Who is aware? - the question and it's effect

Dear Oneironauts,

This morning I went through a series of short to medium lucid dreams, of which I would like to share with you my experience with Stephen Laberge's suggestion - ask: Who is aware?

(as documented in my journal)

The questions 'Who is aware?' comes to mind, and that I wanted to ask it - for it's effect. Immediately the disintegration of the dream environment starts, the dissolution of shape and color happens spontaneously, and, as many times before, I fall backwards, upside down, into darkness, into a dimensionless black hole, with an intense sensations of precipitating, heading down at increasing speed, into a bottomless, non-spatial abyss, accompanied by extreme waves of anxiety and fear of dying, sudden bouts of a shouting, screaming, an eardrum-bursting loud voice coming from a place nearer than my own ears/head, very unintelligible and threatening, deafening. Simultaneous glimpses or a fore-feeling of sheer timelessness, spacelessness, of the eternal witness. Every now and then I remember to keep asking the question 'who is aware?' even during the dramatic, gripping, visceral terror and overwhelming sensory stimuli, and as result intuited this ever-present, silent, non-conceptual, non-attached 'seeing' or observing or 'knowing' modality of consciousness, i.d. pure awareness. There was no body-image while falling into the paradoxical abyss. Still, sound and feeling came - is this proof of the concept Mind-Space, or awareness as absolute space, where everything appears and fades away, but which itself is neither born, nor will die, has no name, quality or anything 'objectifyable'? What does this mean for our fundamentel identity (issues)?

Does some of this resemble psychosis, ego death, bardo states, transpersonal realms (as described in psychotherapeutic literature, traditional religious and spiritual scriptures, scientifically documented experimentation with psychedelics/entheogens, shamanistic ritual paradigms)? The vividness and reality of perception and proprioception is so strikingly similar to ''normal'' waking life that it is fascinating and puzzling to ask: Can the brain just perfectly emulate and create innumerable 'virtual'/artifical/synthetic/mind-made universes which are structurally often so close to conventional reality that the majority of people will not even recognize the difference, and thus do not become lucid in their 'illusory' dreams? And what does this amount to ontologically, neurologically, existentially, phenomologically?

Has anyone experience with the effect of asking the question 'who is aware?', while lucid in the dream, or even as a cue to become lucid? And was this in some respect comparable to the 'falling into darkness'?

I am very curious to hear from you.

Thanks!

Metta,

Mick
17-10-1987