notes from the dreaming

Last night I meditated on a candle flame and the mantra "aum vikataya namah", an invocation to Ganesh to show the world as the dream it is, repeating the words subsonically as I counted out 108 beads on the japa mala J and L brought back from thailand. Which brought about an interesting state of gnosis by calming the mind to a point of focus. By about the 85th intonation I found I had raised my consciousness from the physical layer up past the energy layer, where the "spirits" come out and the energy of the room starts warping around itself. After the count I called on Murphy (my personal take on Morpheus) to grant me clearer dream vision, then grounded and went to sleep.

Over the night I had dreams more vivid and detailed then any before (I know I keep saying that but they keep getting clearer), waking up with almost total recall of about five full dreams! Some of them where the standard subconscious processing of daily events, but mixed among these were several of the teaching dreams, the beginnings of a quest dream, and a very symbolic regression to my infancy and some of the thought-feelings that later shaped my approach to life in regards to fears. (That dream I woke up from in a cold sweat, and fully expected to still be in.) None of the dreams were explicitly lucid but I imagine I could use the same technique to intend lucidity tonight. Especially if I go about the day aware that it is all a dream.

If I wasn't concerned that wanting to acquire siddhis was enimical to enlightenment I'd be curious to practice the mantra that supposedly lets you shoot colored beams of healing energy out of your hands and make your every wish come true. But to paraphrase a passage from one of Sivananda's yoga sutras, beware of the siddhi, they are the path to the dark side.

[edit: and several other people I talked to today also had intense and emotional dreams last night, so this could all just be an astronomical phenomenon of Jupiter's presence in the sky right now.]