Perspective Shift

Over the past few months I've been experiencing a steady increase in precognitive dreams. These are dreams in which the future in part, or in totality is foretold by symbols or clear images and scenarios within a dream. Many have experienced precognitive dreams in their lives, be those the standard Deja Vu like instances, or the almost premonitory dreams that seem to rattle the minds of those who experience them. This dream is either later recalled at the time of the "future" event transpiring, which is also refereed to as being Deja Vu, or directly after sleeping.

Precognition has never actually been an appealing area of practice for me. The answer for that? I can't really say, but I'm more so grouped with those who feel that the future is, and will always remain completely dependent on the individual, and so I don't see the need in predicting it. I do believe that there is some purpose for all actions, and a grand design within the lives we live, but I do not however feel as though we do not have choice, or different "paths" in this life that we optionally take.

For those of you who regularly read my content, it won't be a surprise to know that I'm an avid practitioner of both Lucid Dreaming, and Astral Projection. What's so interesting to me is that it's only after upwards of 6 years actively practicing Astral Projection, and closer to 9 pursuing Lucid Dreaming, that I have experienced a connection between these practices and precognitive dreams. It's either this, or something has changed within my practice to create this. I'm for the most part at a loss regarding the situation because it is quite foreign to me. I suppose the first step would be analyzing what may be different about my practice in these areas now, as opposed to years ago, or even a single year ago.

The Dreams

Over the years I've had my fair share of Deja Vu experiences, and even a few eerie dreams which seemed to come to pass at a much later date. This is nothing compared to what I've been experiencing lately though. It seems as though I have at least one dream every night that directly correlates to my life in future days. The dreams themselves are hazy to some degree, like a puzzle with small bits that pop up throughout sleep, jarred with clear audio and random clear images. As the events come to pass I can't help but examine them with frustration and excitement. Yes, it is very exciting to experience something in daily life that you had written about weeks earlier, but it is also frustrating because the events themselves seem to alter, seemingly only due to the very act of dreaming about them.

What I mean is, the dreams that I actually dream and write down, seem to be different from their "real life" counterparts. Sometimes this occurs because where in my dream I say something, in real life I'm too preoccupied realizing that I experienced this to some degree already, so all that comes out is the description of the dream I had. I can imagine this is slightly irritating to the people who are around me all the time, so when this happens I'm always met with "yes Chris, it's crazy..." or something else along those lines. Fair enough I suppose, but the cool factor wares off after awhile and I'm left sitting here wondering how, and why this is occurring.

My Current Sleep Cycle

The best place to start in figuring this whole thing out I suppose is within my actual sleeping patterns. Every day I usually get to bed between 10pm and 1am, when exactly depends entirely on my workload for that day. I wake up at 6:30am everyday besides weekends. During the last month or so I've been struck with terrible nights of sleep which I attributed to my increased stress levels. I've had several family, personal, and financial issues lately to leave any average Joe pulling out their hair and running from the men in white coats. Luckily, I love my hair too much and the men in white coats are probably hiding from me.

Despite this, I did feel as though the stress was affecting my sleep. For some reason I haven't been able to get comfortable, so when I do eventually fall asleep I wake up a few hours later and then repeat the process. The actual dream state occurs within Rapid Eye Movement (REM), which is the deepest level of sleep and happens during the first hour or two of falling asleep. So, if we consider that I wake up to a conscious level four times a night, and am sleeping an average of seven and a half hours a night, we can estimate that I hit a REM cycle at least 4 times. I may be waking up more throughout the night though. It would be almost impossible for me to say, but mild sleeping issues run in my family and I've been known to talk and even be conversational, or wake up and do something with no recollection of having done it. As in, I was still sleeping.

I have also been taking regular naps that I just stopped taking recently. I had been taking a nap from around 1 or 2pm to 5pm everyday to try to catch up on any sleep I might have missed out on. I think this could have been in part to blame for my hardships in sleeping at night, creating a vicious cycle of napping because I'm tired and being tired because I'm napping. I since stopped the naps because of this.

This is unlike my usual sleeping patterns. Prior to these past four months or so, I was getting between 8 and 10 hours of uninterrupted sleep every night. Looking back even further, my sleeping patterns have changed based on my activities, but yet and still, I hadn't experienced precognitive dreams to this extent.

My Current Practice

My practice overall is extremely dependent on my mindset. Much of my practice involves nothing more than pursuing and solidifying already instilled beliefs about the reality in which we live. I attribute a lot of it to my spiritual views, and less to my actual active "practice." So to be safe, not much has changed as far as overall practice is concerned. Many of my views change regularly, but the overall perceptions have remained for quite some time now. My lucid dreaming practice has actually lessened over the years. By that I don't mean that I don't experience them as often, but am less inclined to pursue them directly, followed by logging each event. It's not so much due to time constraints, though it does play a factor, but it's more so based on a lack of interest in doing so right now. I still experience lucid dreaming regularly, so it would be safe to say I have one on a nightly basis.

My involved astral projection practice has actually increased over the last month. This is where much of my interest comes from, because out of everything, this is the one thing that has changed the most. I felt the need to improve my skills in this field to sort of "loosen" the hold my physical body or rather "consciousness" has on my astral body. If you're lost, I don't blame you, but my current view on the astral body vs physical body is that it is mostly a factor of shifting your consciousness and awareness. The harder you hold onto the physical world as your reality, the harder it is to shift it into just your astral body. I've felt more disconnected from our physical world, no doubt do to my ever growing spirituality, and because of this, felt the need to make astral projection and interaction with that plane a lot easier. What I ended up doing was actively astral projecting as opposed to falling into a lucid dream first. The issue I faced when doing this was fatigue.

College is never something that people call "easy." With the other things that were on my shoulders just piling up, the workload from this past semester has been higher than I'm use to. So when we incorporate this, with my lack of sleep, we find fatigue, and lots of it. Unfortunately, the only time I really feel comfortable to practice astral projection right now is before sleep. This is a big no no typically, because the practitioner is most likely going to fall asleep during the practice because of the relaxation exercises. Even in knowing this, I really haven't felt like I had a choice in the matter, so I persisted anyhow. Well, not to my surprise I've been falling asleep either right before a projection, or right after some deep breathing.

Recent Astral Projection Experiences

After falling asleep I've experienced some fairly "odd" things. It would appear that I'm projecting at times right before sleeping, but then am caught in some form of dual awareness. It doesn't even make sense to me when I say that because when you're sleeping your consciousness is elsewhere as your subconscious or unconscious mind takes over. So the fact that It feels as though I'm aware that I'm sleeping, yet lingering in an uncontrolled projection is hard to truly grasp, even in writing.

Craziness aside, this is what it feels like. It's almost like sleep paralysis, in which you are awake and know you are awake, yet your body is sound asleep so you have no control over it by usual means. When I'm in this position I don't really know how to break free of it. I've tried various things but then either fall right asleep, wake up, or wake up the next morning wondering when I actually fell asleep, and what happened.

What's This Got To Do With Precognition?

Well, something I've never really taken interest in was "teleporting" to the "future" by means of astral projection. I have heard of numerous people attempting and succeeding in this act though. It is apparently no different than moving from point A to point B, as time nor distance has any relevancy in the Astral. The need I see to alleviate myself of stress has led to some serious time management activities. These activities have included making detailed to-do lists and placing these feelings of "stress" on the back-burner until the unfinished, or soon to come annoyances have successfully passed.

I believe that somehow it is possible that prior to falling asleep, and during projection practice my thoughts drift to some degree on these issues. When this occurs, it seems as though I may fall asleep, and my astral self may leap forward to a specific event, or place of relevancy to whatever issue I was considering so that I could make "time" in a sense by living it or seeing what was to come in more detail before it occurs. I think it would make sense and may be a regular event that happens to us all. The unconscious minds way of fixing an issue with the least amount of conscious exertion. Somehow, because I am trapped in this odd limbo, as I sleep this information is then fed to me and I remember it and even see it as it occurs on a somewhat conscious level.

All of the dreams I have been experiencing have been relevant either to a situation I was facing, to something I was stressed about, something I was curious about, or even just what my last thoughts before bed were on. So this is all I have to go on right now. It makes sense to me I guess. It's almost as if this odd state of limbo acts as a sort of Psychical Google that fetches whatever information I need, and delivers it in a way I can understand. There are some holes in this idea though, or perhaps those holes are due to my current ideas of what exactly is relevant to these experiences.

I don't understand how this would cause me to wake up periodically throughout the night. It may not be related to this though, but I'm curious to know the difference, if any, in these events if I were to get a full and uninterrupted night of sleep. My waking up may be due to my experience in lucid dreaming though. Something to do with noticing a difference in a dream that triggers a light bulb moment, and as opposed to becoming aware of a dream, because of the "state" I'm in it results in my waking up.

Also, if I wasn't stressed, would I be in the position to go through this still? I'm not quite sure as of this very moment, and haven't really taken the time to look at it in depth or experiment with different scenarios or manually doing this, so the information I have from personal experimentation is pretty much none at this point. In fact, in just writing this I have put more consistent thought into the situation than I have up until this point.

Coincidentally, reading over that last paragraph I experienced another Deja Vu moment relating to a dream I had a month or more ago. All of this does put me into a very interesting state. I'm in a position where I have seen various images, many of which change when they come to pass, but all of which are somehow relevant to me. I would love to see if I could bring in more information of topics that do not directly relate to me, to see if the overall "future" is as subjective as impressions of my own tend to be. I can say there is a clear relationship between astral projection, lucid dreaming, and precognition now, after thinking about it more. The true question would be, is this relationship based on an understanding and developed conscious "skill" in these areas? Or is it more so based on the conscious passive acceptance of it?

If you were to talk to me regularly, you would know that I feel as though all areas of spiritual development and practice are connected, and once you develop your understanding and acceptance of this, they are all developed in one motion through means of meditation and intention, as opposed to hard "training" in any one given area. So for me, seeing a connection between the unconscious mind and the conscious mind through these means is very intriguing.

It could also be that because I am in this limbo like state, I am just more conscious to my mind "downloading" information from the "Matrix" or the "Akashic Records," both of which are essentially different words describing the stored information of everything that was, is, and will be. Many spiritualists believe we are innately connected to this and constantly receiving and giving information. Many Technical and Coordinate Remote Viewers believe that we can "link" up to this force at will to get whatever information we are seeking. I've also experienced this in remote viewing, but never such a direct conscious connection, because in remote viewing you distract the conscious mind to allow the unconscious to do the work. Maybe all of this is just me being in a conscious state of seeking that specific information out.

Either way, despite what these experiences are or might be, if it is related to the first possibility, and we have the potential to "send" the astral body to do something while only remaining partially aware of this, the world of possibilities drastically increases. It's not so much that this would be a useful practice, as it would be interesting for the sake if spiritual, and even scientific research and discovery. I suppose now all I can do is wait, watch, and continue doing what I'm doing. I'll be sure to keep you guys posted on any new developments, especially after the next two weeks when the current semester is over and my sleep cycle once again changes.