El poncho patria, donde nace y quién lo usa

A lucid dream is one where you are fully aware, with your normal consciousness, of the fact you are dreaming. The out of body experience described earlier occurred while I was fully awake the

entire time, but my first lucid dream was initiated from the state of awareness between waking and sleeping.

I was in my early twenties and had been attempting to initiate a lucid dream every night for about three months. I had no real clue how to do this but felt the intent should be enough to make it happen. Finally one night as I was drifting off to sleep, doing my usual, "remember to have a lucid dream" mantra, I had fallen asleep but was close enough to wakefulness to recognize that phrase happening in my mind. I looked around me and realized I was indeed dreaming, yet I felt as normal as ever.

I was standing on a dirt road near the top of a very gentle slope. All around me were fields of grain turning yellow in the bright sun. A monk in an orange robe was walking up the road toward me. He acted as if he knew me well and immediately told me, "Today's lesson is learning to deal with fear."

He seemed irritated by my excited questions. "Do you know me? Don't you realize we're dreaming?" He looked me over carefully and said something like, "Oh, I see. You've brought your normal awareness along this time." He shrugged off my pestering questions and led me to a group of buildings where several, very large, open tanks were buried in the ground. They were filled with water, and in one tank the water was boiling fiercely. We walked along a wide wooden plank that stretched out over the boiling tank. The hot steam burned against the skin of my face when the breeze blew the vapors toward me.

"You are here to learn how to deal with fear," he said. "Look into the tank." I looked and saw another monk swimming about, smiling and waving at me in a friendly way. "You feel the heat and your mind tells you that if you fall into the tank you will be boiled alive, but you also see that our friend is not harmed. You must overcome your rational fears and jump into the boiling water."

I figured that since I was dreaming, nothing could hurt me, so I jumped in. The water was warm and comfortable. I looked up at the monk on the plank above me who was shaking his head in disappointment. The next thing I knew I was completely dry, walking with him on the dirt road again, back toward the spot at the

top of the knoll where we had first met. I asked him what I did wrong.

"You must be fully afraid, and yet go on," he said. "The problem was you were never afraid to begin with." I told him I knew this was a dream and nothing could hurt me, so what was the point of being afraid? As we reached the top of the low hill I noticed there were railroad tracks crossing the road there. He pointed out across the fields to a large diesel train rounding a curve in the track about half a mile away.

"You must stand here on this track and allow the train to strike you with all it's great force. You must allow yourself to be fully afraid, but under no circumstances are you to jump out of the path of the train."

He positioned me on the tracks facing the oncoming train, which was just a couple of blocks away now. I could feel the ground trembling slightly beneath my feet, and felt the warmth of the sun on my face and the gentle breeze moving my hair. This was so very real, but it was just a dream. I had to remind myself of that, and for a moment I was afraid it might not be a dream, that I would be smashed into a gooey spot on the front of the train if this wasn't a dream after all. I looked at the monk, who was eyeing me carefully, and clearly recognized that I don't usually stand in fields in the middle of nowhere with monks in orange robes after jumping into a tank of boiling water without being harmed. I was dreaming all right.

The train blew it's ear piercing horn and the ground shook as the mass of steel approached the crossing. Everything seemed totally real and my heart was pounding. The train raced toward me at around 70 MPH, the weeds swirling in the wind on either side of the approaching engine. I could see grease marks on the yellow paint and saw the face of the frightened conductor just as the train reached the road, shaking the ground hard now. The horn roared, hurting my ears as I steadied myself for the impact -- two seconds, one second - -

Nothing. The massive train was half an inch from my nose when it froze as still as a photograph.

"What a rush!" I shouted to the monk next to me. He just shook his head as he held his chin, looking disappointed.

"You were not truly afraid," he said. "We will have to take this up again some other time." He turned and began walking away. I followed after him like an excited puppy. "But I was afraid! What did I do wrong? When will we do this again?"

"In about three years," he said almost half consciously. "Three years!" I whined. "This was great! Let's do it again tomorrow night!"

But the scene before me began to lose it's cohesiveness and blurred into the darkness of my room as I awakened. I waited anxiously for those three years to pass, but much to my disappointment a similar lucid dream never occurred.