Experiencing nonlinear time through lucid dreaming

About a year ago I had an interesting lucid dreaming experience that involved what I perceived to be a peek at the nature of nonlinear time and how it’s used to travel/transition in dreams. I had just left one dream scenario and found myself in a place where I was deciding where to travel next. I was observing a series of scenes, dozens of them, flicker by me in a line, moving right to left. I could see just a scene, a landscape, a person, a thing for a split second, just a slice of it, and another, and another, and another… The effect was like a strobe or those old fashioned projector movies (or a zoetrope) where there are few enough frames per second that I could perceive each one separately.

This was a place that I had not previously imagined or conjured up…but it still seemed deeply familiar to me somehow and I instinctively knew how to utilize it, scanning each frame, recognizing each place in an instant…past, present, future, different dimensions…all were familiar.  I chose and focused on one frame briefly and it enlarged and then I was there, transitioned, into that scene/place/time/dimension into my next dream scenario.

The dream stuck with me and I found myself going back and pondering it a lot not quite knowing what I had experienced but my gut telling me I’d remembered something important.  I thought about it a lot but never told anyone about it.

A few months later a wise, elder friend and spiritual mentor of mine, invited me over for tea at her house in the rainforest. She pulled out a book she’d been reading and said that she was eager to hear what I thought about a passage in the book that spoke of nonlinear time. I didn’t think much of it except to wonder why she thought that I could enlighten her on the subject. After I read the passage she was referring to I had one of those moments where the dots all connect and another piece of the puzzle was revealed:

“On Earth I see Time as a straight line. Upon it, the present is a point from which, in opposite directions, stretch the past and the future, marked into divisions of the years like thumb-joints on the taunt string of the drawing-scribe. On earth I see the horizon also as a straight line. when I am free of my body, I can see Earth as a sphere and Time as a circle. Upon this circle are the years marked, and if one travels along it, then is the distance between any two points greater or lesser according to the distance that one travels, just as it is on Earth. But I can reach a place where it is as though the circle of time were the rim of a wheel, and I upon the hub of it. From me radiate the spokes, which are of equal length, whether they go to a point in time of what I have been, what I am, or what I shall become. While I am here, that moment I was first born as man–though it was before this little Earth–and that moment when I left the body that I dwell in now, and that future time when I shall be reborn, are at the same distance from me; for where I am is within and beyond Time, for it is the center of a circle where past, present, and future join and are eternal. ”
— Joan Grant, “Winged Pharaoh: a far memory book”

The author was a highly psychic person who experienced precognitive and prophetic dreams. Joan Grant had written the book recalling her memory of a past life in ancient Egypt where she lived as a priestess-pharaoh who had been trained in a secret technique that would allow her to implement the ability to tune into and remember past lives in great detail. [The book is fascinating. I highly recommend it.]

Now, after I have more fully integrated that dream and the bits of information I received about the true nature of time I’ve felt compelled to start experimenting more with intentional dreaming through time and into the future as a kind of remote viewing. So far, the experiments have been successful enough for me to continue to pursue them…including one bit of very practical remote viewing/far seeing about what the weather would be like here during summer 2013 (more hot and humid than usual) which proved completely true. That’s just one practical application of non-linear lucid dreaming but small steps are good to help build confidence. (I did this again for 2014 and the answer was that we’d experience a lot of extremes in the weather this season.)

Actually, it’s my hope that by sharing this experience others will be compelled to start experimenting consciously with nonlinear time and lucid dreaming. First, one must realize that such a thing is achievable, though.

Dreaming can also be consciously used as a practice space for what we wish to bring forward and manifest in this waking earth reality. Who knows what is possible. Actually, anything we can imagine may be possible, IS possible, but one must “know” it is true in order to manifest it. That is easier said than done. (More on manifesting, later.)

For now, it’s an interesting challenge, experiencing nonlinear time as a circle (well, actually, a sphere, as my son pointed out) in the dream time yet living in a linear time-based world in this waking reality. I ran across a Terence Mckenna video where he expressed the experience like this:

“The shaman actually rises into a domain where past and future are different areas on the same topological manifold. This is not a metaphor; it’s what’s really going on. If you think about shamanism in its classical guise for a moment, it is about predicting weather; predicting game movement; and curing disease. If you had a prescient or extraordinary understanding of the future, each one of us would be able to do these things. Predicting the weather? — you just look into next week, and there it is. Predicting the movement of beings? Progression of disease? — same deal.”
–Terence Mckenna: Nolinear Shamans Amongst Linear Societies

I’ll have to qualify all of this by saying that 10 years ago a lot of these quantum sorts of ideas made my head spin. I did not have any frame of reference to help me understand theoretical concepts like nonlinear time, no personal experience I had access to (Although I had a tingle of recognition that exploring it was important.) Through lucid dreaming the experiences finally came, just enough to switch on the light for me.

Lucid dreaming has become my experimental laboratory where these concepts can actually be experienced in order to step out of the old ways of thinking (the old paradigm the textbooks in school taught, that society reinforces) into more open-ended and expansive ways of thinking and living. It’s an incremental dance, this conscious opening to channel more of the subconscious, but also a rewarding and personally, transformative one.