Dream Techniques for the In-Between State

by Serge Kahili King, author of Dreaming Techniques

What I call the “In-Between” State is that range of consciousness with eyes closed where you are not quite awake and not quite asleep. This includes meditation, hypnosis, shamanic journeys, and others.

What you want to develop in this state is a form of controlled dreaming, where control consists mainly of purposely evoking at least a portion of the inner experience and of managing your own behavior during the experience. The main difference between this and “ordinary” lucid dreaming is the purposeful framework. In this article I will discuss three broad categories of practice.

Meditation Techniques

When someone asks “Do you meditate?” they usually mean “Do you do the type of meditation that I've learned?” The word itself covers a very broad range of practices, from simply thinking deeply about something for a while to the most intense, ecstatic spiritual visions. The range is so broad that I will limit the discussion to a few of what I think are most useful.

Passive Meditation. The purpose of this meditation is to narrow one's focus in order to drift into a pre-sleep mode. In addition to focusing on objects, repetitive chanting of words, gazing at a mandala, or contemplating a spiritual image can all have the same effect. So can focusing on one's breathing and purposely slowing it down. It's fairly easy for the practitioner to slip into sleep mode while doing this, which is considered a good thing for some meditators, but serves no useful purpose for in-between activity. A good way to stay in the in-between mode is to maintain some kind of contact with the fully awake state. I have found that holding an object in your hand while doing this can be of great help if you remember to be aware of it from time to time. I use a crystal or a pen or a rock, but it could be anything you can hold in your hand. Allow experiences to happen on their own, and as they do, practice using your will to modify them.

Active Meditation. This could also be called “Active Imagination with Your Eyes Closed.” Basically, you create a story that gets you into the in-between mode deeper and deeper as you create more and more detail. What will happen is a combination of your intention and spontaneous reactions to that intention. We don't control the dream world any more than we do Waking Life, but our conscious actions produce reactions in both places and we can find opportunities to make decisions and exert our will. Here are some ideas for practice:

• Follow the Path. Close your eyes and imagine that you are walking a path. Pay attention to what the path is made of (dirt, grass, pavement, etc.) and what is on either side of the path (grass, trees, flowers, desert, etc.). As you walk the path you find something blocking your way (stone, gate, hole, etc.). Find a way over, under, around or through it and keep walking. Up ahead is a village and the path goes straight through it. Pay attention to what kind of village it is (medieval, modern suburban, primitive, etc.). At the end of the path and the village is a tall building. Pay attention to what kind of building appears (church, tower, temple, palace, etc.). There is a doorway. Go inside. Just inside is a pedestal with a box on it. Inside the box is a gift for you. Open the box and take it out. Whatever it is, you decide what it represents for you. End the experience if you wish by moving your fingers and toes and opening your eyes (moving your fingers and toes helps you return to the awake mode more easily).
• Invitation to a Luau. Close your eyes and imagine that you are on the deck of a sailboat anchored in the lagoon of a tropical island. Stand at the railing. Feel the railing under your hands and the deck under your feet. Look down into the clear water and see fish swimming. Pay attention to what kind of fish are there. Look at the island and see a white sand beach fringed by coconut palms swaying in the soft breeze. Smell the perfume of flowers coming from the island. See two natives come out from the trees with an outrigger canoe and watch them paddle it out to your boat. Hear them invite you to a luau on the island. Climb over the side of your boat and get into the canoe. Let the natives paddle you to the shore and help you onto the sand. Feel the water and the sand with your feet. Now you hear the sound of drums and singing. Follow the natives through the trees to a clearing where a great feast has been prepared for you. Accept the invitation to sit and eat with them and watch dancers entertain you. Let the rest of the story open up on its own as you make appropriate decisions and take specific actions until you feel like coming back to the awake state.

It might be interesting to have some friends do the same experience on their own and compare differences.

Meditation to Solve Problems. My friend Jim Fallon worked at an electronics company and was ordered to come up with a solution to a problem caused by the power company switching power to save energy, which resulted in voltage spikes that damaged sensitive equipment. What he did was to enter into the in-between state to find an answer. In that state he saw a tiny little wizard holding a stop watch and using the watch as a timing device to turn an AC wall outlet switch on and off. Back in the awake state he designed a piece of equipment with a voltage sensing relay connected to the power source going to the sensitive equipment. If the voltage from the power company went to high or too low the relay would turn off the power, allowing for a safe power down or loss of power. What follows are two methods he used to find solutions when he needed them:

• Method One: “I first decided that I wanted to have a dream that gave me solutions to the problem I wanted to solve, then I did a simple progressive body relaxation. After that I used my breathing to imagine I was going up an elevator on my inhalation, and on the exhalation I was projecting my awareness from my forehead to a room where I was monitoring a large TV screen for watching the dream, While watching the TV, I kept asking the question and watching the TV monitor for a return answer.”
• Method Two: “When I really had to do something fast, I just simply focused on my breathing, without trying to control the breathing, just being aware that now I was breathing in, and now I was breathing out. This was very repetitious, and the slow rhythmic breathing slowed down the brain wave activity from the active beta state, to the lower brainwave frequencies, but with the added difference that I was carting my conscious awareness into these brainwave states without blacking out, and that allowed me to have a more active, vivid, recallable dream.

Meditation for Spiritual Insight. In some forms of Tibetan Buddhism the purpose of meditating goes far beyond the realization of life as an illusion and the ability to dream lucidly toward being able to enter the esoteric lands of “Sambhogakaya,” the matrices of all form, and to learn from the thoughtforms of already enlightened beings. This is described as a very advanced form of meditation. What is required is a belief that there are such esoteric lands, which brings up the question of whether they exist on their own or are created by the desire to find them. Still, it is possible to use the in-between mode for spiritual purposes without having to go through intense spiritual training. Importantly, The Dalai Lama has said, “Going through this transition (meaning from just closing your eyes through the in-between state) without blacking out is one of the highest accomplishments for a yogi.” So here is one way to meditate for spiritual insight.

1. Decide what kind of spiritual insight you want and close your eyes.
2. Think of a source for your spiritual insight and imagine a symbol of it above your head.
3. Inhale with your attention on that symbol and exhale with your attention on your pineal gland (in the center of your head behind the bridge of your nose). Do this ten times.
4. Imagine an empty circle in front of you and ask the insight to appear there in some form.

Some people will receive an insight right away, and some will have to repeat the practice until an insight comes.

Hypnosis Techniques

Hypnosis is nothing more―and nothing less―than an in-between mode state used to change habits, reduce pain, practice skills, assist the healing of mental, emotional, and physical problems, and facilitate a host of other practical benefits. The basic process consists of getting someone to close their eyes, giving suggestions to relax, guiding the person through some kind of inner experience related to resolving their problem or achieving their goal, then bringing the person back to an almost awake state and suggesting that they will feel good when they open their eyes. It is my opinion that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis, aided and abetted by the hypnotist to the degree that he or she is perceived as an authority figure.

Almost all hypnosis makes use of dream-like imagery in some fashion and most of it takes a person no farther than the border of closed eyes and in-between. As a matter of fact, hypnosis is often described as states of light, medium, and deep trance. As noted in The Complete Book of Self-hypnosis, by John M. Yates and Elizabeth S. Wallace, “The profound emotional changes described by people in a deep hypnotic trance resemble nirvana in Yoga or Zen’s satori.”

One famous experiment (famous among hypnotists, that is) concerned a group of people who played piano moderately well. They were guided into a deep hypnotic trance in which it was suggested that they become various famous composers like Beethoven, Bach, Liszt and Debussy. Then they were asked to play the piano while in trance. Each one of them played markedly better than usual in the style of the composer they had emulated, even those who had never played that composer's music before. One of them, I think it was the one who became Liszt, even composed music in that style after the experiment was over.

In one of my workshops I use a hypnotic-style deep trance induction to take students back to a past life in which they were a shaman, allowing the specifics to emerge from within the students themselves. I begin with having them be aware of their feet, then move up the body through sexual orientation, clothing, jewelry and hair styles before expanding their awareness outward to their surroundings. Most interesting to me is the incredible variety of times and cultures that appear, and the astounding details of the experience. On the way back to present awareness I suggest that they will retain the skills of the shaman they were, and while not everyone reported back after the course, some have claimed that their skills did improve. Of course, there is no way to prove or disprove that this was an actual past life experience, but that's not the point. The point is that a past-life dream experience appeared on demand, skills were learned or improved, and any interpretation of that is no more than speculation. Here is the actual process.

1. Close your eyes and intend to experience yourself in a past life (it doesn't have to be a shaman).
2. Count backward from 10 to 1. At the count of 1 check your feet and continue as above.
3. If you choose, use a count of 5 to go forward or backward in that life.
4. When you are ready, count forward from 1 to 10, move your fingers and toes and open your eyes.

OOBE Techniques

OOBE is an acronym for “Out Of Body Experience.” Also called “astral travel” and “magical flight,” this is an experience that could occur during the in-between or sleep mode. Essentially, it involves the sensation of being separate from one's body and either hovering about or traveling to some other destination. It is a phenomenon reported worldwide over many centuries. Meditation and hypnotic induction can be used to bring it about and so can sensory deprivation practices, but most often it happens spontaneously during in-between or sleep-mode dreaming.

Occult practitioners of this insist that astral travelers retain a connection with their body by means of a “silver cord” that is attached to the back of the head or some other inconvenient place and warn of the danger of it being cut, which would result in the death of your body and leave your astral self wandering through endless dimensions forever. In my experience and that of all my students there is no such cord. My belief is that the idea was invented by someone who was afraid he wouldn't find his way back to his body. The simple rule is: no fear, no need of a cord.

In one of my classes where I teach this, I begin by isolating myself in a room, then going quickly into a deep in-between state. From there I use imagination to separate my consciousness from my body and put it into a form of some kind, usually an animal. Next I energize the form and project myself into the classroom, where I dance, jump, fly, touch the students, and generally act silly. Then I go back to my body, return to the awake state mode, and go into the classroom to ask the students what they experienced. Almost always, half or more of the students report an experience related to my animal form or something I did. After that, I guide them into a deep in-between state, have them take animal forms, and walk, run, or fly to a location nearby where I have placed an object none of them have ever seen before and examine it closely in their “astral” form. When questioned back in the classroom, around 80 or 90% of the students report something related to the size, shape, color, material, or symbolism of the object. The point here is that some of the students did perceive something when I projected, that most of them were able to see or feel something at a distance, and that anyone can learn to do it because it isn't difficult.