Descend Further...
. . . into A.k. Crook's mind and motivations to Dark Descent and the entire Shimmering series. Expand your reading and knowledge, gain insights into the books, the characters and how it all has come to be.
Lucid Dreaming
Lucid dreaming is your chance to play around with the extraordinary abilities buried in unused parts of your brain. Regardless of whether your are superhuman in real life or not, lucid dreaming is a way for you to put the deepest areas of your brain to good use while you’re sleeping. You can be a Jane Doe while awake and superman while sleeping. All the obstacles of reality can be set aside, as you make trips to the sun or the interior of the earth or test your craziest science experiments on your worst enemies.
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- Berit Brogaard D.M.Sci., Ph.D, "Lucid Dreaming and Self-Realization”, Psychology Today
Tulpas & Thought-Forms
There's an ancient idea gaining more and more traction in our modern world. It's the idea that given enough thought and focus, we can actually create real sentient beings. They're known as tulpas, beings or objects that are created in someone's imagination by visualization techniques.
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Like imaginary friends, tulpas are "entities" generated entirely in the mind. But unlike imaginary friends, some believe tulpas think on their own, experience emotions and have memories. Tulpas generate personalities, desires and curiosities all their own, quite separate from their host; French explorer and Buddhist Alexandra David-Neel wrote that tulpas will eventually leave the host's body, like a child leaves the womb. She herself claimed to have made a tulpa that grew more and more sinister until it eventually had to be destroyed.
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- Diana Brown, “Tulpas: Thoughts That Can Come Alive"
Active Imagination
Active imagination is a method of assimilating unconscious contents (dreams, fantasies, etc.) through some form of self-expression.
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The object of active imagination is to give a voice to sides of the personality (particularly the anima , animus and the shadow) that are normally not heard, thereby establishing a line of communication between consciousness and the unconscious. Even when the end products-drawing, painting, writing, sculpture, dance, music, etc.- are not interpreted, something goes on between creator and creation that contributes to a transformation of consciousness.
- Daryl Sharp, M.A. Jungian Analyst, "Jung Lexicon”