LUCID DREAMING

LUCID DREAMING USE YOUR PSYCHIC POWERS TO EXPLORE THE WORLD OF YOUR DREAMS. It is also available in eBook form and in Paperback – slightly larger as more information has been added.

Tony Crisp

Sleep is a strange country. In it we lose our sense of self. Or dreams take us into realms of extraordinary experience in which we are still largely unaware. But throughout history there have been individuals who have described a different meeting with sleep. They wake up in what is usually a dark, unconscious world. Or in the midst of a dream they realise the situation and relate to the dream in a new and dynamic way.

This is a frontier only a few people have crossed. Like the frontiers of sea and sky that past generations overcame, the frontier of awareness holds enormous treasures and benefits. However, unlike the frontiers presented by the exploration of the oceans and space, the crossing of this frontier is open to us all. To wake fully in sleep and dreams is one of the most amazing experiences and adventures you can have. Climbing a mountain or travelling to wild places is exciting and interesting but discovering your roots and exploring the depths of your mind and heart are life changing. Even the techniques leading to lucidity bring life transforming change in your everyday life.

Many people is lucid dreams control their dreams so nothing scary or threatening happens. Considering that suppressed such feelings such as grief and stressed emotions are connected with higher incidence of physical and mental illness, this is not a healthy way of dealing with fears and emotions. However, there are ways of transforming these. The following examples illustrate an unusual type of lucidity, and the possibility of dealing with a life problem.

Chapters

What is Lucid Dreaming?

A New World to Explore

Benefits and possibilities

First Steps in Lucidity

Going Deeper

Using Your New Abilities

Dreaming – the Miracle of Transformation

Being more than you have ever been before

Tony Crisp

To Petrina

For travelling with me and

All of you who dare to explore beyond the frontier

Lucid Dreaming

Tony Crisp

Introduction – (14 pp)

What is Lucid Dreaming?

This condition, usually called ‘lucid dreaming’ holds in it enormous possibilities and advantages generally unavailable in waking, sleep or dreaming. To understand these possibilities and something of what takes place in lucidity, it is helpful to realise that during sleep our sensory input is largely switched off, and while dreaming the voluntary muscles are paralysed.

Usually we enter this sightless, soundless, immobilised world of sleep without awareness. Travelling consciously beyond sensory input into the substrata of your mind and body is an incredible experience. You then enter sleep with critical faculties, with active curiosity, and the ability to explore what you find. When you become lucid in sleep you carry the bright torch of personal awareness into the depths of your body and mind.

In becoming lucid you not only enter into the world of sleep, with all its possibilities of extended memory, creativity and healing, but you also discover a world of experience that is beyond the limitations of waking life. Imagine what it is like to reach for creative ideas and find them; to create a world around you that brings peace; to be able to practice new skills or improve old ones with expert tuition; or to be able to follow your curiosity off in almost any direction, with full access to whatever you have read or learned in the past. Also, you are able to live these things, not just think them. You can explore love and relationship with a wonderful sensitivity, or even step beyond the usual barriers of time and space – experiencing yourself in a variety of roles or different periods of time.

In lucidity, not only do you begin to touch the enormous potential latent within you, but you also release something of that potential into your waking life. So lucid dreaming is not a Disneyland of ephemeral entertainments, it is the doorway to real personal growth and adventure. (507 words)

Voyages in Lucidity – People’s experiences of waking in the world of dreams

My first experience of lucidity occurred when I was fifteen and had been practising a method of relaxation. One night I fell asleep while using the technique. Instead of losing awareness I continued the descent into sleep with full consciousness. This was an incredible experience because I could feel my body senses being turned off. Thinking disappeared and I experienced a profound ocean of peace. For the first time in my life I knew that life offered much more than I knew while awake, and I could exist without a body.

Usually one’s earliest experiences of lucidity are less dramatic. The following example is fairly typical.

My family and I got out of our car. As we talked, I realised there was a motorbike where my car had been. I said to everyone, ‘There was a car here a moment ago, now it’s a motorbike. Do you know what that means? It means we are dreaming.’ So I asked them if they realised they were dreaming. They got very vague and didn’t reply. I asked them again and felt very clearly awake.’ William V.

For many people their early experiences of lucidity are frequently linked with flying. Jill Gregory describes one such dream as follows.

There is a crowd watching me to whom I explain that I can fly, since this is a dream. I soar high in the sky, touch clouds and return to earth. I experiment with several variations in styles of flying. For example, I fly backwards while standing, and directing my flight by choosing the distance of my visual focus. [Jill Gregory gave me a lot of her dreams with permission to use if I wanted]

Although such flying experiences are interesting, they do not illustrate the creative, learning, and personal growth potentials of lucid dreaming. Bruce Marcot, Ph.D, in reporting his own explorations of lucidity, explains one of its creative possibilities. He writes:

In a few lucid dreams I play the piano and play it like a concert pianist. My “real” keyboard skills are all by ear, self-taught, and at best rudimentary. But in the lucid dream state I’ve had fun with this ability and spontaneously composed some wonderful classical pieces as in a concerto. At times I awoke with the musical composition still fresh in my mind. The pieces were complex, beautiful, moving, and as far as I can tell, thoroughly original and spontaneous. These dreams have shown me that we probably all have a tremendous capability for innate, spontaneous creativity and composition. [This is public domain material on the web. I also wrote to Bruce and he said I could use it. He is a Ph.D. Research Wildlife Ecologist]

Note that Bruce does not simply daydream being able to compose spontaneously, he actually experiences it. This is one of the wonders of lucid dreaming; we experience things in a full surround virtual reality activating all our senses and abilities. But usually we do not leap full-blown into such creative lucidity. Like most other things, it is a learning process. To arrive at your creative power you may need to deal with the attitudes or fears that prevent you being your best in waking life. Unfortunately, some dreamers avoid this, as Alan describes.

In many of my dreams I become aware that I am dreaming. Also, if anything unpleasant threatens me in the dream I get away from it by waking myself.’ Alan. [I was told this during a radio phone in on dreams I did]

Considering that suppressed grief and stressed emotions are connected with higher incidence of physical and mental illness, this is not a healthy way of dealing with fears and emotions. However, there are ways of transforming these. The following examples illustrate an unusual type of lucidity, and the possibility of dealing with a life problem.

In my dream I was watching a fern grow. It was small but opened very rapidly. As I watched I became aware that the fern was an image representing a process occurring within myself, one I grew increasingly aware of as I watched. Then I was fully awake in my dream and realised that my dream, perhaps any dream, was an expression in images of actual events occurring unconsciously in myself. I felt enormous excitement, as if I were witnessing something of great importance. Francis P.

Breaking through the imagery in this way to the processes and possibilities underlying dreams is a royal road to discovering your own innate talents. You can transform negative memories and habits and use your creativity to deal with real life events. Jon describes such a transforming experience.

I am in a landscape and notice that everything is brown; the whole world is brown and lifeless. There is also a feeling of solemnity or dullness. I have enough lucidity to wonder why the world of my dream is so brown and dull. As I ask this, I become more aware of what feeling the brownness expresses. It is seriousness – with no room for humour or fun. The feeling deepens, real enough and clear enough to look at and understand. I see it is my father’s attitude to life that I have unconsciously inherited. I realise how anxious he always felt about life, and how I took this in. That is how I became a ‘brown’ person. I see too that I do not need to be either brown or serious anymore.

Then the landscape changes. There are trees, plants and animals in brilliant colour. I wonder what this means, and the landscape begins to spin until the colours blend and shimmer. Suddenly my body seems to open to them, as if they are spinning inside of me, and with a most glorious feeling, a sensation of vibrating energy pours up my trunk to my head. With this comes realisation. I see how stupid I have been in my brown, anxious existence, how much life I have held back. The animals and plants are the different forces in my being that blend into energy and awareness. I feel I am capable of doing almost anything, like loving, writing a song, painting, telepathy, or speaking with the dead. This sparkling vibrating energy is life itself and can, if I learn to work with it, grow into any ability or direction I choose. I wake with a wonderful sense of my possibilities. Jon.

A New World to Explore – Describing the amazing features of the world of sleep, and basics of meeting that new world of experience

For a few moments, think of yourself not as a body with five senses, mouth, eyes and nose, but a point of awareness. Now think of yourself being mobile. You can either get into a plane to fly, a suit of armour, a deep-sea diving gear, or any other sort of equipment.

While awake your point of awareness is locked firmly into a particular type of equipment, your body. Usually we think of our body as ourselves. But for a moment I want you to see it simply as something like a diving suit that you have put on. While awake you are clothed in this ‘suit’ all the time, so it is like a glove you forget you have on. But in going to sleep you take that glove off. While sleeping your senses switch off. You lose all sense of body shape or size. While dreaming your voluntary muscles are paralysed. You have stepped out of your diving suit.

Over millions of years your body evolved to deal with particular situations – survival in the physical environment of our planet’s surface. This equipment only has limited senses to deal with the needs of immediate survival, with some space for improvement. But life itself – the magical and mysterious process that formed you – can be almost anything. Look around at the creatures existing in sea, air and earth. In sleep you return to being unclothed, prior to the forming of any body, any suit. You return to the root of life’s immense possibilities. You are naked awareness. In your dreams you can then be anything at all.

Think of what that means for a while. From the moment of your conception you started a journey from the earliest forms of physical life on this planet. You moved through various stages of growth, almost like a plant, then a fish, then an animal and mammalian form. But even at birth there were further journeys. You entered into absorbing and taking on the culture you were born into, and the language and beliefs of your culture. Your naked awareness took on level after level of ‘clothing’. Becoming aware as an individual person was yet another layer you put on.

Perhaps you identify totally with who you have become. But if you had been born into another culture you would have different beliefs and a different response to the world. Who then are you at your roots?

Well, fundamentally, you are a million possibilities, as is life itself. In sleep you touch that wonder of yourself, beyond all the clothing you have taken on. You touch your unbounded potential, even though, as in dreams, you struggle to make it conform to the waking person you are convinced you are. Becoming lucid in sleep enables you to start the exploration of what you want to become; the building of the life you want to create for yourself; the channelling of that extraordinary potential into your waking life.

Breaking Through

An important point to know about this relates to the growing use of virtual reality in daily life. Dreams are the greatest expression of virtual reality, and people are often frightened of going to sleep because of their dreams or nightmares. Yet it is provable that you cannot be hurt in your dreams. You cannot drown, you can’t die in a dream, no tiger or other animal can harm you. Of course, you can feel feelings of dying, or being hurt, or drowning, but they are all images you create because you feel afraid and you haven’t faced up to your fears – but it is all virtual reality. See Avoid Being Victims; Dreams are Like a Computer Game

Here are two examples:

Example: I was getting ready to leave and this dark haired guy told me I couldn’t leave, I felt scared and was going to leave anyways, he pulled out a pistol and shot me in the stomach, I fell down, but there was no blood. The thoughts in my head was, “OH NO”. Next thing I remember is that I was still on the floor in the same place and I got up and I remembered being shot but I didn’t seem to have any pain or blood and was moving normally etc. I started looking for a way to leave I was sneaking around trying not to get noticed so that I could get out of there w/o the shooter guy seeing me.

The interesting thing in the example is that even though she could see no hurt came from being shot, yet she was still scared of the guy with the shooter. And it is overcoming such fears that can release you from terror and hurts that haunt us. But here are some dreams where the dreamer feels no fear.

Example: I was trying to confront an extraordinary haunting that was influencing a man who was on a deserted bus, and then felt I had to confront whatever was the source of the ‘haunting’ that was pulling him into his inner mind in a form of Buddhist trance. I turned away from the man and saw just to my right a short distance from the bus an animal that was the ‘haunter’. It was a mammal of no particular type – a bit like a mixture of dog, rat and guinea pig. It seemed very ordinary and tame, and stood looking at me. I walked toward it and stretched out my hand. It was a tan colour with short fur and gave a feeling of being okay to approach, so I touched it to stroke. This was okay and I was thinking there was no problem when the creature leapt at my throat in a flash of movement and dived into my body to eat my insides.

This sounds disturbing but I simply observed this and thought to myself that stroking and trying to be friendly was no way of dealing with this thing. It was as if I was in command of the imagery, so I simply formed another image of my body. The only way I felt that I might deal with the creature was to not feel panic at its attacks. In fact, apart from the gory imagery, there was nothing to be frightened of, as the creature was only attacking my dream image of myself. As I wasn’t identified with this, it couldn’t hurt me. That was the end of the dream.

The first example of the dreamer still locked in the feeling that the imagery of the dream is like waking life – so she remained scared. The second example is of the dreamer still locked in the imagery of the dream, but not feeling fear so he could be in command of the imagery.

Benefits and possibilities

From the experience of dreaming and lucid dreamers the following possibilities have been recognised.

Healing of physical and psychological problems

In the second century AD three hundred healing temples using dreams still existed throughout Greece and the Roman Empire. There are records of both physical and psychological healing being achieved. I our own times the imagery and drama of dreams are seen as being something like a book cover – interesting, but only an illustration of the massive information held under the surface. By asking the question as to what is under the surface of the dream, enormous insights can be gained, and healing changes can be achieved. Lucid dreaming has the potential for speeding that transformation because you enter into the very heart of the dream process with a searching question.

The imagery in your dreams is a way of communicating with the usually unconscious body processes. Once you grasp that, you can begin to work toward self healing. Lucidity enables you to enter into yourself and re-program your ‘wiring’ offering an amazing means of self help.

Solving problems in daily living, relationships, work or creativity

We all have enormous problem solving abilities. When you learned to walk and talk there was no college professor or dictionary to help you. You learned the meaning of hundreds of words without ever having looked in a dictionary. Similarly you have absorbed an unbelievable amount of information simply by living and, as it were out of the corner of your eye, taking in millions of bits of information about life. You absorbed most of it without really being aware what you took in. But at times we realise it as ‘gut feeling’ or intuition. These come from things we learned in the rough and tumble of life, not in the schoolroom.

Dreams and lucidity take us beyond our surface level to where all those stored lessons of life exist. Then we can draw from an immense store of information and experience to solve problems. Your conscious problem solving ability only deals with things we have already organised into words, or have formulated into clear ideas. But a gigantic amount of your experience still remains unorganised. It does not readily jump into words or clear ideas. It has to be gathered together by a question and by a particular state of mind. Dreaming is that state of mind in which the ocean of experience can be explored, and in which it expresses as drama and imagery. Lucidity is the creative act that transforms imagery into insight and creative problem solving.

Practising skills

Adrian Morrison at the University of Pennsylvania found that cats having damage to a particular part of their brain would live out their dreams in movement. These cats would stalk, crouch and spring at imaginary prey. He concluded from this that one of the functions of dreaming is to practise life skills.

Lucidity enhances this possibility. Dreams are a world in which there is no risk of any hurt. You can explore relationships, life situations, new skills, your own creativity or sexuality in this world of limitless possibilities. When lucid you can choose to meet any person to learn from or relate to. You can place yourself in any situation to explore. All you face are your own emotions, experience and thoughts. What world you weave with these is up to you. For in dreams you are the creator.

Finding the enormous potential you have, and bringing it into your daily life

‘Unintelligent’ small birds have learned to fly from one end of the world to the other without a compass. Life, alive in them and in you, has drawn that skill out of its limitless possibilities. As a human being you have the self awareness that enables you to ask questions and seek out what you are capable of. You can tap what it is that enabled the bird to travel the world. As Jon was quoted as saying earlier on, “This sparkling vibrating energy is life itself and can, if I learn to work with it, grow into any ability or direction I choose.”

We often believe that people who are creative or achieve great things are somehow different or far more gifted than we are. Or else we excuse ourselves by saying their life circumstances gave them a better start. Maybe they did have a better start, but that doesn’t mean you lack potential or creativity. Remember that every night your dream maker creates a uniquely different drama. That fount of creativity is alive in you. If you are not using it because you do not believe in yourself – well, step into the temple of your dreams and get a good helping of belief. Drink from the source!

Discover your deep history

Lucidly entering your dreams can give you something few people ever find. It is an experience of connection, of the continuum and of memory beyond your years. You are connected to everything around you, just as your finger is connected to your hand, or ear to your head. They have independent existence, but in no way are they disconnected. They could not exist without your body. Neither do you exist without the you whole memory. It has as intimate an influence in you as your body does with your finger.

Similarly, you do not exist outside of your forebears. In the same way the tree of today carries an aspect of all previous trees it sprang from, so you carry in you an immense history. It is both the history of life, and the history of your family. The deeper you dig into your dreams with lucidity, the more of your history you will uncover. With lucidity you can discover your odyssey through time, space and eternity. You can discover what an extraordinary being you are.

A single cell, which is a seed from which all life forms evolved from, doesn’t become old or die because it is immortal, for it keeps dividing and doesn’t die. In dividing it constantly creates copies of itself, but as it does so it gathers new experience, it changes what is copied, so becomes the ‘seed’ for multi-cellular organism. We all started from the original one cell, and we, you and I, are the result of gathered experience.

No plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life you developed a new brain, and the memories, education and programming you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very ancient self. To explore it see Opening to Life

Unfolding your emotional and sexual self and your personal confidence

Your growth is like that of a plant. As a tiny seed you were fertilised and began to grow. There were stages to your growth and there are different possibilities, not all of which you might have achieved. The acorn holds the potential of a mighty oak, but the tree might not achieve all its potential. Similarly you may not have managed to blossom in life, or not produced what you are capable of. This might be because some of your emotional, mental and creative energy is frozen, or did not have the opportunity to develop. The process of growth that grew you from the tiny seed still holds latent the possibilities of further growth. If you work with awareness in the garden of your dreams the blossoming can take place. There is much more love, sexual satisfaction and personal stature for you to unfold.

Exploring the universe within you

The psychiatrist and dream explorer Carl Jung described the unconscious as something we must not ignore. He said it is as natural, as limitless, and as powerful as the stars.

Dr. Stanislav Grof, chief of psychiatric research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Centre and an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, spent many years collecting evidence from people exploring their unconscious. At first he could not believe his findings. But proof continued to grow that people could remember their experience as a baby in the womb; they recalled verifiable information regarding their forebears; they described past cultures in detailed ways, including the form and meaning of various amulets used in Egyptian mummification. In fact people were able to transcend all the accepted boundaries of what is possible. He concluded his findings by saying that he had no doubt that the present view of the universe and the world around us, what we call ‘reality’, and especially our understanding of what it is to be human, is superficial, incorrect, and incomplete.

Unfortunately many of us carry beliefs of our limitations. We move beyond such beliefs by recognising their limitations. There is also the question in people’s mind as to whether what is experienced is real or only imaginary. The simple solution to this is to test what is experienced to see if it works in your waking life.

There is a whole universe to discover within you. Go explore it!

Experiencing ecstasy

Having taught and worked with relaxation techniques for many years, I know that underneath all our concerns and unrest is a state of blissful peace. We are like the ocean, on the surface of which a storm might be raging, but at the sea bed all is calm. To bathe in this bliss is deeply healing and nourishing. It doesn’t take away your worldly motivations or concerns, but it does bring renewal and strength in dealing with them. David describes this as follows:

I felt a slow dawning of something soft and beautiful in me. It emerged from a deep silence within and filled me with a feeling of radiance, as if my being was gently shining. I literally felt and saw a shining light from within. I knew this radiance would alter the way I relate to others and also penetrate them. I felt I could love easily and without grasping, and it didn’t matter what happened in the relationship.

20-43 First Steps in Lucidity

Intro: Dreams as the Doorway to Your Wonderful Body-Mind

In 1978 Dr. Bernard Siegel, assistant clinical professor of surgery at Yale University School of Medicine, started Exceptional Cancer Patients, an individual and group therapy using patients’ dreams, drawings and images. Recognising that dreams gave patients insight into what their body was doing, Dr. Siegel started a campaign to make more people aware of their own healing potential. Many other doctors have stated similar findings, that dreams reveal the deep working of the body, and can be used in promoting ones self-healing process. Vasily Kasatkin, a psychiatrist at the Leningrad Neurosurgical Institute, based his opinion on the forty-year study of 10,240 dreams collected from 1200 patients.

My own experience leads me to liken dreams to the monitors we see at the bedside of hospital patients. On the monitor there is a visual representation of what is happening unconsciously within the patient. Their pulse, blood pressure, respiration, even their brain patterns, can be shown visually on the monitor. However, in dreams, especially lucid dreams, the image and drama of dreams are, like computer desktop icons, linked with the inner functions they portray. Click the icon and it stimulates a response. Two way communications can take place. The dream image directly links with what it portrays. So when you are lucid you can literally work with sick parts of your body and help them to heal. Or you can seek out answers to questions about your health.

Jennifer Wohl, a researcher into body-mind therapy, calls such dreams X-rays of the Unconscious. But of course they are much more than that. Elizabeth Faber, 50 years old and living in Vancouver, at 24 dreamt she was looking into a treasure chest with skull and crossbones on it. When she opened the chest it was full of bread. On waking she knew the dream was warning her not to eat bread. She went on to discover that she was suffering celiac disease, and bread was killing her. So her dream was not simply showing her an illness in her body, but suggesting what she could do about it by saying bread was poisonous. [Elizabeth Faber is a real person, the account has been paraphrased]

In his book Love, Medicine, and Miracles, Dr. Siegel gives examples of such directly informative dreams. Although scientific research has not yet been able to discover the how and why of these dreams, the countless thousands experienced by ordinary women and men, show us there is something in the depths of your being that responds to your needs and enquiries.

Sometimes such dreams come spontaneously, but they can also come because you have asked for help or insight. This is why it is important not to simply wipe away dreams that disturb you or you don’t like. They are messengers, and you need to work with them and transform them through understanding. Jon’s experience of his brown landscape is an example of this. He didn’t reject the brownness, he explored it and it transformed because he realised he didn’t need to be ‘brown’ any longer.

Remembering your dreams and entering your dream world – with exercise

Most of us know the saying, ‘Use it or lose it’. We know that our mind and body need exercise and stimulus to maintain present quality and develop further. The innate ability you have to move beyond the boundaries of your everyday world of experience also needs to be exercised and stimulated. An old story of a grandfather apparently on his deathbed illustrates this. The old man loved playing the fiddle, and had spent many wonderful hours teaching his grandson how to play the instrument. Now, alone and with such joy ebbing from him he seemed to be sinking fast. But his young grandson arrived, sat with his grandpa and quietly took out his fiddle and played something. His grandpa’s eyes opened, and the miracle of renewed love and pleasure soon had the old man sitting on the edge of his bed joining in the music.

Your body and mind are the most amazing instruments, and there is so much more music for you to play as you move to a fuller life. And a first step in learning is to begin remembering and recording your dreams. In doing so you will be taking the first steps into lucidity. In fact remembering a dream is a penetration of the unconscious by your awareness.

Your Dream Creator is in some ways as shy as a deer in the woods, and in other ways as ready to please you as a dog that loves you. It is certainly as old and as natural as the creatures of the forests. Like any creature, this natural part of you is moved by feelings, by curiosity and love. Therefore your first step in remembering your dreams lies in stimulating interest in that usually hidden and natural world within you. Remember that a lot of great art arises from the unconscious in dreams and unbidden inspirations. Sigmund Freud wrote that, “Not I, but the poet discovered the unconscious.” So open yourself again to those things you find moving, beautiful or rouse passions in you, and allow your curiosity to question what more of wonder is still unknown in you. Use the steps in the following exercise to help you remember your dreams and become lucid.

Exercise One – Remembering Dreams

1) Take time to find something such as an object, a picture or a piece of music that stirs a sense of the best in you and in life. People use things as varied as a symbol of their religious beliefs, a picture of a family member they love, or something from nature that depicts for them the wonders of life. Before going to sleep take a few minutes to dwell on the chosen thing. While doing so hold the thought that the wonder or love you feel is the beginning of a stream of influence that arises from within you. This sense of beauty can also communicate with you through your dreams, so ask it to help you remember your dreams.

2) Your intention and interest in recalling your dreams is important. It directs your attention to the subtle dream process that can so easily be ignored or lost in the welter of waking impressions. But keep your intention playful as you might with a good friend. Don’t let early failures bring difficult feelings. If possible avoid taking sedatives or stimulants before going to sleep – such as coffee, alcohol, tea, cocoa derivatives or a heavy meal.

3) Put a notepad or small tape recorder near your bed so you can record any dream you remember. Dreams melt like snowflakes on your hand unless you record them quickly. This is especially so of dreams remembered during the night. The tape recorder is probably the easiest as you do not have to put a light on or rouse yourself too much to use it.

4) As you start to fall asleep, wonder what strange world of beauty or learning your dreams are going to explore. You dream about five times a night, so you will certainly have a different life in your sleep. Wonder what it is, and determine to ask yourself what you have dreamt as you start to wake during the night or in the morning. What is life telling you in your dreams? Build an image of yourself remembering a dream and recording it.

5) When you wake, do not move or open your eyes. This floods your awareness with massive new impressions and can blast the dream memory away. Tests also show the passage of time, even a few minutes, between dreaming and attempting to remember, causes many dreams to fragment and be lost. So lie still for a while and look backwards into the dimness of sleep. Imagine yourself drifting backwards into the place you are just emerging from. Leave your mind like a keyboard that can be played by subtle feelings and images. Having given time for your dream to emerge, record it right away.

6) Write your remembered dreams into a dream journal, either in a good thick book, or in a computer file. Such a journal is a precious resource. It will gradually develop into a record of your most intimate and whole self. It can become a rich mine of inspiration, of creativity, and definitely of insight into yourself and your endeavours. When you have written your dream, think about it as a drama that reflects your own hidden nature. Ask yourself what the images depict. This is not an attempt to interpret the dream, but a necessary technique to make you aware that dreams are only like a book cover. What is important is what lies underneath.

A computer file has the advantage of being easy to search, so it is worthwhile noting any themes, characters and places that appear.

A number of further exercises will be given throughout the book. To avoid making this like a weekly course I suggest not hurrying on to the further exercises until you feel you have succeeded in the goals of the one you are working with.

The first steps in becoming lucid – with exercise

Becoming lucid in your dreams is about extending focussed awareness into areas of yourself you are usually ‘asleep’ in. This is why the first stage of lucidity is remembering your dreams; in doing so you extend your perceptions beyond your everyday waking experience. Taking these first steps in lucidity is therefore about widening the spotlight of that awareness even further.

Carl Jung taught that our waking personality is only a small fraction of who we are. He describes it as a small bright spot on the surface of a large sphere. The sphere as a whole he calls the Self. The Self includes all the conscious and unconscious parts of you. Extending focussed awareness means taking the brightness of waking awareness into the unexplored aspects of your wholeness. Becoming lucid is about extending awareness even in everyday life. The following exercise starts this process, and should be used for a week before moving on to the next exercise.

Exercise Two – Waking up to Now

This exercise involves taking in a more total experience of where you are and what you are experiencing, and doing this several times each day.

For instance you may be barely aware of your body for most of the day. Or you may be so focussed on what you are thinking, working on or worried about, that you are unaware of subtle feelings or what is going on around you. So take a few moments to notice what is happening in your body. Are you tense or relaxed? What is your posture expressing? Move from that to noticing what you are feeling. On a scale of ten is your mood low or high? Notice what is on your mind. Then, staying generally aware of your body and mind, take in your surroundings. Listen to the sounds and feel the atmosphere. Notice how you relate to the people around you and the world in general. This can be done in any situation, even in the midst of talking or being involved. Aim is to do this at least four times each day. As you do it ask yourself if you are awake or dreaming, or are you lost in the whirl of events and impressions?

This needs to be done until it is habitual. If it is a habit, then it will transfer into your dreams and lead you to ask the same question – am I awake or is this a dream? If you are dreaming and you become lucid, the question then becomes – am I lost in the whirl of events and impressions of this dream?

The next exercise starts an even more penetrating type of awareness that will begin developing your ability to gain insight into your life and dreams. This is fundamental to real lucidity. Remember that these exercises develop enormously advantageous life skills and lead to lucidity, so do not hurry through them.

Exercise Three – The Dream Home

Using the technique in the previous exercise, sit somewhere comfortable in your home. Take time to find somewhere that you most like, and where you are most comfortable. Sit and look around, but not in any critical way. If possible see it as if it were new to you, and notice what impressions you have. See if you can sense what the atmosphere of the place is. Do not read on until you have achieved something of this.

Now look around you as if you were in a vivid dream. Remember that a dream is a full surround virtual reality. All of its features are reflections of who you are and what you feel. This is proved conclusively by lucid dreamers being able to be any of the characters or objects in their dream, and even transform them. Similarly, you have transformed your surroundings in some degree. Even if you are in a hotel room you have probably put personal possessions around you, and changed it from how it was when you entered. So what is your home saying about you? What of you is it reflecting?

The following description a man gives of returning home when he was in a condition of lucid awareness gives a graphic example of this.

When I walked through the garden gate I noticed things about the garden I had never let myself see before; the untidiness and absence of care were no longer hidden by veils. The track I had worn across the small front lawn particularly caught my attention. It was there because I used it as a shortcut instead of walking around the path. But then I arrived at the door and knew suddenly that it was all me. The door was me, and every scratch on its paint was a part of my life, reflecting who I was. Opening the door I went into myself. The door and garden had already shocked me with my lack of attention to outer details. Now, inside the house, the same things showed themselves in the state of my house, depicting my inner health. But I also saw the beauty of my children, and how, despite my self absorption, I had helped make a warm home for them.

At this point do not fret if your response is not as pronounced as that quoted. It is enough to look around and let your feelings and thoughts respond spontaneously. This is not an exercise in concentrated thinking or analysis. It is an opening to spontaneous or intuitive responses. It is a way of penetrating your usual way of seeing things or responding to your surroundings. The shift is brought about by looking at the outside world as a reflection of yourself. Your home surroundings are particularly useful as they most reflect your qualities. But they must be looked at as if in a dream, with the question: What do my surroundings depict of myself? The question, if used frequently, becomes a catalyst promoting new perceptions.

So use the exercise frequently, and as you gain results from looking at your home, turn your attention also to your relationships, to work, or to any other aspect of your life such as your clothes.

Learning the brake, gears and accelerator

If you purchased a machine as complex and as wonderful as yourself, you would demand a handbook from the manufacturer. Unfortunately, the universe, the planet, and the parents who brought you forth, do not supply such a helpful guide. Yet there are things about how you work that are incredibly useful to learn. For instance in some ways you can be likened to a car. You have a brake, a gas pedal, and a steering wheel. Most of the time these are applied unconsciously by external controls. Running, making love, drinking coffee or watching a powerful film, will cause your body and mind to become more excited. Your breathing and heart will speed up. This is like pressing the gas pedal. Drowsing in an armchair, drinking alcohol, is the opposite, and slows you down. This is the brake. As for the steering wheel, other people or events influence you and your direction.

However, you can learn to press your own pedal, apply your own brake, and take more control of the steering wheel. Learning to use your own controls instead of them being constantly activated by other people or events is a life changing skill. So, for a start, if you recognise that breathing reflects excitation or quietness, learning to direct your breathing is one way of taking control. So, for a few minutes try slowing your breathing. Do not hold your breath, but simply make it as slow and smooth as you can without having to gasp for air. It helps if you sit or lie quietly. You can count as you breathe to help regulate the cycle. Being aware of the slow passage of air at your nostrils aids the calmness. So there must be no gasping for breath because you are breathing too slowly. Find a rhythm that is slow but not making you out of breath, and over time lengthen the cycle.

Realise that you are gradually changing very deeply seated habits that have been with you a lifetime. Taking hold of the breath and controlling it is like taking hold of your nervous system, or body, and gradually altering the way it responds to events and thoughts. It is like gently taming a wild animal. There should be no force or conflict involved. Practising this for ten minutes each day for three months will change the way you respond to triggers that cause stressful responses.

Being at the driving wheel of your life means you are not swept away by emotions and urges such as anger and sex unless you want to be. Equally it means you can let yourself be spontaneous if you wish. It means you can direct your feelings, mind and body where you choose, not where fears or urges deny you access. In the realm of dreams this is vital, otherwise a scary dream can send you scurrying away from something that holds vital personal information, or from releasing frozen energy and potential that would add enormously to your effectiveness and physical health.

Shifting gears by learning to relax, and to take and surrender control

I once witnessed a noisy argument, almost a fight, between two men on a London bus. One was an agnostic and the other believed in God. Being so rigidly stuck in a belief has led thousands of men, women and children into terrible wars. Most of us have such rigidities, sometimes to the point of paralysis. In the world of dreams they literally create inability to make use of your potential – you can’t run, can’t talk, and can’t defend yourself in your dreams.

So here are some gearshifts you can make:

You can shift between being tense and relaxed. Take time each day when you are sitting to close your eyes and slightly tense your anus and face. When you are aware of the tension slowly relax it – even to the expression on your face. Repeat this, gradually tensing less and less, until you can feel the difference between the tension and relaxation even if it is only the feeling of tension and the feeling of relaxation. Then allow the feeling of letting go tension to carry on even as you move from sitting. Take your time learning this, and check your tension level frequently each day till it becomes an effortless habit.

Another important gearshift in learning lucidity is to be able to move from active to passive and back again. Adult life can be partly summarised as the effort to maintain control. This means we attempt to control our body movements, our emotions, our speech and where we are going in life. As important as this is, letting go of control is equally necessary. It is also a lesson few of us learn well. If we cannot let go of control we cannot go to sleep at night. Sleep is the ultimate letting go. Also, many important processes within us cannot surface if we control what we are experiencing all the time. Our bodymind heals itself by doing things we might not like consciously, like vomiting poisonous food, like discharging stressful emotions, like producing scary dreams in an attempt to heal old traumas. If our control went too deep we would die very quickly. That is why most of the vital life processes are out of our control. To be able to get into the realm of the most vital parts of our mind and body, we need to learn a little bit of humility – a little bit of letting go.

Learning to relax is the first stage of letting go, but it is still a form of control. So when you are in your relaxed state, develop an image or a sense of your vital life process – what it is that is breathing you and making your heart beat. Now imagine that you are opening to that process that moves your heart, breathes you, and you are ready for it to move you in any way it wishes – move your thoughts, your emotions, and your body. Take on a passive observing and allowing attitude and watch what you experience. This is like a keyboard ready to be played.

Using the relationship between waking awareness and the unconscious processes of the body and mind

The previous exercises and techniques have been a graded step-by-step approach to gradually learn a different way of bringing you into a deeper connection with your life processes. Whatever you do when you become lucid, you are basically experiencing a closer relationship with your life process – with the usually unconscious processes of life that cause you to exist. Of course, the same holds true in a normal dream. But in lucidity you begin to cross an amazing and evolutionary threshold leading to becoming a new type of human being. You are developing a new type of self awareness. You are learning to extend that relationship with life and enter new possibilities and a new world.

All memories are unconscious until you call on them. You use the doorway of memory all the time, so you already have an open doorway to work with. Your breathing is another such connection with your unconscious self, and in slowing your breath you are extending that doorway. We are therefore going to build on what you already have, and what you have learned in the previous exercises.

Because you are going to use what you have already developed, it is not useful to attempt the next step until you feel you have a good working experience of the previous exercises. This is because the next step is an actual movement into the unconscious. There is no danger in that, but it might not work until you have learned to slow your mind and body with the slow breath, achieved a relaxed state, and found some degree of letting go. The unconscious cannot express its more subtle side unless you have let go of conscious control in some measure.

Exercise Four – What Did I Dream?

This is a technique to enable you to enter more fully into your memory. It is also a test to see if you can cross the frontier of sleep while awake. You will then become lucid directly from the waking state, and recover something that you have never previously been aware of.

You can do this at any time of day, but you need quietness and at least ten minutes when you will not be disturbed. So if there is no other opportune time, you could use it just before going to sleep or waking up.

In the exercise you ask the question, ‘What has been dreamt?’ This can be done at any time of day. You are not looking for already remembered dreams, but for one you have never recalled before. Because you have no idea of the subjects or images of the dream, you need to leave yourself wide open to all images and ideas. Think of it like standing in a stream of images and ideas, letting them all drift past without interference until the right one comes. When the actual memory comes, there will be an immediate realisation that this was a dream, despite all the other images. When you succeed with this you will know that you have truly delved deeply into yourself, into lucidity, and this is a great thrill.

How to wake up in the world of symbols and feelings – techniques of memory, waking attitudes and sleep cues

When you consciously cross the frontier of sleep you will learn there are two levels of will or decision making in you. Both are familiar. The first is your conscious decision making. The other we often forget. It is the will that keeps you alive. If you hold your breathe, and keep holding it, you will feel the strength of that will pushing against the decision to hold your breathe. This will is an expression of the universal life acting in you. That same will circulates your blood, and attempts to keep you healthy despite the many things you might do in acting against it. It expresses in sleep as dreams and spontaneous movements or speech. It is enormously important and powerful, and we have started a fuller relationship with it in the breathing and relaxation exercises.

Some years ago I taught dreamwork at Atsitsa on the Greek island of Skyros. Windsurfing was one of the activities there, and I watched raw beginners struggle to keep balance and repeatedly fall into the warm waters of Atsitsa bay. But by getting back on the board and trying again, in a few days a transformation took place. The waves were the same, the board was the same, but now the surfer was in balance and harmony with the forces of wind and waves around them, and they flew over the sea. This is exactly the relationship we are seeking with the powerful forces you will meet as you cross the frontier of sleep – not control, but learning to ride and move with the energies within you to the goals you wish to reach.

So we are defining a waking attitude here that you will carry into your lucid experiences enabling you to ‘surf’ that ocean more skilfully. The attitude is one of watchful awareness in the midst of letting go. Being too much in control keeps you in the shallows of the lucid experience. It is like trying to stop the waves or the tide. Better to work with their energy and to use it. The following exercise helps you to develop this attitude.

Exercise Five – Carving in Space

Stand with feet slightly apart in a space you can easily move your arms and body. Relax and close your eyes and extend your arms sideways as far as they can go, but not tense. Now start circling your arms across the front of your body and hold your awareness on your finger tips, noticing the shapes you are making in space. Continue this for a while being aware of the shapes you are carving in space. When you have a sense of this, be aware of what sort of shapes your hands and arms want to carve in space if you simply let them move where they want to. Give yourself fifteen minutes of this, allowing your body and even your voice to enter into the spontaneity if they want to. Allow whatever feelings arise. Hold the attitude that what you are doing doesn’t have to make sense. Nor does it have to comply with what other people might expect of you. Realise that you are allowing another part of yourself, perhaps a non verbal part, or a facet unknown to the rational mind, to express. Write up what you experience in your dream journal.

What arises will often be expressed as symbolic movements or mime. You are thus entering directly into the world of sleep and dreams while awake with critical awareness. Therefore it is deeply important for you to recognise that symbols are an attempt on the part of your deeper nature to communicate with you. Therefore ponder on the significance of what is met. Gradually this open, watching and questioning attitude will lead to direct insight while the process is going on. What you learn while awake will then enter into your sleep experience and bring lucidity.

The above exercise needs to be done until you find easy results. But the next step is to wake in a dream and become lucid, so do not use this until well versed in the previous. So far, the exercises have gradually led you to step over the frontier of sleep. You have begun to develop a relationship with the world active on the other side of that frontier. So the next step is to go further into that territory of awareness by developing a deeper relationship with it. Here are two exercises to cultivate this.

Exercise Six – The Slow Breath

For thousands of years meditation has been seen as a doorway to wider awareness of lucidity. In fact some masters of meditation say they are continuously lucid throughout sleep. Their lucidity didn’t arrive through clever techniques, just through gradually widening their everyday awareness.

You have already been using one of the most powerful meditations – the slow breath. The next step is to prolong your practice of it so that its influence can deepen and gradually transform you. Use the practice every day for at least 20 minutes. It will repay all that you put into it in many more ways than lucidity. This is not an easy meditation as it takes discipline, but please use it until you find your breathing is slower when you are at rest. You can then dispense with it.

Exercise Seven – Reality Check

Many things done during the day, you are also bound to do while you dream. Common ones are walking through a door, or meeting someone. The Reality Check is a way of linking the waking act with the dreaming one. You do it by using one or both of the examples, meeting someone for instance, and each time you meet someone you ask yourself whether you are awake or asleep. If you make a habit of this it will happen when you dream and lead to lucidity. Just before you go to sleep, imagine yourself using the reality check in a dream, and becoming lucid. Say to yourself, “I am going to do the reality check every time I meet someone/go through a door in my dreams, and I will then become lucid.”

What to do when you become lucid?

It is important to have made a habit of seeing your surroundings and your dreams as depicting yourself in some way. Read again what Jo says about the transformation that arose from recognising what the dream ‘brownness’ indicated. Grasp as firmly as possible how a dream is an expression of your own mental and emotional self. This helps stimulate lucidity and aids you to continue it when you achieve it.

If you find lucidity slipping away it is helpful to use the slow breathing technique. This is because the slow breath helps you to calm and ride the situation. Some people find that if they imagine themselves spinning like a top, this also keeps them lucid.

When you first become lucid it will be a tremendously exciting experience, and may be in a flying dream. The excitement arises because you know from deep within that you have achieved an amazing breakthrough. The sense of possibilities and freedom is enormous. But if you have no idea of what is possible you may simply stay lucid but roam around in the dream imagery. So take time to think about and imagine what you might like to do with the following possibilities.

You can explore the freedom open to you beyond the dangers and limitations of your body. You can fly, swim underwater without breathing, jump from a high building without danger, make love in any way you like, be any shape or any gender you wish, experience being an animal or a tree, or in any period of time. In other words you can play and revel in this safe world beyond any dangers. Playing with the virtual reality world of dreams needs you to learn how to direct and move the imagery around you. This comes from practice. It all arises from changing your feelings and thoughts, and using your imagination. Whatever you imagine becomes real in lucidity.

You can explore and find useful or practical answers to almost any question. This does not require the sort of laborious thinking one uses in study and exams. It is a matter of taking on the keyboard condition described earlier, and holding the question in mind. The answer comes intuitively. I once wrote a third of a book in this way. But you have to let the answer create what you see and experience around you. Someone might appear and talk to you and give an answer to your question.

Search out the roots of personal problems, fears or failings. This is done in the same way as seeking answers to questions. It takes more courage and discipline though, as you might need to meet strong emotions and memories.

Clarify your destiny. This is done by exploring the question of what are the main drives and passions in your life, and where do they come from. These drives are like great underground rivers that flow into many of your motivations and actions. (493 words)

Experiences you might meet, and how to use them

No matter where you live, if you look around you your surroundings are either largely or wholly shaped by human action. Your house was at one time only an idea in someone’s mind. Materials were then moulded to make that idea a physical reality. We constantly shape or re-shape the world around us individually and collectively.

In lucid dreaming this becomes accelerated to an incredible degree. Shift your mood in a dream and your whole surroundings change. So the overall situation you are going to meet is that you are the creator of the images, characters and experiences you encounter. Of course, at first the creation is going on unconsciously. Your hopes, past traumas, ideas and creative impulses, your underlying potential, are shaping what you experience in your dream. This is why the changing gear exercises were given. The slow breath meditation is vital in meeting the world you inhabit in dreams. So use the imagery of remembered dreams to practice shifting your feeling and mental states, and use this in dealing with your lucid experiences. Do this by imaginatively reshaping the dream toward a more fulfilling conclusion.

Something that lies behind the creation of many of your dream scenes is the process in you that attempts to keep your body and mind healthy. This will manifest as recurring themes or situations that confront you again and again. Honour the process by learning to work with it. What it requires is the ability to observe and constructively question. For instance if the theme of a lost or hurt child appears often, then you would need to ask the question, “What situation in my life does this reflect?”

The findings regarding the difference between the right and left brain operation show that most of us live in a type of narrow focused perception most of the time. In lucidity there is a wide beam global awareness. This wider vision is an extraordinary enhancement to your normal way of learning or experiencing. You will encounter this ‘wider awareness’ again and again in lucidity. Test it and assess what you gather from it just as you would any other source of information. Often it is like a wise teacher in that it gradually unfolds deeper and deeper understanding in you about given aspects of your life.

The teachings of the major faiths around the world say there is something of great value to find at the core of human life. Many explorers of lucidity say they have found this pearl of great price. It is the direct experience of their very essence, and is beyond life and death. They touch something that is beyond time and space, beyond change. In different cultures it has different names. Nevertheless it is within each of us, and does not have to be earned. It simply exists. Finding it may radically transform your values, changing the direction of your life. Open yourself to its influence. (488 words)

Going Deeper

Intro: Lucidity is more than Dreaming – knowing the difference

In 1968, Dr. Charles Tart, author and faculty member of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, attached an EEG machine to a young woman who had experienced lucid dreams since childhood. While lucid in sleep she claimed to be able to move about a room and witness what was happening despite her body being immobile in sleep. Tart hid a five digit number where the subject could not see it. It took her several attempts, but she successfully reported the number, a 100,000 to one chance of success. The EEG showed an unusual brain situation while the woman’s awareness was not focussed on her body. It seemed she was both in deep sleep and awake at the same time.

It is wonderful to have that glimpse into the brain during lucidity. But lucidity is not something that only happens in sleep. Perhaps the most inclusive description of lucidity is that it is expanded awareness. To understand it you have to move beyond a view of the world based on the limitations of your physical senses. For instance the cells in your body are unbroken subdivisions of cells going back to the beginning of life on this planet. In that sense your body is millions of years old and carries that experience. What would it be like for your awareness to expand to include that time span? What would it be like to remember not just your dreams, but your infancy, your life in the womb, or your life in eternity? Lucidity is not simply playing within dream images. It can also be remembering who you are in your entirety, and what part you play in the scheme of things. Your present personality, even with great schooling, is just a young thing developed during the life of this body. But it is riding an ancient wonderful life form, and can find unity with that.

Tracy, a woman who had long explored lucidity, describes her experience of this as follows:

Suddenly, toward the end of exploring my dream, I leaped beyond anything I had ever experienced before. I knew just as clearly as in ordinary life I know my name, that instead of being someone separated from everybody else living a certain day in time, My real self was a river that flowed through all time. I had always existed and was involved in all history. With an amazing heightened awareness I could see the influence from this timeless self flowing through all my present life, subtly shaping it. The things I had chosen to do or work at were all connected as a working out of ancient influences, or an attempt to change them.

For the next few days take time to imaginatively trace your body backwards. Remember that the cells of your being can never generate from something dead. So move backwards through all the conceptions, all that collected history in the genes, all that change and time. See if you can get a feeling of that vastness. Ask yourself what is it in your being that has survived through it all, and are you in touch with it?

Incubating lucid dreams – with exercise

During the period of writing this book, while walking home along a main country road, one I had walked many times, I suddenly felt fear of the cars passing me. It was strong enough to make me walk as far away from the road as the sidewalk allowed. As I walked on, still away from the road, wondering why I felt such fear, a van pulled up beside me on the road to make a turning away from me. As it stood there waiting for traffic to clear and I was passing it, I heard the scream of tires as a car went into a skid on the wet road. Then the skidding car shot up onto the sidewalk between me and the van. It was an extraordinary experience. But I have had many such things happen to me since I have tried to listen to that wider awareness in which our little self lives.

What happened to me walking along the road was one form of lucidity, and the more you become lucid in your dreams, the more this wider awareness will become a feature in your life.

If you have made a habit of the reality checking technique you have probably experienced lucid dreams by now. But there are ways in which your lucidity can be made even more frequent. Don’t forget though that remembering your dreams is the most powerful method of increasing lucidity. Meanwhile here are some ways to bring about more lucid dreams.

Exercise Eight – Create a Helper

You can create an external helper by making a tape recording that plays while you are asleep. Having already practised the Reality Check, the tape is aimed to work with that. You need a long playing tape, or if you know how to put the recording onto a CD use that instead. If you use the tape get a 120 minute cassette. You can put quiet background music on most of the tape if you wish. This in itself keeps you nearer the surface of sleep, enabling more frequent lucidity. But the important point of the tape is to have the words, “You will now do a reality check” spoken about an hour into the tape. This should then be repeated just before the tape ends. Put the same recording on the other side so when the tape ends you can simply turn it over and let it play again.

This is like having an external friend sitting with you through the night gently reminding you to do a reality check as you sleep and dream. By turning the tape over, or the CD to replay, you can have the prompt reminding you through the night. Obviously the volume needs to be fairly low so as not to wake you completely. As you go to sleep, say to yourself over and over, “When the tape reminds me to do a reality check I will become lucid in my dream.”

This method is extremely powerful. The tape method, allied with your continued reality checking, needs to be continued until you become lucid frequently enough to start exploring and discovering the possible wonders of the lucid experience. As that happens, take time to use some of the suggestions as to what you can do while lucid. This is like learning any other skill and needs practice, so do not be impatient.

Also, as the taped message begins to work and stabilise, you can introduce many other messages played in the same way. If you seek an answer to a problem you could put the words on the tape – “You will now do a reality check while dreaming, and while lucid seek an answer to …” and then put in what it is you seek. In this way you could use the external helper to explore any of the areas of lucidity described, such as finding your innate life direction, or satisfying love, and so on.

Lastly, a waking exercise you can do when you have time and inclination. This is something that helps to develop the keyboard condition that is so important when trying to access some of the lucid possibilities.

Create a space about a single blanket in size in which you can move without banging into things. Wear loose clothing, and perhaps play some music that does not grab your body with its beat. You need to be in a place where you are not distracted or disturbed for up to 30 minutes.

Now stand with eyes closed and feet slightly apart. Raise your hands above your head toward the ceiling – or sky if you are outdoors. Hold in mind the idea or image of a dried seed. You do not need to concentrate. Let your body take on the keyboard feeling and watch to see if your posture expresses what shape you feel a dried seed would be. Follow that feeling until you find a position that you sense is right. Once you feel reasonably satisfied with your position, imagine what a dried seed might feel like inside. Is it waiting, sleeping, unconscious? Whatever you imagine it to be, allow your own inner condition to be as nearly like it as you can.

Then let your seed be planted in warm moist soil. Just as you followed the feeling sense to find the ‘seed’ position, now follow that in the same way to see how your body and feelings will express as the growing seed. But don’t worry if you have no urge to move, and only wish to stay in the warm. Many people find the meditation has its own dynamic, and they can only grow to a certain stage, or the unfolding story throws up unplanned details. These details of how your own growth in the meditation occurs are relevant to your own life situation. Just follow what arises and note in your journal what you experience, and try it again within about five days. (991 words)

Powerful Prompts to wake you in your dreams

The methods you have used so far to help you become lucid are powerful enough, but if you need an extra boost to take you into lucidity, the following techniques will do it for you.

Exercise Nine: The Waking Dream

You need to remember a dream that is clear and vivid. As soon as you wake, with the dream still in mind, use your relaxation technique to drop tensions. Then imagine yourself entering into the dream, just as if it is a real environment. Feel the atmosphere, look around you feeling and sensing what you did in the dream. Take your time with this, and as you look around notice what is dreamlike or different to waking awareness. Learn to recognise what these signs of dreaming are. It might be that things change rapidly, or you are intimate with people you don’t know. Go over the recognition of these signs of dreaming until they are easily remembered. Use this with each dream you recall. And as you do so say to yourself mentally that in future dreams you will recognise these signs and become lucid. In fact imagine what it would have been like to become lucid in this dream through recognition of the dream signs. Allow yourself to change the dream or experience it in any way you choose.

Repeat the process over again, telling yourself that in future dreams you will become lucid. Explore your dream, noticing what is dreamlike about it. Tell yourself that in future dreams, when you meet these dream signs you will wake in your dream and begin to access its treasure. Visualise waking up in your dream and experiencing the things you want to gain from lucidity. Keep repeating the process for at least ten minutes before you finish.

If you miss out on this as you wake, you can do it during the day.

While you dream, your brain produces all the signals to your body that if you were awake, would promote physical movement, speech and emotions. However, a small area of the brain blocks these signals so you do not move around too much while you sleep. Even so, the movements and sounds you make in the dream are important and are part of your memory of the dream. Therefore if you have time and space to do so, imagine yourself walking into the dream and actually make some of the movements, sounds and postures in your dream. This acts as a restimulant of the deep levels of memory. When you have done this act out what you would do and feel in becoming lucid in your dream.

After you have used the previous method for some time, try this next one. What you will find is that one or the other approach suits your particular temperament. In fact, as you enter more fully into lucidity you will find very personal tuition arising from your dream experiences. Until then, however, use these given methods. The next approach is based on a method suggested by Bradley Thompson in his excellent Lucid Dreaming Kit. It is perhaps the most powerful of methods, and if used after you have done the previous exercises, will certainly take you into lucidity.

Exercise Ten: The External Reminder Prompt

Take time to purchase a digital wrist watch that gives an audible beep on the hour. Set the watch to sound its beep every hour. Wear the watch during the day, and every time you hear the beep look at the watch and do a reality check. You must do this until it really does become a habit. It is the habitual response of this that is the important factor. Building the habit takes the action and reality check right into your unconscious where it will act with hardly any awareness – as in sleep.

Do this for three days. Then place the watch near you as you sleep, so that you can easily hear the hourly signal. As you go to sleep, repeat over and over for a minute or two, “When I hear the hourly signal I will do a reality check in my dream and become lucid.”

Use this method for as long as you wish. The more you use it the more effective it becomes

As with the other methods, when you attain lucidity, start giving yourself goals to achieve. To start with it is good just to play in the lucid experience to discover the unbelievable freedom you have and the completely safe environment you are in. You can swim underwater without breathing; you can fly, either as yourself or as a bird; you can become any of the characters in your dreams, or any character in history or the present. These are play things, and you can later move onto things that really interest you.

Lastly here is a script that you can put onto a tape and play to yourself as you practise your relaxation or your slow breath. Please think of the words used only as a suggestion, not as an attempt to state any absolute truth. They are a means to enable you to open to your own wonderful potential. Read it slowly so it plays in that way.

Exercise Eleven: The Lucidity Script

Imagine standing by an immense and beautiful ocean. Create a feeling or an image of this ocean. This is not an ocean of water, but an ocean of life and consciousness. This ocean pervades all space, enters into all things, and is the source of your own awareness. You emerged from it at birth and began the journey of this life with a sense of separateness. But now you are ready and strong enough to accept your part in that ocean and open more fully to what it can offer you. Ask help from it on your journey of further growth — of widening awareness. As you ask this you are allowing the protective layers of yourself to melt sufficiently for you to become more aware of this ocean of life from which you emerged. (1017 words)

Are there dangers in spreading your wings?

There are dangers in virtually everything we do in our everyday life. People die from normal activities such as driving a car, eating out and the electricity in their home. We take it for granted that knowing and avoiding such dangers is a regular part of life. So it is good to look at the possible dangers of crossing the frontier into wider awareness and transformation.

Years ago a young man talked to me about developing his intuition. He was going to use a crystal ball to do this. I discovered he was convinced pictures and scenes actually appeared in the ball, rather than it being a focus for his mental imagery. That lack of understanding could put him in a dangerous relationship with his own imagination and imagery. He would not arrive at a balanced evaluation of what he was experiencing.

The danger of this lack of understanding applies to lucidity also. You are dealing with powerful mental, emotional and spiritual processes. It is important to understand what the dream process is capable of and what it does. Remember, a dream is a full surround virtual reality activating all your senses and abilities. When you are in it, it is just as real to you as the physical world. But there is a huge difference. The environment, people, animals and objects are all projections. In the film Matrix, the hero is at one point put into a lucid virtual reality called ‘the construct’. He cannot understand what is happening to him, and his guide says, “What you see now is what we call residual self image. It is a mental projection….” Your dream is exactly that, an amazing moving and living projection in which you act and interact with YOURSELF. There is, in the widest or cosmic sense, nothing else. The dream process transforms your emotions, your beliefs and hopes, your fears and traumas, your intuitions and creative visions, into people, environments, animals and events. Understanding that is vital.

The second danger is avoidance. Because everything you meet is an aspect of yourself – either your small or cosmic self – any avoidance of a frightening dream figure, a difficult environment is an avoidance of yourself. The figures and environments are created out of your own mental, emotional and sexual energy. Avoiding them means losing portions of your potential and your physical and emotional energy. I know this as a vital personal truth. At one time I suffered what is now called ME. I was so tired I barely wanted to stand up. As I reclaimed my dream figures the tiredness disappeared.

Your dream characters and animals are intelligent and purposeful. They have a semi independent life within you until you integrate them. You create them unconsciously using your energy, positive feelings and motivations. Avoiding them leads to the loss of your full potential and health. I am not suggesting you immediately meet and integrate all your many aspects. That takes time, courage and a form of strength that only grows as you mature in this new environment. What is important is to remember your goals – integration and wholeness – growth into a new level of ability and maturity, a new connection with others and yourself. You do this by claiming and loving all that you are.

The third danger is the lack of understanding about your own growing abilities. In crossing the frontier into your fuller life, you have opened a gate wider than you have in the past. Usually only a few dreams and feelings have been allowed through into waking life, and for some people not even dreams have emerged. So it is important to remember that the world of lucidity can sometimes emerge into waking life if it is important enough. Sometimes there is an urge from within that needs to be known. This breaks through in the form of a waking dream. That sounds easy, but remember that a dream creates a full surround virtual reality. When the breakthrough occurs you see people, perhaps hear a voice talking to you, or see an animal that is not physically present. If you do not understand the process you may develop crazy anxious ideas and feelings about it. So take this in and make it something you understand. A vision, a hallucination, is the dream process occurring while you are awake. It is not a sign of madness, but an indication that you are now able to access your intuition and unconscious senses more capably.

The fourth danger is in not knowing your territory. This is not a big danger, but it can be disturbing if you are suddenly in an environment you have no understanding or concept of. So recognise that there are five major levels of consciousness, each producing very different ways of experiencing yourself.

The first is waking consciousness. The attributes of this are focussed awareness through the physical senses. Limited perception of and ability to change your surroundings. Ability to reason deductively and inductively. Critical observation.

Dreaming. This, without lucidity, loses the ability to reason and critically evaluate situations. In it you are immersed in a world of your own creation that is infinitely variable and easily open to change. You unconsciously create an apparent reality expressed as dream images and drama.

An environment beyond the images of dreams in which you directly observe the forces of mind and body that creates the dream imagery. Usually to enter this you need to be lucid, otherwise it expresses as dream imagery. Here you can directly work with the bodymind processes.

Dreamless sleep – usually experienced as unconsciousness. If entered lucidly it becomes an infinite ocean of awareness in which you are an integral part of the cosmos and all that exists in it. Here there is the possibility of gaining insight into how your present personality was formed out of this ocean of possibilities and collective experience.

Totality. In some cultures called enlightenment or liberation. In this phase you are both the ocean of consciousness and also the individual waking awareness at the same moment.

What near death and out of body experiences tell us about the world of lucidity

When I was eighteen and living in Germany, I was woken from sleep one summer evening by a sensation of rushing upward in darkness and a release from pressure. When I could see, I was looking down at my sleeping body and experienced terror because something was happening to me I had no explanation for. Then suddenly I realised I had read that some people experience leaving their sleeping body. That is what was happening to me. I had left my body behind and was still conscious and independent of it. The terror disappeared and I found myself curled up with my arms around my knees, flying over the countryside, still light because of the summer evening. But suddenly I was in my home in London, standing behind our couch. I felt more awake than I had ever been before in my life, was amazed at what was happening. I seemed as solid as ever, despite having no physical body. My mother was sitting knitting, alone except for our Alsatian dog asleep in front of the gas fire. I was so excited I called to my mother, “Look what’s happening mum.” She paused for a moment but carried on knitting. This puzzled me as I seemed completely solid and real to myself and couldn’t understand why she couldn’t see me. So I shouted to attract her attention. She carried on knitting, but as I shouted the dog heard me, awoke and came bounding to me, barking and howling to see me. I later found out my mother had been alone that evening, and the dog had suddenly rushed to the back of the settee barking and howling.

Dr Melvyn Morse specialises in the care of young children. Katie, a young girl, had been found floating face down in a YMCA swimming pool was brought to Dr Morse apparently dead. A CAT scan revealed that her brain was abnormally swollen. If not dead, she was certainly in a deep coma, and was placed on a machine that breathed for her.

In his book Closer to the Light, Dr. Morse describes how Katie made a full recovery, and because he had to find out how Katie came to be face down in a swimming pool, Dr Morse had to interview her. To his amazement Katie described the operating theatre in which she had been placed while in coma. She also described the other people who were working on her and what they did. While this was happening she told Dr Morse that she knew what was going on in her family home and could described in detail what her brothers and sisters were doing. In fact it seemed as if she existed in a different state of time and space.

Dr. Morse went on to investigate hundreds of such experiences. He did this as a long term study, and also followed up on the children he had investigated and recorded their experience of out of body awareness during their apparent death. Of course, many authorities try to explain such experiences away if they have not experienced it themselves. But Dr. Morse examined the possibilities of drugs influencing the brain, and other possibilities and found these did not apply. Again and again, people could witness and report actual happenings around them while they were apparently unconscious or without a heartbeat.

His long term finding discovered that all of the children who had an NDE show an absence of any drug use. They have little rebellion against authority, and showed a keenness to learn and be active in the world. Their maturity and wisdom was marked, and they each claimed that during their NDE they had learned profound lessons about how to live and the meaning of their life.

Because we often believe that what we see in the physical world is an ultimate truth, we hold the concept that distance takes time to cover, and that our body is the very foundation of who and what we are. Many people do not believe that there is anything to learn from within them. The hold the view that there is only one reality and that is the physical world and all it offers. They believe this despite the fact that consciousness is an extraordinary miracle, and imagination a profound argument against all being in the exterior world. Such ideas have given rise to mistaken views of the world that we enter in lucidity. As can be seen from my own and Katie’s experience, when released from the domination of her five physical senses she had a completely different relationship with time, space and her environment.

This points to an astounding possibility – beyond the limitations of the world we know through our five senses, our mind or core consciousness can move around and live in a world not limited by time and space, or the needs of the body. In this world of experience within us lie enormous resources of information that are deeply relevant to who you are. From it you can gather insights that clarify the most important lessons you face in this life, and your greatest talents and best direction.

Some aspects of modern physics suggest that at a fundamental level the separate parts and units of the universe are totally and immediately connected beyond distance or time. If we add awareness to this, it is saying that consciousness fills the entire universe beyond the limitations of space and time. It also suggests to us there are possibilities open to us beyond our imagination – if we reach out for them! Near death experiences, out of body experiences, and lucidity, give us entrance into that world of timeless and spaceless existence.

I am not asking you to take that in and believe it all at once. Just hold it lightly like a beautiful flower, and perhaps discover it for yourself as you explore lucidity. (985 words)

Will you be a prisoner of your limitations, or a traveller of wider possibilities?

Memory is a good example of how the unconscious and conscious work together, how the known and unknown meet and pass backwards and forwards. It also helps us understand how an enormous breakthrough can occur. For instance a huge mass of your experience and potential lie in you unknown. To illustrate this I am going to ask you a question the answer to which is at present still unconscious. When I ask the question notice if you can how the answer becomes conscious.

The question is – What is your present home address?

As you see, something that was not on your mind suddenly appears. Quite magical!

You could be asked questions for hours, days, and still discover more information. You might discover parts of yourself that had never before been known to you. However, what we are moving toward in lucidity is something beyond that. Supposing you are trying to remember somebody’s name and you are searching your memory under the ‘Bs’; while in fact the name is Jane, and you should have held in mind the letter ‘J’ to trigger the memory. Holding the ‘B’ in mind could act as a block. Certain things in you need the right trigger. This is basic in nature where plant growth and animal mating is activated by duration of light, temperature, or other triggers. While most of our personality unfolded through infancy, childhood, youth, adolescence and maturity, and this occurred spontaneously, there is another level of growth open to us as humans that has to be triggered.

As with adolescence, it isn’t a case of developing it through personal effort. It is more like riding the wave as the development takes place – except that it will not usually take place until the trigger calls it into action. Also like adolescence, it is the birth of a completely different way of experiencing the world. Something new and splendid is born in us. Examples of the birth of this new level of growth are seen throughout history in outstanding men and women. But we live in special times. Many more of us are ripe for this new and wider life. As a species we have gone through enormous and almost inexplicable changes. From a mammal that had no self awareness or complex language we made the huge jump to self awareness, with its explosion of cultural and eventually technological development. But as a species we are ready for the next big change – linking the personal with the whole.

Natural processes, largely unaided by you, like a current have carried you through enormous physical and psychological changes to your present situation. Not only did you develop personal awareness, something unique in the natural world, but you also developed personal will to some extent. What the next step involves is a linking of your personal will and awareness with the natural forces that brought you this far. In fact that is the trigger – the opening of your personal will and awareness to the core life processes that cause your existence.

Opening the Gates of Mind and Looking beyond

In 1969 I was lucky enough to spend time with the psychiatrist R. D. Laing exploring the unconscious. At the time I had an unforgettable experience of lucidity that after all these years remains a fount of inspiration and guidance. I had relaxed deeply and entered a state of lucidity in which I felt like I was falling down a very deep hole. This wasn’t frightening, but reminded me of Alice in the rabbit hole. As I fell I passed through memories of things that had hurt me during my life, like the time I broke my nose. Then I hit the bottom, experiencing a womblike feeling of great peace. I realised as I observed, that it wasn’t the womb, but the very basic level of my personal awareness. But there was still a current carrying me back further, and I resisted, fearing I would lose my identity. Then I suddenly realised there was nothing to fear. I did this every time I went to sleep – trusting myself to the bosom of the deep. So I slipped into what I have called the ocean of consciousness, and it caught me and started growing me as if from a tiny seed. I knew as this happened that it was this power that had grown me in the first place, and that there was so much more of me to discover than I presently knew. Then the immense Life spoke to me. “Come to me each day like this (in surrender) and I will grow you.”

Western science has in the past painted a picture for us that suggested nature and the universe is one vast impersonal and almost mechanical process. When you travel beyond the frontier of your own personality and contact the life that gives you existence, a completely different viewpoint emerges. What you find is the mysterious love that leads a crocodile mother to carry her babies in her mouth unharmed. You discover the wonder that drives birds to fly hundreds or thousands of miles to an exact location to mate again with their dedicated partner. You meet the indescribable beauty that lies behind a flower’s miracle of colour and intricacy. You meet the creative impulse of the universe that has woven your being throughout eternity.

Within the meeting between yourself and Life lie all the other possibilities – the healing of your ills; the finding of a meaningful place in society and the world; the solving of problems; the discovery of creativity; peace. If any of that seems abstract, take a few moments to look at yourself. If you feel you are not totally connected with the processes of nature and this planet, consider this:

You are a river. Water flows through you all the time. Without water you would not exist.

You are the wind. Air flows through you all the time. Without air you would not and could not exist.

You are the earth. The body of the earth flows through you in the form of food. Without substance you could not exist.

You are totally and inextricable a part of the wind and the rivers and the earth. Lucidity is a growing awareness of that. Lucidity is a greater awareness of the part you play in the scheme of things, and the personal attitudes, pains and conflicts that stand in the way.

All the previous exercises and techniques have been ways of gradually looking beyond the limitations of your physical senses and exploring the frontiers of a new level of awareness. There is no reason you should not continue in that way and be an explorer. At this point though, if you wish you can choose to take the first steps in becoming a new being. You can choose to open to the process of life at your core and become a co-worker with Life.

If you wish to open to that new influx of growth, take the following steps:

Exercise Eleven – Opening to Your Core

Take time to clarify what you feel is at the core of your existence. You are not being asked if you believe in God. No such belief is necessary. If there is a God you will find it at your core without any belief, just as you know the wind on your face without having to believe in it. What you are being asked is if you brought about your own existence, and if you completely know who and what you are. If you do know, then you need read no further. If you are uncertain and believe that you are probably a mass of chemical, biological or energetic responses, ask yourself again if you know deep down that you have the final answer. If you admit that you do not know for certain, you can take the next step.

The state of not knowing is important. It frees you of preconceived or rigid ideas and opinions that might stand in the way – so this step requires no belief. What it does require is a sense that there is something you do not understand that brings you into being. Take time to develop this condition of not knowing.

When you feel the open condition active in you, state in some way that is an expression of this pivotal moment in your life, that you want the unknown mystery at your core to emerge more fully into your experience. A suggested statement is: “I come with all my being held open to the action of the mystery that is my core self.”

Considering that in the environment of dreams, and therefore of lucidity, you experience a world you create out of your own beliefs, ideas and attitudes, it is fundamental that until you learn to become empty, all you will experience is what you already hold to be true and believe or are frightened of. Learning the condition of openness or ‘unknowing’ allows the birth of a new level of your own growth. Use it each day.

Using Your New Abilities

Intro: Developing a Relationship with Wonder

In Chinese teachings about widening awareness, there are a series of ten woodcuts called ‘The Ox Herding Pictures’. The second woodcut shows the hero/ine discovering the footprints of an ox in the mud. It depicts the realisation that there is another power active in your life other than your conscious thinking and will. In the pictures the hero/ine goes in search of what caused the footprints.

By now you too will have felt, in your dreams and in the exercises, the signs of another level of intelligence and purposefulness than that originating from your conscious personality. A new type of relationship is forming in you. It is a relationship with your core self.

It is no exaggeration to say that as this relationship grows, you will realise that you are walking hand in hand with Wonder. You will at times know you are standing close to a beauty you never knew before. You will begin to understand that you had somehow become blind since childhood, and you are being healed of your blindness – you were in some ways paralyzed and you are learning to walk. Yet the relationship is not always an easy one. It starts a cleansing process during which old fears and hurts rise to the surface to be washed away. Wonder asks something of you – as love does in human relationships. And in some measure Wonder asks you to give yourself. But you are not left empty, as in some cases of human love.

The author Raynor Johnson, in his book of the same name, calls it The Imprisoned Splendour, and that’s what it is. Your act of searching for it and opening to it releases it from its imprisonment within you. But remember that it may have been bound and gagged so long, that when you first unbind it, it may only be able to mumble incoherently, and barely be able to move. Be patient. Nurture it. Come to it often, and let it trickle or pour into you.

The writer J. B. Priestley, after his own meeting with the Wonder, described it as a sort of white flame, trembling and dancing. He goes on to say that he had never before experienced such happiness as he did then. The Wonder never takes any definite form, and yet is continually creating forms. It is a mysterious dancing influence, and the only power you have over it is that of shutting it out of your life or allowing it in. But in your relationship with it anything and everything can emerge. However, each of us have a unique experience of it, and to each of us it gives our own special knowledge, skills and creativity. Who you really are is discovered in the relationship with that Wonder, and in the way you live that relationship externally.

Of course, these different names refer to your core self. It becomes a wonder when you experience it. You realise then that it has been an imprisoned splendour. (498 words)

Finding healing – with exercise

Lucidity offers several avenues toward physical or psychological healing. To understand how these work and how to find healing, it helps to have a basic picture of human ills seen from the point of view of dreams and lucidity.

An analogy of this is that of electricity going into a house. The electricity is invisible, and by itself it is nothing. It is only when it is connected to an appliance or earthed that it is known. Also, the electricity can express in an amazing number of ways. It can be power to turn a washing machine, light, heat, sound, images on a TV screen, computer functions, and so on. Bringing this back to your body and mind, lucid experience suggests there is a fundamental potential that expresses in a variety of ways. First it releases as growth, but it is also cellular activity, sexuality, hunger and digestion, emotions, speech, thinking and perceiving. So in a sense things such as speech and sex are simply different ways we can direct this basic energy. The lucid experience of Jon quoted earlier mentions this energy. He says, “This sparkling vibrating energy is life itself and can, if I develop it through my desire and effort, grow into any ability or direction I choose.”

Problems arise however in that what you do, think and feel direct that energy. As happened with Jon, his energy or experience of himself, had become ‘brown and lifeless’. In fact he was suffering depression, and that went when he changed his relationship with his life energy. He changed what he was unconsciously creating with the energy of his thoughts and emotions.

So problems arise when this flow of life energy in its various forms is blocked through repression or pain. It can then become stagnant, or twisted to flow in a destructive manner through negative emotions and thoughts. For instance Des, whose sexuality had been injured in childhood, so held it back it turned into aggression and rage. Another man, Tim, had watched his father die from coal dust in his lungs. He had held back shouting his rage so long it became a physical problem in his throat. I also watched a woman regain the use of her legs after uncovering the resentment she felt about the behaviour of her son.

At a physical level, as already pointed out, you are a river; you are the wind; you are the earth. Taking in polluted water in the form of factory made liquids; taking in polluted air in the form of smoking or living in dirty air; taking in lifeless factory produced foods – all degrade your life. Therefore the healing is about bringing accord to the attitudes, beliefs and energies that are your life energy. It is about undoing the damage to the river, wind and earth that you are. It is about healing the blindness, paralysis, and primal pain many of us experience. But the healing that arises from harmony with your core also mitigates or heals illnesses connected with viruses, bacteria or physical damage.

Some of the ways you can work toward healing with lucidity are:

Remember that dream images are like icons on a computer. What you do with them connects with the processes underlying the dream. Therefore, while awake imagine yourself in your dream. Do this by being in the dream and working with the people and creatures in a way to transform fears and negative emotions into constructive and life enhancing ones. Change the dream in any way that satisfies you, but make sure there are no feelings in you rebelling against the changes. If such feelings arise work with them until you resolve the conflict. Work with each dream in this way.

Imagine your core self, your life energy, as a spring of water in which you bathe. As you go to sleep hold this image in mind and create a feeling of this flow of life energy permeating your whole being and relaxing and healing it. Direct this feeling/energy to any part of your body or life that needs healing. Then decide that when you become lucid you will create this same experience of looking for and finding this flow of living waters from the source of your own existence. Work with what arises until you can feel the healing change occurring. Repeat this until the healing is apparent in your waking life.

Use the powers you have near at hand. The ‘placebo effect’ is now well established as a means of helping or healing serious ills. But we each have our own power of ‘placebo’. To use it, look through your recorded dreams to find those in which a powerful pleasure, uplift or sense of beauty occurs. Use the central image and feeling of such dreams as a meditation. Recreate the pleasure or feelings of well being. To enhance this listen to music that uplifts; read those things that shift your feelings to ones of interest in life and love. Remember that what you feel and believe or are frightened of actually create your inner and outer world.

Use the seed meditation described earlier. If you have not used it much, practice it until you find a spontaneous experience of it. It is important to create a keyboard condition in which you are ready for the core Life in you to express spontaneously as movement, your voice, feelings or imagination. So you come to the meditation with as much of the condition of ‘not knowing’ that you practiced earlier. Then, instead of holding the image of the seed, hold in mind that you are opening to your core being from which all that you are arises. You are open to the action of your core and are asking for healing. Let yourself express in any way that arises spontaneously in the meditation. This enables your core to bring about what is necessary for your healing. (989 words)

Problem solving and facing fears and nightmares

Problem solving is a basic life skill we use every day. Most of the time you do it unconsciously, as you do when we look for mislaid keys, or wonder what clothes to wear to deal with today’s needs. But sometimes you may feel lost in confronting a situation, and need extra help. To do this you can learn to use your problem solving ability consciously to find a solution. Lorna, looking for the source of her frustration and tension describes what she found through using lucidity as follows;

I am experiencing an enormous tension throughout my body. I am allowing the tension to wrack me and begin to see what is causing it. It seems to have developed in my childhood. I, like most youngsters, didn’t have it explained to me what the rules of the game of life are; what the social and biological expectations, regulations, drives and urges are and how to work with them. But we are supposed to get it RIGHT. If you do get this amazingly complex apparatus of life right, then the bells ring and you are rewarded. Then you climb the social and biological ladder of success. But if you press the wrong buttons you slip down the snakes, not up the ladders, as in the game. As I begin to understand this my tension starts to melt. I am not wrong, I am just learning!

Lorna had never thought of life like that before. She had to leave school at an early age and had to start work. Nevertheless, as with each of us, she had an enormous amount of observed life experience that had never been organised into insights until she used the problem solving technique. And that is fundamentally what lucidity and the technique does – it draws from your amazing collection of experience what is appropriate to your situation. But there are other possibilities too. At times what you access reaches beyond your own experience and knowledge. Edgar Cayce, while in a sleep state, demonstrated this day after day by diagnosing and suggesting cures for people’s sickness even though he had never seen them and knew nothing of medicine. His ability to do this was tested again and again. In fact he was consulted at the White House several times. When asked, also in his sleep state, how it was possible for him to gain such knowledge, he said that each of us connect to what he called a cosmic or universal mind. From this level of mind we can gain information beyond our own learning, but for most of us it is only accessible in sleep. In his book on psychic experience, Dr. Harmon Bro made a study of this and came to the conclusion that it is open to all of us, not simply to unique or unusual individuals. Similarly, Dr. Karagulla, a neuro-psychiatrist who studied it under the name of ‘higher sense perception’, sees it as a breakthrough to greater creativity. The people she observed were all professionals – doctors, business men and women, engineers – using this problem solving approach to aid them in their work.

Like any other skill using lucidity in sleeping or waking needs practice in learning it. Also it needs to be done one step at a time.

The First Step – Thoughts

Thoughts and thinking are tools to be used in problem solving, but are only part of the necessary toolkit. It is important to clearly understand what a thought is, and not confuse it with any sort of final truth. Any thought or image is only a mental photo of something or someone. It is never the person or thing, and must not be seen as such. As with a photo, thought is also only a tiny fragmented copy of what we are considering. Nevertheless we need to use thoughts in considering and clarifying what it is we seek an answer to. So write down the essence of what you already understand and have done about the problem.

The Second Step – The Framework

Because you create a world out of your feelings, ideas, beliefs and fears, any negative beliefs or attitudes you have can be a massive self fashioned wall shutting off your creative and problem solving ability. Review Exercise Eleven and check that you can drop your ideas of limitation. You ARE NOT trying to replace them with ideas of being superhuman, simply clearing space. So build a framework of thoughts and feelings that leave you open to possibilities.

The Third Step – Going Beyond

A number of times the ‘keyboard’ condition has been mentioned and used. However, it needs further definition as it is a vital part of problem solving. The main thing to attempt is to bring all of you to the condition. Each part of you is a sense organ. Apart from five much mentioned senses, you also have a sense of balance, a sense of beauty or appropriateness. You also sense sexual attraction or repulsion, and so on with your emotions, and hungers. Your speech too is expressed out of a subtle sense of things. So your keyboard is all of these – body movement, imagination, emotions, sexual feeling, memory, voice and fantasy – open to responding to your question or your problem. Don’t think of problem solving as sitting quietly thinking. It isn’t. You need some level of excitation, of motivation and involvement.

When you feel that openness and readiness to let your whole being respond to what you are seeking, take this and your question into a lucid dream, using the ‘digital watch’ approach. As you are going to sleep imagine yourself exploring the question in a lucid dream.

If you do not achieve lucidity, take any dream you have had in response to your question, or take a nightmare if that is the problem. Walk into the dream keeping the keyboard condition, and watch what you feel and experience. Ask your question; work with the dream situation as described earlier.

Use the ‘seed’ meditation approach as described under the healing section. Ask your question instead of being the seed. (1020 words)

Reaching beyond your limitations – finding the universe within you

When seen as a myth the story of Adam and Eve is a description of an epic change in human evolution. Mostly we think of evolution in terms of physical change, but enormous psychological changes have occurred as well. We did not always have self awareness. Like animals we were guided by instinct, by an inner sense or innocence. This was the Garden of Eden when humanity constantly had access to what we now call the unconscious. Then, with the dawning of self awareness came a loss of that innocence. It was a loss of constant guidance. Only in dreams and trances could later humanity recapture something of that wider knowing.

In his book Cosmic Consciousness, Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke suggests we are at present taking the next huge step in evolution – reconnection. Bucke himself experienced what he called cosmic consciousness – a massive influx of intuitive awareness, a leap beyond his usual limitations. Such an experience is a reconnection with the infinite potential underlying our existence. In the East it has been called enlightenment. We are calling it lucidity. The early Christians called it the pearl of great price, or heaven on earth.

The big steps in making this reconnection and finding the joy it brings are:

Exercise Twelve – Reconnection

If you have been using the previous exercises, you have already been practising some of the most powerful aids toward making the reconnection, toward moving beyond the limitations of self awareness. What needs to be done now is to refine or extend what you have learned and built. Because, in their own realm, your mind and personality have shaped who you are, you need to understand that the shape created so far may not be very flexible or yielding. Your mental and emotional structure might not be capable of taking in huge new vistas of experience. The slow breathing aids this by developing greater strength of will and perseverance. The next exercise helps you to go further in looking beyond the surface of things. It is very simple. You take time each day, walking, riding to work, or sitting somewhere, to ask the question, “What am I?”

Make this a fascinated enquiry without any struggle. Take into the question other questions such as – Am I my head? Am I one of my limbs? Am I my thoughts? Am I emotions? Am I what other people think of me or tell me I am? With each of these follow it through. For instance you could lose a limb and still feel you exist as a person. So who are you essentially? If you are not essentially a limb, how does that connect with your physical sexual characteristics? Carry it further still. Consider who you are and can be in your dreams, what does that suggest about what you are? When you have a sense of the power and range of this question, take it into a lucid dream and explore it.

Remembering Your Deep History

Lucidity is not a sport or a thrilling roller coaster ride. It isn’t something you have a quick thrill with and then leave behind. You are gradually meeting yourself more and more fully. This includes the slow uncovering of your history. And your history did not begin with your conception and birth. Any brief study of history shows us that the present shape of cities, of countryside, national characteristics, cultural attitudes and beliefs, developed from past events and people. Similarly, your attitudes, your patterns of behaviour, didn’t originate with your birth and childhood experiences.

In my forties I experienced a short dream that I didn’t think had much in it. But on exploring it I uncovered the roots of a lifelong social attitude that had plagued me. It became clear as I went deeper into my unconscious that my father had passed this to me, and it had come down through the generations for hundreds of years from a time of political and religious persecution.

Your present personality has its roots in the far past. I am not talking particularly about reincarnation. That is just a word. I am talking about observable traits which if you trace them back have their origins in a past prior to your birth. But of course, your deep history is also the memory of your development and the turns it took from conception onwards. This remembering also puts you in touch with what can be called your destiny. You bring from your connection with the past, and from your childhood, a sense of important things to do or learn in your lifetime. Satisfying this deeply innate drive brings tremendous satisfaction.

You can think of who you are as a snowball that has rolled down a hill and gathered more and more snow as it rolled. The snow gathered in the past is still with you. It is not left behind. Becoming aware of the part it plays in the present has probably already begun in remembering and recording your dreams. This is because dreams are like the snowball. In expressing who you are they incorporate your past.

Exercise Thirteen – Recall

Recalling your deep history happens spontaneously as you extend your lucidity. But you can help it to happen in the following way.

Start by using the relaxation technique prior to going to sleep. When relaxed open to your core as in Exercise Eleven. Then imagine your body as it is in sleep. Imagine yourself as you are in sleep. This doesn’t have to be exact, but gain a sense of it if you can. Then imagine that your awareness is leaving your sleeping body and flying high up in the sky. But the sky you are flying in is the upper regions of the landscape of your life. You are going high enough to have a view over the entire span of your life, and in doing so gaining that oversight or insight into who you are. Then sleep and carry this image into a lucid or normal dream.

Touching ecstasy – giving methods

Ecstatic pleasure sometimes arises from such things as a life changing event, or a wonderful sexual experience. Unfortunately these are quick to pass away. But when all else falls away there is an unconditional bliss at the core of you. Usually we fail to experience it because our thoughts and emotions are so noisy and we identify with them so fully. But when we let go of them sufficiently, when they are silenced, as can happen in deep relaxation, the ocean of unchanging bliss is uncovered.

An ancient Tibetan teaching about finding this unconditional bliss says one must cease all activity. It goes on to say that the activity to avoid is the disordered activity of the mind that constantly, like a builder erecting ideas, creates an imaginary world in which it shuts itself like a chrysalis in its cocoon.

So here we are back to the process we are learning from our dream watching – that we constantly create a full surround virtual reality that we take to be real. We believe its reality when we have a beautiful dream, but also when an evil darkness threatens us. But they are both our own creations. So there are two ways we can touch ecstasy.

With each dream you recall, ask yourself out of what hopes, fears, pains, life experiences you have created this dream. Recognise that the dream in some way depicts the ever shifting world of your own mind, emotions and sexuality. It portrays at times the deep surging processes of your life energy as it strives to survive, grow, and find satisfaction. That life energy is like water, it can take any shape. Your fears and hopes, your beliefs and convictions mould it into certain emotions and experiences. Unwittingly you shape it into pleasure or pain. Your aim in watching your dreams is to consider how you shape your own experience. There is no need to attempt at this point to interpret you dreams, just to see how you live in cocoon of your own making. This alone moves you toward the freedom that is bliss.

Use the slow breathe exercise to quieten your body and mind. After some minutes, when you reach this quietness, use the relaxation technique, dropping away physical tension and thoughts. Literally give up if you can and yet maintain awareness until you slip into the borderland of sleep. If your thoughts catch hold of you and drag you off, repeat over and over to yourself while continuing to drop tension, “I am letting go of my thoughts and feelings. I am dropping all effort and sinking into sleep with awareness, opening to my core.”

Remember that you already have that bliss as the basic level of your existence. I believe the Big Bang sent out a huge vibratory sound that still echoes throughout all things, giving them existence, just as sand on glass takes shape from a musical note. It echoes in us as bliss. (494 words)

Transforming worn out habits – with exercise

William James said the only difference between a hardened criminal and a socially successful person is habits. Once while on a local small beach with my children and dog, we had fun clearing the debris brought in by winter storms, and built a bonfire with it. Some of the debris was aerosol cans. So I got the children to stand behind a large rock and threw the cans on the fire one at a time. After the third dramatic explosion our dog ran frantically from behind the rock and headed home – at least a mile away. Three years later, my wife, I and the dog were on that beach sunbathing. We had been there for hours, but as the sun sank I stood up and leaned on that same large rock. Suddenly the dog looked at me strangely, turned and was gone.

It was a dramatic example of how habitual responses can be etched deeply into us. Fortunately, unlike my dog, we can re-evaluate the fear or urgency we feel to repeat original responses. But unfortunately we often fail to realise the nature of what is happening to us.

We would not be able to walk or talk without the amazing support of our habits. But some habits, like repeatedly choosing a destructive lover; constantly feeling inferior; destroying opportunity or mishandling authority figures, are more undermining than supportive. The more lucid we become, the more we become aware of these negative habits and their roots. This in itself transforms them in some degree. But we can also speed up the process. For instance our humanness is built on a much older animal self that still has its natural ways of responding to pain and anxiety. Just like my dog, if something frightens you, you will react. I once had to return to a house I had experienced months of emotional pain in. As we were driving there I felt great stomach pains. I thought at first I had eaten something poisonous, but could not see that I had. But then I asked my unconscious what the problem was. Immediately the response came, “You are taking me back to that house where I was hurt.” I realised I was dealing with my animal self, so talked to it just as I would a horse or a dog. “Steady. We are not staying there long, and the things that hurt are no longer there.” Immediately the pain began to recede and the visit was achieved easily.

Here are some useful techniques.

Try to understand the dynamics of your difficult response. If it is not easy to find clarity, look to your dreams for help. Ask for a guiding dream or take it into a lucid dream and seek the cause. For instance a woman radio researcher was offered the job of presenter, but was on the verge of refusing. She dreamt an air raid attack was taking place and she jumped into a ditch to hide. From the dream she realised she was scared of being out in the open – in public view and possible criticism. This enabled her to deal with the anxiety.

So when you clarify the situation, take time to talk to yourself as if to a child or animal. Explain why the reaction takes place and a way of moving beyond it.

Carefully look through your dream journal and take note of recurring themes. Possible themes are – love – satisfying or otherwise; looking for something; running to or from something; trying to find your way; hiding; being trapped; starting something; building or renovating; relationship; being with others; being alone; leaving things or people behind; death; birth; growth; fear; digging, and so on.

Take one theme at a time and work with each of the dreams expressing that theme. Because it recurs it suggests there is a habitual response involved. So imagine yourself in the dream you are working with and create a different end. Rework the dream so it is more satisfying. For instance if you are always passive in your dreams, imagine yourself being more dynamic and forceful. If you are always relating to unsatisfying men/women, change the dream to one in which you gain satisfaction.

As you work in this way, carry on until you see a shift in the dreams you experience while asleep. Also, aim to become lucid in each of the dream themes and search for the roots of the habit and how to change it.

This next technique is incredibly life changing. But it has to be made into a habit by using it frequently until it becomes active in the background of your waking and sleeping life. If you do not have time for the other approaches simply use this one.

Start by imagining there is a mirror within you. This mirror is your awareness or consciousness. The things you think or feel are images that pass across that mirror and for a while have existence in it, but they all shift and go. Only the mirror remains. When this is fairly clear, sit and watch what is in the mirror of your awareness. Notice if it is a thought, a feeling, a body sensation, or a memory. Give each one a name such as – This is an opinion, this is a thought (such as an image of something you have seen) – this is an emotion – this is from something I read – this is a conjecture about an experience, and so on. As you get used to this, imagine standing in the midst of your dreams. Use one at a time. Hold onto the sense of your naked awareness being something that is not the images that play upon it. As you review each dream say to yourself, “These dream people and images depict passing emotions and thoughts. I will realise this while I sleep and transform frightening or unsatisfying dreams. I will remember myself as the shining mirror.”

Finding greater sexual and emotional fulfilment – with exercises

Dreams portray sex as something greater than genital movements or sensations. Genital sex is simply the first stage of sexuality or mating. It is one way of expressing this incredible flow of life. To mate fully is to merge fully.

Dreams suggest that what we call love in today’s world, is often a form of childhood dependence. This seems obvious from the enormous pain that broken relationship brings to many people. So the movement toward a greater love that dreams try to take us toward means a clearing out of the many childhood pains, angers and fears that cloud our present attempts at relationship – or deny us a heterosexual bonding.

Also, before you can adequately love another, you must achieve a male female unity in yourself – and this does not mean a man trying to outwardly become a woman, or a woman trying outwardly to be a man. It means gradually managing a full unity with the opposite gender in your dream life. If you have not managed that, you constantly seek yourself in another person and are disappointed, maybe even betrayed.

Two dreams illustrate this.

I am standing at the door of a Quaker Meeting House with my bride to be. A person at the door asks for our tickets to get in. I don’t have one and so my bride goes in without me.

I know an alien woman who I love. The love is so intense that we give ourselves to each other, to the point where I absorb her personality with all its memories, and she absorbs mine. This felt like a very important thing to do.

In the first example the dreamer hasn’t got the ‘ticket’ – meaning the quality needed to fully wed. The same dreamer achieves this in the second example. It is with an alien because he was previously alienated from this love and wholeness. After this dream he found many people spontaneously approaching him with and for love.

Exercise Fourteen – Loving Yourself to Love Another

In every dream, lucid or otherwise, attempt as full a relationship with each person or animal in the dream. Hold the idea that everything in the dream is an aspect of yourself and you will come to wholeness as you integrate each part. Obviously this is not without exception. Some parts you might want to discard. But in general move toward integration. Do this in the dream, in lucidity, or while awake through visualisation.

Here is a beautiful dream illustrating a possible result.

A woman led me rather reluctantly into a large building. Inside, along a passage, a mesh of patterned energy completely filled the space. With no hesitation the woman and I walked into energy. We knew we would be absorbed and become wholly a part of this life form. I could feel the energy totally penetrate me and work on me in a healing way that was transforming me. I knew I was being made whole.

Travelling time and space – with exercise

The theory of the big bang gives us an event from which time and space emerged. Prior to that event there was no universe, no time, and no space. It is an incredible concept, and if you are in the business of tracing back your origins, the big bang lies behind the existence of us all. Science has explored this through using such things as radio telescopes and measuring various radiations and light shifts. But in some ways it is shown only as a physical phenomenon. In fact our present cultural and philosophical views often leave us with the idea we are basically just a physical body with a mysterious and inexplicable self awareness. As David Bowie said in one of his songs, “Life’s a bitch – and then you die.”

However, the exploration of origins has been undertaken for thousands of years as an inward journey using lucidity to cross the frontier of consciousness. Hindu explorers described the expansion of the universe ages before our modern rational science. They also pointed out that it expands and contracts in cycles. But they add an equation that only the latest exponents of the new physics mention – consciousness. They say that to its very foundations, the universe has Sat-Chit-Ananda – Being-Consciousness-Bliss. Each of us, according to our talent and determination, can discover this for ourselves.

But such exploration of time and space is not alone the territory of past seers. Sir Auckland Geddes, a surgeon and one time British ambassador to the U.S., gives a brilliant description of a lucid experience showing how time and space are no longer the same in the lucid condition. Becoming suddenly and violently ill with gastro-enteritis he quickly became unable to move or phone for help. As this was occurring he noticed two levels of awareness. One was normal sensory awareness in his body; the other was external to his body. From the external self he could see not only his body, but also the house, garden and surrounds. He needed only think of a friend or place and immediately he was there and was later able to verify what he saw. In looking at his body, he noticed that the brain was only an end organ, like a condensing plate, upon which memory and awareness played. The mind, he said, was not in the brain, the brain was in the mind, like a radio in the play of signals. He then observed his daughter come in and discover his condition, saw her telephone a doctor friend, and saw the doctor also at the same time. His observation was that in the lucid condition one can be ‘here’ and ‘there’ at the same time.

There is even more to this ability though. Stefan Ossowiecki could move backwards in time and experience the past as if he were there living it. His ability to do this was so accurate that he was employed by Stanislaw Poniatowski, a professor at the University of Warsaw, to describe the origins of ancient archaeological finds. As he explored each object the room he was in would fade away, and he would ‘live’ in the past of the object and see its surroundings.

Whole books – such as Breakthrough to Creativity, and The Holographic Universe – have been written about these abilities and their reality. Although the higher levels of moving through time and space are usually only shown by people who use such skills as part of their work – some doctors for instance – most of us can reach beyond the limitations of our body senses and travel in space and time. In fact this is fundamental to knowing who you are. Although, as with any other skill, it needs practice and perseverance to draw it out of your potential.

Exercise Fifteen – To Infinity and Beyond

The first step is recognition of your place in the scheme of things. Just as the skipper of a sailing boat can choose a direction, but has to recognise it is the wind that gives power. So we must recognise that success depends on the greater energies of the ocean of mind in which we are immersed, and how we relate to them. If there is no ‘wind’ then you are unable to move.

Your success depends not upon your will or worldly power, but on how you relate to the intelligences and energies that constitute your being – shown in your dreams as animals, people and things such as trees, rivers, etc. Success also depends upon motivation. An urgent and deeply felt request has more chance than a desire to experiment.

Imagination or visualisation using imagery is the language of the unconscious. Use it to form your request for what you want to experience. Put this as a fervent request to your core self. Watch your dreams to see how you might be blocking the way for yourself.

The possibilities are endless. In lucidity you can visit any place on earth. You can talk with or develop a relationship with any person living or dead; explore the past, or glimpse the forming of the future; uncover your past beyond this latest birth, and in doing so understand the life lessons and work you are meeting in this life.

Write down your request – such as travelling to a distant place – on a piece of paper you can carry in your hand. Hold it in your hand at times and read it, visualising success. Use the digital watch method to induce lucidity, and go to sleep with the written request in your hand.

Prepare yourself for your travels by gaining as clear a sense as possible that time and space as we know it in our body is not the same as in lucid dreaming. As Auckland Geddes points out, you can be ‘here’ and ‘there’ at the same time. Trust the fact that you are a native of the inner world through your years of exploring it unconsciously in dreams. But always remember that the world you meet reflects what you and others create from your thoughts, attitudes, fears and emotions.

Getting Up To Date

I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT THE UNIVERSE – I WANT TO TELL YOU HOW THE FUTURE CREATES THE PAST WHICH THEN CREATES THE FUTURE. A statement from the science video.

Yes it is a wild idea, and I came across it while exploring my dreams and wandering in the unconscious. So I was startled to find it is the latest scientific theory of the universe we live in. I was startled because dreams and the unconscious have been pummelled into me by scientists and intellectuals that believing that dreams and ones voices from the unconscious are a lot of twaddle.

In December 1974, I had a dream which I recorded in my Journal, that resulted in this statement, “Your present life will release much that arises from the future. You are a gateway for the future to pour into the present. Past and future are from the one source.”

So take time to watch this – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0ztlIAYTCU

Dreaming – the Miracle of Transformation

Intro: The Transforming Influence of Dreams

Imagine living in a house with only one window and one door. The door leads out onto a road with traffic, and the window looks out onto a park with trees and people. Now imagine that you wake up one morning and find you have six doors and twenty windows, and each one leads to or shows something different. You can now look at a beautiful seashore, a mountain range, desert, a city centre, and can walk out into different parts of the world. A crazy idea perhaps, but not if you are acquainted with your dreams. They are windows and doorways into an infinite number of experiences and insights.

However, dreams appear to give back to you what you believe they are capable of. At one period of my life I had been exploring a method of entering the lucid state while awake. Fortunately I had read a great deal about past cultures and modern psychology and psychiatry, so I had a very wide expectation of what might be possible. My experiences were in fact very wide, rich and transforming. Then I joined a group who were basically using the same practice, but had a much narrower view of what was possible. Their range of experience matched their restricted expectations or the horizons of their belief.

When you look at one of your dreams and try to understand it, in a way you are approaching a wonderful alien. It is an alien with intelligence and powers perhaps you cannot even conceive of at the moment. So here are some points to ponder and use in your relationship with your dreams.

Dreams arise from a different type of awareness and intelligence than your waking self. Like any intelligent being your dream will respond to you. If you don’t understand its communication, tell it so. Ask it for help or a clearer message. Challenge your dreams to show you what this great intelligence behind them is capable of. Ask them to widen your horizons

A dream is a sort of baby language the Dream Creator uses in an attempt to reduce its message to your level of awareness. It is couched in imagery or mime. If you persist in trying to enter into this communication you will eventually break through into the enormity of awareness the dream is communicating from.

To understand a dream more fully sit and use the relaxation technique. Then imagine yourself as one of the characters, animals or places in your dream. Literally fill their shape with your awareness – become them or it – and watch the screen of your bodymind to see what it feels like. Let your feelings and imagination respond. Don’t worry if it is ‘true’ or not. If it works in your life it is true. Put what you experience into words and do the same with each part of your dream. It can help to ‘be’ the dream character in the keyboard condition and allow full body/feeling response as in the seed meditation.

Bringing the New World into everyday reality– with exercise

One of the biggest hurdles to cross in becoming lucid is realising clearly that whatever you believe, whatever you think, fear or accept as real, you begin to live and create in your life. The other hurdle is that some of the difficulties are there from the beginning. Perhaps they have shaped your life in particular ways, and now you are faced with the task of trying to transform inner problems or anxieties.

At a period when I was feeling deeply frustrated with my situation, I sought advice using some of the techniques explained earlier. The response was extraordinarily clear, like someone gently explaining how to deal with my problems. To quote what was said:

Because you make real what you believe, you are in a trap of your own creation. It is not like somebody else can take it away from you. It is no good appealing to God to remove it, because it is you who have the power of creating or recreating it. You made this trap. You have to find the combination yourself and undo it. To put it simply, if you believe life has no meaning, then you are living a life with no meaning. You are creating your own limitations. If you live a belief that you have wider possibilities – even if that belief is only that you have a right to talk to your neighbour, then perhaps you will go to them and say, ‘Can I have a spoonful of sugar’. You will then have stepped beyond your previous limitations. Each such tiny step creates a wider life. So who knows where the boundaries are? Who knows where you will travel to if you take the next small step?

That is one of the great secrets – taking the next small step. You don’t have to be superhuman, and everyday life offers you the opportunity to transform. As you reach out to life, life reaches out to you – and ‘life’ includes plants, animals, children and people of all nations. It includes the rain and sunshine, the sky and rivers. Believe me, this is not just a platitude.

Lucidity offers an incredibly powerful way of transforming who you are and bringing positive change into your life. It offers everything from deep healing of childhood trauma, to creating your future by forming it in your mind and lucid dreams first.

Exercise Fifteen – Creating a New You

The small steps you can take that build into big changes is to practice what you find in your dreams. As an example, Ryan dreamt he was making repairs in a house he had lived in. He is mending an electric meter. He needed to screw from the bottom. It started to work and he leaned forward to apply more pressure. As he did so he looked down and sees he is balanced on a stool, balanced on two other stools. He starts to fall, but becomes lucid, and realises he cannot fall, so suspends there and finishes the job.

Ryan described the house as one he had renovated with his wife, and related it to satisfying changes he is making in his life. The stools were ones he had known in his first marriage, in which he constantly felt unable to make positive changes. So he saw them as fears that his present positive changes would collapse. But what he found in lucidity shows him that he is not at the mercy of his anxieties anymore. And the meter is his flow of greater energy arising from his new awareness. So Ryan practised his move from anxiety to confidence until it became a part of his everyday outlook.

See if you can find in your dreams and lucidity an example of either failing or succeeding in a direction, or running away from or dealing with a threat or problem. If the dream is one of success, practice the stance or feeling quality that enables you to succeed. If it is a dream of failure, try out different attitudes or stances until you find one that makes a difference, then use it in your waking life. Write it down to secure it in your memory.

There is another immense resource in your dreams. If you look through your journal you will see a wide variety of characters, animals, and places. The more dreams you have, the greater the variety. Each of these characters, animals and places is an expression of your own resources, your own talent, and your potential. The fact that they appear as external simply says you have not fully identified with or claimed those parts of you yet. So when you are problem solving, when you are looking for that extra zest in creativity, or courage in dealing with a situation, call on your dream characters to help.

Start by listing your main characters and animals, and put a brief description of what their abilities or talents are, or what they bring you. Delve into them to discover this by imagining yourself as them. Role play and find out who or what they are. Identify with the character or place and discover its secrets. Whether peaceful or aggressive, wise of energetic, these are all parts of your potential. Call on them when you need to. Do this by seeking their help in a situation of danger, or if being attacked in a dream, or facing fear. Recently a friend asked for help in facing a difficult change because of loss of employment. She described the image she had of her situation as that of being alone and stuck high up in a cable car. When asked what or who could help change the situation, the only figure that came to mind was Superman. He got the car moving and her mood shifted. It doesn’t matter if this seems like complete fantasy, if it shifts your feelings it has value.

Remember that you are much bigger and with more resources than you believe.

Levels of experience in the new frontier

The five levels of awareness were described earlier. But now let us look at some of those levels when met as personal experience.

Dreams are the level most of us know best, and the main factors of this level are that you experience yourself in a full surround virtual reality. We are used to recognising symbols such as a red cross to represent an organisation. Such a symbol links with all aspects of the organisation so could be enormously enlarged in its associations. But we are less expert at realising that a person, an animal or a place in our dream can also depict a mass of our experience. The drama or events of the dream are a many dimensional expression of your personality, its many facets – sexuality, ambition, fear, etc – along with how you relate to life events.

No computer, however amazing, can yet do what your mind does in creating a dream. It produces a living being such as a dream character that can have a conversation with you, and in doing so draw spontaneously from huge areas of your experience or memories through linking with everything you are or have been. Behind the image lies enormous data, emotional response and created patterns of behaviour. So the main thing to remember at this level is that you are in a full surround databank of fantastic information. You can tap this information just as you would with any person, by asking questions and prodding for a response. But, even the trees and animals in your dreams are also enormous reservoirs of information, linking back perhaps infinitely with your potential and experience.

In most dreams you are lost in or carried along by the dream. But when you gain lucidity, either in the dream or while awake, you can penetrate the surface of the dream images. This takes you to the next level in which you become aware of and can work with the enormity of who you are. As happens in most cases, you will probably be confronted by the ‘housework’ or ‘renovation’ that needs to be done. This is the clearing or healing of the many blocks, fears and pains you have gathered from conception onwards – or even from the far past – that act as obstacles in the way of your fuller, healthier and happier experience of living. However, the process is not simply one of healing or cleansing, it is also one of learning. This is because if the work is done well, you will gradually remember your history, recovering childhood, infancy and life in the womb. But at times you will also remember what I call your life in eternity – an experience of the timeless core of you that has dipped into life again and again. At that point you will realise something of the main life lessons you are learning or trying to learn as your present personality.

When that happens you will know your part in the eternal quest that is life.

Miracles within reach – with exercise

There are many types of miracle – and I define miracle as being the emergence or happening of something that we do not think possible, or that we do not feel ourselves capable of. There is the miracle of healing, of creating something that is unknown until it is arises out of you. There is the miracle of giving birth. There are little miracles when extraordinary coincidences happen. There is the miracle of relating to an animal or nature in a transforming way – and there is the miracle of love.

In old French the word miraculum meant to feel wonder or experience something wonderful. The Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Anne Porter says, “Miracles are spontaneous, they cannot be summoned, but come of themselves.” This is a really important point. It links with an old saying, “Man proposeth, God disposeth.” To put that into other words, we may decide to walk, or sing, or eat, but it is not our conscious personality that completes the act. Without the ever present action of life in us, performing all the complex processes of cellular interactions, energy transmission, digestion and circulation, along with the hidden intricacies of mind, none of our intentions would be accomplished. And that is the first step of realisation in performing miracles. The performance is a duet. You can only dance on the stage of life. If life does not support that action it can never occur. The miracle arises and completes itself when you dance with life, sensing each other’s movements and intentions. Then the dance becomes entirely creative and spontaneous, and the miracle of such a dance occurs.

When you touch the ocean of sentient life in lucidity, you discover that it is intelligent and responsive. You can ask something and get a reply in one way or another. But sometimes our request is not related to the wider scheme of things. It doesn’t have the life in it that links us with our own truth, or with others and the wider truths around us. Then like an infertile seed it has no power of growth.

One of the great prayers or requests going out from so many of us today, and commercialised in online dating, is the asking for love – to love and be loved. Life hears this plea too.

Here are some pointers to finding your own miracles.

Recognise that your life is linked with the universe, and therefore the great ocean of mind or awareness that penetrates all things timelessly. Create a mental image and feeling of this connection, remembering that at your core is infinite potential. Your very existence is a miracle that is not fully understood by physics, by biology or by psychology. So let you feeling include the fact that the infinite potential flows into you all the time, and you know that as your present existence.

Therefore your infinite potential is not distant. It isn’t something you have to climb a mountain to reach. It is here and now in the very fact you are breathing and conscious. That is a miracle! So remember next that your infinite potential flows through the creative or destructive power of what you think, what you fear, and all the unconscious feelings and past pains you might carry within. So the creation of your new miracle is to use your creative power consciously and toward healing and life enhancing goals.

The miracle you seek might be the healing of a bodily illness, or a difficult life situation. Or you might be seeking to become a different or fuller person. Whatever it is, take time each day to visualise it. Create a clear mental picture and inner feeling of it. Realise this is like a pattern or image you are holding out to the infinite life, to the universe, to flow through and make into a physical reality. Imagine that at the core of you is a shining warm light, and it is flowing through the hope and image you have formed, and it is becoming real in the world.

Carry this image into your lucid dreams. Explore anything that disturbs the creation of it as a reality at the level of lucidity. In that way you will be clearing the obstacles to its becoming real in your waking life. Then leave it to the universal life that is in all things to bring it about.

One of the great laws of the universe is that energy flows more fully when two or more people are asking for the same thing. So if you have a friend or loved one who will join you in asking for your miracle, this will enormously help to speed its becoming real. You can even ask some of your great dream characters to work with you on the request for the miracle. And remember that some miracles are instant, and some are slow miracles

At a time when I was out of work I sat with my wife seeking a miracle. I asked for work in which I would be able to use my skills. I asked for an adequate income from that work and that it would not need me to be absent from my children. I also asked for some level of public acclaim. The next day I received a telephone call asking me to work for a national newspaper. It included all I had requested.

Recognise if you can, that we each both create our own life experience, but also meet events and circumstances that arise out of the long past. Each difficulty is a means of gaining strength and wisdom. Your work to transform it is part of Life’s work to transform the world. These are not platitudes. They are truths garnered by countless people, myself included, by years of struggling with huge personal burdens. Muscles of the soul develop, and most of what confronts us is a pathway offered by life leading us to greater love and wisdom. (997 words)

Using your intuition – with exercise

Intuition is one of the most formidable of life tools when you learn to use it with skill. But to do that you need to have practised some of the previous exercises that develop discrimination and perception.

All of us use intuition throughout the day. In fact we use it more often than our reasoning ability. Most decisions we arrive at, and responses we make, arise from collected experience and subliminal impressions of the situation or person we face. It would take too long to carefully reason out each thing we do. We arrive at an intuitive response from gathered experience that has not all been made conscious. This experience might be a special area of study such as medicine, motor engineering or working with animals; or it might be general such as the everyday life experience of people and social interactions. This form of intuition can afterwards be examined and with time the sources of it be explained or known.

Intuition can also come from cues given us by other people in their behaviour, facial expressions, clothing, speech and speech tones, posture and movements. We all gather an enormous amount of information about each other within a few seconds of meeting.

For most of us our intuition or hunches occur spontaneously or without real awareness. To take hold of the process and use it consciously changes it into an enormous life skill. It is not an exaggeration to say that when you hone your intuition there is almost nothing it cannot investigate. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries were made by intuitive leaps, especially in lucid dreams. Some of the finest literature and arts came form an intuitive vision of things. Doctors and counsellors who are skilled with intuition use it every day in their work.

However, an intuitive feeling or response can come from many sources, and so we need to train our powers of observation to discern whether what we are finding is an anxiety, whether it is an expression of prejudice or old beliefs and opinions, or whether it is coming from acute perception of the situation. This has to be done because intuition is often a feeling sense or an emotional response, it could arise from anywhere. As you train it however, you can direct it to express as images or clear perception of something, or even what I call spontaneous voice.

The prime skill needed in consciously using your intuition is that of being able to take on the keyboard condition mentioned already. In this way you learn to observe the subtle changes in the different sensory areas of yourself – physical sensations; movement; mime; sexual responses; emotions; imagination; memory, vocalisation and fantasy. These are all ways in which your intuitive sense can express. The main methods you can use are as follows:

Method One: Clarify the question you want insight into. This should be with one single issue in mind, and not be several questions in one. So it might be a question like – ‘What should I guard against in this issue?’ – ‘What direction should I take?’ – ‘What sort of relationship can I expect from my new lover?’

When the question has been defined take it into sleep to incubate a dream or a lucid state so you can explore the question. Write the question on a piece of paper and keep it in your hand and look at it until you develop a habit that can carry over into sleep. Imagine looking at the paper in your hand while dreaming. As you go to sleep take on the keyboard condition and hold your paper in your hand. Carefully record any dreams and explore them for the answer to your question

Method Two: This is accessing intuition through the process of memory. There are two ways of doing this, both of which you have practised earlier. The first way is to sit where you can be quiet for about ten to fifteen minutes. Open to your core as described in the exercise of that name. Relax into that and take on the mental state described in Exercise Four – relaxed observation. Now ask your question and watch the flow of memories, of fantasy, and any shifts in body sensations. What you are attempting to do is to not simply think about this. Thinking usually only runs over the same old ideas again and again. This open watching allows impressions, imagination and intuitions to arise from deeper or wider sources. Sometimes the answer does not come till you have given up watching.

Method Three: This is similar to the above method, but with many more possibilities. Again you open to your core, but this time you stand and use the Carving in Space exercise. When your body and perhaps voice are expressing spontaneously ask your question and give time for the answer to be expressed in mime, in posture, in your voice or in the imagery and direct experiences that can arise in this approach.

Your core is not interested in trivial pursuits. It is the wonder and miracle that grew you from conception. However, it is completely involved in your life and your experience. It is constantly trying to find ways to help your unfoldment. So go to it with your questions. Practise until a good dialogue develops. Test the accuracy of what emerges. Although I have not found the core self to lie, we often take what arises and interpret it according to our own desires or longings. What comes might have arisen from anxieties, and simply be an expression of those. That is not a lie, just an expression of what you hold in you. So develop your self observation and discrimination in your use of your intuition. Particularly explore the carving in space exercise as it holds so much potential. It is a way of learning how to allow more of yourself to express spontaneously, and therefore allow fuller responses from your core, awake or in lucidity. (997 words)

Exploring worlds beyond your senses – with exercise

Everything you see around you has a hidden nature – hidden that is to your physical senses. Any person you might be with has their own thoughts and feelings. They have a condition of health or otherwise in their body and mind. They have a history that is written in their memories, their physical posture and their body condition. These things are visible to you when you use other senses than your eyes and ears. While working at a hotel cleaning a bench I was idly listening to the boss and one of the female employees. They were talking about customers, how trade had been. Then I glanced up at them and suddenly my whole perception changed. Every tiny movement of hands, limbs body and face were pouring out information to me. Every expression, every tone and shift of voice was understood in a way I had never experienced before. I could ‘see’ that these two people had at some time been sexually involved. I also saw that this involvement had created a column of energy passing between them through which they were communicating with each other unconsciously. I later asked the woman if she had in fact been involved sexually with the boss, and she smiled and said yes.

That is simply one tiny part of what we can ‘see’ when our other sensory perceptions are working. And this has nothing to do with weird spirits, sorcery or magic. What happened to me, when I analysed it, was that I became aware of a level of perception that we all have. It is an awareness of body language that animals developed through millions of years, and that we still have within us, but which seldom breaks through our ‘civilised’ training and thinking mind.

But there are other senses we have too. A recent feature in New Scientist tells the story of Erik Weihenmayer who lost his sight at thirteen, and now, twenty years on can see with his tongue. Paul-y-Rita of Wisconsin Medical School developed an electronic device that fed the impulses from a video camera to a small device. The device sends tiny electrical impulses to Erik’s tongue. Erik’s brain, completely at ease with translating nerve impulses from the eye into visual impressions, translates the impulses from his tongue in the same way.

The point I am making is that whatever the impulses, signals or vibrations are, our brain is adept at forming them into imagery or experience we can understand. Just as dreams form physical and emotional conditions that were previously unconscious into a dramatic full surround virtual reality, we can do the same with other sources of energy.

However, up until recent times we have lived in a mental and social environment that tells us this is impossible. Our beliefs, as already mentioned, create their own reality. We therefore live within a small world of our own making. What is being attempted here is to show you doorways out of it.

There are, of course, other reasons you might not be experiencing the world as fully as you are capable. You might not want to see what is going on around or within you. You may have shut down those other levels of perception in childhood so you could appear ‘normal’. It might even be that you are a prisoner of the massive collective consciousness you exist in. The commercial powers of our society bombard us with a view of the world encouraging us to feel incomplete and therefore be consumers. Part of this barrage on our awareness tells us life is meaningless, or we are helpless sinners, and we live within enormous limitations.

There is however, a powerful current flowing in our times toward waking up, calling us to go beyond our limitations, and we can step into that current. There are ways to do this. You have already been developing the early stages of this wider awareness in using the previous exercises and techniques. What follows are methods to take you further.

You need an open door in you to be able to allow a larger sense of what surrounds you to enter. A way to do this is to think of yourself as a T.V. screen you are watching. You then observe what body changes, shift of feeling, ideas or images occur when you ask yourself what is hidden from your normal senses in what you are looking at. You need to be fairly focussed and quiet inside before this can take place, and this is where your previous practise of slow breath and opening to your core will come in. Practice first on something belonging to somebody else, something they have had a lot of contact with. Think of it as carrying messages, much as a cassette or CD does. Hold it and use your body and mind as a screen on which the messages can play. Note any shift of feelings and images in your imagination. Practice until you begin to recognise and understand what you receive.

Being lucid in your dreams is itself an enlargement of your world. But often it only reflects what you believe, or the skills you have developed in your waking activities. This is why you need to develop other skills transferable into your lucid experience. This next skill is designed to do this. It is to develop the habit, when you are looking at people or natural objects, of wondering what their inner world is like. If you could pictorially see, or experience in some way what it is like to be a tree or a particular person, what would you find? Look at people and observe what images or feelings arise. Learn to distinguish between what are impressions, and what are you own feelings. Clear your mind and disconnect when finished.

We live in the midst of an extraordinary universe. What we see of it through our physical senses is only a tiniest fragment of what is there. So take time to listen to your wider awareness and the strange and wonderful beauty and wisdom it unveils. (1014 words)

The creative leap – lucidity without sleep – with exercise

In January of 1972, two friends and I formed an experimental group. We wanted to explore the possibility of the dream process breaking through into waking consciousness with ourselves as the subjects. Our main reason at that time was to see if the healing functions of dreaming could be more fully exploited. I for one was seeking personal healing from depression and psychosomatic pain.

Franz Mesmer who was the father of modern hypnotism, found that when he placed subjects in a relaxed condition, they experienced spontaneous movements, powerful fantasies, vocalisation and healing of trauma. I realised that all of these connected with the dream process. During the dream we spontaneously experience a dramatic fantasy, body movements, speech, and sometimes the healing of trauma. Having watched humans and animals move while dreaming, I theorised that during the dream, in most people the movements being experienced only partially express through the body. As dreaming is largely an attempt to bring our body and mind to balance and growth, I thought that if we could allow a process of dreaming while awake, and these movements were fully allowed, we could greatly enhance this process. My reading about different world cultures suggested that this process had been used many times in many ways in the past.

Our experimental group developed enormously, and for me at least was an extraordinary introduction to waking lucidity and the exploration of what was usually unconscious. I also found healing of the pains and depression I had been experiencing.

Exercise Sixteen – The Waking Lucid Dream

You will need twenty to thirty minutes to complete this exercise. Use a comfortable place in which you will not be disturbed and your body is at ease, with your head supported in some way. Make a tape of the following if you can, so you can listen to it.

First slow down with a minute or so of the slow breathing, dropping tensions from face and anus as already practiced. Say to yourself mentally, “My thoughts and emotions are gradually becoming quiet. They are melting away like snow in the sun. Without effort they are melting away. As this is happening I am seeing myself in a house. It is a house I love and am at ease in. It is the house of my own body and mind, and I am going more deeply into it than ever before.” Repeat this again. Then you will see a door on your left. Open the door and you will see steps leading downward into a rocky but lit tunnel. This is the tunnel you usually descend in sleep. But now you are descending into a state of sleep but remaining aware of what you are experiencing.

You go down seven steps. See and feel yourself doing this. Count the steps. At the bottom there is a stream. It is warm and you undress and bathe in it, washing away the influences of your waking life. You cross the stream and there are robes you can choose to wear. Put on what colour you wish.

Now you go down another seven steps to a deeper level. Count the steps. At the bottom is another door. Pause before the door and say to yourself, “When I pass through this door I enter the greater mind and life within me. I have left behind the limitations of my waking life.”

Now pass through the door and you will see yourself standing on the bright shore of an infinite ocean. Behind you in a rock face is the door you came through. It is blue. Stand for a while on the edge of the ocean and feel yourself filled and penetrated by the peace and energy of where you are.

In this place you can ask for healing, you can ask for wisdom regarding something that is troubling or perplexing you. Do not be concerned if you still feel awake and aware of what is happening in the external world. That is not a difficulty as long as you keep gently watching the screen of your bodymind. In this way you will receive impressions from the ocean and the special areas in this place. If you have a question, ask it. The ocean has many wonderful things to share with you, so bathe in it often for renewal of body and mind. Bathe in it now and watch what arises in your awareness.

If you look behind you, you will see four more doors, two each side of the blue door. To the far left is the door to your existence through all time. It holds all that your being has experience through eternity. The door on the immediate left of the blue door is an entrance into the inner life of other people. Through it you can gain insight into those you love in order to help and counsel them. The door on the right of the blue door leads to healing of yourself or others. The door on the far right is to the universal wisdom Life holds. Enter them with care and respect when you need.

Exercise Seventeen – Your Guru the Body

Your body has arisen from living cells that are as old as life on this planet. Your body, mind, emotions and imagination are the screen upon which ancient life can project its wisdom and experience. What arises from the ocean of mind within depends upon who you are, what you need (not necessarily what you want), and what you seek.

Your connection with your core has deepened through your use of the different exercises. So now go back to Exercise Five and the dried seed meditation and use them again. This time approach them with your greater awareness of opening to your core. Keep the keyboard condition in place as you do the exercises, being ready to go deeper than you have in the past. You can either approach the exercises to allow your inner process to bring to you what it knows you need, or with a question or request. (1008 words)

Dreaming with Others

Introduction – Connections Beyond Yourself

Have other human beings in the past created a frontier post in the dimension of sleep and death? Do they now live there just as we live in the physical world? Can we learn to wake up in that world and develop, not simply a few minutes of excitement, but a dwelling place, a place of work, of relationships and exploration, within the dimension of bodiless experience?

This is such a magnificent possibility, such an unprecedented step forward in human evolution that it is difficult to grasp why our history books do not point out the first human beings to achieve full and lasting awareness in sleep. Why don’t we honour these men and women as the magnificent trailblazers of a path that has opened us to transcendence of personal or planetary death? It is also the doorway to the stars, and makes our silly tin cans of spacecraft look ridiculous.

For many hundreds of years in the Far East, a culture developed that had as its vital centre, the exploration of consciousness. Human beings rose from their birth in jungle surroundings to become giants in their ability to live beyond the frontier of sleep and death. Life and death became for them a single territory. Even before their body aged and died they had entered the bodiless state and knew it as home. Some of those early explorers became permanently lucid. While sitting quietly they demonstrated constant awareness of what people were doing at great distances. When we ourselves enter lucidity we cannot help at some point meeting one or more of these giants. If you are lucky or worthy, you will find yourself taught or sustained by such a being. Even masters of lucidity in recent times, such as Aurobindo, worked with people in their dreams.

As you become more lucid in dreams and waking, you will gradually become aware of the connections you have, at this level, with those you love, and with those you are linked to by affinities, interests and common goals such as the spiritual work you undertake. Sometimes this arises as deeply felt understanding of particular past cultures and their way of life and the wisdom they arrived at. Sometimes the connections you develop lead you to do specific work in your waking life. Finding love at that level is also extraordinary. You meet someone in your dream life who may live half the world away from you, and who yet has deep links of understanding and love with you. Then gradually you find each other in waking life. That is a very special thing.

The most enduring aspect of such connections is that your life develops meaning and dimensions it never had previously. You sense great depths in yourself. You feel more complete and whole as a person. You know you have a meaningful place in the world, and are more capable of living and loving in it. (486 words)

Linking with others

Henry Reed, a dream researcher with great initiative and wide vision, discovered that individuals in the dream groups he ran were having insightful and sometimes healing dreams about each other. These dreams often gave insights regarding the person dreamt of, that the person themselves had not arrived. Henry went on to encourage people to dream in this way, recognising that while dreaming we can reach into the lives of others.

The more lucid you become in your dreams or in waking, the more this becomes possible. The many reasons we wish to meet one of our family, a friend, loved one or stranger, can also operate at the lucid level. So your desire may be to understand what is really going on with a child; what might resolve a problem a friend is experiencing; how one might develop a loving relationship at a distance; or even to check someone’s state of health. Of course, the simple desire to communicate in a fuller way than words or distance allow may be the prime motivation.

Some of the possibilities are:

You can arrange with other people interested in lucidity, to meet on certain nights. This enables you to increase your own lucidity because when one of the group becomes lucid they can ‘wake’ others in the group. It also enables you to test your lucidity by checking what happens within the group. A dream experienced by a member of such a group is as follows. “There were six or more people sleeping on mattresses on the floor. Two or three of them were awake, sitting up. These had small pointed hats such as Tibetan Lamas have. I realised this meant they had reached a point of growth where they could wake up in dreams. We talked together and then were going to start waking the others.” [One of my own dreams]

You can decide to meet someone to deepen or clarify your relationship with them. It is worth making this meeting with another person a regular thing as it helps to develop and train your lucid dreaming.

Create a meeting place that can be somewhere for those you are involved with to gather. Remember that what you think and feel becomes an external reality at this level. You can therefore visualise the setting or building you want to meet in. Create it as an individual or as a group. Do this by carefully visualising all the details of it. Dr Karagulla, in interviewing lucid dreamers, found that some of them regularly attended places of learning while they slept, and recalled detailed information about what was learned. In some cases two different people attending the same place of learning could remember the same information. [Karagulla is mentioned earlier and linked with her professional status]

Lucidity gives you entrance to a new territory. From what has been learned, not yet by science, but certainly by individual explorers, this is as valid a territory to live in as the earth. We do not know how many individuals, and intelligences beyond our understanding, exist and have their home in that dimension. No doubt it is like our external universe, vast beyond our comprehension. Oliver Markley, a social psychologist, described his experience of this by saying that while lucid he went deeply into the possibilities of the dream process. In doing so he came to an environment that expressed as images of a resort where beings other than human existed. Some of these beings were so utterly different to anything he knew he couldn’t understand them in his lucid dream state.

One of the greatest aspects of this is the allowing entrance into waking life of a new and transforming power changing you individually, and through you, society.

Earlier, in the section on out-of-body-experiences, I mentioned travelling from Germany to my home in London. I said that at one point, although my mother was not consciously aware of my presence, a part of her knew and was united with me. In the dimension of lucidity, your body is simply a form you adopt because it is familiar to you, and it is a way of maintaining a sense of your identity amidst your enormous range of possibilities. You do not have the fixed boundary of your skin or your finger tips. Because of that I was at-one with my mother’s mind. I knew her in a way usually impossible. This is one of the great features of extending your awareness into lucidity. You can, as one science fiction writer put it, swap minds. You can merge into one another as little or as much as is mutually agreed. You thereby learn and grow, just like being nourished by food. You become richer in life experience and even in knowledge. This is not so strange. We do it all the time when we learn from each other or love one another. At those times we absorb enormous amounts from another person. During lucidity this can happen much faster and more fully.

Exercise Eighteen – The Inner Vision

With a partner who is ready to explore lucid dreaming with you, make an agreement to meet and look at each other in more than a surface way. Agree that you will merge together to the point that is mutually agreeable, to see what you can learn about and from each other. Give each other a personal object small enough to be held in the hand. As you go to sleep say to yourself aloud that you are going to become lucid and meet your partner. The object you are holding, and continue to hold as you go to sleep, will help you become lucid. Then, when you meet you will reach out to each other with a welcome feeling and open yourself to your partner. At that point imagine you are entering into their being, like stepping inside them. As you do this observe whatever change of feelings you experience. When you wake, even if you cannot remember a lucid dream, lie quietly and observe what you feel and what thoughts come to you. They are often very relevant. (1023 words)

Dreaming with a partner

Exploring the world of dreams with a partner is one of the most intimate relationships you can have. Although a great deal of learning and growth is possible in this relationship it is not always easy. It is more difficult to hide who you are in the lucid and dreaming condition. Whatever you undertake with a partner will have added power because of the fundamental law in this dimension that the desires or requests of a single person have far less effect than two or more. The possibilities of what you can do are endless, but here are a few suggestions you can explore together.

Create a dream house, sacred lodge or meeting place.

A few years ago my best friend Kevin died. Shortly afterwards I experienced a lucid dream in which we were walking together talking. Kevin was complaining that he couldn’t find a home. Kevin had a rough beginning in life, having been put in an orphanage. Feeling ‘homeless’ was a lifelong problem. So putting my arm around his shoulder I said to him, “Kevin – you are dead! If you think like this here you will create a hell for yourself. So let’s build you a home.” Kevin began to get the idea, and the scenery gradually changed. He created a walled courtyard, sunny with vines and plants, with an adjoining house. The rock built house had a room with a huge window overlooking a view of the sea; a very Mediterranean beauty.

Things can be built and changed fast in the dimension of dreams. So with your partner, carefully plan what you want. Talk over and define details. If possible draw it to create a clear image in your mind. Then take it into a mutual visualisation. The world of lucidity is a very real place, so don’t think of what you are doing as a meaningless fantasy. You are building something that has existence as real as any concept or idea – and remember, ideas, or words, influence millions of people. Follow through by deciding to have a lucid dream in which you enter your new home or sanctuary.

Look for your ‘akashic records’.

Akasha is a word defining something early travellers in the lucid dimension discovered. It refers to the fundamental substance of the universe. The early explorers found that every shift and change in the unfolding universe left a record on the akasha. These are known as the akashic records, and include a history of every individual. But as each individual has two aspects, an eternal undying, and a transient self that lives and dies, the akashic records hold the memory of all the many personalities your eternal being has projected into time and space. So if you are a loving couple, then the records will tell when you have been together in the past. In seeking your akashic records recognise this is not simply a game. Remembrance brings change and responsibility.

Imagine as you plan your lucid time together, that you are looking backwards along a beam of light that has projected your present life. Feel the sense of travelling back along that beam to its source, and there looking at the traces or memories from which your present life has arisen. Unless you are an adept in lucidity this will not come at the first attempts. But keep moving through the obstacles that arise until you get a completely understandable insight. When you arrive you will know. This is because you will gain insights enabling you to make real life changes, unfold new skills and know innate weaknesses.

Experience the wonder of sex in mutual merging.

In researching this book I came across mention of sex in lucidity that was primarily about things like putting butterscotch on ones sexual organs and licking it off. If that is what you want to do it can surely be done while awake. Such action misses the glorious possibilities of love and sex during lucidity. At that level love is a splendour that irradiates the whole of life. Sex is a merging together of yourself and the person you love at all levels. It is a giving and receiving from which you can emerge a new person. It is a return to the very primal level of yourself and of creation.

Yes, in dreams we do have, or can have, a very full and varied sexual experience. But I believe that in our depths we are seeking something more than just genital sex. We seek union, completeness, and a companion who is in some way a complementary aspect of us. We seek the joy that flows through us in magnificent union.

If you have a partner you wish to explore the many dimensions of love with, talk to each other openly about dreaming together and discovering further depths of togetherness. Plan how and where you are going to meet and love. Make a contract and before sleeping go through whatever ritual of washing or preparation you would use in waking. Then determine to meet each other lucidly.

Enter the Energy Flux.

In the dimension of dreams there is the possibility and existence of many people merging to form a new condition. We see something of this when groups of people unite their efforts, influence and money to achieve something. In lucidity it can become a merging of personal strengths and abilities in a healing and balancing way. In it you merge with others without losing your identity. Entering the flux brings a living connection with purposes beyond your own life, and opens you to energies that are flowing into human life from the cosmic mind. New ways of being human are emerging.

To enter the flux, first imagine it as a wall of energy, perhaps like countless cells but without physical substance. Realise it is made of many beings who have merged. Then slowly walk into the energy and open yourself to the healing and wholeness that enters into you. If you are lucid in your dream, ask to be led to the flux. A simple request is enough to produce a response. (1019 words)

Being a healing channel

Within lucidity there are countless ways of working with other people to heal and help. The lucid dream mentioned earlier in which I was with my friend Kevin showed a healing action. You can bring about a healing change because you are awake to, or aware of, things that the person you are helping is not. In Kevin’s case, he was not recognising or remembering that he was dead, and therefore had completely different possibilities than when alive.

So working with those who are dead is one possibility. We all at some time face the death of a friend or relative, but if you have worked with the principles given in this book, then you have a guide to helping when that happens. The help to give is usually that of recognising they are dead, and what the possibilities are within their new existence. Beyond that there is the need for them to gradually digest and integrate their life experience. As you extend your ability to be lucid in dreaming and waking, you will be in a position not only to help, but also to learn as you relate to the dead.

One of the great methods of healing is akin to dream work. In other words you work with the virtual reality or dream world the person you are helping is in. As you learn to stabilise your lucidity, you can then move about in another person’s dream and help them, either to wake them up to see what is happening, or to shift their dream environment. The following dream illustrates this.

I and others were helping a man who insisted on living in a small stable like room that was foul with his faeces and urine. He wouldn’t go out or clean it and his clothes too were filthy. He wouldn’t be helped, but blamed his condition on anything and anyone but himself. However, we managed to help him accept responsibility for his condition. He came out of the stable and then happily asked if we could put his clothes in a washing machine. This enabled him to start a new life.

The dirt the man was living within was his own negative emotions and attitudes. These kept him trapped in a very limited life. And although the change brought about was at the level of his unconscious, this did emerge into his waking life.

Because you create our own world in dreams, many of the situations you meet will be reflections of your own condition that need dealing with. Here is a man’s description of meeting such a situation.

The only way I can describe what happened is to say that I was lucid and wandering around a big and dark building. I realised this meant I was exploring the dungeons of myself. I didn’t know where I was going, but was led into a dark cellar, and there, curled up, was a little boy. I was deeply shocked, because I realised this child had been locked in here alone for years. I tried to get near but he shouted to me, ‘I don’t want anybody near me. I’m dangerous. Keep away.’ Being awake to what is happening, I realise this is myself, hurt as a young boy, and trapped in the misery I felt then. I know too that his being ‘dangerous’ is a defence against being hurt again. So I say to him, ‘How old are you, little dangerous being?’ He says, ‘I’m three. I’m only little. But I’m dangerous. I will KILL YOU if you get near me. I’ll bite you or something.’

There followed a back and forth communication too long to report. But it gradually gained the child’s trust and the boy was taken into the man’s arms. In this way the man recovered a precious part of himself and became more whole. So this sort of healing, with oneself or someone else, has to do with the gradual development of a trusting relationship through which real change can be effected. But sometimes it also means meeting emotional pain that needs to be released before the change can come about.

One of the classic forms of healing is that of opening to the power at your core, and directing it into another person’s life. Although we all have the ability to do this, some of us have enormous skill in it. The earlier exercise in which you opened to your core laid a foundation for this type of healing. In using this approach it is easy to slip into the mistaken attitude that you have to be somebody very special to do this, or that you have to concentrate or struggle like mad to make it happen. In fact the opposite it true. Your core exists already. It is self-existent. You do not develop it or earn it by being ‘spiritual’ or good. It is already yours. However, you may not be able to surrender effort enough to let it flow out of you. Your attempts and effort to heal others might be the very things getting in the way of the flow. The more you drop effort, the more that ever shining radiance flows out of you. You have to recognise that you are not the healer. Your visualisation of the healing flowing to another person is the circuit or switching gear through which the energy of life flows.

Exercise Nineteen – Being a Channel

Try this simple form of healing. Use the method already explained of opening to your core. Keeping that as a background feeling, link it to a person or people you wish to let life and love flow to by creating a mental image of this. If there is a specific problem the person has, hold an image of the flow from your core washing that away. There is no need to struggle with this. Hold this for a few minutes and then let go. (1003 words)

Group Energy

Considering how lonely many people feel, and how depressed or isolated they are, it seems a part of the human condition to feel we are separated from each other by real distances. We see ourselves as physically isolated. This is a strange illusion considering that everything around us connects us with other people in a real physical way. For instance it is probably true to say that you didn’t make your own clothes; you didn’t grow your food or generate the electricity coming into your home. You do not drill your own teeth or operate on your own appendix if it was diseased. Also you depend upon teachers for your children, and millions of others for transport, building homes, making you laugh or to sing to you. You are completely immersed in other people. It is only by cooperative effort that most of the things around you exist. Life itself, the working together of cells, and the interplay of organs and systems in your body are extraordinary examples of cooperative action. What we fail to see is that we as individuals are just as much cells in a great organism as the cells in our body. We fail to see the cosmic body we are cells in.

Although we can see the results of cooperation or group action, it is sometimes difficult to actually grasp its essence. It always stays hidden as it flows through the cosmos creating the enormity of galaxies beyond counting. But it IS active in your life all the time, and if you can begin to recognise it you can work with it. Everything that happens to you is part of its action.

One dreamer, Sarah, lucidly entered a dream and found herself viewing her life as being moved by waves of influence that passed through her and moved her like being part of a flock of flying birds. And that was a glorious feeling. It felt like a huge and wonderful anthem of life she was involved in, and she saw she was part of an immense being or process. Sarah also felt that she needed to let herself move with these enormous currents

Tuning in to these vast but subtle currents that flow around us, is like swimming in the direction of the flow in a river. You move faster. You not only have your own power, but that of the current too. In life this means you achieve more and find greater satisfaction. In the world of lucidity I sense enormous changes emerging, tremendous shifts in society. We feel these as subtle energies, but they gradually take on form and become real in the world.

There are things you can do to find your place in these enormous flows of creative energy. And what follows are not given as exercises to do in the way the previous exercises were, as a developmental sequence. These are more long term directions you can take.

Buried deeply in you is what we might call a seed. It is the seed of something you want to do, be or become during your life. It is a seed that ultimately wants to bear fruit before death ends this cycle of your experience. It differs with each of us. But what is common to us all is that what grows in you and moves toward bearing fruit, only does so in your relationship with others and with the subtle processes of Life. So the question to ask is what is your life plan individually and in the scheme of things?

Use the approaches you have already practised to pursue the question. Take the question into a lucid dream by visualising yourself waking in sleep and asking the question. Then, when you have asked the question watch what changes occur around you, and what you realise or gain insight into. But if you do not reach lucidity, record your dreams and explore what they depict. It can also help if you take an object to bed with you that in some way represents the question. Hold it as you sleep, and realise it is there to call a meaningful dream from your Dream Maker.

Many of us read newspapers or trade journals to see what the latest events and trends are. But behind all that are the huge cosmic trends filtering into human events. To gain a view of these first imagine you are standing back from human evolution and getting an overall view of it. From creatures that didn’t stand upright, there is the streaming flow through many changes to today’s human experience. Then pose the question as to what influences are playing upon human life now. What is emerging in individuals and the race in an overall way that impinges upon your life? Pursue this question in the same way as the one above.

Looking at life from the vantage point of lucidity, it can be seen that we come into life to accomplish or meet certain things. We have links with people, only some of who we know in the flesh. We are part of a group endeavour in some way. Also you may not have met a real loving and cooperative partner in life. So in your lucidity you can reach out to find those people you have a deep kinship with who you are working with, or love but have never yet made contact physically. This search takes time, but be persistent. At first it will be an intimation in your dreams. Then it clarifies, and becomes real in waking life. Approach this search in the way describe in number one of this series.

Life is a grand adventure in which we are not alone. Our links with others are many and varied. To uncover them brings depths of meaning to your present existence. So search the trails of dreams for the footprints of those who walk with you. (992 words)

Tapping the Cosmic Mind

It is possibly that the universe is like a giant hologram. Every part of a hologram, if cut up, has the complete picture in it. So it is with the universe. Any tiny fragment of it, such as a skin cell, connects with the whole. If you look deeply enough into yourself you will find all history and all the cosmos. As already mentioned, Edgar Cayce of Virginia Beach daily displayed the ability to tap this wealth of information. He left a treasure gathered from his excursions into the cosmic mind in 14,000,000 words dictated from that state.

Many people who have had a near-death-experience report what they call a ‘life review’. During it they live again every moment, every thought and every fleeting impression of their life. Also they experience the impact their words or deeds had on those around them. Such accounts have been reported in every age and in every culture, all remarkably similar. Such reports show an extraordinary human ability to know more, to gain more insight and to digest experience. Unfortunately we have been taught to see ourselves and our brain as isolated from the world around us.

Karl Pribram, a specialist in neurophysiology, says that when the mathematics of quantum level particles and the brain are compared, they are the same. In other words, our brain and physiology are not isolated from our surroundings, but are enfolded in the larger cosmic processes. In fact the descriptions of spiritual experiences parallel the descriptions of quantum physics. That is why the physicist Fritjof Capra wrote the book The Tao of Physics.

Without banging your head against quantum physics, what I want to get across to you is that drawing from the cosmic mind is not something only accessible to yogis or mystics. It is an everyday part of your experience – if you but learn to listen.

If you have been using the exercises and techniques, you have probably noticed an increase in your intuitive awareness of what is happening around you. This is the first stage of experiencing expanding involvement with life. Earlier we called this cosmic consciousness, and pointed out that it is possibly an emerging stage of evolution.

The universe is an ocean of sentience. You are already swimming in that ocean, and you are conscious because the universe knows itself through you. It knows itself as you. That you are barely aware of who you are proves nothing. That you can gradually become more ware of your existence as a fundamental part of the universe is the essence of this book.

Exercise Twenty – Finding More

Previous exercises have given the first steps in tapping the resources of the cosmos. What comes next is to get a feel, not just an idea, for what it means to approach the ocean of Life. To do this create a feeling or sense of, not just the world around you, not just of the whole globe of Earth, not just our galaxy, but of the uncountable galaxies. Sense them as your extended being.

Okay, perhaps it is beyond imagining, but get a feel for it. What is your relationship with that enormity, and how are you going to approach it? How are you going to open yourself to this sublime mystery that is the universe that you are a part of?

How you have treated the universe might be relevant. The universe is everything around you. It says to you, “Whatever you have done to the smallest of creatures around you, you have done to ME.” Entering the wider life is all about relationship.

Take those two things in – 1) With what attitude or feeling are you going to approach the sublime mystery of the universe? With what state of mind do you stand before it? And 2) How have you treated it?

When you take those two things in and feel them, then you have the beginning of finding the More that you are. Then you are open.

In my thirties, when I was struggling to understand just how the cosmic mind enters into our experience, something extraordinary happened. I had got up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet. Sleepily I started to climb back into bed when a voice, everywhere in the room, said, “You have asked how God touches your life – now watch closely.”

Ever since then I have watched closely how the sublime touches lives. In doing so I have learned the following things.

The sublime can express in two major ways, either as an inner experience or insight, or as an outer event. But the ways this can be done are incredibly varied.
The mechanism involved when we experience the sublime inwardly, can usually be seen to involve the dream process. My experience of the voice for instance was the dream process – full surround virtual reality – in action while I was awake.
Any of the senses or ways of experiencing can be used. This includes seeing colours, seeing people or animals, smelling scents, hearing a voice or music, or body sensations.
When the communication comes from outside it might be through a strange coincidence, from an event that is obviously a response to a question you have asked, or something you have looked for.

One of the deepest of human drives, one that has lasted throughout human evolution from the earliest of times, is that of finding a sense of belonging, or being of value in the scheme of things. This drive, and many of the enlightening insights men and women have garnered from their personal relationship with the cosmos, have been enshrined in world religions. Your own personal meeting with what Suzanne Segal in her book Collision with the Infinite calls ‘the vastness’, will also have this sense of the holy. It doesn’t take away all ills, but it does add to you a surety that you are part of an eternal life. It does leave you transformed.

The Great Adventure

Your life is the grand adventure. You are the heroine or hero of the drama. The challenge is to be as much as you can be in the circumstances and events you face, and with as much love. Lucidity is one of the magic charms you can have to help you find your way through the maze. Along the way you have a mission to fulfil. There is no set task that we all have in common. Each of us has something different to do. So part of the challenge is to discover what your mission is and set about it.

Explorers of lucidity have, collectively, told us what they understand of the principles underlying life’s adventure. Free will is a fundamental part of it. Of course a perfect world could exist completely controlled by a ‘good God’. But that would mean we were all robots. With free will the core of your being enters into an experience of physical life again and again, gradually learning to manifest its innate potential in the difficult three dimensional world of the body. Although we are small fragile creatures physically, the potential of the human spirit can be seen in the incredible range of the human mind and imagination.

The core self is both male and female, but assumes a gender in the body. And the personality that forms is usually only a facet of the core self, and only begins to realise the distinction between these two aspects as it grows in awareness. If great progress is made in a life, the personality displays multiple talents as it draws more and more into expression in the body.

At times the waking personality gains an insight into its core self, and produces insights or life changes that are inexplicable when seen from the viewpoint of our body being the only reality. One such happened to a woman during a near-death-experience. She was saw a picture of Dr. Raymond Moody while she was apparently physically dead, and told his name. This happened in 1971 and Moody had not yet published his book Life After Life about near-death-experiences, so the woman had no knowledge of him. However, four years later Moody moved to the street the woman lived in. During Halloween Moody’s son knocked on the woman’s door trick-or-treating. When she heard his name she asked him to tell his father she needed to talk with him. Moody later visited and heard her extraordinary story.

All of us have these two lives. One is within often enormous limitations as a personality experiencing physical life. The other is a huge and timeless being who has dipped into time and physical life again and again. This being has links of love and work beyond our usually knowing. Only as we become more lucid in waking and sleeping do we begin to realise the enormity of who we are. This is the spiritual path taken by men and women through the ages. This is the path home.

Who Can You Be Today?

When we achieve greater lucidity we discover we are not alone on this planet. There are beings we meet who have trod this path long before us, or are way ahead of us, and no longer need to live a physical life. Some of these being are so incredible to meet they are beyond what we can understand. To touch such wonders of what Jacques Vallee calls the Multiverse – the multiple dimensions of the universe – is to have a wider and nobler vision of life. It is to live within something with vaster possibilities than offered by the usual view of the universe and ones place in it.

So today, this moment, here and now, you can open to being more than you have ever been before. Recognise how limiting beliefs and thoughts create actual walls that close you in. Realise now that at this moment, if you drop away the views and beliefs so often taught us since childhood, you open yourself to a wider and more wondrous life. Now, at this moment, you can swim in that ocean of life and love that constantly gives you existence. No thunderclap needs to sound for this to happen. No lightning bolt needs to strike you to enable this. It is here, now, within the ordinary sounds and events surroundings you. Here it is, interwoven with all you think and feel. Why not open to it and let yourself know it?

Today, here and now, recognise that your thoughts and imagination are not useless fantasy. They are the subtlest of threads out of which you weave the substance of your life and love. They are the tenderest shoots of what can grow into a massive tree of life. Out of them you create wonderful possibilities or machines of destruction; you open doors or build castle walls; out of them you create your life. When Walt Disney fantasised his characters he was not living a useless daydream. His acceptance of his imagination was the subtle reality upon which he built a whole industry. So now, today, be aware of your power of creation. Recognise it and look to see what world it is you are making to live in. Take care and work with love and the best in you to form what in the end is all you have – your life.

Today, here, now, this moment, remember that you are capable of creating a full surround virtual reality we call a dream. Remember also that every night you create a new drama. You conjure out of yourself the people, the creatures, and the surroundings of your dream. Then you give life to what you create – not only life but purpose and drama. You are a supreme dramatist, playwright, actor and actress. You are the great Creator – in your dreams. Considering this, have you ever wondered why that enormous creativity does not flow into your waking life? You can see that some people have that creativity and are enriched by it personally and financially. Let it happen to you!

Today, here, now, remember a few well-known facts about how you encounter the so-called ‘real’ world of waking life. Firstly, when you look at an object such as an orange or apple, remember that although you have the sense of seeing what colour and texture the fruit has, in fact all you are seeing is reflected light. You never see the actual colour of the object. Your eyes take in streams of light that are translated into nervous impulses transmitted along the optic nerve. In the brain those nerve impulses are again translated into an image that enables you to have some relationship with an apparently external world. In the same way the nerve endings on your fingers transmit signals that are translated into sensation. In no way do you have a direct awareness of what you are ‘looking’ at. In no way do you really know what is around you. As in a dream, you are creating a full surround virtual reality. Perhaps if you could really see and know what you are, it would be a wave in an ocean of energy, only having a sense of your independence out of your particular wave formation or movement. The wave is, out of its movement and form, a separate being. Yet at the same time it is inseparable from the ocean giving it existence. Today, here, now, remember you are in that ocean. Sometimes take off the clothing you wear created out of the images you have conceived of who you are and how you exist, and dive naked into that sea. Swim in it, play and be part of your natural surroundings.

When you are in the ocean that is your real home, look around for the others who swim with you. Feel the great currents that carry you along, and ask yourself where they are going, and where from. Look back on what you perhaps viewed to be your ‘real’ life and see it from this perspective. See it overall and find the seeds from which it grew, and what fruit it seeks to bear. And when you see that, ask for wisdom and strength to enable you to bring those fruits to ripeness.

Look for me there, for there is much more to share with you than can be expressed within the restraints of this small book. There I swim with you and am know as Dreamhawk. If our paths have meaning together I will take you to meet some of those great beings who are to us like mountains we stand before in awe. There we will bathe in the waters of life together and be renewed.

Notes

More important than dream theory or interpretation (in the Zen Buddhist tradition) is the significance of the relationship between waking and dreaming. Questions – e.g. Who dreams when I dream? Is dreaming a function of sleep, or can sleep be a function of dreaming? Do enlightened people dream? And what is the distinction, if any, between waking reality and dreaming reality? – are answered by the following Zen stories.

The priest made no reply because the desire for enlightenment was already aroused by the dream experience, itself not different from waking experience. In the Zen tradition, this would be considered as a type of death dream for at least two reasons. First, it indicates the necessity of a death to the dreamer’s old self-identity, and, second, it points to the necessity of the enlightenment experience which, as we will see, involves passing through death while alive.

In the second story:

There was once a monk who was met by a well-known teacher in a cemetery, weeping at the edge of a tomb because he had been kicked out of his house, and driven from his village. When asked why, he replied: “Because I like to sleep! I sleep all the time. I wake up to eat, and then I go back to sleep. I really love to sleep!”

“Well you’re a lucky man,” said the master. “Don’t you know that sleeping can be the pathway to Buddhahood?”

So the teacher initiated him in sleep yoga. He told him to mix his sleep with the dharma-kaya [suchness or “being-body”] and death. He taught him to study the transition from waking to sleeping consciousness as the transition from dharma-kaya [transformation body] to dharma-kaya, and to withdrawing the emanation of consciousness into dharma-kaya, into the clear light of dharma-kaya emptiness. He taught him to move from sleeping through compassion into dream, and to accomplish the aims of living beings through the subtle body of the dream. Then he taught him to withdraw those emanations back into the d}dharma-kaya of sleep and then to re-arise in a waking body. The master encouraged him therefore to spend as much time as possible asleep.

So the monk slept for twelve years, after which by the practice of this yoga, he achieved perfect enlightenment.”

Emperor Taishu of the Sung dynasty dreamed one night of a god who appeared and advised him to arouse his yearning for enlightenment. In the morning the Emperor summoned the official priest and asked, “How can I arouse yearning for enlightenment?” The priest made no reply.”

Clearly this is an unorthodox, and highly creative, approach to enlightenment. Through sleep and disciplined dreaming, the monk was able to die to that which kept him from waking to his true self.

Simply put, the Zen tradition speaks not of one, but of two deaths – ordinary death at the termination of this life, and extraordinary death, or Great Death in the midst of this life. Zen is one of the few traditions whose major practice is to live as though thoroughly dead. This experience is termed the Great Death. It is the Great Death that Siddhartha actualised under the Bodhi Tree, and to which the entire history of Buddhist spiritual practice has pointed ever since. In Zen, the Great Death means dying to ordinary, dualistically conditioned consciousness in which: I am I, I am not you, and I am not not-I. Dying to all ideas of self, to all dualistic clingings, to all dependency on the patriarchs, is the expression of Zen’s awakening.

When the Great Death (which is the Great Birth) is achieved, the dualistic self (i.e. the internal division between self as subject and self as object) has been annihilated. One becomes not-self, or selfless self. Now, in Zen’s illogical logic: I am I, and I am you, and I am not-I. In this mode of awareness, there is no struggle between life and death, for one is both fully alive (I am I, and I am you), and fully dead (I am not-I) at the same time. The Great Death uncovers what Zen calls the “Original Face” – the nature of self before God said: “Let there be Light!” In Zen, therefore, it is said that a person who dies (spiritually) before dying (physically) never dies again.

The most significant aspect of this Great Death, for our study, is that it points to a fully-living, fully-dying, eternal moment. As Zen Buddhist philosopher Masao Abe has indicated: “One should not speak of ‘life and death’ but ‘living-dying’ which is a process without beginning and without end. Abe further states that to achieve “transformation” in Buddhism (i.e. from samsara to nirvana), one must clearly realise:

(1) The non-duality of life and death;

(2) The beginninglessness and endlessness of our living-dying;

(3) The total living-dying at this moment of the absolute present.

I am a wave on a shoreless sea.
From no beginning
I travel to no goal,
Making my movements stillness.
Constantly I am arriving
And departing,
Being born and dying.
I am always with you
And yet have never been.

By analogy, therefore, one may be able to view death dreams (or all dreams) as not different from enlightenment:

(1) The non-duality of waking and dreaming;

(2) The beginninglessness and endlessness of our waking and dreaming states;

(3) The total waking-dreaming presence at this absolute present.11

In this sense it is sometimes said: “A Zen master does not dream.” Perhaps this is because the master has already died to his or her attachments, to worldly concerns and to dualistic thinking which separates waking from dreaming. Thus, dreaming is waking as waking is dreaming.

In the Rinzai Zen School, a favourite spiritual practice (often mistaken as a method) is called the koan (a totally illogical puzzle/riddle or challenge to ordinary dualistic consciousness). For example: “Without speaking and without not speaking-speak!” A koan is given to a student with the intention of driving the dualistically calculating mind temporarily out of commission. Koans force the human proclivity toward intellectualisation to exhaust itself, once and for all.

A monk once asked Joshu: “Has a dog Buddha-nature, or not?” Said Joshu, “Mu!” (No or Nothingness). D.T. Suzuki was given this mu by his master as a koan, and he was instructed to think of it regardless of what else he was doing or where he was. Suzuki reports that when he finally ceased being conscious of mu, he became one with Mu, so that there was no longer any separation between himself and his no-self. The solution to the Zen koan, in other words, does not pertain to the language of one’s answer, but to the realisation beneath (or prior to) language.

This is an extremely significant point, for it refers to the deepest level in Buddhist psychology-absolute alaya consciousness. As the chart illustrates, there are at least four levels of mind: empirical thought (ignorance-bound), consciousness, the unconscious (both personal and collective) and pure, formless self-consciousness (absolute alaya). The mind, like the ocean, contains many unconscious undercurrents. Suzuki’s realisation of mu is not a rising up of unconscious emptiness, but rather the actualisation of the still-point source of both consciousness and the unconscious. Zen Buddhist philosopher Nishida described alaya consciousness this way:

There’s something bottomless Within me I feel. However disturbing are the waves Of joy and sorrow, They fail to reach it.

The use of koans is aimed at plunging one’s mind down through layers of consciousness to the bottomless, formless storehouse from which all forms arise.

In his book Clinical Use of Dreams, James Hall writes that he has noted occasional dreams in his studies which he calls “koan dreams.” For example, one man who had practised Zen meditation in Japan dreamed:

I was in Philadelphia, in the train station, desperately trying to find someone who could tell me what train to take to get to Philadelphia.

What is this dream saying? At first it appears to be a flat contradiction. It seems to pose an illogical situation. But in Zen terms, this is not the case. Like the well-known koan “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” this has no logical answer. Rather its answer is contained in its question. How am I to be fully “present” when I am not that I Am! In Zen, the way is to pass through the door of (spiritual) death in order to be reborn, truly, where one always, already is-empty and meaning-less-whether dreaming or awake.

Experience of Lucidity

When I was 15 I started a new phase of the long journey of my life – now I am now 84. At that time I experienced something extraordinary – I went to sleep but remained awake. At eighty I am still discovering the depth of meaning in that experience – no, it was not lucid dreaming, for in that condition people are still lost in their dream images and are only slightly awake.

I want to explain step by step, because we are all lost in a form of dream, for I am writing about Lucidity – a clear understanding, allowing them to explain simply.

The First Step

The first step is to realise that we are probably all almost totally blind, deaf and senseless. That is because now it is shown that we are only aware of 1% of the spectrum of light, we can only hear 1% of audible sound, and our sense of smell doesn’t even get near to what dogs and cats can detect. So, we live in a dimmed down awareness of the world we exist in. The amazing sense we do have is self awareness and a complex language.

That is strange, because if you ask anyone, “Who are you?” they give answers such, “I am a woman” or “I am a male” – both of which are descriptions of their body, not of their SELF. Or they say such things as I am the President, I am a loser – an alcoholic – a child – an electrician – a father – etc. all descriptions of their activity, social position or their age – never the vital description of who they are fundamentally.

The reason for that inability is because we are all asleep to what we are.

The Second Step

I took the second step when I began to explore memory. Realising that scientific investigation found that everyone dreams several times a night, and I wondered why most of us cannot remember any dreams, or very few of them. Knowing the experience of totally waking up in sleep and that we were missing half of our life experience, I investigated how memory works. I wasn’t from studying what others had said about memory, but by observing it, a sort of field study. I carefully analysed how I recalled things. I saw that a very special state of mind is necessary. This became obvious when we try to recall ordinary memories that usually are so available. Or if in a situation such as an exam, where questions need a speedy reply, and a great deal rests upon being able to answer, one might very well find known information beyond recall due to one’s fear of forgetting, or overactive attempt to remember. This is often due to feeding into our memory system a wrong re-call stimuli. Or, put more simply, we may feel sure the name we are trying to remember begins with ‘B’ and we are searching through the ‘Bs’; while in fact the name is Miller, and thus should have been called up under ‘M’. So holding the ‘B’ in mind has actually blocked the memory. Then, as soon as we drop the search and thus drop the blockage, up pops the right name.

Therefore a strong desire to remember is as blocking as the fear of failure. Particular emotional or mental biases are also causes for blocking. Also the search is conditioned by information that is thought to be right, such as our search through the ‘Bs’.

So, remembering a dream in this way is a tremendous break through into the immense and hidden world of our consciousness. This method of penetrating the great mystery of sleep also makes nonsense of the many meditation techniques with a formed goal in mind. I learned much later that Carl Jung, in writing a commentary on the traditional Chinese meditation method – The Secret of the Golden Flower – said, the great secret is to do nothing but let things happen.

The question I asked was – What did I dream or experience during my sleep?

Having formed the question, one now has to realise that as one has never been conscious of the answer, one is looking for information one has never known. Therefore, all attempts to search for the answer must be avoided, as one does not know where or how this information is filed. The question must be held steadily without even a hope of response, or fear of failure. We have to leave ourselves wide open to all images and ideas. I can only describe this as standing in a stream of images and ideas, letting them all drift past without interference until the right one comes. When the actual memory comes, there will be an immediate realisation that this was a dream, despite all the other images. Why this is so I cannot explain. But just as, when the right name is remembered, there is a feeling of sureness, fitting the name to the face; so there is immediate sureness fitting the memory to the question.

Results

The results soon appeared, and I could magically conjure up what was previously invisible. Soon another unsought result began to appear – lucid dreams that I had not sought or tried to achieve. It seemed that breaking open the seal of forgetfulness, had taken awareness into the dream world itself.

The following example is fairly typical of the dreams I had.

“My family and I got out of our car. As we talked I realised there was a motorbike where my car had been. I said to everyone, ‘There was a car here a moment ago, now it’s a motorbike. Do you know what that means? It means we are dreaming.’ So I asked them if they realised they were dreaming. They got very vague and didn’t reply. I asked them again and felt very clearly awake.”

As you can see, I was awake but clearly still in the images of dreaming. I know many lucid dreamers will say their own dreams are full of meeting with great people of the past, or they can change the images to whatever thy wish. Wonderful, but they are still locked in dream images.

But it didn’t take long before another level of lucidity appeared.

“In my dream I was watching a fern grow. It was small but opened very rapidly. As I watched I became aware that the fern was an image representing a process occurring within myself, one I grew increasingly aware of as I watched. Then I was fully awake in my dream and realised that my dream, perhaps any dream, was an expression in images of actual events occurring unconsciously in myself. I felt enormous excitement, as if I were witnessing something of great importance.”

In remembering my dreams I broke through the barrier between our conscious self, our personality and the unconscious. In doing so I was still dealing with dreams and their imagery. However, you cannot keep digging without going deeper still. Carl Jung said what we find within us is as natural, as limitless, and as powerful as the stars.

There is a whole universe to discover within you. Go explore it!

“I felt a slow dawning of something soft and beautiful in me. It emerged from a deep silence and filled me with a feeling of radiance, as if my being was gently shining. I literally felt and saw a shining light from within. I felt certain this is the direction I am going, and this radiance would alter the way I relate to others and also penetrate them. I felt I could love easily and without grasping, and it didn’t matter what happened in the relationship.”

Steps Onward

I began to see and understand that what we call our personality is a tiny point of awareness dipped into the sensory experience of the body. Behind that point lays an immensity that in one sense is not at all mysterious. The immensity is there for all of us to see as the existence and workings of our body and consciousness that we are mostly unaware of.

Also, over the years, I experienced a growing sureness, that we, our sense of having separate existence, our personality, is a tiny part of a huge and powerful under-being; a being that is incredibly creative – after all it is the creative action that brought us into our life and continues to keep our body and mind working – and with wisdom beyond our understanding, but is not an intellectual or word based consciousness.

The next barrier to pass through was dream symbolism. People try to understand their dreams by thinking about them, but dreams arose millions of years ago in creatures without any ability to think; they were creatures who reacted and had only a small behavioural range. We too are living life forms whose dreams arise out of the ancient workings that are how Life has dreamt for a long time. Here is how the Life process deals with this when it is allowed to surface.

“I was dreaming and woke up in sleep. I was then aware of being in the level of dream images and wondered what was beyond it. Immediately I was in another level in which I could directly observe the subtle energy workings of my body. I saw that I had a slight infection in my lungs, and observed how it was like watching fluid moving through a plant. It was a healing action. Then I also observed how the energy between my trunk and head was blocked slightly in my neck. In trying to understand what the block was I realised it was an attitude I have of being proud or stiff necked. If it were not dealt with I could see it would lead to a serious illness in my neck.”

In that one short experience a massive amount of information is shown. Firstly there was no dream imagery of a person and body, but there was direct insight that was otherwise unavailable. I had never before realised I was ‘stiff necked’. I had certainly had several neck problems, but had no clue what caused them; and the information that if it were not dealt with I could see it would lead to a serious illness in my neck was serious. In later explorations I several times saw maggots coming out of my neck and saw that if these were not cleared it could lead to cancer. They were later cleared by using Opening to Life

As can be seen it is this level of insight that can radically change one’s life. But there is still more.

“I became lucid in my dream and realised that I could move deeper. I was already at the level of seeing into the inner workings of the body so asked the question is there anything else. Suddenly I was plunged into bodiless awareness. I had been here many years previous and so I was at ease with it. In the past I had seen that this was the apparent nothingness that is the primal level, and out of it everything appeared. But being curious I asked if there was anything beyond this. I was amazed at what happened next. I was at the same time bodiless, space less and timeless existence, and also here and now in everyday waking life. I had always thought that the physical existence and the holy of holies, the Core Self, were completely and utterly separated and beyond each other. And here I was experiencing the marriage of such enormous opposites.

It was like Blake described it, “To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.”

That is true lucidity.

Summing Up

In life and sleep we have two powerful actions working in us. The first is our waking experience based on having a body, its limitations, vulnerabilities and a particular gender.

Our second is the power that gave us life and continues to express as dreams.

While we sleep our conscious self is largely or totally unconscious, and while we dream our voluntary muscles are paralysed – so another will or motivating force moves our body. So, we have a Conscious Will, and what I will call a Life Will. The first one we have experience of as we can move our arm or speak; but the second will takes over when we sleep.
This Life Will can move us to speak, to move our body, and in fact do things that we cannot do with our Conscious Will. As Freud pointed out this inner will has full access to our memories. It can do so many other things that are described else where.

This Life Will or motivator has been active for millions of years and we see it working all the time in animals. We are partly split in half because we are often opposed to what our Life Will in us wants. So, the only way to express what is good for us is in dreams when our conscious will is largely passive.

Life Will created your body and pre-existed you as a person you know today. It was working in you prior to your ability to speak or know in the way you do now. But of course it has fantastic wisdom and skills, as can be seen in animals. See Life’s Little Secrets

The experience mentioned at the beginning is:

In 1952, when I was fifteen, and already deeply interested in the possibilities of the human mind, I took a course in deep relaxation. It was a postal course by Willian Ousby titled Self Hypnotism, but it was actually advanced relaxation.

I practised every day for three months, tensing my muscles, relaxing them, then passing my awareness over and over my body, dropping the feeling of tension. After three months I was quite proficient. One evening, after coming home from dining out with friends, I went to bed thinking I would leave my usual practice, but in the end decided to practice even though it was late. After going over my body several times I suddenly lost my right arm. I had no sensation of it other than space, hugeness. Then I lost my left arm, and – my whole body. It was like falling through a trap-door into the stars. I had no sense of having a body. Thoughts had ceased, except for a murmur apparently a thousand miles away. Yet in blackness, in immensity, in absence of thought I existed vitally as bodiless awareness. We think that we are our body because we have no other experience of our existence. So, we identify with our body and so are terrified of dying – which in a sense is what we do every time we go to sleep and leave our sense of a body behind.

After that day I could for while repeat the experience almost any time I sat down and used the relaxation technique. I felt at the time, and still believe it correct, that I had fallen asleep yet remained awake. Waking, critical awareness had been taken through the magic doors of sleep into a universe it seldom ever sees – deep dreamless sleep. See Dimensions of Human Experience

I realise that what I describe must seem like a strange and even imaginary world to many people – except that it isn’t. But many people do not give three months of their life in everyday practice at the age of 15 to break through the barriers of our physical senses. Looking back I realise that I had dropped every thing – I did nothing and let things happen. At the time I had not really grasped the how and meaning if it. See Realisation

A few more experiences gained in the same way.

“Suddenly, toward the end of exploring my dream, I leaped beyond anything I had ever experienced before. I knew just as clearly as in ordinary life I know my name, that instead of being someone separated from everybody else living a certain day in time, My real self was a river that flowed through all time. I had always existed and was involved in all history. With an amazing heightened awareness I could see the influence from this timeless self flowing through all my present life, subtly shaping it. The things I had chosen to do or work at were all connected as a working out of ancient or timeless influences, or an attempt to change them.”

“I am in a landscape and notice that everything is brown; the whole world is brown and lifeless. There is also a feeling of solemnity or dullness. I have enough lucidity to wonder why the world of my dream is so brown and dull. As I ask this I become more aware of what feeling the brownness expresses. It is seriousness – with no room for humour or fun. The feeling deepens, real enough and clear enough to look at and understand. I see it is my father’s attitude to life that I have unconsciously inherited. I realise how anxious he always felt about life, and how I took this in. That is how I became a ‘brown’ person. I see too that I do not need to be either brown or serious anymore.

“To my amazement a huge living and wondrous circle appeared on the wall. It was full of movement, everything dancing in time to music. At the very centre of the circle was emptiness, nothing, a void. Yet out of this nothingness all things emerged. There were plants, animals, people, hills, rivers and mountains all coming to birth. They danced out in their own individual movement, yet each unknowingly was part of the whole wonderful and intricate dance which made a great pattern and movement in the body of the circle. All danced to the periphery and there turned and moved, still in their ballet, back to the centre. At that centre they plunged into its oblivion again. But at that very moment new life sprang from it to dance once more.”

True this has dream images, but such enormous truth is shown. But the real lucidity is done while fully awake, by penetrating dream symbols, or learning to switch between bodiless, space less and timeless existence, and the here and now everyday waking life.

CORRESPONDENCE

I have what I call awake dreams almost 3x a week. I know I am sleeping and in a dream state, but I feel “free” as if I was awake. I get to do anything I want, but with no repercussions whatsoever. Mostly, the state I enter is either hovering or flying, and outrageous sexual promiscuity — no guilt and with both sexes. So far, I celebrate this state I enter often. Is there anything I should do to encourage or discourage? Please let me know.

Tammy

Tammy – You are someone special if you manage lucid dreaming three times a week.

I don’t think you should discourage this. But I feel you are only on the very tip of what is possible for you. I know lots of books say you should be capable of controlling your dreams and doing whatever you wish – okay, but not at the cost of allowing yourself to explore the wonders of your core self.

And your exploits without repercussions are proof that most people introvert their moral views unnecessarily. Morals are very useful for outer life, but they should not lead to the sort of dreams most people have of being imprisoned in one way or another.

Example: I was inside a large boat, probably a tanker. There were a lot of passengers, but it appeared as if we were imprisoned in a huge room. It was very dingy and dismal. I am not sure though whether people realised they were prisoners. Maybe one only realised one was imprisoned if one tried to escape. Bob. Axe ” A ” .

We can be crushed by difficult events, by the loss of someone, by an accident, by criticism or even by our own moods. Sometimes we allow parts of us such as love or creativity actually crush us. Perhaps without being really aware of it, you already know your body is a screen. When you see a film or read a book you might be moved to laugh or cry, or shout out in fear. Considering that the book and film is not reality, what is happening? Well you are trapped by your feelings of fear.

You are perhaps caught in another way for you create lucid dreams which do not challenge to you. For instance, instead of creating your own dreams, perhaps realise that ‘you’, the personality you know has only a tiny control of the forces that keep you breathing and alive. You are a minute part of the cosmic forces that exist to cause you to be. So allowing that part of you to spontaneously show you and lead you deeper into yourself is an incredible adventure – the greatest adventure there can be.

Here are some of the possibilities of what you can do in waking sleep.

That occurred because I did not control my dreams and make them ‘in my own egoistic image’ but let the spontaneous Life functions that are the very essence of life, like the spontaneous movements behind such as breathing, sneezing, digestion etc, show themselves.

Here is another one with greater range.

I am in a landscape and notice that everything is brown; the whole world is brown and lifeless. There is also a feeling of solemnity or dullness. I have enough lucidity to wonder why the world of my dream is so brown and dull. As I ask this I become more aware of what feeling the brownness expresses. It is seriousness – with no room for humour or fun. The feeling deepens, real enough and clear enough to look at and understand. I see it is my father’s attitude to life that I have unconsciously inherited. I realise how anxious he always felt about life, and how I took this in. That is how I became a ‘brown’ person. I see too that I do not need to be either brown or serious anymore.

And those are again just the tip of the iceberg of your being.

Tony

-Molly

I have always dreamed very vividly and graphically. My dreams have always invoked strong emotions into my surroundings and towards people’s “auras” so to speak. But my dreams have never consisted of an actual thought process. Recently though, I have begun to be totally clear headed and logical in my dream state. I have not yet experienced a realization of dreaming, but when crazy things happen, I do recognize that they are out of place. It is like watching a movie of absurdity flash by me while I remain consistent and have clear thought processing as if I were awake.

However, since my dream state has begun to evolve into this, my awake state has become a confusing mess of unclear sporadic thoughts and strong vivid emotions. My ability to apply cognitive processing and make sense of the absurdity around me has become like it should be in a dream during my waking hours, and vice versa.

I do not know if this is something I should relax into and may help me better myself and connect myself further in the future. Or if this is very bad.

Regardless, people have always told me that I am out of it and seem like I am in space, and doctors have told me that my ability to form memories is almost nonexistent. I have only never felt that way until now. After experiencing what true clear thought is like and normal awareness and ability to remember things in my dreams, I feel oddly and newly aware of handicaps when I am awake. That may or may not have always been there.
What does this mean?

Molly – I would need to talk with you and ask lots of questions to really understand what is happening to you. But one thing that is clear to me is that with such a big change in your dreaming experience, it must also produce a massive effect on your waking self.

I believe the dreaming process preceded the waking self, and so is dependent on the sleep self.

Also I can see that a change in viewpoint or perspective can completely change your view of the world. We do this all the time but without awareness. If you stand before a closed door and look around you and notice what you feel, then you open that door and look through with awareness and feelings, you will experience a completely different space and feeling.

So I wonder if it is not a ‘bad’ thing but that you will get used to it and it will change.

Also I am surprised that you haven’t yet woken up in sleep. You must be very near to it.

But I have found after years of experience that dreams are an expression of a Life process that is trying to lead you to grow in awareness and self-regulate – self regulation/homeostasis.

Dreams are a way of trying to communicate things of intense importance to your conscious self or ego. Dreams are one of nature’s miracles, not the result of a wandering mind in sleep. A dream is an interface between the process of life, our core self and our conscious personality. Life existed quite capably for millions of years before the self-aware human personality came on the scene. In all that time the ancestors of the modern human being survived without having a rational mind to reason with, or self-consciousness to ask such questions as ‘What do I do about this?’ Nevertheless, survival strategies were still developed in their unconscious intelligence. Dreams express this unconscious wisdom that was developed in humans and animals through millennia.

That you have never explored your dreams to find meaning in them is perhaps a new direction for you. Perhaps it would open a new world of experience for you – see Practical Techniques to explore your dreams

Tony

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