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Sound Advice: Strike a Note, Flex Your Brain, and Fly! © 2007 Lucy Gillis In 1992, I learned, while in a lucid dream, a method for initiating and maintaining flight in lucid dreams: . . . I find myself near railway tracks. Somehow it looks familiar but all wrong. I must be dreaming! Then I seem to be in the middle of a street. . . A man, grinning, walks close by me. I accidentally hit him with my hand as I try to rise in the air and fly. I apologize saying "I shouldn't have hit you." Still smiling, he walks away. I hop up into the air trying to fly. I get up only a few centimetres. . . . For whatever reason, I spontaneously begin to sing "Aaah-aah-aah" as I jump. I land on the ground, take a breath, jump, and sing again. I recall reading that Robert Butts* once used the sound of his snoring to try to propel himself elsewhere while in the "astral state." So I sing louder to see if it will help me get airborne, and sure enough, as I sing, I can fly higher. I keep this up, singing to gain altitude and fly with better control, and soon I am flying down the street. . . . Hovering above the street, I can see a huge aquarium in a storefront window. There are two white skates (flat fish), with a red house-like symbol on their backs; floating in the water, yet gently flapping their wing-like fins. I'm sure this symbol has to do with my own flying, I think to myself. As I fly past the skates I again sing "aaah" as loud as I can, but know that my sleeping body is soundless. I can feel the head and throat area of my sleeping body; it is motionless. I marvel at this feeling of duality; my solid sleeping body not moving, while my lighter dream throat vibrates. I can't tell which throat is inside the other. *Husband of Jane Roberts (Seth Material) Since that first experience of singing to fly, I have used the method of making sound as a means of propulsion in many lucid dreams. In some, I sing notes, in varying keys, and varying melodies. Sometimes, I sing well-known songs, or I’ll make up my own lyrics, borrowing a known melody. If I’m creating the song, I often sing about what I am doing or observing in the dream. (I’ve found this to be helpful for dream recall, particularly if the dream is lengthy.) Some songs or melodies seem better suited for different flying situations, (though I suspect that the more likely reason is due to my emotions and beliefs in a particular dream at a particular time). For instance, singing the chorus to k.d. Lang’s Constant Craving is especially useful when swooping low then soaring high. For a peppy quick flight, I usually sing part of Led Zeppelin’s Out on the Tiles: “As I walk down the highway all I do is sing this song Though now and then I substitute a few words to better fit my own situation: “As I fly up this sky-way all I do is sing this song Usually I find myself in a sunny country environment when I feel like using this tune. In a quiet night scene, if I want to fly vertically, very high into the sky, I’ll usually sing the opening sounds and lyrics to Pink Floyd’s Goodbye Cruel World. Despite the nature of the song lyrics, I find it a peaceful and powerful way to soar into the silent sky. The lyrics lose their meaning for me, and just become sound-movement. In fact, the single notes sung at the beginning of that tune are the notes I use most often in lucid dreams in order to sing-fly. On rare occasions I may hum a tune. Whether I have used sound or songs “outside” of myself in a dream, like using the sound of a radio instead of my own voice for movement, for instance, I don’t readily recall. Sometimes I’ll choose a single tone (like “ohm”, or like one of the notes sung at the beginning of the song just mentioned) and use that sound vibration to travel higher, or “deeper” into the dream. Sometimes the sound feels like it emanates from my throat or from my solar plexus (when I have the sense of a dream body). On some occasions, when I feel I am more a point of consciousness (without a body), I seem to travel on the sound, yet I create it too. It’s difficult to describe, but if I use one single tone, my awareness will travel “forward” or “upward” depending upon my intent, in a straight line, whereas, if I make a more undulating sound, I’ll get the sensation of traveling up and down, in a sinusoidal pattern. However, I’ve discovered that if I concentrate too much on the making of the sound in that bodiless state, that I soon form a body and lose the sense of just being a point of consciousness. So far, I’ve used this technique in a playful manner, whenever the mood strikes me, but I do suspect that there could be many other uses for sound in lucid dreams – perhaps healing with sound, for example? When I first read Dr. Stephen La Berge’s Lucid Dreaming, I was immediately taken with his laboratory experiments dealing with the connection between tasks performed in the lucid state and physiological effects noted in the body and/or brain. What was particularly interesting to me was the studies done on counting and singing in lucid dreams. Briefly, the brain is divided into two hemispheres, the left and the right. There are differences in left and right hemispheric brain wave activity, which depends upon the type of mental activity you are doing. In most awake people, solving mathematical problems or counting, increases activity in the left hemisphere. When performing creative tasks like painting or singing, the right hemisphere is more engaged.
In La Berge’s experiments, lucid dreamers would count and sing, when lucid, while their brain wave activity was being monitored. It was shown that an increase in left and right hemispheric brain activation was similar for the lucid dreaming and the waking brain. Interestingly, when doing the singing and counting experiment, subjects were also asked to imagine singing and counting when in the lucid dream state. In the waking state when they imagined these tasks, no significant increase in activity was detected in the right and left hemispheres of the brain, unlike when actually singing and counting. But when in the lucid state, and imagining singing and counting, increased brain wave activity was detected. It was as though they were awake. This suggested that tasks performed in the lucid dream state are more like doing the task than imagining it. If singing in the lucid state engages particular brain wave activity I wonder what happens if you “consciously” or “with intent” try to activate a part of your brain while in the dreamstate? I have once in a while had a lucid dream (and non-lucid dreams) in which I have “wrinkled” a part of my brain in order to move. Every time - so far - has been done without prior thought given to the method, it is just spontaneous and feels perfectly natural. I see a distant location, visually focus on it and then, with intent, will flex or “wrinkle” a fold in my brain. I actually feel the sensation of movement in my brain, and then I am propelled smoothly to the desired location. I wonder if there could be some kind of connection between the sensation of “brain flexing” and the sensation of movement. Could my intent to move in the dreamstate, rouse that part of the brain associated with movement? And is the “wrinkling or flexing” that I feel some subconscious or subliminal awareness of brain activity in that region? Or maybe it is not even connected to my intent to move – could it be perhaps associated with some physiological aspect of dreaming or the sleep cycle and I merely translate the awareness (subconsciously) in a way that fits in with the dream story? Is that part of my brain already active and do I pick up on the activity and weave a translation of it into my dream? The general area of my brain where I most often feel the flexing, is at the lower back, in the area of the cerebellum, and interestingly enough, the cerebellum is the centre for the regulation of balance, posture, movement, and muscle coordination, and, if Wikipedia can be taken as a fairly reliable source, <g>, I found there that modern research shows that the cerebellum also plays a part in “a number of key cognitive functions, including attention, and the processing of language, music, and other sensory temporal stimuli.” Well, I’m no brain surgeon. But I do know that when I want to fly, or to fly with more ease and control, singing or brain flexing seems to do the trick. I invite and encourage lucid dreamers to give these techniques a try sometime and see what happens, and please let us know at LDE what you experienced. Sometimes, the most absurd-sounding advice turns out to make a lot of sense. “There is an art, or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
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January 27, 2009
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