#psychomancy

Dream States

Sleep states are fun to consciously control for various reasons. They can be used to view and analyze our memory and sense of self in an indirect way. The feelings and ideas produced by sleep feel profound and vivid, and can be used for creative inspiration.

The characters and places we encounter in our dreams are reflective of the things we have experienced and imagined. We have dedicated systems of memory for things like our stereotypes of people and places, as well as our relationship to our environment and to ourselves. When we are in a dream state, we see the boundaries between ideas contained within our memory distort and change, leading to the experience of a world created entirely from the contents of our knowledge and memory.

Sleep is essential for functioning. Contrary to what one would expect, the brain is active even during sleep. When we sleep, the brain goes through a process of regulating physical and mental functions. Sleep is essential for memory consolidation. It is difficult to retain and recall information that hasn’t yet been consolidated during sleep.

There are several distinct stages of sleep. Older psychological texts used to break these up into five stages of sleep. Today, most researchers divide the stages of sleep into four stages: NREM 1, NREM 2, NREM 3, and REM sleep. REM stands for rapid-eye movement. During REM sleep, the eyes move back and forth quickly, hence the name. NREM stands for non-rapid eye movement. In these stages of sleep, the eyes are still, unlike in REM sleep.

Staying lucid during the different stages of sleep is an interesting experience that many enjoy and find thought provoking. Each stage of sleep is experienced by the dreamer in a different way. Studies have been conducted on participants who were woken up during the different stages of sleep and asked what their dreams were like. People who were woken up during light sleep felt as though they had entered an immersive daydream but hadn’t quite fallen asleep. People woken up during deep sleep (NREM 3) reported feeling fully immersed in their mind, but that the dream felt more thought-like and involved mundane subjects, activities, and places. People who were woken up during REM sleep reported vivid, surreal, and fantastical dreams.

Different mystical traditions delineate between three distinct types of dream-work which map onto lucid dreaming during the three stages of sleep. Hedgecrossing occurs during NREM 1 and NREM 2 sleep. During this stage of sleep, if the dreamer is lucid, their thoughts become random, vivid, immersive, and contain spontaneous events that feel profound. Their thoughts feel out of their control. Spiritual traditions use this stage of sleep for the purpose of contacting spirits or interpreting some aspect of their lives. 

Lucid dreaming during deep sleep is experienced as astral projection. Astral projection stereotypically involves the perception of leaving the body and walking into the world just outside of the self. Traditionally, the world becomes more random and mystical as the person moves further from their body, which maps onto the idea that the change in sleep states causes a subjectively perceived change in experience while lucid dreaming.

Lucid dreaming during REM sleep is what people traditionally think of when they think of lucid dreaming. REM sleep dreams depart from the normal laws of reality the most severely of all of the stages of sleep. Because of this, lucid dreaming can easily be used to generate creative ideas or to explore themes from one’s life through the vivid feelings produced by the dream. In addition, it is possible to attain some degree of psychological healing through dreams because of their connection to our memory, and because dream experiences feel vivid and thus their content and our reaction to them can significantly impact us even when we are awake.

I will describe how to attain each dream state in the next section. In a subsequent section, I will explain how spiritual practitioners approach dream work. I will then explain how to use dream experiences in a constructive way (such as through dream analysis, creative inspiration, and overcoming traumas and internal conflicts through dream role play) as an alternative psychological technique. 

[ If you liked this, check out my book, The Path: Psychomancy. It goes over this particular topic in addition to covering how to practice and understand other occult and alternative psychological techniques.

https://www.amazon.com/Path-Psychomancy-Astora-Diam-ebook/dp/B08F2YD1GM

Eyyy, finally finished covering all the damage types. You know what that means? Any Spells for Elements sets that come out after this will just get weirder and weirder!

Our Ko-Fi: https://the-homebrewists.tumblr.com/ko-fi

Astral Projection

Astral projection is the act of lucid dreaming during deep sleep. Qualitatively, this state feels more mundane than a traditional lucid dream, and it feels more thought-like. As we enter deep sleep, we finally feel ourselves leave our body. Paradoxically, we are actually entering our memory, completely cut off from the external world. For a moment, we haven’t yet forgotten the rules of external reality or the context we fell asleep in. Our short term memory takes a short amount of time to clear, and in that time when we first enter an astral state we experience ourselves as leaving our body where we left off before we forget where we were when we fell asleep as our previous circumstance is cleared from our short term memory. Some people feel vibrations; other people feel nothing at all as they transition from light sleep to deep sleep.

The general framework for astral projecting is as follows: lay down in a comfortable location; focus on staying awake as you slowly fall asleep. Eventually, you will become overwhelmingly tired that it is almost beyond your capability to hang on to your conscious awareness. Continue to stay focused and eventually, your body will feel strange in some way. Different people experience this change differently. It can be difficult to get up and to exit the body; no longer being able to move the body means you are in an astral state. Eventually, if you stay awake and keep trying to interact with the world, you will leave your body.

This is a good framework, although to properly associate this state of mind for your deliberate use later, I recommend a slight permutation to the classic technique. Before laying down to astral project, enter into your mind’s eye. See a green glowing 2 in the middle of a field of green roses. The sky above is filled with green petals. Turn around and see a door with the letter B glowing green. Reflect on your intention and enter the door; it should be dark. This signals to your mind that you are beginning to focus with the intention of astral projecting. Some people might want to stay immersed in the mind’s eye and imagine a green landscape beyond the door; a green hedge maze with infinite twists and turns, and green marble fountains and benches. You will completely enter your internal landscape when you fall into a deep sleep. This is similar to hedgecrossing, and it is easy to get stuck in a hedgecrossing state and it can be hard to transition to an astral state, although some do it this way. It is important to fall asleep in astral projection, whereas in hedgecrossing it is important to stay aware as you are near sleep. In an astral state, you completely lose touch with the external world and your internal world becomes your entire reality.

Uses

Astral projection is fun. The vivid emotions provoked by this state of mind can be entertaining. It is interesting to watch the changes in cognition that accompany the different stages of sleep. It is possible to use lucid dreaming states in order to solve or work on personal problems. As in hedgecrossing, analyzing and interacting with the content of dreams can be highly meaningful and symbolic.

Some people use dreams to help deal with psychological issues. Profound visions, such as religious experiences and positive dreams, can be used to help improve mood even if one isn’t spiritual. It is possible re-enact difficult memories or scary situations and to master them in dreams, which leads to one feeling more comfortable with that memory or situation in waking life.

Because of the way we think, we often encounter certain types of forms when we astral project. These forms reflect the way our brain encodes and interacts with the world around us in our memory. We have specific types of memory rather than just one unified type of memory; we have memories for knowledge, behaviors, habits, associations between ideas, and events. We also have further subdivisions in our memory for our perception of ourselves, others, places, cultural stereotypes, objects - and our relationships (which can take the form of opinions, a perception of personality, narrative plots, and themes) to these things. We can interact with these elements of our mind in a literal way in dream states and understand how our memory itself is structured.

People often encounter elements of our memory- and its ability to create novel versions of things it has introjected- in specific forms in our dreams. Some people refer to these constructs as deities or spirits, others see them as thoughtforms depending on if they subscribe to a spiritual belief system or not. We can perceive other people or ideals as characters that feel emotionally profound; we can perceive otherworldly places that feel as though they are beyond us. We can perceive the elements of our memory in a vivid way that is highly creative because of the memory shuffling that is occurring during memory consolidation which happens during sleep. I am convinced that dreaming is people watching the process of (some part of) memory consolidation in a literal way.

[ If you liked this, check out my book, The Path: Psychomancy. It goes over this particular topic in addition to other occult and alternative psychological topics.

https://www.amazon.com/Path-Psychomancy-Astora-Diam-ebook/dp/B08F2YD1GM

When  I attempt to conceptualize the idea of belief being a tool, I'm left  with several interpretations of this (that are not necessarily mutually  exclusive with each other). Roughly, it seems like "belief as a tool"  means that you either passionately believe in multiple things (as  needed,) or you believe in nothing and are motivated by something else  (utilitarian goals like - the belief that x y z spiritual paradigm helps  me to control my psychology):

1. No  belief whatsoever. Engagement in practice satisfies idle curiosity; at  the most extreme form of this mindset, there is no attachment to   spiritual or psychological attributions for how mystical experiences   operate. At the other end, a practitioner may take techniques from   different paradigms with some expectation- either from experience or   from a psychological study- that they work as psychological tools.   People who are cultural practitioners of the occult but do not have a   spiritual belief fit in here.

Mirror meditation is an unusual type of meditation. Most types of meditation function by anchoring our awareness on a specific point in the present. This allows us to stop automatic thought loops and stay present in a neutral reality, which shuts down things like the fight or flight response and can even reduce blood pressure over time.

Mirror meditation is slightly different; it lowers our psychological barriers in a slightly more intense way because it additionally overwhelms parts of our sensory processing - specifically, our cognitive capacity for facial recognition and interpretation. Specific regions in the brain (such as the fusiform face gyrus) handle the way in which we categorize objects, remember faces, and read facial expressions. Incomplete categorizations of human vs. object faces lead to psychological phenomena like the uncanny valley effect. Mirror meditation, like focal meditation, demands us to focus our attention on a single point. This point is our face reflected in a mirror.

Pick a reflective surface such as a mirror. Assume a comfortable posture in front of the mirror with your entire face visible. Some people prefer sitting, others prefer standing. Focus on a point on your face - perhaps between your eyes, the bridge of your nose, above your lips, and so on. Hold your focus on this point for a pre-set amount of time - ten to twenty minutes is a good length of time, but you can choose to hold this meditative activity for longer or shorter periods of time if preferred. Every time a thought distracts you, bring your attention back to your face. Eventually, you will reach a meditative state characterized by your face morphing and intersecting with concepts encoded in your memory (you can see the clear neurological basis for the state change and it’s quite interesting.) Don’t try to control the way your face may blur or shift or take on the characteristics of something unusual. Simply keep your attention focused on the act of focusing on a point on your face.

Occult techniques have captivated the minds of many over the years. Meditation, lucid dreaming, astral projection, hedge-crossing, ceremonial magick, shamanic soul retrieval, evocation, invocation, scrying, and tulpamancy are examples of topics covered within this text. This book explains magick, psychic powers, and spirit work from a purely psychological angle. Exercises within the book break down how to use these various techniques in a concise, step-by-step manner.

Hi, my name is Astora Diam, occult author. Almost 30 people have purchased my book, The Path: Psychomancy, which is 30 more people than I expected would purchase it.

The Path:Psychomancy is a book that goes over a variety of basic techniques encountered in spiritual paradigms repeatedly across time and place and breaks down how to use these techniques, what to use them for, and the underlying psychological principle by which they work. Meditation, thoughtform construction, the psychology of ritual, otherkin as a psychological construct, soul retrieval, and dream states are examples of topics covered in this book.