, and near death experiences.

Lately I have been experiencing very strong emotions in my dreams, sometimes it almost feels like dying... I have been afraid to explore these emotions. I usually wake up a few seconds after the emotions get too strong. Sometimes I feel like they are ripping me apart. Sometimes I am afraid I won't come back from the dream, despite many reports to the contrary. Sometimes I am afraid of having a seizure...

It took me some time to learn not to fear the jet-engine-heart-ripping entry to lucid dreams; I wonder how long it will take me not to fear overwhleming emotions and the feeling of passing beyond a death-like barrier [at least that is how it feels]. This is difficult, because any healthy mind wants to run away from death, real or fake.

I wonder what waits me beyond... will I change somehow like many people that went there and came back?

The human mind is such a vast and curious place...

Even cats can teach you a lesson

I always say, don't judge someone unless you have all the information at hand - which you mos't probably don't. Let us say you see someone crossing a red light at 100kph. Let us hope there were no people at the junction at that time and no one got hurt. You might ask yourself "who is that asshole?". You can never know if there is a bleeding, dying person in the back seat and he is rushing to hospital. At most, you can ask "what is wrong with him?" to which the answer will either be "he's trying to save someone" or "he's an asshole". If you assume bad things already - you are judging prematurely.

I was walking on the street at night and I saw a cat just standing in the middle of the road. I forgot my own advice, and yelled "you stupid crazy cat, get off the road!!!". When I came closer, I saw she was looking over her kitten that has been run over. It was dead, but she kept looking over it.

I didn't see the kitten from far away, as she was hiding it. "Get off the road!" would have been enough. Why did I add "stupid crazy?"... I judged prematurely. Had that been a person, I really would have come off stupid myself.

I said thankyou to the cat for reminding me of my own lesson. I took a stick and carefully moved the run over kitten to the side of the road, in the hopes that the cat won't get run over, looking over its dead kitten in the middle of the road.

Sometimes even cats can teach you valuable lessons.