Hi Ann, Helene, Sylvanheart.

Thanks for contributing to the thread. I was going back over old posts and wanted to flag 2 sections that Open wrote. The first is about staying conscious during deep relaxation and altered brainwave states:

"Essentially there's several points to make in terms of sleeping and what we may call conscious resting.

Generally people need to go fully to sleep because they're often not living in alignment with their soul which creates stress. So the soul practically vacates the body in order to get rest at a soul level and so the bodymind may achieve some degree of rest and recouperation. There are several problems with this: you don't necessary fully rest and rejuvenate; when the soul vacates the body (practically), other energies - like Opposing Consciousness - can come in. Implants are created and other distorting energy.

What I'm advocating is the movement towards deep consciousness resting. So basically when you go to bed, you spend your time moving consciousness around the body, giving yourself permission to let go and relax. And then to continually do this as long as you can - scanning for tightness, releasing and unwinding it.

This takes a lot of mastery, because you have to encounter things like boredom, and the challenge of simply falling asleep - going unconscious. Ultimately though, you become purely present, so time disappears and with that any boredom. It takes you into many deep states of consciousness - yes you can even enter delta states and yet still be fully conscious. Yoga nidra is a practice for this and also some particular Tibetan yoga practices.

When in these states, astral travel can really take off and lucid dreaming, where you're completely awake within the dream, which can be very healing and integrating for the soul.

I'm not saying this is easy by the way! And it will take years of practice to fully master. But there's great value in it. I'd say it's a natural state the soul yearns to move into at the right place on the path."

The other passage from open concerns his method of interpreting dreams:

"I'm usually well able to interpret dreams - or at least aspects of them. Over the years I've practised applying higher mind to interpret them. I'd say this is probably the most effective way to go. In the beginning, for me, I'd naturally wake up around 4am, but if you can't do this, you could set an alarm - some people go to bed setting an intention to do this. I began by simply writing in a journal on one page exactly what I remembered. But I wouldn't try to interpret until later in the day. When I then came to the journal, I'd simply right the first thing that popped into mind in relation to the dream. After a while my interpretations became increasingly accurate - they offered guidance about the direction forwards or understanding as to what had happened. These days I'm usually conscious through most dreaming."

Hope that helps you. :-)

Rich