By Albert Lauer © 2014
I was fourteen when a series of sleep paralyses incidents left me distraught. The first time it happened, I was sure I was dying. I had no control and even my breath seemed to stop. Apart from not being able to move, most notable were the vibrations, paired with loud noises. Each time it would occur, I always tried to wrestle myself back to waking.
That first time, after I had finally regained control over my body, I hurried to my father, who measured my heart rate at 45 beats per minute, while I was still rather upset. By the time I was nineteen, I had only had a few of these experiences, but then they started up again.
After I had learned not to panic, my usual response became to try to shock, or force, my body out of the grip of the paralysis. One particular time, I tried to shock my body but had no success and I needed to reload my energy several times by calmly waiting. But then I managed to influence the situation. I shocked/forced myself in an upright position, but was still surrounded by the loud tremors.
I didn’t understand how I got upright at the time but proceeded with a plan to throw myself onto the sofa lined up with my bed in the small room that I rented. Well, that worked, but differently than I had planned. Instead of falling onto the sofa, I drifted slowly down, like a feather. I even bounced a few times lightly, while in the moonlight I saw the fabric of the sofa. In awe, I recognized that I was out of my body. Instantly I was back in my body and woke up, as if I had not been paralyzed moments before.
My first lucid dream experiences were all of the out of body variety.
As soon as the vibrations started, I tried to get out of my body and undertake a little traveling adventure. Sometimes the vibrations were as strong as a storm and I could get nowhere. In the beginning these states of sleep paralysis came most often when I had been in a big city during the day. I was very sensitive to the energy of the city and the agitation seemed to keep my mind awake while my body fell asleep. After meeting the storm (intense vibrations) a few times, I once tried to go forcefully against it, exhausting myself quickly and I happened to get ill the day after.
Later, I found some good advice in a book by the Dutch psychic Van der Zeeuw, Helder Weten. He would just let himself be blown away by these vibration storms and never worried where he would end up. Several times I just let myself go with the wind and the storms didn’t bother me anymore. From these experiences I learned to go with the vibrations themselves, of which the storms seemed to be just a stronger variation.
One time I noticed that I could also go into higher frequencies when going along with the vibrations. After doing that I would end up in a lucid dream and not out of body. So, I learned to choose when the vibrations and noises were around me, to either go dreaming or go travel out of body. The initial lower, more coarse vibrations ended me up in the seemingly physical world and the higher ones belonged to the dream. Many times my out of body travels were in neither realm but somewhere in a vast black expanse of virtually nothing. However, as the years passed, I no longer heard the noises or sensed the vibrations when I experienced sleep paralysis.
In the beginning, my lucidity during sleep always started the same way.
I noted many different ways of falling asleep while maintaining clarity of mind. For me, usually the start of a lucid dream, immediately after falling asleep, is marked by a slow drifting down out of my body to some depth before I can see anything at all. Sometimes I feel some kind of floor beneath my feet even before I can see anything. Although it may happen that I float just a little upwards out of my body, before I can distinguish anything with effort, in the dream state. If I float up a bit, I have an out of body experience and if I drift down, I find myself in a dream.
Later it became my practice whenever I found myself in a dream to always first check back with my body to gain a clear reference. That by itself has generated many beautiful dream episodes and interesting control over waking and dreaming. I have learned always to find my body from the center of my dream body. I don’t see a ‘silver cord‘ or anything like that, but can feel the connection and then simply reel myself in by intent. Always when I do that from a lucid dream I seem to be deep inside of the earth and I have to travel quiet a distance before I can enter my body.
One time when I woke up in the middle of the night.
I sat up in my bed and started meditating while almost still asleep. While I did, I could see my dream hands, but only if I looked out of my body from below my ribs, I was playing with my blue-ish smoky dream hands when I really fell asleep. Interestingly, dream awareness immediately took over and created meaningful imagery for the basically meaningless movements I was making. Suddenly I was making choices on the touch screen of a smartphone in an otherwise black environment. Within seconds I caught myself and managed to get back to the same waking perspective as moments before and again saw my dream hands.
Upon waking, most of my dream body stays outside and is responsible for picking up many sensations, ideas and psychic impressions from all around the place. A smaller portion tunnels into the waking body. One of the most impressive experiences occurs when I am fully aware while waking up.
Sometimes I can feel that I am approaching my nerves and entering my nervous system, getting sucked into my brain and instantly feeling much less lucid, or rather, instantly missing the genius of the heightened awareness of the dream. My awareness seems to be held apart from itself, drastically limiting my experience of . . . well, waking life. Consequently, every morning after I wake up, the first thing I do, is to go out of the back of my head a little, and sit on that ledge where dreaming meets waking.
Read more of Albert Lauer‘s experiences in his blog, The Awe of Awareness at www.albertlauer.com
