system
A chat on 4chan
human
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

1Cor. 13

To begin, I think we would all agree that we all have some faculty of our mind which can generate a kind of imagery, albeit lacking the reality of what we take to be real in our physical experience. Now, I also think that we would agree that from time to time we have a type of experience that also lacks the intense reality of our conscious physical experience and occurs while we are sleeping; these experiences we call dreams.

Now, we usually take the imaginative faculty during waking life to be subject to our will and as a result imaginings are within our control. On the other hand, in our dream experiences, many events appear to occur against our will. However, I think that both dreams and waking imaginings are both products of our imaginative faculty. Why then is it that one experience is taken to be voluntary and the other involuntary?

I think an analogy to the functioning of the imaginative faculty could be made with the functioning our lungs; our breathing process can occur on a voluntary and involuntary level. It is constantly occurring in the background unconsciously and involuntarily, but enters our consciousness when we voluntarily take over the breathing process. In comparison, dreaming is like unconscious involuntary breathing in so far as in dreaming the dream events occur against our will and, although we are conscious of the dream, we lack the self-awareness to be conscious that we are *in* a dream; waking imaginings, on the other hand, are like conscious breathing, in that we are imagining in accordance with our will and our aware that they our only our imagings; we are self aware and do not become identified with the imaginings, that is to say, lose self-awareness.
gpt
Now notice that waking reality has a more intense reality, or sensual intensity, than dreams, and dreams have a more intense reality than waking imaginings. In this way, I hypothesize that waking reality, dream worlds, and waking imaginings are all a continuum of the products of our imaginative faculty. If this is so, then to continue with the breathing analogy, then there may be ways to taking conscious, self-aware, and voluntary control of dreams, and in fact there are many who claim to have developed this ability through what is called lucid dreaming. Furthermore, if we achieve the ability to alter our dream reality, then if our waking reality is also a product of our imaginative faculty, which I believe it is, then believe we may also be able to alter waking reality by attaining a type of self awareness. Now, how this self- awareness is to be obtained I am not sure, but I suspect that the methods of Yoga are, in fact, the path to this self-awareness, and, as a result, a path to becoming divine in a very literal sense
human
I was thinking of picking up yoga so thanks for the suggestion man, also yeah lucid dreams are definitely a thing, once you become aware of the dream not only you can control it, which takes practice, but you can also make the dream more and more vivid/real, which takes even more practice
gpt
Oh God I just realized, what if with practice you can control waking reality and actually make reality even more real just like with dreams??