My experience so far with dreaming
Hello! I'm new here.
For clarity, I'll use "Dream" (capital D) for The Art of Dreaming practices and "dream" (lowercase d) for regular dreams. English isn't my first language, so there will probably be some errors or unclear parts, let me know so I can clarify if needed!
So, I'm a man and new to Castaneda's work. I've been practicing for about 8 months. Most of this time, I've been practicing not-doings and gazing, such as "the right way of walking"(since I have to walk anyway, why not use it as practice?), gazing at shadows and the sun, and contemplating the distance. My intent is to fill my entire day with practice to achieve inner silence.
During this time, I've had 4 Dreams. They were very short (less than a minute each) and set in places near my house.
The first one was a normal dream until I became sober and remembered to "look at my hands." I did, but I forgot the next step and just stared at my hands until I woke up.
A month later, I had my second and third Dreams back-to-back. In the second one, I was sober right away and proceeded to look at my hands and then at other objects. This was very difficult because everything looked as if I were looking through a kaleidoscope. I kept doing the exercise until I got fascinated by a detail on a pipe, at which point everything turned to noise and I woke up.
I closed my eyes again and immediately entered another Dream. At first, I wasn't sober; two figures were talking to me and laughing. I had the impression they would attack me as soon as I became sober. When I did become sober, the closest figure grabbed me by the neck, and I woke up for good. This was 2 months ago.
Then, 2 days ago, I was practicing darkroom (I'm new to dark room, just 4 days of pratice). I saw the purple puffs and went to bed. I had a regular dream and woke up in the morning, had breakfast, and went back to bed. This time, I had the most unique Dream so far. I was conscious but had my eyes closed and couldn't move. I remembered a tip to intent rolling out, so I did, and I stood up in a very unnatural way, like a puppet on strings. I couldn't see anything, as if my eyes were still closed. I tried to open them and instantly snapped back to bed, with my eyes still closed. I repeated this process 5 times until my tonal woke up.