Posts Tagged ‘lucid’
Lucidity – Awake In Sleep
Lucidity Part 4
Sometimes in the practice of deep relaxation, meditation or sensory deprivation, our being enters into a state akin to sleep, yet we maintain personal waking awareness. This is like a journey into a deeply interior world of mind and body where our senses no longer function in their waking manner, where the brain works in a different way, and where awareness is introverted in a degree we do not usually experience. It can sometimes be a frightening world simply because we are not accustomed to it.
In a similar way a measure of waking awareness can arise while dreaming. This is called lucid dreaming. During it we can change or wilfully direct what is happening in the dream in a way not usual to the dream state.
“Only a handful of psychical researchers studied lucid dreams and many people associated such work with the paranormal or occult. Orthodox scientists who studied sleep were not interested. They argued that lucid dreams could not possibly be real dreams at all; that the very idea of awareness during a dream was a contradiction in terms. So their theory went, lucid dreams must be occurring in brief moments of wakefulness or in the transition between waking and sleeping – but not in the kind of deep sleep during which rapid eye movements (REMs) and ordinary dreams usually take place. In other words, lucid dreams were not really dreams at all.
How could the dreamers of lucid dreams convince them otherwise? After all, when you are in a deep sleep and dreaming you cannot shout, ‘Hey! Listen to me. I’m dreaming right now.’ The muscles of the body are paralysed. You cannot even move a finger.
The breakthrough came when sleep researcher Keith Hearne, at the University of Hull, realised that, of course, not all your muscles are paralysed. In REM sleep, the eyes move. So perhaps a lucid dreamer could signal with eye movements. It was just over 10 years ago that Alan Worsley, a lucid dreamer, first managed this crucial trick. He decided to move his eyes left and right eight times in succession whenever he realised he was dreaming. In the sleep laboratory, Hearne had him connected to a polygraph and could see the string of extreme eye movements clearly recorded in the middle of REM sleep. So the doubters were wrong. Lucid dreams are real dreams and do occur during REM sleep.” Quoted from New Scientist vol 178 issue 2397 – 31 May 2003, page 26
Example: ‘I had backed my car into a big yard, a commercial area. My wife, two of my sons and I got out of the car. As we stood in the yard talking I realised there was a motorbike where my car should be. 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.’ Mark my son was now with us, and my ex wife. 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.
William’s is a fairly typical lucid dream, but there are features which it does not illustrate. During the days or weeks prior to a lucid dream, many people experience an increase in flying dreams. The next example shows another common feature.
Example: ‘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 LBC.
Lucidity often has this feature of enabling the dreamer to avoid apparently unpleasant elements of the dream. The decision to avoid any unpleasant internal emotions is a common feature of a person’s conscious life, so this aspect of lucidity is simply a way of taking such a decision into the dream. Some writers even suggest it as a way of dealing with frightening dreams. Avoidance does not solve the problem, it simply pushes the emotion deeper into the unconscious where it can do damage more surreptitiously. Recent findings regarding suppressed grief and stress emotions, which connects them with higher incidence of cancer, suggests that suppression is not a healthy way of dealing with feelings. See The Healing Experience
Another approach to lucidity is that it can be a sort of playground where one can walk through walls, jump from high buildings and fly; change the sofa into an attractive lover, leave ones body, and so on. True, the realisation that our dream life is a different world and that it does have completely different principles at work than our waking world is important. Often people introvert into their dream life the morals and fears which are only relevant to being awake in physical life. To avoid a charging bull is certainly valid for waking life. In our dream life though, to meet its charge is to integrate the enormous energy which the bull represents, an energy which is our own, but which we may have been avoiding or ‘running away’ from previously. Realising such simple differences revolutionises the way we relate to our own internal events and possibilities. To treat lucid dreams as if they offered no other attainable experience than manipulating the dream environment, or avoidance of difficult emotions or encounters, is to miss an amazing feature of human potential.
Example: ‘In my dream I was watching a fern grow. It was small but opened out very rapidly. As I watched I became aware that the fern was simply an image representing a process occurring within myself which 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 of actual and real events occurring in my body and mind. I felt enormous excitement, as if I were witnessing something of great importance.’ Francis P.
It is now acceptable through the work of Freud, Jung and many others, to consider that within the images of the dream lies valuable information about what is occurring within the dreamer, perhaps unconsciously. Strangely though, it is almost never considered that one can have direct perception into this level of internal ‘events’ without the dream or without dream interpretation. What Francis describes is an experience of being on the cusp of symbols and direct perception. Considering the enormous advantage of such direct information gathering, it is surprising it is seldom mentioned except in the writings of Corriere and Hart – The Dream Makers.
Example: ‘After defining why I had not woken in sleep recently, i.e. loss of belief, I had the following experience. I awoke in my sleep and began to see, without any symbols, that my attitudes and sleep movements expressed a feeling of restrained antagonism or irritation to my wife. I could also observe the feelings were arising from my discipline of sexuality. Realising I did not want those feelings I altered them and woke enough to turn toward my wife.’ Francis P.
After the first of his direct perception dreams, Francis attempted to use this function again, resulting in the above, and other, such dreams. Just as classic dream interpretation says that the dream symbols represent psychobiological logical processes which might be uncovered by processing dreams, what we see in Francis’ lucidity is a direct route to self insight, and through it a rapid personal growth to improved life experience. Such dreams provide not only psychological insight, but very frequently, a direct perception of processes occurring in the body, as the following examples illustrates.
Example: ‘Although deeply asleep I was wide awake without any shape or form. I had direct experience, without any pictures, of the action of the energies in my body. I had no awareness of body shape, only of the flow of activities in the organs. I checked over what I could observe, and noticed a tension in my neck was interfering with the flow and exchange of energies between the head and trunk. It was also obvious from what I could see that the tension was due to an attitude I had to authority, and if the tension remained it could lead to physical ill health.’ C.
Example: Taken from CompuServe files – contributed by Oliver W. Markley. First appeared in Whole Earth Review, Fall 1991:
It was as though the dream I had been watching was a movie, and instead of looking at the screen on which it was being projected, I somehow began looking into the lens of the movie projector. As I did so, the energy of my gaze ‘melted’ the movie that was passing through, which in turn allowed my gaze to penetrate deeper into the movie process, seeing where the movie came from. I knew that I was about to get an answer to some of my deepest questions about dreaming: What is the true nature of dreams? Where do they come from? What function do they play?
I was somehow able to see first the more superficial levels of dream process within myself, and then deeper levels, until the depth of my gaze revealed processes so alien that I was no longer able to understand them. At this point I returned my attention to the need to record the dream, and woke up. There were five categories of dreams in all. The function of the first type of dream process I saw was pure entertainment.
The second reviewed current concerns and unfinished business, and the attempt to find solutions to problems therein.
The third process involved the reception of guidance from higher wisdom sources within the mind. At a superficial level, this guidance dealt with the concerns of the second type of process; but at a deeper level, it dealt with topics that came along with the guidance process. These topics seemed to concern the future, and the evolution of the mind and soul both individual and collective.
The fourth type answered a question about the familiar assertion that ‘most of us use but a small part of our mental capacities’ (some ‘experts’ say we use only about 10 percent, others that it is as small as 2 percent). I had often wondered about this, thinking that in nature, if things don’t get used, they atrophy. If we have all this excess mental capacity that we aren’t using, why doesn’t it atrophy?
The fourth mode seemed to be some sort of gymnasium, with a range of mental, psychic, and spiritual exercises to keep the brain/mind fit.
The final type of dream content was totally surprising. As I penetrated deeply into my internal dream process, what I found can perhaps be best described as being visited by aliens.’ The ‘foreground’ resembled a resort hotel, a place for sightseeing and recreation. It was benign and human-feeling, although the visitors were anything but human! As I explored more deeply, however, things got so alien that I couldn’t understand them in the lucid-dream state.
As I reluctantly turned back from this journey, I realised that I had an answer to yet another question about dreams that had long puzzled me: ‘Why are our dreams so highly symbolised? ‘
I now understood why the deeper reaches of dream life must be camouflaged by symbols: the self-protective belief systems which dominate waking life are simply unable to accept the alienness of deep dreaming process; symbolic camouflage artfully bridges the gap.
This last category of dream represents what I call ‘the L-Squared dream,’ a lucid dream in which the dreamer is lucid about the process of being lucid. To become lucid in this way, it is helpful to imagine having a miner’s lamp on one’s forehead, a metaphoric ‘truth beam’ that reveals the underlying truth of whatever is involved.
An effective way to develop lucidity is to frequently consider the events of waking life as if they were a dream. Try to see events as one might see dream symbols – what do they mean in terms of ones motivations, fears, personal growth? What do they suggest about oneself? For instance a person who works in a photographic darkroom developing films and prints might see they were trying to bring to consciousness the latent – unconscious – side of themselves. A banker might feel they were working at how best to deal with their sexual and personal resources. A person working with children who are in some way injured or deficient might be trying to heal their own inner child. In this way one might actually apply what is said in this dream dictionary to ones outer circumstances.
The second instruction is, on waking, at a convenient moment, imagine oneself standing within ones recent dream. As you get a sense of the dream environment, realise that you are taking waking awareness into the dream. From the standpoint of being fully aware of the dream action and events, what will you now do in and with the dream? Re-dream it with consciousness. For example the things you run from in your normal dreaming you could now face. See: Techniques for Exploring your Dreams; The Waking Lucid Dream; for further suggestions Dream Yoga and Lucid Dreaming
See also: processing dreams; Lucidity- The New Frontier; Creativity: The Lucidity Institute.
Link to List of Chapters – Link to Part 5