Liminal states

Hello everyone

I notice that right before waking up I’m conscious of existing or being but I’m not localized yet in the physical body. Sometimes I notice a vibration and entering in the body form as If I were putting a glove on.
Sometimes I even travel around my room and notice the warmness of the energy of the walls and objects without having really a solidity , it’s just a bunch of energy. Sometimes a thought arises like "don’t cross the wall , your flatmates is right in the other side"and I come back to the body form ( dress up )

Besides that, since one year I wake up in the middel of the night by a tremendous force that pulls my back in front like doing an abdominal movement and I can’t breathe, I feel like having a seed or ball covering my throat and I think to myself always the same question: I’m going to die if I swallow it. And then I need to breathe so I decide to swallow and I notice I’m alive.
I go back and try to sleep again.

Do you have any thoughts about it? I’m new in the NC :slight_smile:
Mónica

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Hello Monica @Venus_12

I experience very similar things in the liminal space between dream and sleep…and more. I believe this to be a time when we are not tied in to our coarse (physical) body but instead are working with our subtle (illusory) body.

From my experience in this state it seems as though we are able to interact with the world on deeper levels than those that depend on purely physical characteristics.

There are meditation/yoga practices you can do that can help you to gain confidence and agency in this state,

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Glad you joined the Night Club. I have not had that feeling but I have heard others who have called them “Out of Body” (OBE) experiences. There is a debate about whether OBEs exist, or are only a certain type of lucid dream, but perhaps some investigation on your part would be useful. Jade Shaw has a site devoted to OBE and you might check it out.

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Thank you very much, it helps as Im a bit disoriented.
Barry, I thought exactly that, weather is real that I’m awake as it feels or it’s a dream and I’m just lucid. It just so real and I don’t have much experience with lucid dreaming.

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That feeling of “putting on a glove” is an excellent description of what I experience as well.

Regarding OBE’s…I have had a very specific experience that I think I wrote about already here…let me look…

Ah yes…

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Mmm interesting and beautiful.

Do you think that what we seem to experience in a subtle body during the awaking state could actually be happening lucidly during the dream state ?

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Well…I have had some very “real” bodily experiences in the dream state but nothing at all like this particular experience. Here are a few of the ways that experience differed from lucid dream “physicality”:

  1. I have had some strong WILD experiences where I went directly into a lucid dream, but in those cases I knew it was a dream. Things were not quite right…dream-like. In this experience I had just closed my eyes when I felt myself being very physically whisked from the bed. It was a very directional experience…toward my back yard. It did not feel at all dream-like but rather it felt very…physical.

  2. Everything below me in the yard was exactly as it really is. There were houses where they should be and the big ash tree was exactly where and as it should have been.

  3. The fog that I found myself looking through turned out to be real fog. When I ended up back in bed and fully awake I immediately looked out into the yard and saw the fog. It is very rare to have dense fog in January in the northeast US.

Whatever these experiences truly are, they are a testament to a deeper level of reality that we can access on this path. Perhaps these liminal states have the characteristics of both the dream state and the waking state.

Perhaps there are even moments of clear light awareness involved that kind of stitch the other two states together into something uniquely devoid of the constraints of this illusory existence. That’s what it feels like to me.

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If there is no medical condition like apnoia, it could be that you are very sensitive to your energy body. There are daytime prana exercises for your chakras and perhaps you might want to experiment with working with the throat chakra, like e.g.Tibetan Warrior Syllables or Tsa-Lung exercises - they clear and settle the energies in the chakras.

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This is the sequence that I do in the morning and sometimes at night during WBTB:

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Such a good help and inspiration

Thank you

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I will give a try. Thank you for sharing your knowledge

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Just a suggestion to Bookmark this thread so you can find it more easily in the future.

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Steve - any chance you could elaborate on your morning routine/ritual? I’d be interested in knowing what you do and the times you do them, along with the reasons if there happens to be one.

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Hey Tim @yet-another-tim

Thank you for your interest in my practice. I’m pleased to offer as much detail as I can about it but it is constantly evolving and much of what I have gleaned from as many sources as possible has been somewhat personalized as I think we must each find our own way on this path. :slightly_smiling_face:

After transitioning from lucid dreaming to dream yoga, and after some very powerful experiences in the liminal spaces between waking and dreaming, I felt a very strong need to go deeper. So I began to study some of the older original texts that describe the origins of these practices.

It was in Je Tsongkhapa’s text entitled “The Three Inspirations” that I first read about the use of Inner Heat Yoga as a primary path to conscious awareness in the dream. I decided to abandon the standard dream lucidity protocols (LaBerge) and concentrate solely on the more esoteric consciousness expansion protocols as described in the Six Yogas of Naropa, particularly the first three (Inner Heat, Illusory Body, Clear Light) where dream yoga is generally considered to be a subset of Illusory Body Yoga.

So around a year and a half ago I began a daily practice that begins with the Tsalung protocols as posted above and goes right into Inner Heat Yoga as outlined in a number of older texts. The Tsalung practice loosens the knots around the four main chakras. Then the Inner Heat practice brings universal energy into my central channel where I can then use it to dissolve into illusory body form and then even further into primordial emptiness.

I actually do this in my office where I can practice in front of a window that faces the rising sun. It takes around 45 minutes.

A few times during the week, particularly on weekends, I go through the practice during a WBTB period in the night. This can lead to some very powerful…nocturnal experiences.

I also revert to vase breathing as often as possible during the day.

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Thanks for replying Steve (and sorry for the slow acknowledgement). That’s really interesting. I will play with the Tsalung practices. Looking forward to trying them out.

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