Thread: Is it possible to be aware in more than one location?

Ah, not simply making clones of you and having split conciousness?

I just posted something like this in my DJ. 2 dreams layered over one another happening at the same time. I also have one entry where I could feel myself in 2 places at once as well, its a very strange feeling.

Yeah that sounds right. But maybe not limited to just clones of yourself. Maybe split your consciousness or awareness (i'm not sure which word fits better) between your 1st person view and also a third person view. The part of your awareness that is observing from the third person view could possibly make changes to the environment while the part of your awareness that is observing from 1st person view could interact more closely with these changes. It's a concept that's hard to put into words. Maybe you could call it multiple personalities?

EDIT: Sorry Caden, i took to long typing my post and didn't see yours. That sounds very interesting. I'll go take a look at your dj.

That's an awesome dream Caden! I wonder if it would be possible to do this lucidly? I wonder if it would be possible to have those two awarenesses of yourself within the same layer of a dream or the same dreamscape?

I would think of it as looking at a reflection in water. You can see through the water but you can see yourself too.

Originally Posted by Raetin

I would think of it as looking at a reflection in water. You can see through the water but you can see yourself too.

That's a good way to put it. The only thing is that when you look at water, you can only look at your reflection or look through the water at one time. What i'm thinking is maybe being able to look at both simultaneously. Like you say in your sig, you would like to be a dragon rider. Imagine that you could be both the dragon and the rider simultaneously. Then when you wake up, you could recall the experience from both perspectives. That would make for an awesome ld. Or maybe you could have 2 ld goals (maybe one goal is to fight zombies and the other goal is to fly) you would like to accomplish. Imagine that you are in an ld, then you split your consciousness into two. One of you would go fight zombies in the nearest grave yard and the other one would go flying through the night sky. When you wake up, you would remember both experiences and would have accomplished both goals. I guess this would be comparable to omnipresence; except that would mean been everywhere at the same time; i'm just thinking about being in two places at once.

i would say it is absolutely possible because we can do similar things while awake. like looking down a thin wall where your nose is in the middle so your eyes see either side of the wall, you can see two seperate images. or putting one hand in a bag of sand the other in water, you can feel both. this means that your mind could hypothetically create two different points of view or other types of awareness in dreams. it wouldn't be two complete consciousness since that's impossible but yes you should be able to have two different points of awareness. more than two would be a real challenge and i'm not sure how possible that is but who knows?

our brains can handle only so much input, like try to watch two tvs and you'll do okay, now try to watch ten. try to keep your mind going and figure out whats going on on each one without looking at any one individually but look at them all at once. i can't imagine having much success at all. or try putting each of your ten fingers into different substances. you won't be able to take it all in at once. try to ask yourself without looking which substance your ring finger is in. then look. you'll probably be wrong. or listen to two different songs on two ear buds. you should hear both more or less. now try six different ear buds each a different song, three per ear. good luck lol! so i think we're designed for two different inputs at any given time so in a dream you could make two consciousnesses but no more.... maybe three but that's probably the limit. however i've always wondered about this. ever since that guy in waking life said he has three sixty view in dreams i've been trying to wrap my mind around such concepts.

i can't even picture in my mind what three sixty view would be like. so is it possible to dream about something you cannot imagine? like can you really picture seeing in 360 degrees? i can't but i can picture seeing two different images and maybe three. so i guess if you can do it while awake then you can do more extreme versions while asleep but not much more. like seeing two sides of a wall in waking life could be seeing two different worlds in dreams wow now i want to go to sleep and try this!

but in dreams our brains are very powerful so maybe i'm wrong and you could, with practice, make ten separate points of awareness! wouldn't that be amazing? i wonder if it would improve your perception in waking life. in minor ways like you would be able to take things from your peripheral vision in better or hear two conversations at once more clearly. this stuff is really interesting, good thread!

Wow Somniumrex! You really helped put some of this in perspective. I guess we are really limited by how many things we can focus on at one time. Like with your example of multiple tvs, songs, and fingers in different substances. We could probably focus on one or two, maybe three, but all of them at the same time would be overly difficult. For instance, if i were listening to six different songs at once, and i chose one or two to focus on, the other songs would probably cause distraction. Even now just trying to focus on all five senses equally and noticing all of the input from them is difficult. By trying to do that, your attention tends to either gravitate towards only one of the senses or your focus tends to cycle through them one at a time.

As a note on the 360 degree vision, i'm not sure how the brain could pull it off, although i can't say it is impossible. While typing this, my eyes focus on a very small part of what is within my range of vision. All of the clarity seems to go to that very small area while everything else is visible yet not clear or in focus. Maybe if someone's goal was to obtain 360 degrees of vision in an ld, they could try by expanding the clarity and range of their vision a little at a time. It would probably take alot of practice.

I thought of an idea that might help bring us closer to achieving two points of awareness and 360 degree vision. What if while in an ld, we could take both of are eyes out, assuming that both were processing their own image (the same way our physical eyes do). Then if are goal was to go for two points of awareness, we could place them in two different locations away from each other. We should then be processing two different images (i guess this would be similar to how a chameleon's vision operates). We could place them facing different directions, which would give us two different points of vision, which i think would bring us closer to two different points of awareness. Imagine that you are standing in the middle of a room. You have placed one eye on the left side of the room and one on the right. Then you go and stand in the middle. You could be looking at your body's left and right side simultaneously. The only issue i can think of with doing this is that the view from each eye would be 2D rather than 3D, but since it would be a dream, maybe we wouldn't have such a hindrance. As for help with the 360 degree vision, imagine putting your eyes back to back, so that they were both facing exact opposite directions. This would in theory double the degrees of vision. I don't think it would add up to 360 degrees, but it would bring you closer. Then just think if we could somehow obtain vision through a third eye and maybe place it somewhere else as well. The only problem is that i think we would be getting into the limits of what the human brain could focus on and process at one time. Who knows!? All of this is kind of hard to wrap my brain around. But it sure makes me want to ld tonight and see what i can do.

Well, I don't know about doing it at will, but I've definitely experienced this in non-lucid dreams. Usually the two experiences are linked somehow though, it's not quite two completely seperate dreams. For example, in the dream I remember most clearly where I was two places at once, I was playing some sort of video game with an X-box-like controller, and at the same time I also my avatar in the game, running around, completely after in control of my body as usual. In the dream of course, this seemed completely normal; but its very difficult to remember that sensation after waking up.

I agree with somniumrex...nice post. Although no matter how many copies there are of you, there is still only one that can receive the majority of your focus at any given instant, unless you don't mind sacrificing a bit of resolution...because when you divert your focus from one to two things, both things become a little blurry and lose some detail. I experimented with this a lot the other night by splitting my vision.

Also as far as 360 vision goes...just try to imagine how things would look through a really, really wide angle lens. The image would be very curved and sort of wrap around your head. I'm assuming that 360 vision merely implies a full horizontal rotation, not horizontal and vertical? Because the latter would involve vision in every single direction at once, not just what is behind you but also what is above and below. Now that, is much more difficult for me to envision.

I was wondering if anyone here experiences this. I read about something like this in an LD ezine a few days ago and I can't get it out of my mind. A woman wrote her experience of being able to fully experience 2 dreams at the same time. It was very hard to wrap my head around it at first. She said it happens naturally for her about twice a year for 32 years, and got it up to 3 times most of those days, if I remember correctly. The maximum number of dreams she was able to experience was 5 dreams at the same time I think.

Thanks for bringing this topic up, I'm really interested in knowing about other's experiences with this like Caden's.

Honestly, I thought this is probably going to be more common in women. They have a pronounced ability to multi-task and "multi-experience" due to having a thicker connection than men between the two halves of the brain (i.e. corpus callosum). And of course, I like to believe that because it makes me believe in the likelihood of experiencing it myself.

Okay after reading Caden's dream, I'm not sure if I've never had an experience like this myself. I normally experience a knowing of something else that's happening while in a different place, as if it is a part of the story. Not only that, but to even know what another person is intending because the dream is a story I am witnessing or experiencing. Anyone else know what I mean?

Is this a common occurrence in dreams or am I misunderstanding?

Sweet Dreams...that's interesting. I'd like to know if she says anything about where her focus is at any given instant during these multiple dreams. Could you post what she said so we can read it?

Wow...
That sounds really cool...But I think the dream would be really unstable..
Then again,wouldn't hurt to try
-sam

Ah, having two dreams at the same time is tricky, it isn't really unstable, it is just hard to... percieve, to say something, I have had that happen to me some times, it was like having split conciousness, but each one was playing on a different dream, and I was on both dreams at the same time. Then again, one of the dreams was composed only of red-stuff, while the other was yellow/blue.

I'm kind of curious about how this would effect the stability of the dream too. It may be too much for us to handle and cause the dream to collapse or it could even help stabilize the dream. We use are senses to engage the dream in order to stabilize it, so i wonder if this could give a higher level of stability than is normally experienced in an ld, since we would really be engaging the senses.

There was no ld for me last night, but hopefully i will have one tonight. I would really like to try and use each of my eyes independently like i mentioned in my previous post. I wonder if by taking out the dream eyes and separating thing into different locations, would the other senses follow? I wonder if this could actually be an easy way to become aware of two different places. It would be awesome if by placing an eye one place and the other in a different place, that you would also be able to hear from the location of each eye, maybe have smelling, tactile, and even taste senses present too. Or would the other senses reside where the rest of the dream body is? I don't know, but this is turning out to be an interesting thread!

@Aquanina: I thought wrapping my brain around 360 degree vision was hard, but in all directions at once, that would be crazy. I'm not sure how all of that could be in focus at once either. Another thing to think about is that we would be looking outwardly in all directions, could we also look inwardly in all directions too?!

I think people are limiting themselves way too much. Very simple animals can pull off this feat and some barely have brains at all. Many insects can do this and you would literally need a microscope to see some of their brains. The most intelligent animal that I know of with 360 vision are ducks. This is an animal so dumb it eats its own waste and doesn't even realize it.
Look at this video to see how smart a duck is.
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/80487386/
If Quackers brain can do it, yours can too!

Originally Posted by dark_grimmjow

Wow Somniumrex! You really helped put some of this in perspective. I guess we are really limited by how many things we can focus on at one time. Like with your example of multiple tvs, songs, and fingers in different substances. We could probably focus on one or two, maybe three, but all of them at the same time would be overly difficult. For instance, if i were listening to six different songs at once, and i chose one or two to focus on, the other songs would probably cause distraction. Even now just trying to focus on all five senses equally and noticing all of the input from them is difficult. By trying to do that, your attention tends to either gravitate towards only one of the senses or your focus tends to cycle through them one at a time.

As a note on the 360 degree vision, i'm not sure how the brain could pull it off, although i can't say it is impossible. While typing this, my eyes focus on a very small part of what is within my range of vision. All of the clarity seems to go to that very small area while everything else is visible yet not clear or in focus. Maybe if someone's goal was to obtain 360 degrees of vision in an ld, they could try by expanding the clarity and range of their vision a little at a time. It would probably take alot of practice.

I thought of an idea that might help bring us closer to achieving two points of awareness and 360 degree vision. What if while in an ld, we could take both of are eyes out, assuming that both were processing their own image (the same way our physical eyes do). Then if are goal was to go for two points of awareness, we could place them in two different locations away from each other. We should then be processing two different images (i guess this would be similar to how a chameleon's vision operates). We could place them facing different directions, which would give us two different points of vision, which i think would bring us closer to two different points of awareness. Imagine that you are standing in the middle of a room. You have placed one eye on the left side of the room and one on the right. Then you go and stand in the middle. You could be looking at your body's left and right side simultaneously. The only issue i can think of with doing this is that the view from each eye would be 2D rather than 3D, but since it would be a dream, maybe we wouldn't have such a hindrance. As for help with the 360 degree vision, imagine putting your eyes back to back, so that they were both facing exact opposite directions. This would in theory double the degrees of vision. I don't think it would add up to 360 degrees, but it would bring you closer. Then just think if we could somehow obtain vision through a third eye and maybe place it somewhere else as well. The only problem is that i think we would be getting into the limits of what the human brain could focus on and process at one time. Who knows!? All of this is kind of hard to wrap my brain around. But it sure makes me want to ld tonight and see what i can do.

i think you're onto something there good sir! that sounds very plausible. i can't wait to hear some results from people. or next time i get an LD i'll try it and post mine. i slacked off for months and am now building back up to my old LD skills, it's taking some time but i'll get there soon enough

Originally Posted by dark_grimmjow

I'm kind of curious about how this would effect the stability of the dream too. It may be too much for us to handle and cause the dream to collapse or it could even help stabilize the dream. We use are senses to engage the dream in order to stabilize it, so i wonder if this could give a higher level of stability than is normally experienced in an ld, since we would really be engaging the senses.

There was no ld for me last night, but hopefully i will have one tonight. I would really like to try and use each of my eyes independently like i mentioned in my previous post. I wonder if by taking out the dream eyes and separating thing into different locations, would the other senses follow? I wonder if this could actually be an easy way to become aware of two different places. It would be awesome if by placing an eye one place and the other in a different place, that you would also be able to hear from the location of each eye, maybe have smelling, tactile, and even taste senses present too. Or would the other senses reside where the rest of the dream body is? I don't know, but this is turning out to be an interesting thread!

@Aquanina: I thought wrapping my brain around 360 degree vision was hard, but in all directions at once, that would be crazy. I'm not sure how all of that could be in focus at once either. Another thing to think about is that we would be looking outwardly in all directions, could we also look inwardly in all directions too?!

hmm i think it's possible that it would make it more stable. one thing that makes dreams collapse is withdrawing attention. like if you get all excited and run around crazy and cease to interact with anything specific a lot of times it fades. but if you get really involved with something in the dream that usually helps it last longer. also spinning in a circle helps to keep dreaming. stephen laberge theorized it is related to inner ear function and the brain tries to reform the dream the same way it quickly tries to reform your vision after spinning until you're dizzy in waking life. that being said i can only imagine how much reforming of things your brain will try when you are making it form two worlds. not to mention you would be so very involved in the dream itself. i would assume that this is the case, it will stabilize the dream. that is the best way to look at it.

Originally Posted by dark_grimmjow

@Aquanina: I thought wrapping my brain around 360 degree vision was hard, but in all directions at once, that would be crazy. I'm not sure how all of that could be in focus at once either. Another thing to think about is that we would be looking outwardly in all directions, could we also look inwardly in all directions too?!

Yes...omnivision! Something I'm totally going to try in my next lucid dream. Though you just blew my mind slightly with the looking inwardly as well. I can't even fathom that. I'll still give it a try though.

Originally Posted by somniumrex

our brains can handle only so much input, like try to watch two tvs and you'll do okay, now try to watch ten. try to keep your mind going and figure out whats going on on each one without looking at any one individually but look at them all at once. i can't imagine having much success at all. or try putting each of your ten fingers into different substances. you won't be able to take it all in at once. try to ask yourself without looking which substance your ring finger is in. then look. you'll probably be wrong. or listen to two different songs on two ear buds. you should hear both more or less. now try six different ear buds each a different song, three per ear. good luck lol! so i think we're designed for two different inputs at any given time so in a dream you could make two consciousnesses but no more.... maybe three but that's probably the limit. however i've always wondered about this. ever since that guy in waking life said he has three sixty view in dreams i've been trying to wrap my mind around such concepts.

For little things like that we can do it, but to handle two separate entities and their surroundings all at once, I'm not sure the human brain can do all that at once (I mean, it's designed (so to speak) to do all that onceover, so twice...). That aside, I never thought of this before and I'm interested to try it. If I get any results (once I finally LD again, just too damn busy) I'll post back here.

Originally Posted by Caden

I think people are limiting themselves way too much. Very simple animals can pull off this feat and some barely have brains at all. Many insects can do this and you would literally need a microscope to see some of their brains. The most intelligent animal that I know of with 360 vision are ducks. This is an animal so dumb it eats its own waste and doesn't even realize it.
Look at this video to see how smart a duck is.
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/80487386/
If Quackers brain can do it, yours can too!

I have to agree. Just think of how a fly sees things. They're stupid, but they have compound eyes that see hundreds (or thousands, i'm not sure) of different images. I think the human brain is capable, but finding the method to make it work could be the difficult part. I think animals have it easier, because their brain is wired for this kind of stuff already and they have the hardware for it too (their eyes ). I think what's important is what you said Caden, that we don't limit ourselves. The second we start to limit what we think we are capable of in an ld is the second that create a limit. Hopefully were onto something in this thread.

Originally Posted by somniumrex

hmm i think it's possible that it would make it more stable. one thing that makes dreams collapse is withdrawing attention. like if you get all excited and run around crazy and cease to interact with anything specific a lot of times it fades. but if you get really involved with something in the dream that usually helps it last longer.that being said i can only imagine how much reforming of things your brain will try when you are making it form two worlds. not to mention you would be so very involved in the dream itself. i would assume that this is the case, it will stabilize the dream. that is the best way to look at it.

I'm thinking the same too. Hopefully engaging the senses to such a great extent will super stabilize the dream. We just have to make sure that we don't lose lucidity. You know how easy this can be sometimes when we get caught up in the plot of the dream or whatever we're experiencing at the time. I imagine that if we can pull this off that we could easily get caught up in the experience and potentially lose lucidity. Guess we just have to be careful.

Originally Posted by Aquanina

Yes...omnivision! Something I'm totally going to try in my next lucid dream. Though you just blew my mind slightly with the looking inwardly as well. I can't even fathom that. I'll still give it a try though.

I think you might have coined a new word. Omnivision sounds like an awesome term to describe seeing in all directions at once. I think that's what we should call if from now on.

Originally Posted by Supernova

For little things like that we can do it, but to handle two separate entities and their surroundings all at once, I'm not sure the human brain can do all that at once (I mean, it's designed (so to speak) to do all that onceover, so twice...). That aside, I never thought of this before and I'm interested to try it. If I get any results (once I finally LD again, just too damn busy) I'll post back here.

I know this sounds difficult and it is, but i think we can do it. We just have to make sure any doubts or pre-conceptions that we have about it, doesn't limit us. One reason that i think it is possible is people with multiple personalities. Some of them claim to see and have all of their senses, but they can't control themselves, because another personality is in control, and i'm assuming that both personalities are receiving input from the senses. I'm not sure, i'm just speculating (i personally don't have this mental disorder, thankfully). Anyway, all we can do it try.

I had a cool thought today about the removing the dream eyes experiment. Is anybody familiar with what it looks like when there are two mirrors facing each other. They keep reflecting each others' reflections "infinitely". It looks like there is a portal or infinite tunnel in each of the mirrors. You can get the same sort of effect if you take your webcam and point it at the monitor of your computer; it looks like an infinite tunnel on your computer screen. Having said all of that, what would happen if you took both of the eyes and pointed them towards one another. Would you get the same effect? What a trip that would be! Having both of your eyes looking at each other and have this "infinite" tunnel thing going on in both eyes! I seriously need to ld tonight, so i can start experimenting with this stuff.

EDIT: Now that i think about the infinite tunnel thing, i'm not sure why it would work after all. The eyes would not be reflecting anything really, i don't think it would work any better than if you pointed two video cameras at each other. So i think i was wrong about it, but it's still an interesting thought.

I'm really enjoying this thread.

The nature of the dream that was initially discussed has been termed "Simultaneous Dreaming" from what I've read. Not too bad a name for it.

Even though I was really having a hard time wrapping my head around this, I agree with Caden's comment in that the human brain is capable of experiencing and pulling off a lot more than we realize.

I'm not sure that we need to separate our eyes to be able to use our vision at various angles within the same moments. I think we can simply do that with our mind's eye by dividing the direction or multiplying our identity and placing it in different directions. I am starting to believe that we may have experienced this behavior multiple times without even noticing.

It's common for us humans to over-analyze and get overwhelmed when we inspect the nature and philosophy of something that we experience naturally, and I think this is one of those natural things that could overwhelm us easily. (Many people still think lucid dreaming is overwhelming... Impossible even. )

Looking inwardly from multiple directions, for instance, is something we probably do a lot of and would be one of the most capable of achieving since it's internally based. We do this a lot because we're complex and mindful beings. That's where we get those aweful internal conflicts from.

About that interesting dreamer I talked about, Aquanina, I said it was a woman, but now that I read it again, I doubt "Jayron" is a woman's name, I just assumed the dreamer was a woman before reading his name. I'm so sexist.

I found a direct link to his letter:
http://www.dreaminglucid.com/article...eamer%2053.pdf

Enjoy

Nice find, Sweet Dreams! It seems Jayron is one of those lucky people who have experienced this kind of thing multiple times. They said that this kind of thing cannot be willed to happen, but just happens. I don't know if that is true or not, but i like to believe that if we give our best shot that we can figure out how to do it.

I believe that you're right, Sweet Dreams, about how we may be over-analyzing things. I think that separating our eyes and putting them in different places could be over-complicating things. I don't things have to be so complex. I think we should start with the simplest method first and if we can't get that to work, then we can try something else. We should avoid any unnecessary complexity. In my opinion, the simplest thing we could try is to simply ask the dream what we want. There are just two important things that i think we should consider before trying asking the dream. First, is to make sure that we expect and believe that what we want to happen will indeed happen. Every lucid dream learns eventually that expectation is very powerful. Secondly, thanks to advice i got out of Robert Waggoner's book Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, we should choose our words carefully when asking something of the dream. When asking something of the dream, our words are taken very literally. So we should use strong words that really mean what we want them to and cannot be misconstrued as meaning something else. Like we could say, "I want to be in two places at once!" That is not too bad, but it could be better. Instead, we could say, "I want to experience being in two places simultaneously." The word experience feels like it carries more power and weight. Also, i guess you wouldn't have to use simultaneously, but i think it also adds more power and weight to the request.

One example that Robert Waggoner uses in his book is that of an artist lucid dreamer. He wanted to find art in his dreams and then paint it when he woke up. So when making a request of the dream, he said something like, "I want to look for art." That's exactly what happened. He looked for art, but never actually found any. After analyzing his words, in a later dream, he said something like, "I want to look at art." This time he was presented with a large room full of art.

If anyone wants to try this, please post your results here. Also, you don't have to copy me word for word; that is just the sentence that i've chosen to use. Just be sure to use your words carefully.