What was it about those early lucid dreams that propelled you deeper into lucid dreaming?

I think I was most excited that I no longer needed to read esoteric books or study the experiences of others. I could have my own experiences and engage the larger Awareness to learn things that I might never read in a book. My relationship developed much more deeply after my first contact with it. I spent the following years asking It questions or asking for conceptual experiences (based on the instructions you gave in your first book).

 

Those early years engaging my larger Awareness and receiving responses made me reconsider every assumption I had about the nature of reality and my relationship to my experienced reality. I largely dropped my entire belief system and rebuilt it around the insights I received from the larger Awareness or from my own inner knowing or thinking on certain subjects of interest.

 

In an ironic twist of events, my interest in OBEs dissolved and I focused completely on lucid dreaming as a pathway to exploring the nature of experienced reality, the larger Awareness, and what I later found out to be the co-creative, psycho-dynamic relationship of the dreamer and the larger Awareness.

 

As you went deeper into lucid dreaming, did you feel like you were being shown new information (outside of your ego’s knowledge base), or a new perspective on the nature of reality?

Definitely! I spent a few years asking the larger Awareness questions or requesting to have conceptual experiences beyond my own knowing/beliefs.

 

One night, when I was not focusing on lucid dreaming or even intending one, I had a lucid dream of being enclosed in a giant canyon. Even though I was lucid, I still had a hard time making the dream walls disappear or trying to fly over the walls. At the early stages of interacting with the larger Awareness, I thought that I had to yell all my requests to the sky for the larger Awareness to respond. So, in that dream, I yelled my requests for the wall to disappear at the top of my lungs but nothing changed.

 

I think the answer did eventually come but in the appearance of the dream figure of Hermione Granger (from the Harry Potter book series). In the dream she gave me the advice that I didn’t have to yell and that the larger Awareness was ever-present and not really in the sky. In a way that’s hard to explain, I had a certain kind of clarity about how the larger Awareness is ever-present in the dream. After she left I started to direct the dream in a much smoother way by announcing my intentions aloud to myself or saying my intentions in my mind (while knowing that my larger Awareness would ‘hear’ my intent since it was ever-present).

 

I recall a lucid dream of being in a dream kitchen and asking the larger Awareness what the ‘main knowledge’ or message of that particular dream was. It told me to “Know that the power of the trinity is accessible to all…!” At the time of the dream I was of the belief that the larger Awareness was a kind of ‘inner God’ or part of God in a sense. I immediately asked my larger Awareness if It was a part of God or maybe if it was the ‘trinity.’ The larger Awareness then repeated my question back to me but with an inflection of surprise as if to almost mock me for asking such a question. It felt exactly like when you ask someone an embarrassing question and they rhetorically repeat the question back to you to show you how ridiculous it sounds.

 

Then, in an amused tone, the larger Awareness stated, “You have mystified me the entire time; put me to use!” I realized I had to wake up to write everything I just heard. As I was ‘leaving’ the dream, the larger Awareness concluded our encounter by humorously adding, “Don’t forget to leave a tip on the way out!”

 

A few weeks later, I asked to be shown the ‘power of the trinity.’ In that dream of asking to see the power of the trinity, the dream environment disappeared and a holographic ball of light expanded outwards to show the solar system, the movement of the galaxy, and then other geometric lights with the symbol of man resurrecting or waking up…! I’m not Christian and so I didn’t interpret the last symbol as being fully connected to Christ. It may be a symbol for the awakening of ‘mankind.’ I’m not completely sure at this point and never bothered for clarification since I started focusing on other things after that dream.

 

So how did that change your thinking or perspective?

That ‘Power of the Trinity’ lucid dream acted as a way for the larger Awareness to rebuff my beliefs about it and to make me stop ‘mystifying’ It as a kind of divine figure or inner God. Instead the larger Awareness wanted me to develop a deeper relationship with It. That lucid dream eventually helped me see each lucid dream as a co-creation of my self and my larger Awareness.

 

The initial encounter with the dream figure of Hermione Granger taught me that the larger Awareness isn’t literally an awareness ‘behind’ the dream but that the larger Awareness was nonvisible, non-spatial, and essentially ever-present. It took me a few years of thinking on that to understand exactly what that entailed.

 

How did you explore that in subsequent lucid dreams? What did you discover?

I explored my co-creative relationship with the larger Awareness by studying exactly ‘how’ my mental actions or requests were expressed out into the dream environment (and looking at the incredible Creativity involved). For example, I recall a lucid dream of being in a library and wondering what would happen if I intended a painting of Thomas Jefferson to appear behind me when I turned around in the dream. In that moment, I vividly and creatively imagined a crude painting of Thomas Jefferson behind me and as I turned around I saw exactly what I imagined in my mind projected out by my larger Awareness. The painting looked just as bad as my imagination was limited to.

 

I turned back to my original position and intended instead that the larger Awareness would show me a ‘beautiful painting’ of Thomas Jefferson. When I turned around this time, I saw a larger painting that was nothing short of a masterpiece. It was so detailed and realistic. I could see that when I initially used intent, and ‘imagined’ the exact crude details of the painting, that my larger Awareness expressed those exact nonverbal/imagined specifications. When I used verbal specificity without using my limited imagination I could also see how my larger Awareness used the phrase “beautiful painting” as my specifications for the forthcoming response.

 

When using intent to study the co-creative relationship between myself and my larger Awareness, I started to use only phrased statement as specifications for my intent (since I felt using my imagination was more limited than the Imagination of the larger Awareness).

 

I can recall another lucid dream of being in my living room and seeing a glass shelf with Hindu art like a glass Vishnu mask, a larger statue of Shiva, and other various figurines. I tried an experiment in which I verbally asked to see “Christian art.” All of a sudden, the art in the glass morphed into a beautiful painting of Christ, a handmade crucifix, a gold angel, and other Christian iconography. I took it further by verbally requesting to see different things in the glass case and seeing the larger Awareness create an appropriate dream construct that was representative of my specified intent.

 

Have you requested any mystical or spiritual experiences using verbal intent?

Like I mentioned before, I spent my time asking the larger Awareness or conceptual experiences so I could specifically examine Its Creativity in action. For example, while outside of a dream bank, I verbally requested that my larger Awareness let me experience “Divine Grace.” Suddenly, in the space above me, a vortex appeared and pulled me in. I emerged into a deep void and felt oneness and calmness. In front of me, I could see the solar system and I had a ‘direct cognition’ or ‘knowing’ that the Universe has an intelligent design underlying it, maintaining it, and supporting it.

 

Thanks Jeff.