These were the deeper questions that I was determined to answer.

At the next opportunity, I had a lucid dream of being outside buying ice cream in a park setting with a friend from school when I became spurred into lucidity. Remembering my experiment, I looked into the sky and saw three large planets looming in the distance. Using clear intent, I wondered what would happen if I pulled the ‘space’ in which one of the larger planets was occupying to me.

In a way hard to describe, the park setting moved away and I was now floating right above the atmosphere of this planet! I successfully experienced pulling a ‘space’ to me without the need of flying to it. Excited with this experience, I started focusing on far away spaces and pulling them to me. Each focused-upon space would rush to meet me. I was genuinely impressed at seeing the dream space change in relation to my mind instead of me moving in relation to it.

Going further, I mentally contracted the space itself and expanded it further outwards. The space and relative position of objects in that space held no stationary position that I couldn’t manipulate. The same mental actions I initially used to manipulate the dream body were now used to manipulate the dream space itself.

In a lot of my following lucid dreams I would think about how movement through space is ‘illusory’ and the ‘appearance’ of movement may be just a constructed representation of the use of will, intent, and focus to change our mental perspective—which changes the ‘position’ of the dream space in relation to our mental perspective.

Just as you rhetorically bring up at the end of chapter 3 in your first book, maybe the only real ‘movement’ that occurs in dreams is our changing mental perspective to change the position of the dream around us. I do want to add that these two insights about the dream body and dream space made me focus on manipulating my mind as being fundamental above all in the dream.

What general advice would you give dreamers that wish to explore the experienced reality of the dream?

In our last interview, I mentioned the importance of the larger Awareness in co-creatively constructing the dream. In this interview, I detailed how I came across the fundamental nature of mind. My personal experience shows that both the mind and larger Awareness exist non spatially in relation to the dream space.

When I used intent to influence or manipulate the dream space, I also examined the co-creative Will of the larger Awareness as It changed the ‘projected’ experience in relation to the specificity of my intent. In the ‘nospace’ experience, the reappearance of a new space clearly showed me the activity of the unconscious larger Awareness as It ‘projected out’ space.

‘Where’ is the larger Awareness before the ‘appearance’ of that space? So the lack of a space made me think deeper about how the larger Awareness can’t be anywhere ‘out there’ since ‘out there’ was removed and so it must be unconsciously occupying the same ‘position’ as my awareness in the dream.

Just as the dream figure of Hermione had given me insight into the larger Awareness being ever-present (see Part 1 of this interview in the December 2016 issue of LDE), these lucid dreams also gave me a deeper clarity in understanding that the larger Awareness was ever increasing as It, like my own mind, can exist independent of space. Seeing the mind (and larger Awareness) as being the fundamental agents upon which the dream emerged around made me relate to the dream space as more of a ‘projected’ mental construct.

So with that, my main advice to dreamers would be to experiment with manipulating your mind and also pay attention to how your projected experience changes in relation to your mental actions (as evidence of the co-creative Activity of the larger Awareness).

Having an understanding of your mind and larger Awareness’ essential role in co-creatively projecting the dream can open up an entirely new avenue of dream manipulation and understanding the psycho-dynamic relationship between your mind and larger Awareness, along with the projected experience which is an expression of that relationship.

Photo by StockSnap via Pixabay

Thanks, Jeff, for sharing your thoughts about lucid dreaming. Also, thanks to Wil in Seattle who passed on some of these questions for you.