Hello Jim (and forum members) --

An acquaintance who follows my journal notified me about this site. My journal's very ambitious title is "The Reality Engineering Handbook"--kind of the same vein as "The Universe-Solved!". :) That title is a holdover from many years ago, when I was certain the secrets of the universe were about to fall into my lap due to an unusual propensity for lucid dreaming. Since I'm also an electrical engineer by degree, I thought my growing freakish talent would lead to discoveries that would cause a revolution in mainstream science in no time flat.

But...as I don't see any Nobel Prizes on my shelf, it's safe to say this has not yet been achieved. It's not for lack of trying! I interview dream characters at every opportunity, and attempt to do what I can to use solid methodologies to reduce the noise of my perceptual biases and get whatever "signal" I can.

Since there are 300 or so dreams in the log, I'm not sure where to start in offering a tailored introduction to my experiences. But picking through the "matrix" tag here are a couple that you might find interesting... given the emphasis of this site:

http://realityhandbook.livejournal.com/23619.html
http://realityhandbook.livejournal.com/13682.html
http://realityhandbook.livejournal.com/22692.html

I assure you it only goes on from there, and you can read the ones tagged matrix... but there are other categories:

http://realityhandbook.livejournal.com/tag/

Programmed reality is actually a model that could explain a whole lot of different wacky experiences. I put it this way: whether the Bible is historically accurate or not, you could make an online game in which every event described did happen (WOJ: World of Jesus?). So even though I've met Jesus in dreams, I keep in mind that I've also met him on LiveJournal...so I try not to jump to conclusions:

http://jesus.livejournal.com/

You have my word that the dream "anomalies" I am documenting are not things I make up for sport. This is what happened to me, and continues to happen. Though for purposes of readability I decided to do a dialogue format and put things in quotes instead of constant paraphrase--it scans better. So take precise wording in conversations with a grain of salt.

In any case, I like what you're doing here... and it's nice to find a community of people who are open-minded and prepared to consider wild ideas. The success of movies like The Matrix presenting programmed reality is a double-edged sword; on the one hand, people know what you're talking about. On the other hand, it spurs responses like "Oh, but it's just a film! You've been influenced by that and your subconscious is just processing it." Well, while they're at it, should I just say they're a figment of my subconscious? Sigh.

I welcome comments on my journal. There are essays, open letters, a couple of hypnosis transcripts. All the material is public and there are no "locked" or hidden entries.

Regards,
æ

Hi Jim, thanks for the welcome...



Be careful what you wish for, it may come true! Ten years ago when I had my first lucid dream, I predicted dream-awareness and dream-control was a curiosity that wasn't going to change my life. Perhaps a "Stupid Brain Trick", a lot like reading text upside down or learning to see Magic Eye images. Especially based on what I was reading in books and on the web, it just looked like a known and mapped brain phenomenon you could use for a better kind of imagination (Swedish-Bikini-Team-in-my-personal-oversize-hot-tub, learning to fly, etc.) Seemed harmless at the time and rather exciting.

Today the evidence is scattered, but all arrows point in one direction: I've been in contact with many elements that are not usefully modeled as coming from within. It's looks like the Matrix/ThirteenthFloor/VanillaSky may be on target, and we are a subspace of a greater programmed reality that has some capacity for influencing us. Yet since I haven't pinned down anything provably useful to bring back to this world for verification, it's not so much fun as it is disturbing and frustrating. (Especially with the added worry that being lewd with the Swedish Bikini Team could be a red mark in terms of measuring my maturity for being told more profound things...!)

Though the dreams, even the bad ones, aren't so much a problem. The hardest part for me personally is finding kindred spirits in the communities that discuss lucid dreams. The newbies will write posts like "saw my grandfather, and then I sez 'hey your dead, how can we talk, this must be a dream', and he smild and I woke up. Wazzit mean?" That's 90% of the posts and most people never get much farther. I don't fault them for being excited, because it's quite the uncanny feeling even for an incident *I* wouldn't bother to think about nowadays. But what I don't get is why they would they want to hear someone tell them "I communicate with angels, and an angel told me your dead grandfather is trying to talk to you and comfort you from beyond the grave?"

Plus, people pay for the New-Age nonsense. And barely anyone reads my journal. All it does is feed my suspicion that this IS a programmed reality, and we're surrounded by non-player characters. :)

So enough of my little puffed-up tirade, but the point was: my selfish interests would like for you to have some deep and convincing experiences in lucid dreams, so I'll at least have someone to talk about it with. That said, if anyone gives you a blue pill at some point, save it for a rainy day (and get an extra for me). This gets rough!



I can't exactly tell if you're joking... but if you're serious, I'm happy to try that, or any experiments you suggest. I can't imagine the differences of word choice yielding significantly different results than for questions like "Hey I'd like to meet Jesus". Though as it so happens, I actually did bring up the architect from the Matrix in a conversation once:

http://realityhandbook.livejournal.com/18596.html

As for "analoguing" or "pixelated worlds" being my concepts, well... I'll reiterate, they're not mine. Nothing I say on that journal is intentionally made up. It's not a science fiction storytelling experience, and it's not a part of a greater Alternate Reality Game (that I know about).

If you have the time to answer the question of your disposition towards my experiences, I'd ask you (and your forum readers): do you classify my journal as the rantings of a madman? Or do you think it is shedding light on the possibilities of how some bigger system works? I guess if you don't have interest to dig into more than what I've linked, I'd like to know what blocks your interest. Because in a sense, you are precisely my target audience.

Regards,
æ