How Daydreaming Might Lead to Better Health
Whether you’re seeking to improve general disposition, or perhaps would like to learn how to lucid dream, the Daydreaming Path may be one of the easiest paths to success. Maybe you have heard that sports players who can visualize an experience tend to do better than those who don’t practice. Perhaps you have heard people who meditate tend to be more peaceful and or generally healthier than those who don’t. Maybe you think you can’t visualize or meditate, but if you’re interested, I will show how a meditation practice is just a daydream away.
https://www.livescience.com/60768-daydreaming-creativity-intelligence.html
Author of Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self, Manoush Zomorodi is onto something! Traditionally we have encouraged people to focus, not space out. It isn’t that being focused is wrong- it’s very useful if you’re threading a needle, but if you’re observing the sky, you are engaged in peripheral vision, which is more expansive.
Working on your story, focused. Stepping outside and taking in the sky and trees and birds-expansive. In all things, there is expansion and contraction.
Daydream Believer
Andrew Holecek, and others who teach and practice lucid dreaming, recommend cultivating a daytime practice of lucidity, asking yourself are you dreaming, and looking for triggers. What you do in daily life will often occur in your dreams. There is evidence meditators tend to do better at lucid dreaming than others.
Interestingly enough, daydreaming is a form of meditation. The thing is, most people have not been taught how to daydream properly. The basic, entry level daydream that people engage in is running a scenario in their head, and re-scripting as they go, as opposed to running the whole scenario to its conclusion before re-scripting. If you have ever rehearsed an argument, planning out what you intend to say, perfecting your speech as you go- you have engaged in this process.
If you ever rehearsed something, but didn’t deliver the speech, you may find the next time you have an argument with the person you had the daydream drama with will suddenly escalate into fight level energy. Most of the time, the other person will report being surprised, because they are not aware of the pending attack. The emotional energy of the daydream rehearsal was put into an energy bank, and the next time your orbits passed, you launched photon torpedoes and phasers before you even knew they were loaded.
If you related to that anecdote, have you ever daydreamed a peaceful resolution, and the next time your orbits passed with a person- did it go smoother?
Practicing Daydreams
Practicing daydreaming is the equivalent of narrative therapy. You play the scene out in your mind. On completion, you examine the story- from a literature perspective, looking for antagonists and protagonists and themes. Thank the antagonist. We all need a Darth Vader and a Wicked Witch West in our narratives.
My experience with narrative therapy, if you write these episodes down as you’re experiencing them, in real time, negative energy gets depleted, and positive energy gets enhanced. Sometimes just finding a neutral space after pushing a daydream is evidence of peace. Life is an oscillation between some good, some bad, a whole heck of a lot of neutral.
Interestingly enough, the more you engage in unscripted daydreams, allowing them to unpack themselves- the more nuanced and real your daydreams will seem. Daily conscious life is experienced in the brain. So is REM sleep. So is daydreaming. It all happens in the same place, and so it can all be very real.
By allowing daydreams to flow as they will, you will learn to make observations. This practice of observing thoughts and the changing architecture of a day dream translates into you becoming more aware of artifacts in waking reality.
Indulging in daydreams does not detract from reality, it enhances it.
Daydreaming practices by other names
I have three go to practices that have worked for me. They are huge in outcomes, to such a degree- I am often baffled that more people don’t participate. At the minimum, these practices are so useful- they at least deserve more attention and conversation than people give them.
Active Imagine, by Carl Jung is essentially daydreaming mediation. You participate in the daydream by establishing parameters of what you’re willing to experience, and then you let it go.
The Red Book is where this practice went for Carl. He experienced a person, his spirit guide if
you allow, Philemon, to such a degree that if you read the Red Book you might agree with me-Carl thought Philemon was a real person.
I think he was, or is. I think you can access Philemon to the same degree he did, if you allow, just as I have had reports that others have experienced my Tulpa- Loxy Isadora Bliss. Whether this is real or imagined, Carl’s collective unconscious is a vector for transmission. Most people in the world will respond to the words ‘Star Trek,’ even if they know nothing more about it than, “I have heard of it and I am not interested.” The degree that we embrace an idea or subject changes the degree we experience it. I am as comfortable walking the corridors of the Enterprise as I am walking the M*A*S*H camp. Is it real, no. Can I go there, yeah.
The Invisible Counselor Technique, by Napoleon Hill- is essentially a daydream meditation. He specified the parameters by inviting people he esteemed into a mental office space. In addition to sending out invitations, he cram packed his brain with information about the people he esteemed, making it more likely his brain would have real world information, as opposed to just his inferred brain information. He had experiences with people he esteemed that defied his understanding of imagination. They behaved autonomously. They deviated from his expectations.
Tulpamancy, is essentially a daydream practice, which originated with Buddhist Monks in Tibet.
You define the parameters of an artifact or personality, and you meditate on it to such a degree it begins to manifest as a hallucination. The character, if you will, interacts back with you.
Practicing Daydream meditation
Practicing daydreaming is an act of letting go. Yes, you reach in and initiate the process, but then you allow it to unfold as it will. It’s a practice of trust that your inner person, whether that be a higher conscious or a subconscious mind, will participate with you.
Milton Ericson, hypnotist, suggested that 90 percent of our lives are unconscious. Hypnosis can be compared to a guided daydream experience. You can guide yourself, listen to a tape, or have someone else guide you- and the more you do this, the more automated the practice becomes.
When you start the practice, you may feel like you are scripting all the time. That’s okay. Keep practicing. There will become a point when you engage that you cease to narrate and simply flow through the experience.
Interestingly, Robert Monroe’s Gateway series is essentially this- only he is arguing, once you become a master of this space, you will start finding artifacts that other people have encountered and written about. Thomas Campbell, author of My Big Theory of Everything, who learned from Robert, echoes this.
I liken this to learning to drive a car. When you first started, it took almost all of your conscious energy to sort through all the available data- speed, turn radius, proximity of others… But after a certain number of hours, you eventually got in the car and went from point a to point b without remembering anything in between. That’s not a lack of awareness, that’s evidence of mastery.
You know how to tie your shoes, but if I ask you to demonstrate- most people take a moment to relearn to do it in slow motion. For me, I had to sit criss cross applesauce, turn my son around, and learn to tie my shoe…
This is daydreaming. You initiate the practice, do it consistently, and eventually you will open a door and step into another world and find there is little distinction between real world and fantasy. It doesn’t take a thousand hours to master a thing. It only takes a minimum of40 hours of flight time to qualify to take the exam for your private license.
You already have the ability to fly, you just have to practice.
