HOW TO BE A NINJA IN ONE EASY LESSON by GRIMLY WHETFOX

“It is better to have the mind of a wily fox than to follow the way of Hinayana self-control.”
~ Zazen Master

“The more closely a phenomenon is observed, the more complex it is seen to be.”
~ Heinrich Weisskopf.

"From my experience I cannot doubt that man, when lost to the terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know, and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking."
~ H.P. Lovecraft, "Beyond the Wall of Sleep"

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Okay gather round folks, 'cos I'm giving this one away for free. Seriously. I could sell this. But I have just sat on it for years. Ever had really big news but not the balls to deliver it?

Yeh, me too.

You will need:

- A notebook
- A pen
- A DIGITAL watch
- A DIGITAL bedside clock
- A bedside lamp
- A paperback book (any book)
- A bed (I'm assuming you already have the last one.)

How you acquire these items is entirely up to you. I recommend, specifically, that you go and buy a very nice lush fancy bound blank notebook in your favorite colour from an expensive stationery or art store. Choose one that you REALLY like. If you are Jungian, get a red one. Make a special shopping trip just for it, if you can choose it and then come back another day for it, all the better. Tell them to keep it for you and then go back to pick it up on a full moon, or something. Whatever the hell you want to do. And buy yourself a nice expensive stilo while you are there. The thing is you are telling your subconcious that this is something important, that this is something to take notice of. We will continue with that theme later. Fondle your new book. Inspect the thick blank pages. This is your ticket.

By no means do you have to purchase these items if you have them already and THEY MEAN SOMETHING TO YOU. I used a digital watch I was given when I was 8, by someone who was very special to me. He was very much a grandfather, although not by blood. Anyway, I had always kept his gift, the watch, and all I did was go out and have it fixed at the jewellers, a new battery and a new strap. I took to wearing it that very moment. And the adventre begins.

I was already keeping a dream diary, you see. This wee trick just seemed obvious.

You wear your DIGITAL watch all day, every day. I'm stressing digital, m'kay? You set it to beep, once, twice or until you have to switch it off, you choose, but set it to go off EVERY 20 MINUTES. This is gonna drive your friends and co-workers nuts. Also, you may find it much harder to become a ninja if you have a regular bed partner. Unless they are... let's say... understanding. And I should have mentioned, that, em, this is pretty serious stuff, folks. This is what dreams are made of.

So. You got your dream diary, you got your digital watch. The reason it is digital is that, it appears, from countless sources [see Waking Life] that all electronic items, specifically clock faces, (computers, mobile phones, that sort of thing) do not work properly in the dreamworld. This is also the reason for the digital bedside clock (so you dont have to fumble around for your watch when you 'wake up') and the electric lamp. Lightswitches are another reality test already well explored (see The Good Night, although the light switch phemonena is not displayed correctly in the movie, and the whole theme of how the character used lucid dreaming is, um, wrong. This is not an escape. It is an entrance. Still, it's not a bad movie.)

So you got your watch beeping, every twenty minutes, you keep checking it. KEEP CHECKING THAT WATCH.

EVERY SINGLE TIME IT BEEPS DO A REALITY CHECK. Do ALL the reality checks, if you can. You gotta be patient, and you've got to have discipline. If you don't start writing in your dream diary the very second you realise you are awake (with 2 quick clicks on your bedside lamp to check you actually ARE awake) EVERY TIME YOU WAKE UP, then you don't get the full result as quickly. Also drugs, drink and hard work can really get in the way of this process. Try to avoid them. Quitting smoking (weed or tobacco or both) will trigger intense disruptions in your patterns of seratonin and melatonin production and uptake, and you are gonna get some seriously vivid experiences... But if you don't keep your dream diary regular, you won't really remember them properly. If you don't learn to do the reality tests, you won't even realise they are dreams. Am I making sense here?

So, reality tests. We currently have 3:

1 - lightswitches don't work (in my dreamworld the lights flicker rapidly if I try to use a lightswitch.)

2 - digital clock faces don't work (again, what you see in 'Waking Life' isn't exactly what I see when I am sleeping, but it's descriptive enough.)

3 - small printed text changes. This is the reason for the paperback novel. Simply read any piece of text, look away, look back, and read the same piece of text again. Any long sentence will do. If it has changed, the words have shifted, altered of changed order, you are dreaming, or possibly very drunk. (Watch out for that one.)

Now I realise any of you that have read this far are either going to be saying, yeh, I've heard of this shit and this is nothing new, or, cleary your humble narrator here is somewhat, shall we say, crazy in his coconut? The latter may well be the case, my friends, but plenty of other people have verified this (not that I trust all of them, cough cough, Stanford Research Institute, I'm looking at you...) and what you are reading now is just my take on it. The 'watch the watch game' is neat because it is it's own reality test. It beeps, you look at the numbers, if they are normal, you are awake. It takes less than two seconds, and the reality test is included for free with the memetic reminder. If you do this 48 times a day (16 hours awake, 3 times an hour) for two or three days, trust me, you will start to do it in your dreams. Our dreams, I believe, are a filing system for memory and emotional associations with those memories. Dreams are brain software for processing, storage, and information retrieval. Seriously, I'm not making this shit up. Go ask New Scientist or something.

So, you've mnemonically (M.I.L.D) induced a lucid dream by repeating to yourself all day "AM I AWAKE?" and doing reality tests every time you check your watch, and then doing that again during your R.E.M. phase of sleep. You can't help but do it, to check your watch in your dreams, because you trained yourself to do it all day. And your watch face in your dreams is gonna look... well, I'll let you see for yourself. Try mirrors too. They are fucking weird. You'll know you are dreaming, I'll tell you that much.

Once again I must pause to mention that this is heavy stuff, ladies and gremlins. The 'watch your watch game' is just a cute little trick to kick start it, I dare anyone to wear the thing for more than a week without getting a 'result' (what's a 'result'? When you get one, just try to explain it... sheesh....). But the real discipline is in the dream diary. You gotta be on that sucker like a dug wi' a burst fitba, every time you wake up. I mean it, seriously; like a tramp eating soup.

Wake, lightswitch check, bedside clock check (Rule 4), write date, time, and dream description. Include in your report all settings, scenes, colours, animals, people, and especially anything that any dream character says directly to you, or you say to them. Note the emotional flavour of the entire dream. You can make four or five of these reports a morning, if you have time to lie in and keep going back to dreamland. Your R.E.M. is strongest in the early morning, or after more than 6 hours of sleep. See 'Wake back to bed' (WBTB) method.

When you first start you will only get a sentence or two per dream. Vague notions of what it was about, who was there. Keep it up for a month... Soon you'll be writing novels. Well, pages, at least.

It's carnival night, Chuck. Can you hear that music?

Typically, your memory functions shut down during R.E.M., your concious ones I mean. What you are doing with the dream diary is teaching yourself to REMEMBER FULLY what goes on, and in this way, YOU ARE CHANGING YOUR BRAIN CHEMISTRY.

Its quite like yoga, but without the farting.

Use at your own risk my friends. Nobody said being a ninja was going to be safe. Not recommended for people who have a history of mental health issues in their immediate family. Not recommended for people who don't like large parts of themselves very much. Not recommended for pussies.

Dream exploration is one of the quickest ways 'down the rabbit hole,' and can be quite unnerving at times. I like to remember the Hitchhikers Guide, DONT PANIC!, and always carry a towel. Fear is a useful survival mechanism, but it is counter-productive in this arena. We have nothing to fear but fearmongering itself.

If you start feeling mystical and you don't like it, take a rest. Get plenty of excercise and fresh air, spend time with friends who are not interested at all in your psychonautics, preferably ones who think the whole thing is very, very silly. Drink beer. THINK ABOUT OTHER THINGS.

If you have success in accessing your subconcious through lucid dreaming, you should research the subject heavily. There are several standard experiences people seem to go through when they begin to actively pay attention to their dreams, through the essential dream diary.

Being extra diligant with your diary will trigger false awakenings. You are in your bedroom, but something is strangely out of place. I have had one episode where I had 4 false awakenings in a row. ie, I woke up in my bed 4 times, got up, wrote my dream diary, started doing things, and realised each time I was still dreaming. When I eventually got back to what we like to call 'reality,' I had to be pretty damn sure that I was actually in meatland.

Waking up to a blank page you just dreamed you wrote is odd. Doing it four times in a row is downright freaky. But it's also cool. Why? 'Cos you know EXACTLY what you are going to write. You just watched yourself write it five minutes ago. You have already practiced it several times over. I get story, music, art and creative multimedia ideas nearly every night. I also regularly dream how to fix home appliances, then wake up and fix them in meatland.

Don't ask me mate, I just work here.

Even if your subconcious tells you how to fix your hoover, which is nice, you can maybe see how these experiences could be slightly taxing to your sanity, without the 'reality tests.'

Indeed, even with the reality tests, you will begin to see 'objective' reality as some sort of dream / computer program / simulation. Everybody does. Remember to enjoy it, and not take it too seriously (fnord). Perception is a funny thing. Try to remember you are only seeing the things you want to see. The links your subconcious wants you to notice. See the Red Dwarf episode 'Terrorform'. Keep an untroubled spirit and you won't run into too much bother.

Research into this is pretty easy, there are plenty of forums for people practising and comparing notes, and there is plenty of literature describing the methods. If you are lucky enough to ever have had spontaneous lucidity in your life, I would strongly recommend you explore this. Your brain is doing it anyway and it is the second most incredible thing I have ever experienced. Honestly. It's gonna blow your mind. However, without wanting to sound too much like the dungeon master...

'There is danger down this path.'

I have come to think that the characters that you meet in dreams are an extension of your own psyche - facets of it - stuff your subconscious wants to work through. But sometimes they tell you things that you just... don't... know. Things you had no way of ever knowing. You can wake up and verify that they are telling the truth. And they are creative, in ways that 'you' are not. I plagiarise their ideas all the time. Can't be copywritten if its only a dream, now can it?

So, after a little while of this there comes an ever increasing synchronicity in daily life that references your dream life (which you can check via your dream diary), and you've soon got yourself the basics for appearing to be 'a very weird dude' to even (especially) your nearest and dearest. It's very hard to relate to them the proof you are developing that there is more to this life and the universe than what we know, so it is my suggestion that you really, really don't try - see my comment about sitting on big news - and try not to worry about the state of play on this 'huge spinning rock in space' too much if you are going to spend time fleshing out the lucid dreaming phenomena. Essentially, beware of becoming convinced you have some kind of 'important mission' in the meatworld. I hope you see what I mean, Neo.

Nobody said being a psychonaut was going to be easy! Oh, actually, I did. And, in many ways, it is. But it can also be a bit scary. Which brings me nicely to my other point...

The dream monster. I have had many strange experiences with this stuff, but a dream monster in the archetypical form has yet to be confronted. It is definitely very high on the list that I was talking about earlier of the 'standard experiences' lucid dreamers go through. The theory for these guys, the shadow creatures, is simple. The practice, I imagine, is not. Gotta take your balls in your hands if you want to jump over the big hurdles. Show no fear, show no pain.

Watch the end of "A Nightmare on Elm Street." How does Nancy defeat Freddy?

There is ABSOLUTELY nothing to fear in the dream world, in my humble opinion. Explore. If you meet your monster, DO NOT RUN. Laugh at it. Punch it in the face. Try to take it by the hand and lead it in a waltz. Challenge it to a game of table tennis. He won't bother you again after that (I have heard stories that the monster often becomes your dream friend!). Now you can apply the neuro-lingusitic programming pattern you used to defeat that fear, the fear of the monster, on anything, both in the dreamworld and meatland. Courage and confidence are raised across the board. Does this remind you of the Aboriginal and American Indian initiation rituals into adulthood, by any chance? Or maybe Luke Skywalker defeating Vader in the forest of Dagobah , only to find out that it was himself beneath the black mask all the time? I didn't really understand that scene when I was a kid. I do now.

Two things you should be aware of before you experience them (not that it will help, these ones are fucking terrifing):

1. 'The Void' as I call it. The Himalayans say there are 7 levels of lucidity (the top 3 are essentially indescribable thanks to the limitations of language - we don't have words for this stuff). The bottom level looks like Krueger's Dungeon (to me, at least). The highest I have seen is just colours... it's impossible to relate. The Himalayans believe between each level is 'The Void,' where you have no body, and there is NOTHING AT ALL. One tends to think that one has died. It is NOT NICE IN THE SLIGHTEST. Wait it out, try to imagine colours and textures, eventually they will solidify into an environment, you can then command yourself to wake up (cue the false awakenings). You can't really 'wake up' from the void, you just have to wait until you move to another Himalayan level eventually, or if you manage to push out, it has been my experience that you 'wake up' into a state well known by psychologists, which is sleep paralysis...

2. Sleep paralysis - you are in your bed, paralysed. All you can do is breathe, and move your eyes. This is usually when the aliens / demons / shadow creatures show up. Even if they don't, it's just as terrifing as the void, if not more so. The technique I have for getting out of both situations is the same.

Relax. Experience. Enjoy.

But then, I've never been anally probed by a bug eyed grey alien before, to the best of my knowledge, so what the hell do I know?

Sleep paralysis is perfectly natural, you do it every time you dream so you don't start walking around or trying to fly in the real world. Oh, did I mention the flying? It's awesome. Anyway, you have sleep paralysis every night, you just haven't taught yourself to remember it. That is the difference. And when you're alert and stuck there, pinned to your bed, your imagination goes into overdrive. In my experience these unpleasant events are very rare, and despite all this alarmist rhetoric, the impact of lucid dreaming on my life has been 100% positive. Honestly, I was already a pretty weird dude, so this is just a bonus.

"It's like boot camp for the psyche. In real life, human beings are packaged in the flimsiest of packages, threatened by real and sometimes horrifying dangers... But the narrative form puts these fears into a manageable series of events. It gives us a way of thinking rationally about our fears."
~ Wes Craven talking about his horror movies

Let me know how you get on!

Love, Grimly.