Korpo

I recently had an experience that reminded me of the concept of "psychological time" - our experience of passing time in environments in which time does not exist as it does in physical reality.

What happened was this:

I seemed to experience events comprising several weeks within one dream experience. I was convinced I moved through a series of events and that this was my reality. It concerned being given a free trip, preparing for it and finally boarding the plane.

When I was aboard the plane, I wanted to send a message to my benefactor, only to realise that I had not told the person I would stay with that I would come. This was so totally outside of my own expectations regarding my behavior that I realised that the experience was a dream or something similar.

I was very surprised to say the least. I was now within my mind present in the experience and could start to unravel it. I had taken everything that led to this point for real, and now that I had found too crass an inconsistency to accept, it started to unravel. I started to notice all those other inconsistencies I had so blithely ignored.

This is of course very common for many other who have become lucid in dreams before, but I was also on to something else here. For the moment I could not tell what had been real and what part of this alternate timeline. So I went backwards through the experience to trace it back to its beginning - in my mind that is, but still within the experience itself.

As I did that I realised that I had this illusionary sensation of believing weeks had passed. When I tried to look where it had come from I only found very few actual events had happened. I realised that to my consciousness the flow of key events had been enough to create the illusion of time in this experience. My mind just had skipped from event to event relying on the feeling of "This is real" and "This is time passing" and had ignored all details.

This is very similar to the experience of nonlucidity itself. Just as my mind had ignored all inconsistent details (for example I had tried to send a mobile text from a flying airplane), it also ignored all the missing bits. It just relied on the sensation. When looking back at the experience later on as I wrote it down I realized that there is more to this sensation than I first thought.

There is an inherent trust into the experiences our senses provide us with. From these we construct everything - the passing of time, the experience of the reality around us and the feeling that this reality is real, solid and conforming to an expected set of rules. We even do this in nonphysical reality to varying degrees. Our mind operates within the constraints of expectations and relies on the sense impressions and this feeling.

This is essentially what Seth (and Kurt) have called camouflage. It is our belief into the reality we experience. This belief lasts till we activate the 7th chakra of an energy body to see beyond the camouflage of a plane, and that is also why the 7th chakra is fundamentally linked with lucidity: It lets us see through the illusion we so willingly accepted before. When the 7th chakra is fully activated for any energy body the illusion falls away and the real parameters of that reality become apparent.

I believe this happened here. As I reviewed the experience I just had had I could see the constrast. When I had moved through it "forward" the 7th chakra had been dormant. The illusion had been perfect in the sense that my mind relied on the feeling of trust into its senses. Then lucidity kicked in, and with it the 6th chakra. It provided the means to analyze these inconsistencies. When I encountered fundamental inconsistencies in the reality I was experiencing, the 7th must have kicked in for good and I pierced the veil of illusion for a moment.

And what an illusion it had been! The sensation that weeks had passed relied on very few events as props. The senses readily transmitted these spoonfed events and in the mind a whole reality was created within, unquestioned. A reality that came loose once questioned.

When moving through all the parts of the experience I encountered another phenomenon: I found a thread of events that felt too real to challenge. It seemed like I was working on a programming project with a coworker, and some impressions of this had interwoven with the other events. When trying to challenge this as unreal it did not go away. But at the same time I realised there had not been a real programming project, and when I tried to look at its details, nothing would really come forward but the sensation of having done some programming, some designing.

Only when writing the adventure down for myself did I get some clue about this. I think it was the part of myself that was aiding in creating the experience. It cooperated with another entity to create this simulation. Part of this awareness still existed within the experience, but was only available as symbolical representation - work done on a programming project. That's why it did not go away. It was the most real aspect of the experience, its actual cause and the process of creating and maintaining it.