Still having huge problems getting past hypnagogic

[holy reality]

Okay, I feel like I made a lot of progress today.

I wavered in and out of the hypnagogic state many times within the past hour and 20 minutes, I'd say 3-4 staple points in which I was only able to remain "conscious" for like 3 seconds inbetween each gap session (like when i go into hallucinations and start falling asleep)

so What I found during the last one is that when I feel myself coming out, I look at my eyelids... I let myself waver in and out a few more times until I feel very disconnected and mentally unstable and unable to concentrate at all.

When this happens, right as I catch myself losing it, or coming out of it, i forcibly exhale and focus on my inner eyes and do breath awareness with very forceful exhalatoins whenever I feel like I'm losing it... I stare at the blackness and just try to toy with the falling asleep sensations, trying to keep them there while keeping my focus on the breathing and the blackness, and on my heavy body.

What happened was I would feel my fingers twitch and constrict, perhaps paralyzing, while I was doing this, and I do think they really were paralyzed at times, though it may have just been psychological.

I definitely felt a twitch while doing this though and felt totally incapable of moving my fingers.

The only problem is by staying focused this long I ended up snapping out of the in/out process and then I thought "well I must be in a trance" so I tried to move my fingers and they moved no problem, no paralysis.

But I think I'm on the verge of figuring it out, it's a very fine tuned give and take between focus and chaos and I think I need to just once in a while bring the focus up then let it decay a bit then bring it up as to not ever completely lose control of my mind, but to in times be very out of it, as to gradually and gently and constantly coax myself deeper and deeper into a trance.

I must have been pretty deep in the few fleeting moments that I lost control of my mind though because I am absolutely freezing cold right now, shaking and chattering like crazy and my muscles feel very lethargic.

[cube]

I have found that breathing in deeply when I'm hypnagogic helps to raise energy to send me into an OBE or start hearing spirit voices.

[holy reality]

well i still can't get there and i don't think i actually progressed at all

when i start drifting in and out of consciousness i apply the breath awareness and stuff and it makes me feel kind of weird but i never go into a paralysis and stuff, it just eventually brings me back to a normal state of mind.

i have no idea what i'm doing wrong

[ralphm]

I have gone through similar states, the best thing I do is to wake in the middle of the night since that puts me back to sleep but I will wake with vibes and project. It seems like there are lots of states that are somewhat easy to get to but actually projecting just doen't seem that easy.I usually get stay awake but my body feels like lead, my heart is fast, vibrations are going up and down my body but I just can't go any farther. To me hypnogogic seems one step closer but when i've reached it sleep is next.

[Blackstream]

I sometimes have that problem.  At any time of the day, I can lay down and get to a state where I'm deeply relaxed and have to try to move (as opposed to trying to keep still).  I can sorta feel vibrations and I'm in tune enough with my body to feel energy a bit better.  The hypnagogic imagary gets up to blurry flashes of light, with the occasional small clear .2 second image and sometimes swirling clouds of color.  And this is where I stay.  I don't feel vibrations, I don't get paralyzed, I don't see much imagary.  I try falling, visualizing light, climbing down the ladder with out breaths, feeling around for the key to vibrations and so on, and it usually doesn't work.  

Ironically, the one time it did work, I was wanting for some bonked up reason a succubus to come and do me, and the instant I said "I want it", I felt the vibrations, especially in my head, and some head and stuff.  But it just stopped after a bit... it's possible I projected and didn't get the shadow memories into me however, and I've resolved next time to hop back in as soon as I hop out.  Btw, I don't recommend this technique for very obvious reasons:)  It's possible that the reason why I felt the sensations right when I said that was not because I actually called something over that tried to molest me, but because I had some surrender in that thought, and it was the surrender to the process which allowed the obe to start.  

The only way I can go beyond this stage usually is to do a interrupted sleep technique usually, since my meditation skills are way sup-par.  I'm sure that I could surmount this if I could bring myself further down in trance, but right now I'm a tad bit slow.

[holy reality]

interrupted sleep is no problem for me, it's a piece of cake to project during the night

the past two nights in a row around 7 a.m. I can just say "hey i'll go into paralysis" and do it at the drop of the hat.

it's very light though and i'm not out very long, usually.

though last night my recurring themes of being raped popped back up... i  completely beat the thing down and set him on fire and did all sorts of stuff then talked to him, it's obvious to me he isn't real (though i think he is at the time) but I'm not sure why this started happening again other than that I wrote about it in a paper last night.

It might be due to feelings of gas or something biological going on in that area (given that I am a male and i called the figure a he you should be able to figure out how that could cause me to dream about such things being done to me) is about all I can think of, as the issues that would seem to make it manifest I have already more or less dealt with and accepted.

But anyway this was a somewhat isolated incident and it may have just happened due to me interpreting a weird experience and expecting it to be that old famliar thing going on again.

My problem with meditation (if you can call it that) is during the day, the hypnagogic state is NOT an interactive experience. I will be thinking, and I will verge off rack and lose focus. After a short or great while of time spent doing this passes, the time spent rambling off track starts becoming done unconsciously, sometimes taking on a different voice.

So it's like, how are you supposed to do anything if you aren't conscious? There has to be a way to get into a LUCID hypnagogic state, I mean I can be aware that I'm hallucinating sometimes but If I try to do anything to it it stops.

So.

The answer may be extremely intense focusing and not allowing yourself to think at all, but I find that impossible. I can block verbal thoughts after a while, but then the unconscious ones take over, and I get too groggy and disoriented to try to silence them.

Breath awareness is perfect for that point in time but the problem is it is an energizing form of meditation, it seems to pull me away from the sleep state of mind, instead of going down (as in, down into paralysis) I go up... wherever that is.

Concidentally that "up" is very close to the hypnagogic state, it just has extremely different vivid but focused and non dissociated traits.. and the only hallucinations are floating colors, which I haven't had success in using to project. If I focus on them then I drift into unconsciousness, if I focus on breathing and them I just stay there forever and it eventually fades into a normal state of mind.

It's all very confusing.

I think I have something wrong with me in terms of sleep becuase it's very hard to stay asleep for more than 3 full hours, usually 2. And I don't ever seem to go very deep. So maybe this is why I am jolted out of the hypnagogic state no matter what and I can't get deep enough in it to come out into vibrations.

The only way for me to fall asleep in a directed manner is to initiate the state then stop caring about it and to move around a bit and fidget a lot...

otherwise I tend to just think forever and never get tired.

[holy reality]

.... state.


I guess a month or two ago I made a post about this, and I'm still kind of stuck here, I took a break for a while and stopped caring about OBEs and lucid dreams and such, and subsequently have had NO obes during the night and had a huge reduction in lucid dreams.

This has it's advantages given that when I do have a good dream I tend to enjoy it more becuase I think it's real, and becuase I keep doing the same unproductive things in my lucid dreams over and over again... and becuase it might help me sleep better.

But at any rate I've still been trying to project during the day at least twice a week usually, and I'm getting quite good at getting myself into the hypnagogic state within a moderate amount of time (it's hard to measure how long it takes but I think recently I made it in under 10 minutes having come home from a mind numbing day of school)

So what happens is I'll just try everything I can think of to set a chaotic wave of uncontrolled thoughts in motion, at first they start out really mild and I'm in control of them.. after a while they last longer and longer and when I suddenly realize I've gone way off track I get feeling very tired and heavy and sometimes get that rush you get while falling asleep.

So I just keep doing this until I get to a point where I feel that I cannot possibly maintain normal thinking for more than 30 seconds before I go on another brief and intense hypnagogic journey (sometimes I don't remember anything from them, sometimes I do) and it's at this point that I try to gain control of my mind and force myself past this borderline alpha waves state I'm sitting on top of and down very deeply (yet consciously) into it.

And this is where I fail.

I can for example try to do rope... this lasts for 5 seconds and I'm dead inside for a while until I pop back into normal thinking accompanied by a rush of adrenaline, heaviness, and sometimes vibrations (this rush only lasts less than a second and I'm not in control during it)

I can repeat a mantra such as "go deeper, go deeper, go deeper..." but after a while the mantra is just mumbled up nonsense and I hit that gap again and then rush back into consciousness.

I can make images somewhat manifest, but when they get vivid and 3d it's beyond my control.

See this is very frustrating because I would be fine if I could even just take a fricking nap for a while, I don't have to OBE, but I can't do either.

This hypnagogic state is not like the one you get during the middle of the night where you can sit back and go "wow, look at all this cool random stuff going on" ... it's not conscious at all.. it's... "unconscious" my normal mind is shut off and my subconscious feels like it's turned on... with me extremely passively observing, sometimes so passive that I don't even remember what was going on unless I think very hard about it in the 5-30 seconds I have before it starts back up again.

I know this is an ideal state to be in, I know that I'm right on the verge of projecting. I know that my body is going to sleep for brief moments and that this is the best potential of hitting body asleep mind awake that you can probably have before you drift off into a mild sleep for a while.

What I don't know, is how to maintain consciousness and drive myself down inside.

Okay I'm going to try to illustrate this somehow.

c.........G.......X....|...............Z......u

c=normal waking consciousness
G=groggy consciousness in which transition into the hypnagogic state will be likely (say 70%) if nothing distracts my attention.
X=my sort of "base consciousness" which once I feel that I'm there I start really trying to project and to seize control of the randomness.
|=the border between consciousness and unconsciousness, the entrance to the hypnagogic state.
Z=completely out of control vivid hallucinations, a very deep feeilng...
u=where i would consider sleep to start up.

Now I will generally take a while to just do relaxation techniques and let my mind roam, then I will do everything in my power to jump start the hypnagogic state, such as thinking a question and attempting to force the voices out so that they can answer it on it (but ensuring that i do not consciously try to answer it) or sometimes focusing on  repating image or sound inside my head.

This usually works fairly well and I hit G... as soon as I hit G I will periodically enter the hypnagogic state (not deeply) and I will have a rebound, comparable to a slingshot effect... it will send me back up to G, but it will be a smooth transition.

The more this happens, the deeper I go, and the higher the two opposite rebound extremes are.

Once I get mounted into X I tend to transition to Z very quickly (smoothly though) and then I am chaotically shot back up to G, sometimes all the way up to c, and then I quickly transition back down to X and begin to start the process over.

Now once I hit X it seems I can only do this a certain number of times before I'm flung into normal thinking and my brain decides it's had enough of this... however X seems the optimal point to be as I cascade very quickly into completely bodily unwareness yet still have a point of solid thinking before hand to try and direct where I'm going.

Basically this gives me at best 1 minute of thought before going in, and usually about 15 seconds of it.

So I'm here, and each time I hit X I can decide to try something, and carry that something out for a while.

My problem is once I enter the state, I have no control over what happens to me. Sometimes I can feel the random thoughts starting to end and can attempt to refuel them as to prevent a rebound but usually not.

Monroe would say I'm meeting criterion A, and that I should focus on the inside of my eyelids and watch the colors...

That's all good and well and when I read that I thought for sure it would work, but no... it is too much work for my mind and I lose control of it and start entering semi dream like scenes...

But I stress that I have zero control and cannot fully enter the scenes, I'm just a passenger in my mind at this point.

So I'm sorry for making this so long but I really want to try and express in as detialed of a way that I can what exactly is going on inside my mind.

I know that I am so close to projecting at will that it isn't even funny... hell I feel the vibrations sometimes during the brief and hugely disorienting rebounds into consciousness.... and I can't stress enough how violent and sudden and chaotic this slingshot feeling is... it's like... sometimes a huge flash of light coupled with feeling like I've started falling really fast and am getting really heavy coupled with vibrations coupled with sometimes a loud sound. Basically it's like you have stared to fall asleep in a car but you don't want to sleep, so you jolt awake suddenly...

This does not happen WHILE falling "asleep" though it happens when my random chain of thoughts and images suddenly ends without warning and I FLING back into semi-consciousness (usually point X)

all I need is to be able to keep my mind awake and alert while this is going on and I won't have a slingshot and I'll stay in bodily unawareness and I'll be able to do what I wish with the hallucinations or be able to project...

The only new ideas I can think of is "try this sitting in a chair so your brain knows you aren't trying to go to sleep" so I'm going to give that a shot now that I feel fairly confident in my abillity to get to the hypnagogic state at will... or "don't do it when you get home from school because you're tired then"

But has anyone gone through something like this before? whether you are having the same problems I am, or y ou know what I'm talking about but you are capable of controlling it....

I'd really like help. I feel that this is more or less "my method" and I know that in theory it would work.. I just need to be able to gain control of my mind once it starts to deeply enter the hypnagogic state.