Castaneda's "Hands" technique Properly explained.

From Waking Nomad's dream:

Quote:

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"You ever read Castaneda?"

"Yeah some."

"I haven't, but he said to look at your hands. My hands look normal."

"Yeah. That RC, doesn't always work."

"That's why I like to kill myself to RC."

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ARRRGHHHHHH! I am pulling my hair out here. Castaneda's book about looking at hands in dreaming is SO mis interpreted it's not even funny. I Notice how 99.9 percent of people who read that think that Don juan meant "Look at your hands to do a reality check." Arghhh! I've read the books enough times to know that you will NEVER Read that line coming out of Don juan's mouth.

Let me quote from my book.

"To set up Dreaming means to have a precise and practical command over the general dream situation. For example, You may dream that you are in your classroom. To set up dreaming means that you don't let the dream slip into something else.... ...you control the view of the classroom and don't let it go until you want to....

... Of course it's possible. This control is no different from the control we have over an situation in our daily lives... ... In order to get use to it for yourself, you must start by doing something very simple. Tonight, in your dreams, you must look at your hands." - P. 21

Notice how he says NOTHING about looking at you hands to become lucid. He is saying, AFTER YOU BECOME LUCID, You must look at your hands. Why? so you can use your hands as a focus point to keep the dream from changing into something else. not as a Reality check.

And like the telephone game, Castaneda's hand task has morphed into the popular hand rubbing technique, of which most people are ignorant of it's origins.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Man of Shred

From Waking Nomad's dream:
Notice how he says NOTHING about looking at you hands to become lucid. He is saying, AFTER YOU BECOME LUCID, You must look at your hands. Why? so you can use your hands as a focus point to keep the dream from changing into something else. not as a Reality check.

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I don't know about stopping it from changing, I think it could very well induce change. But a quick glance would be harmless enough. Possibly Castaneda was supposed to learn how directing his attention induced change, but it's hard to say for sure what Don Juan's intentions were. He was a wily old goat.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by The Cusp

And like the telephone game, Castaneda's hand task has morphed into the popular hand rubbing technique, of which most people are ignorant of it's origins.



I don't know about stopping it from changing, I think it could very well induce change. But a quick glance would be harmless enough. Possibly Castaneda was supposed to learn how directing his attention induced change, but it's hard to say for sure what Don Juan's intentions were. He was a wily old goat.

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Yeah. I think in Tales of Power. Don juans instructions were to start with the hands. and then make brief glances at other objects quickly until they didn't change. If they did change, make a quick glance back at the hands and start over.

I've tried this numerous times. The lucid will either be super long and hyper real, or the next dream or so will be very vivid.

This was my understanding as well, that it wasn't a RC, but a way to stabilize your dream with conscious intention. My dreams gave me similiar instructions. :)

Why did you make this in Beyond Dreaming?

I think this is appropriate to discuss it here because this topic implies that dreaming is a authentic and practical vehicle ultimately for body & mind.

Many people outside BD and even some in argue whether dreaming is more than purely a physiological or psychological phenomenon.

Almostanything with Castaneda Dreaming involves BD material. since this is the starting point for building your energy dream body.

I always look at my hands to become lucid... and it works for me. I think it is also the best auto-suggestion one can make: "I look at my hands and realize I'm dreaming" It isn't abstract as "I have a lucid dream". Until you become very profficient in lucid dreaming it is quite an unusual thing to have a LD - so maybe your subconsciousnes doesn't know what you are actually asking it to do.

On the other "hand" (pun intended) I think that my subconsciousness is helping me out to get LD's, I think that I already might suspect that I'm dreaming before I look at my hands and so makes my hands look weird. I always have to look at my hands to be totally convinced that I'm dreaming - so it could be a case of dreamcontrol from my side. (like you have to strongly believe to make things happen in dreams - eg. I am able to go through that wall)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Man of Shred

Yeah. I think in Tales of Power. Don juans instructions were to start with the hands. and then make brief glances at other objects quickly until they didn't change. If they did change, make a quick glance back at the hands and start over.

I've tried this numerous times. The lucid will either be super long and hyper real, or the next dream or so will be very vivid.

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It's in Journey to Ixtlan, i'm reading this part right now:
""I'm going to remind you of all the techniques you must practice, " he said. "First you
must focus your gaze on your hands as the starting point. Then shift your gaze to other
items and look at them in brief glances. Focus your gaze on as many things as you can.
Remember that if you only glance briefly the images do not shift. Then go back to your
hands.
"Every time you look at your hands you renew the power needed for dreaming, so in
the beginning don't look at too many things. Four items will suffice every time. Later on,
you may enlarge the scope until you can cover all you want, but as soon as the images
begin to shift and you feel you are losing control go back to your hands." - P.94
It's said earlier, but the book is too awesome to scroll back.

OK, the first time I ever heard about this technique was J to Ix. I don't know of any earlier reference to doing this to become lucid. Anybody know of an earlier mentioning than CC's (prior to 1970)?

On this subject I fell asleep last night and as fell into dreaming instantly. in the dreams two hands appeared They were strange and foreign. They seemed to be showing themselves off, turning over and uncurling their fingers. For some reason this shocked me awake. I struggled to remember what i had just dreamt.
Then i realised 'shit, these were my dreaming hands'. It caused a bit of a jolt.

I also understand when i read in Castanedas books that the first time someone encountered their hands in their dreams 'they were strange and not their own'. That is exactly the feeling i was left with last night.

Sorry if this is dragging it slightly off topic but i just wanted to write this. I have been trying to find my hands like this for over 20 years now!!!!!!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by oldbill

On this subject I fell asleep last night and as fell into dreaming instantly. in the dreams two hands appeared They were strange and foreign. They seemed to be showing themselves off, turning over and uncurling their fingers. For some reason this shocked me awake. I struggled to remember what i had just dreamt.
Then i realised 'shit, these were my dreaming hands'. It caused a bit of a jolt.

I also understand when i read in Castanedas books that the first time someone encountered their hands in their dreams 'they were strange and not their own'. That is exactly the feeling i was left with last night.

Sorry if this is dragging it slightly off topic but i just wanted to write this. I have been trying to find my hands like this for over 20 years now!!!!!!

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I'm sorry to break it to you:
"The way I've told you, " he snapped. "You can, of course, look at whatever you
goddamn please-your toes, or your belly, or your pecker, for that matter. I said your
hands because that was the easiest thing for me to look at. Don't think it's a joke.
Dreaming is as serious as seeing or dying or any other thing in this awesome, mysterious
world." -P. 84, Journey to Ixtlan

20 years to find your hands? wow. took me a couple months. at first they were all big and hairy. But I used mirror gazing in waking life to stabilize my dream body. Now every time I see my hands they are mine. Unless i've shape shifted recently.

A few comments about dream control, lucidity, and reality checks - I view these as being just different forms of manipulating awareness. Our awareness has to focus somewhere and our ability to focus that awareness is key regardless of where it may end up in dreams, or for that matter, everyday life.

Using Castaneda's deeper energetic model, dreaming is in fact a movement of a particular part of the energy body he calls the assemblage point (AP). It is his contention that it is the point at which an individual energy being assembles reality. He also has stated that it is our individual attachment point to the universal energy which he calls the sea of awareness or infinity. In normal awareness of this world the AP sits between the shoulder blades about an arm's reach away - right on the surface of the sphere of the energy body. In dreaming or in other non ordinary states, the AP moves away from this customary position and the world perceived literally changes.

Getting back to dreaming, the movement of the AP is natural while we sleep and so we perceive new realities, but our focus is poor simply because we haven't learned to control it well in that state. Using the "hands technique" we learn to anchor our focus at a particular new position and this position is often very arbitrary at the beginning. The point is to attain pure focus (lucidity) at this point by keeping the AP in place. Usually in a dream the AP is all over the place, hence the need to get it focused. This kind of focus can in time lead to a very specialized use of awareness which Castaneda calls "attention". With time we learn to have clear attention in the dream state regardless of where the AP ends up. He calls this attention "dreaming attention" or "the second attention".

It is interesting to note that Don Juan maintained that the everyday world is in fact just a position of the AP - a position that is not really a natural fact of being human, but rather a trained position. We learned from all the people around us to anchor our attention here in this exact world uniformly. That process in none other than the act of growing up, of becoming socialized. That is why he refers to this world as "the first attention." In truth there is no stable world except from the point of view of attention, the fine focusing of awareness via the position of the AP. If you can move the AP at will and with full awareness, then you are a sorcerer who has endless worlds at his command.

So says Castaneda. So what is a reality check? In his terms, an attempt to anchor the AP to any given new dreaming position. Or to be more abstract, to attempt to find a new position to anchor one's awareness to the infinite, to the sea of awareness. We always have that connection, but are unaware of it in everyday life or in everyday dreams.

Nice explanation been there. This is Exactly how I understand this technique.