Lost in Lucid Shadows
This story is part 3 of a continuing story
Here is part 1: The Fool’s Journey
Here is part 2: The Magnetic Messiah
Here is part 4: Narcotics Anonymous Meeting
Here is part 5: DIY Sensory Deprivation Tank
Here is part 6: The Joy Of Homelessness
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Chapter 1: Deep Diving
I couldn’t stop thinking about it how I’d failed so spectacularly, twice. I’d thrown myself headfirst into shamanism, thinking a combination of psychedelics would tear down the walls between me and the divine. Instead, I just puked my guts out and spent a night hallucinating, convinced my hands were melting. Biohacking hadn’t been much better. A little electrical stimulation here, a focused magnetic field there, it was supposed to unlock the secrets of the universe. But all I got was a splitting headache and the distinct feeling that I was becoming more of a human experiment than an enlightened soul.
So here I am again, deep-diving into the dark abyss of the Internet, hoping to find where I’d gone wrong.
It wasn’t the drugs. The forums are full of people talking about their life-altering ayahuasca trips, their soul-baring peyote experiences. So, I reasoned, it had to be the method. Maybe the biohacking tech was outdated. Maybe I hadn’t used the right combination of mind altering techniques. I was obsessed with finding the missing key. The one little tweak that would push me past the invisible barrier to transcendence.
It didn’t take long before I stumbled onto something else. In this case, lucid dreaming. The Senoi tribe of Malaysia had apparently mastered their dreams, bending reality to their will as they slept. They’d used their dreams to solve problems, heal their bodies, and even guide their waking lives. That’s it, I thought. If I couldn’t crack the code while awake, maybe I could do it while asleep.
Next I discovered Robert Monroe’s work on out-of-body experiences (OBEs). This guy had claimed to separate his soul from his body, floating through realms beyond human comprehension, and returning to tell the tale. It wasn’t long before I was devouring every word.
I was convinced that I’d found my new shortcut to transcendence. Forget years of meditation or slow, painful introspection. “The Monroe Method”, involves profound relaxation and entering a state found between sleep and wakefulness, a sort of self-hypnosis. The secret ingredient to Monroe’s technique is using sound waves to entrain brain waves thru binaural beats. Who knew that wearing headphones could be the fast track for my consciousness to leave my body and traveling the universe. No ketamine needed.
The problem was, which I didn’t realize that at the time, I wasn’t interested in healing. I wasn’t interested in dealing with the years of crap I’d buried deep down. Years of neglect, abuse, and membership in cults. My entire life had been an endless carousel of toxic relationships. From the foster parents who barely noticed me to the religious zealots and series of narcissistic girlfriends who wanted to control my very being. All I ever wanted was to escape. To get free of the pit of endless dysfunction that was my life. But instead of facing it. I wanted a way out that didn’t involve revisiting the wreckage.
So, I latched onto the next new bright shiny concept; dream techniques. I read obsessively about lucid dreaming. But I wasn’t patient. I skipped the slow build-up, ignored the warnings about the importance of emotional readiness, and dove straight into the techniques like I was taking a shortcut through the labyrinth of my own mind.
I downloaded Monroe’s guided meditations, set up my dream journal, and started practicing reality checks.
Reality checks are a technique to help people achieve lucid dreaming by training the mind to differentiate between waking and dreaming states. It is a form of mental training. Training that enhances metacognition by teaching your mind to recognize your awareness of your waking and dreaming states.
It all seemed so simple. Too simple, really. But I was desperate for something to work, anything.
Chapter 2: Guided Meditaton
During the guided meditation was the moment I thought it would all come together. Monroe’s voice was smooth, calm, hypnotic. “Picture your body lying still,” he said. “Now, imagine your soul rising, weightless… free… drifting upward.”
For a moment, I believed it was happening. I felt that eerie sensation of weightlessness, the kind that makes you think you’re hovering just above your bed. My heart pounded with excitement. I’m finally breaking through!
But I wasn’t. Not even close.
Instead of floating away, I was yanked downward, deeper into my own subconscious. And there, in the worst parts of my mind, the dreams turned dark. Terrifyingly dark. I saw the door of my old foster home, the chipped paint, the smell of mildew. I heard the sharp cruel voice reminding me, “You ain’t worth the space you take up.” I wasn’t free-floating in some higher realm. I was stuck, trapped in a nightmare that had its claws into me.
Every scene I tried to escape only led me further down. The beatings and whipping from my abusive foster father. The fake smiles of the religious cult leader whose empty promises convinced me I’d find salvation if I just followed the group’s rules. The controlling manipulative narcisstic girlfriend. Who continually reminded me, “You’re so lucky to have me.” and in the next sentence saying “How can you be so smart, and so unable to understand me.” It wasn’t a dream. It was all of it — everything I had spent years trying to bury, now tearing through my mind with a vividness that made me want to scream.
And I couldn’t wake up.
The thing is, I had always thought my failures were because of the drugs or the methodology. I wasn’t smart enough to realize that it wasn’t the techniques that were wrong. It was me. I hadn’t prepared. I hadn’t dealt with the mess inside me. You can’t transcend what you refuse to confront, and that’s all I had ever done: refuse to face the truth.
I wanted to rise above it all. But you can’t build on a broken foundation. You can’t soar when your wings are weighed down with trauma you’ve never acknowledged. And now, here I was, trapped in the deepest, darkest corners of my mind.
Chapter 3: Waking Up
When I finally woke up, drenched in sweat, I didn’t feel enlightened. I didn’t feel free. I felt shattered, the thin layer of control I’d been clinging to was ripped away.
Maybe this was why I couldn’t be normal. Why I couldn’t feel like other people, why I avoided intimacy, avoided connection. Maybe I had been so damaged that I didn’t even know what it was like to live without the weight of it crushing me.
For the first time, I started to wonder, was it even possible for me to transcend? Could I ever escape this cycle of self-sabotage and trauma. Was I doomed to keep failing, over and over again, because I couldn’t face the darkness that was inside me?
Maybe that nun, Sister Louise of my Narcotics Anonymous group, had been right all along. Maybe I wasn’t looking in the right places for salvation. Maybe I wasn’t even ready for it.
But knowing the root of my problems didn’t make the emptiness go away. If anything, it made it worse.
Still, I not ready to give up. Not yet.
All personal statements were written by me and edited for spelling and grammar by ChatGPT. Sections of this article have been refined by AI to enhance comprehensibility and to provide facts that only online search engines would know.
© David Speakman 2024
