Lucid Dreaming

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Re: Lucid Dreaming

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Tue Mar 13, 2012 1:07 am

82_28 wrote:Has anyone heard of John William Dunne?

I found out about him by way of for some reason naming a website/blog I once ran "www.dunneIV.org". It came to me in a dream and I woke up repeating the phrase "done for", "done for" etc. So I decided to google the significance of the spelling of the name "Dunne" and why I kept saying "done for". Well, I came across this cat:

John William Dunne FRAeS (1875–1949) was an Anglo-Irish aeronautical engineer and author. In the field of parapsychology, he achieved a preeminence through his theories on dreams and authoring books preoccupied with the question of the nature of time. As a pioneering aeronautical engineer in the early years of the 20th century, Dunne worked on many early military aircraft, concentrating on tailless designs, producing inherently stable aircraft.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Dunne

He happened to have written a book in the 1920s called "An Experiment With Time", summarized here:

Basic concepts

Dunne's theory is, simply put, that all moments in time are taking place at once, at the same time. For example, if a cat were to spend its whole entire life living in a box, anyone looking into the box could see the cat's birth, life and death in the same instant - were it not for the human consciousness, which means that we perceive at a fixed rate.

According to Dunne, whilst human consciousness prevents us from seeing outside of the part of time we are "meant" to look at, whilst we are dreaming we have the ability to traverse all of time without the restriction of consciousness, leading to pre-cognitive dreams, resulting in the phenomena known as Deja vu. Henceforth, Dunne believes that we are existing in two parallel states, which requires a complete rethink of the way that we understand time.
[edit] Dunne's experiment

In An Experiment with Time, Dunne discusses how a theoretical ability to perceive events outside the normal observer's stream of consciousness might be proved to exist. He also discusses some of the possible other explanations of this effect, such as déjà vu.

He proposes that observers should place themselves in environments where consciousness might best be freed and then, immediately upon their waking, note down the memories of what had been dreamed, together with the date. Later, these notes should be scanned, with possible connections drawn between them and real life events that occurred after the notes had been written.

While the first half of the book is an explanation of the theory, the latter part comprises examples of notes and later interpretations of them as possible predictions. Statistical analysis was at that time in its infancy, and no calculation of the significance of the events reported was able to be made.
[edit] Parallels with other scientific and metaphysical systems

Dunne's theory of time has parallels in many other scientific and metaphysical theories. The Aboriginal people of Australia, for example, believe that the Dreamtime exists simultaneously in the present, past and future, and that this is the objective truth of time, linear time being a creation of human consciousness and therefore subjective. Kabbalah, Taoism and indeed most mystical traditions have always posited that waking consciousness allows awareness of reality and time in only a limited way and that it is in the sleeping state that the mind can go free into the multi-dimensional reality of time and space (examples: "Dreams are the wandering of the spirit through all nine heavens and nine earths," The Secret of the Golden Flower, trans. Richard Wilhelm). Similarly, all mystery traditions speak of the immortal and temporal selves which exist simultaneously both within time and space and without.

There are also parallels with classical relativity theory, in which time and space are merged into "spacetime", and time is not absolute and independent but is dependent upon the motion of the observer.
[edit] Influence

In literature, interest in Dunne's theory may be reflected in T. S. Eliot's Burnt Norton, from Four Quartets, which opens with the lines:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.[1][2]

J. B. Priestley used Dunne's theory directly in his play Time and the Conways, professing in his introduction that he believed the theory to be true. Other writers contemporaneous to Dunne who expressed enthusiasm for his ideas included Aldous Huxley, who was also interested in the expansion of human consciousness to experience time, and Adolfo Bioy Casares, who mentioned this book in the introduction to his novel The Dream of Heroes (1954).

Charles Chilton used Dunne's analogy of time as a book to explain time travel in his radio play Journey Into Space. Philippa Pearce's childhood fantasy Tom's Midnight Garden also makes use of Dunne's ideas.

The idea that time might be experienced differently in enfolded space is one posited by quantum physicist David Bohm, who also believed that consciousness defined how we perceived the world. Bohm, who called for a revolution in human consciousness to free us from the old, Newtonian, mechanistic understanding of the universe, even posited that through a transformation of consciousness Time could possibly cease to exist in the way we perceive it now (cf., "The Ending Of Time" by Jiddu Krishnamurti and Dr David Bohm).

The 1964 novel Froomb! by British writer John Lymington refers to and is inspired by some of Dunne's concepts.[3] The protagonist, intended to be scientifically "killed" and revived to bring back an account of Heaven, is instead physically transported into the future, a parallel "time-band." He attempts to communicate with the controller of the experiment through dreams.

In the 1970 children's TV series, Timeslip, a time bubble allows two children to travel between past, present and future. Much of the show's time travel concepts were based on An Experiment with Time.[4]

An Experiment with Time is referenced in the book Sidetripping by William S. Burroughs and Charles Gatewood.

It is also mentioned in the book "Last Men In London" by Olaf Stapledon (1932).

It is also mentioned in the story "Murder in the Gunroom" by H. Beam Piper, and in "Elsewhen" by Robert A. Heinlein.

The ideas of Dunne also form the basis for "The Dark Tower" a short story by C. S. Lewis, and the unpublished novel, "The Notion Club Papers" by J. R. R. Tolkien. Both Tolkien and Lewis were members of the Inklings.

In the 2002 French movie Irréversible, one of the characters is seen reading the book by Dunne. The movie also investigates the aspects of the book through the style of filming, in that the story is told backwards, with each beginning sequence beginning either minutes or hours prior to the one which preceded it in the narrative. Also, the tagline is Le temps détruit tout meaning "Time destroys everything" – it is the first phrase spoken and the last phrase written.

In his book Is There Life After Death? (2006), British writer Anthony Peake wrote that some of Dunne's ideas are valid and attempts to update the ideas of Dunne in the light of the latest theories of quantum physics, neurology and consciousness studies.[5]
[edit]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Experiment_with_Time

Well, this morning I was having lucid dreams that (hopefully not my ex) girlfriend was texting me left and right and was emailing me. But the texts were lucid enough that each time I would wake up and would have to remind myself that there was no need to check my email or phone from any message from her. Then I logged into RI and saw this thread at the top of the queue and thought, maybe just maybe I can find something about this relatively obscure book I could add to the mix in this fascinating thread.

There used to be a site that had most chapters of An Experiment with Time a number of years ago -- hence how I even found the guy and his works. It's since gone defunct and haven't been able to find it in years. Yet it also, at the time of my website, was long out of print. Well, it's since gone back into print and can be found the usual ways.

HOWEVER!

Sweet, says I!

I just found it here and I do really recommend reading it. . .

http://www.archive.org/details/AnExperimentWithTime

You can download as pdf, kindle etc.


A guy I used to tree plant with got me into Dunne nnearly 20 years ago. I would love to read that book again. It was freaky and so were some of the experiments...

Cheers dude.
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Re: Lucid Dreaming

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Tue Mar 13, 2012 1:12 am

Aurataur wrote:Three years ago, on the day before Valentine's, my dearest friend died after a long and painful bout with cancer. It was a terrible tragedy, as he was loved, the world over, by all who had the fortune of knowing him. He is loved even by people who never met him, but who were connected to him via the amazing bonds of friendship he created in his devastatingly short life. As I write this, I feel the waves of grief coursing through me once again. I still can't believe he's gone.

About a year after his death, within a few days of each other, my brother and a friend both reported similar dreams of our dear friend. They both remarked at how it felt like they were really with him, that it wasn't just a version of him conjured up by their subconscious, but it was actually him visiting them in their dreams. I thought to myself, why not test this theory? If he visits me in my dreams, well, I'll ask him a question for which there is no way I could know the answer. "Who was your 2nd grade teacher?"

A few months later, he visited me in my dreams. As we were talking, I suddenly remembered to ask him the question I had chosen months ago. "Who was your 2nd grade teacher?" I'll never forget his reaction. He looked at me, with a devious smile and a light chuckle, as if to say, "I know what you're trying to do!" Suddenly, the dream disintegrated and I awoke. He hasn't visited me since.


Many years ago when my wife and I first met I had to go to Melbourne on my own. Its about 1000 miles away. We decided to meet during a dream while I was there, as a way of testing to see if such things were possible. Sure enough we met, and I got so excited by what happened I woke myself up to ring her and confirm that it had actually happened. She still laughs at me for waking up straight away instead of hanging out for a while.
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Re: Lucid Dreaming

Postby Nordic » Tue Mar 13, 2012 8:51 am

Whoa. I literally just woke up and that makes it extra freaky to read that.

I was just (in my dream) in some old city where a river pours into what I think was a big lakE, like one of the Great Lakes here. But it was older, especially down where this was, and there was a long park that you could walk through that kind of paralleled the river's path.

It was a beautiful plAcE.

I wonder if it wasn't Montreal, where it says Verdun on the map. Will try to check this out later. Will probably forget I ever wrote this.
"He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God" -- Philip K. Dick
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Re: Lucid Dreaming

Postby Marie Laveau » Tue Mar 13, 2012 9:08 am

psynapz wrote:
Marie Laveau wrote:I've had one lucid dream and it wasn't pretty.

I had a "thinking chair" in my old house and I would sit and read and just think. One day I closed my eyes and IMMEDIATELY I was....somewhere else....for lack of a better term.

I was on a sidewalk, walking toward this huge, concrete, monolithic building. It was square and had one metal door on the side and a row of daylight, opaque windows at the top. The building was, approximately, two-and-a-half to three stories tall.

I walked to the door, opened it, and inside this building was a concrete pool of black water. The water itself wasn't black, just that whatever that pool was, it wasn't a beautifully blue painted swimming hole. There was a large walkway around the pool, probably five or six feet wide. The pool itself was contained with a concrete wall about a foot high.

Anyway, I stood and looked at it for a minute and all of a sudden I realized that the water in that pool was meant to fill that entire building....and then I got an image of why.

Well... why?


Hmmmm.....well, I saw the building filling with water, all the way to the top. And people. But not in my lucid dream. That was the thought that came to my mind while I was standing in the doorway of the building. Hideous.

Again, I hope I never have another one.
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Re: Lucid Dreaming

Postby brekin » Tue Mar 13, 2012 12:03 pm

Very interesting stuff about Dunne, 82_82. It reminded me of the time travel movie Christopher Reeve was in that was
sans time machine but more self experiment based called Somewhere In Time based on a Matheson novel:

Image

Somewhere in Time
Somewhere in Time is a 1980 romantic science fiction film directed by Jeannot Szwarc. It is a film adaptation of the 1975 novel Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson, who also wrote the screenplay. The film stars Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour, Christopher Plummer, Teresa Wright, and Bill Erwin.

Reeve plays Richard Collier, a playwright who becomes smitten by a photograph of a young woman at the Grand Hotel. Through self-hypnosis, he travels back in time to the year 1912 to find love with actress Elise McKenna (portrayed by Seymour). But her manager William Fawcett Robinson (portrayed by Plummer) fears that romance will derail her career and resolves to stop him.




While searching for the above clip I in synchronicity stumbled upon this.
It made me almost piss my pants laughing but is also touching at times.



It's no doubt probably a set up, which even so I think makes it all
the more special. It's amazing to watch someone watching their previous life, even if it is a fictional one. When
Harrison Ford says "I'm dead." regarding Indy driving off the cliff
and crashing there just seems something so profound in it.

It reminds me of Delmore Schwartzes short story, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Dreams_ ... sibilities

Plot summary

The story tells of an unnamed young man who has a dream that he is in an old-fashioned movie theater in 1909. As he sits down to watch the film, he starts to realize that it is a motion picture documenting his parents' courtship. The black-and-white silent film is of very poor quality, and the camera is shaky, but nonetheless he is engrossed. Soon the young man starts to get upset. He yells things at the screen, trying to influence the outcome of his parents' courtship and the other people in the audience begin to think he is crazy. Several times the character breaks down. In the end he shouts at his parents when it appears they are going to break up, and he is dragged out of the theater by an usher who reprimands him. The animadversion is important to the story, as it reveals a bit of the character's insecurity. In the end, the character wakes up from his dream and notes that it is the snowy morning of his twenty-first birthday.
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
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Re: Lucid Dreaming

Postby 82_28 » Tue Mar 13, 2012 2:50 pm

brekin wrote:Very interesting stuff about Dunne, 82_82. It reminded me of the time travel movie Christopher Reeve was in that was
sans time machine but more self experiment based called Somewhere In Time based on a Matheson novel


As I said, what is interesting, at least to me, is that the very name came to me in a dream which I searched out upon waking. I did not seek it out until I had the dream. And it's 82_28, yo! ;) Which also has very weird connotations I have not made up, which again is very weird. I'm super into, or was once was "super into" into PKD. Justdrew once pointed out that my screenname are the years of PKD's death and birth.

Everything is weird. Just trying to hold it together. I assume I am just more attuned to patterns or some shit, like many of us here. It's certainly fascinating, but it sucks to have the capabilities when life sucks in general and nobody understands you and you realize you really don't understand yourself either. . .
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Lucid Dreaming

Postby happenstance » Tue Mar 13, 2012 4:09 pm

Came across this site today looking for a quote from Campbell about the need for a shared myth

http://www.lucidcrossroads.co.uk/shared.htm

Loved the John William Dunne stuff as well as In Dreams Begin Responsibilities!
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