8/19/17, 1:15 AM:
I sat in my chair and decided to set the alarm on my old iPhone for 21 minutes his time. For the past two or three weeks, since I picked up mindfulness meditation as a daily practice again, I had been doing 11 minutes a day, and the last few days 16. Along with cutting back on the drinking significantly, I found it simply made me feel better: more present, more focused, with more periods of equanimity. I feel I’m getting more out of sleep when I actually manage to get some shut-eye, too. Why I abandoned this for perhaps two years or so is beyond me.
I had been noticing the same weird stuff happening during meditation, and even outside of it, that I had the last time I’d routinely engaged in this practice. Though it has gotten better the past few days, I find that when trying to focus on my breath coming in and going out through my nostrils I would experience what I can only call localized, transient, fluctuating dysmorphia. This is to say that one nostril would seem large and close up to my face as the other would be barely noticeable, giving a lopsided kind of feeling. It would never be stable, however; the nostrils would seem to change in size independently and with varying speed, making it difficult to maintain a steady focus. Typically this happens near the beginning of the session, giving way to stability as I keep at it without fighting this illusion.
Another thing I noticed, and which had happened previously, is that as I meditated on the breath I would reach a point where I would suddenly and quite drastically become more aware, my mind became silent. At that exact moment I would feel and hear a sort of crunching sound in my head as I felt myself coming to entirely inhabit the area behind my forehead. It’s almost as if I’m feeling my brain shifting gears. Once seemingly inhabiting the area behind my forehead I would feel a pressure right above and between my eyes as well as within and around my nose, particularly around the nostrils, the area which I’d been focusing on. Since picking up meditation again, this has also been happening while driving, an activity that generally makes me anxious and during which I fight to keep focus, as I’m constantly phobic about something going awry.
Neither of these things — fluctuating nostril dysmorphia or the crunching sound and sensation within the head — are things I have heard happening to people under meditation.
On this particular early morning, however, after a few minutes of meditation, I found that I kept falling into a vivid, detailed dream state and then popping back out again. At first saw a carpeted floor by a door before quickly popping out of it, focusing back on my breath. Next time, I found myself in a similar environment, though I was now sitting on a chair. I bent down towards my feet and then crawled down onto the floor, looking for something. In the process I hit my forehead on the chair — and that was what snapped me out of it again. As my awareness returned to my body abruptly I could still feel the pressure and tingling sensation on my forehead, where I had hit myself in the dream.
When I slipped into the dream state again, this time I leaned down from the chair and picked up what turned out to be a small child, perhaps some rendition of my new nephew, who I then held for a brief moment before snapping back. Each time I came back to my body my awareness was more clear and crisp, and it was easier to focus on my breath, as my eyes seemed fixed behind my eyelids.
This act of popping in and out of vivid dream environments also happened sometime recently, either during my daily meditation sessions or when I listen to Michael Sealey’s YouTube video, “Guided Meditation for Detachment From Over-Thinking (Anxiety / OCD / Depression),” in bed before sleep. In any case, I would see these dream scenes play out at a distance, like from a third person perspective, and deliberately try to push myself into them so as to experience them from the first person, but I kept losing consciousness when I pushed in, only to regain it briefly before snapping back to third person perspective again.
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