Meditation (Day 131)

Prime number day, woo!

Prep

Motivations:

• unity of mind
• practice intentionality
• subduing distractions
• seeing what adept meditation feels like/is
• overcoming the illusion of self

Intentions for the day:

• Prep posture as long as necessary, then set intention to sit completely still
• Before starting to focus on meditation object, cultivate joy
• Body-scan during the "focus on the breath throughout the body" beginning part of meditation (stage 5)
• Body-scan when few distractions and when focus not as vivid as could be (stage 5)
• Focus exclusively on the meditation object (stage 6)
  • usually the breath at the nose
  • also the body parts being scanned
• Keep awareness strong so that it can stop distractions and dullness from interfering
• Specifically be aware of posture and do not give it attention
• Do not feed distractions with attention (even with labeling now), instead just list the ones you remember during post-meditation reflection
• Increase the scope of breath attention to more body parts to help subdue subtle distraction

Distractions to look out for:

• Cardcaptor Sakura
• Body-scan
• Cat
• Wife
• Dreaming?
• Fantasy
• Lovecraft Country
• Memories
• Reflection
• Meta
• Outside
• Planning
• Posture
• Shoulder
• Swallowing
• Vision
• Blinking
• Wisdom
• Work

Post-Meditation (1030)

Today (and for the week) meditation is during primary opslead, so I have to have phone nearby and let slack messages ping. And read them in case I need to act immediately. Slack messages did reach me, but I did not need to act on them. I made sure to keep the breath in conscious awareness, and returned to the session as soon as I could.

Not ideal, but acceptable for the temporality of the week.

Still feels like I'm gaining on learning to focus exclusively, but there's still a lot of leakiness.

Dream

Intention (2310 the night before)

Flexibility may be required this coming week. OpsLead and all that. Priorities are sleep, first-and-foremost, then habits that increase dream recollection and lucid dreams.

Until I get paged at night, however, I will continue my habits as is.

Watch myself fall asleep. WBTS. WILD. Incubate strawberry donuts. Wake up at 0720.

Bed time.

Driving a Bed

I feel like I have had several dreams to process this one already. In my head, I was rehearsing the dream, but now it seems I've lost most of it.

There is a large chunk at the beginning missing but what I remember is:

A highway has been built over a particularly busy bit of road. From what I can tell, they did a good job. I am driving my bed down the road. I turn onto the highway when given the green light at the new intersection that I am quite impressed with.

It gets dark very quickly. I realize the highway doesn't have enough lighting and there's no lights to use on my bed. I remember being chewed out for driving this bed in the dark.

Now, I am going downhill, driving next to a car. I realize I have no breaks either. There's construction ahead. I tell the other driver I'm going off road to avoid a crash. They seem appreciative.

I go off road. It is pitch black. There is this gravel texture vibrating through the bed. And then there's nothing. I'm falling. There is a sudden stop.

A large thud.

A loud crack.

The pitch black gains a static, glitchy filter.

Am I dying?

Am I dead?

I wake up.

A lingering tickle encompasses my body. I play the dream over in my head, including a beginning I forgot. It'd be good to write the dream and do WBTS, I think. But I fall asleep. I feel like I fall asleep and dream an abstract dream that processes this one.

Wake-Back-to-Sleep (logged at 0620 this morning)

A late WBTS. I wrote down the above dream and am now going to try to sleep. WILDs take too long (at this point in my capability, anyways), so going to try incubation.

Strange Session

I am having a therapist appointment. I am in a dream bedroom connected to a meeting room where various folk are having an unrelated meeting. I am having an appointment with a therapist I haven't had before. In my mind, it's some sort of substitute setup.

A friend of mine comes out of the meeting room and crosses through the bedroom on his way to the exit (the only way out of the meeting room is through the bedroom). He tries to start a conversation, but I tell him I'm in therapy.

When he leaves, I wonder how he walked past the wire connecting my laptop to the TV in the room. The laptop is on the bed I'm laying on and the TV is on the wall across the path he walked. I don't linger on the thought.

I switch to head phones as more people leave.

Eventually, my friend comes back. He needs to tell me something. I look at my watch: 425. "5 minutes," I tell him. That's not good enough, it seems. I look at my watch again. 90. I realize I'm looking at my heartbeat. I see the little dot moving around the number. "4 minutes, 20 seconds," I change my answer.

But my friend is telling me that our rental on the unit has expired and we need to leave. I end my therapy early.

Wake (logged at 0730 this morning)

I accidentally did a reality check and didn't realize its implications! Looked at that watch three times! So silly. It did kinda come across as the dream trying to tell me I'm dreaming, in retrospect. Especially how the friend kept trying to tell me something.

Perhaps I should set an intention to listen for my mind telling me I'm dreaming.

Pre-nap (1340)

Opslead stuff may interrupt nap. Not going to go too deep on nap stuff today. Want to carve more time for work.

Post-nap (1402)

Nap continues to be good. Visuals were almost convincing today. Some interesting hypnagogy, but don't want to dwell. Just want to reward it enough to encourage it coming again during a better time to assess.

General Thinking

No real experiments this week, as I'm opslead. Though if I change my mind, we'll see. Going to try to make sure I prioritize maintenance ASAP if an opslead page interupts the normal flow.