Posts Tagged ‘lucidity’

Going Deeper

Lucidity Part 7

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. [My own experience renamed]

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? (522 words)

Incubating lucid dreams

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. If you miss out on this as you wake, you can do it during the day.
4. 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

1. 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.
2. 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.”
3. Use this method for as long as you wish. The more you use it the more effective it becomes
4. 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. An environment beyond the images of dreams in which you directly observe the forces of mind and body that create 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.
4. 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.
5. 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 German, 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 on 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 o 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. (504 words)

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 womb-like 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 – trusted 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:

1. You are a river. Water flows through you all the time. Without water you would not exist.
2. You are the wind. Air flows through you all the time. Without air you would not and could not exist.
3. 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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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. (1002 words)

Lucid Dreams

The Way to a New Adventure

Tony Crisp

To dream with awareness that you are dreaming is called Lucid Dreaming. It is one of the most amazing frontiers of human life. It opens possibilities denied by our  phsyical body. 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. 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.

This swing between waking and sleeping can be seen as the extremes within the possibilities of our experience. Sleeping and waking are the polarities, the North and South Poles of what we can confront. In quite a real sense we can say there is nothing beyond what is included in those polarities. But usually we call sleep a period of unconsciousness, but in lucid experience we can explore to the very beginning of our being – what I call The Core. And that gives freedom of an extraordinary kind.

Chapters

1 –  Some Truths about Lucid Dreaming

2 – Lucidity Means Awareness

3 – Techniques to Lucid Dreaming

4 – Lucidity – Awake in Sleep

5 – The New Frontier of Lucidity

6 – The Waking Lucid Dream

7 – Going Deeper

 

Lucidity Means Awareness

Lucidity Part 2

Being lucid in a dream is the extraordinary experience of knowing you have carried something of waking awareness into sleep. In the lucid state you can make decisions and do thing that in ordinary dreaming are not possible. Our dreams take us into realms of extraordinary experience in which we are still largely unaware.  In lucid dreaming we wake up in what is usually a dark, unconscious world.  Or in the midst of a dream we realise the situation and relate to the dream in a new and dynamic way. Because you are conscious you have entered the world of the unconscious with all its wonders and strangeness.

To make comparisons, in waking life you have to work at something to create it – in the lucid state you can immediately create in the virtual reality of dreams. In waking you have limited memory – in lucidity you have full recall. In waking life you have a sexual orientation through your body – in lucidity you can be any gender. In waking life you only have the three dimensional experience via the senses – and the senses are notoriously limited, and so in lucidity you can be in worlds with little or no form. In other words in waking life you live in enormous limitations – in lucidity you enter a world of freedom, only limited by your imagination or concepts. You can fly effortlessly or even transfer immediately to any part of the earth or beyond.

But lucidity is different to sleep and dreams. Sleep is a strange country.  In it we largely lose our sense of self.  Or dreams take us into a new worlds of 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. Then they can explore this new territory.

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 – or 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 can be the doorway to real personal growth and adventure.

To sum this up, the unconscious is:

The mass of your memories remain unconscious unless called upon, and even may remain hidden or what we call ‘forgotten’. In this case forgotten means unconscious. Here is an example of this from a lucid dream I had.

I was surprised that with the huge instrument like a euphonium I could play a tune rather than simply an accompaniment. All the while I was intrigued how another piece of music would suggest itself, and then I could remember it note for note. I realised that the playing wasn’t difficult because I was dreaming, so that didn’t amaze me. But the memory of the music, pieces that I do not often remember or sing, was startling. It demonstrated to me how easily the memory works when we are in this state.

The unconscious is the master of all our body functions, which remain ‘unconscious’. For instance one of my early lucid experiences was of waking up while deep in sleep, and realising I was in my body examining it. This was extraordinary as I could see the inner workings of my lungs. I had some sort of infection at the time and I could see the way my body was healing it. It was like watching plant circulation dealing with the illness. Then I was examining my neck and I could see I had a problem there that if it continued could lead to serious illness. The problem was of having an attitude of being very rigid in my opinions. This caused a poor energy flow between my trunk and head. Seeing this, a situation I was previously unconscious of, I was able to grow beyond it.

The outer world we take to be the ultimate reality is in fact an externalisation of the forces of the universe, or Life, that are largely unknown and unsensed, and so are – that word again – unconscious.

When you become lucid in sleep you carry the bright torch of personal awareness into the depths of your body and mind, into the unconscious. 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.

Link to List of Chapters – Link to Part 3

Some Truths About Lucid Dreaming

Lucid Dreams Part 1

In case you are not aware of the term ‘Lucid Dreaming’, it means the ability to remain criticallly awake while dreaming. That means that one can carry waking awareness into the dreaming state. That is an enormous step in human evolution and ability.

In the ‘real’ world if you jump off a high building it would kill you – well, not really, but it would certainly mess up that body. But in the world of dreams, and especially lucid dreams, you can of course experience death- and you can do it again and again, because that it all it is, an experience. See Example 6

What is so difficult for most people to grasp is that every dream is a real life virtual reality. But unlike those of computer games and computer generated versions you are firmly in the action and feeling it as if it were real. Therefore if you ‘dream’ of  falling you will usually feel extraordinary fear. And of course, if you dream of having a wonderful sexual encounter it IS wonderful, with depths of experience not usually available in waking life. To really understand dreaming and lucid dreaming you have to understand that you are in an experience without boundaries. I know that is hard for most people to grasp, locked as they are in their view of the world as being subject to time, space and what is usually called ‘reality’. So come with me into another world in which thoughts create your environment, and imagination is a tool with which you can create it. So most people who enter it usually create a world much like the physical world they are so familiar with – people with bodies, gender, up and down, houses and no connection between people except through words and body signals. Pretty boring when you know your way around the many dimensions you exist in. But their dream world is frightening or intriguing because it is so totally unlike ‘real’ life. I want to say here that I was also lost in an awful real world or terrors that I found my way out of through learning the things mentioned here.

The real world and the dream world are not separate, just like the mind and the body are not separate. What I realised was that dreaming, especially lucid dreaming is like dying. The old saying sleep is a little death is true. In lucid dreaming  you realise that you cannot die, and the brain is not the final thing that gives you life. See Example 7

So travel with me into the world of directly knowing another person without the use of words or even a body; to an experience of the Earth and its wonderful tides and energies beyond the knowing we have through our eyes and physical senses; come with me into the vast sea of knowledge where all that has lived is known and recorded. Or into the depths of your own past and ancestors, the evolution of you. For most people, dreams are an adventure in the first level – people with bodies, a fixed gender, up and down, houses and no connection between people except through words or signals. In the dream world we create our environment and it is plastic, able to shift with our thoughts and intentions. Having been able to explore lucid dreaming, I know from experience that is only the first level – the ordinary world of seeing objects in a new setting. So if you think this is weird, there are worlds beyond that are so much more  wonderful. Most people do not realise that our only limitation is our own ability, our own conceptions of who and what we are. See – Inner World

Our growth is to move beyond what we have known and what we believe. But I see that there are two main types of people who manage lucid dreaming. The first is those who with an open mind wish to explore and understand the world of lucidity. They like the author of In the Shadow of Man, Jane Lawick Goodall, simply observed and gradually learnt from what was seen.

But there is also the awful propensity to be in control of everything in Western Society.  Something that needs to be said about this type of lucidity is that I felt lucidity can be a process, or a possibility, sought and developed by people who are basically inadequate in meeting the so-called real demands of life. Because of this, because they seek an alternative to what is difficult for them, they attempt to inhabit a sort of existence between worlds. I suppose I have called it living in the cracks of life. Finding an environment that is not threatening and where the usual rules of society and physical life do not apply. In this view I could see lucidity as a sort of drug to be taken to deal with stress, especially for lucid dreamers who insist in controlling every aspect of the dream, or who afraid of their own fears and will not face them. The world that one can inhabit and explore as lucidity was one of a type inhabited by dropouts, and others seeking an alternative way of being – but not in a positive dynamic sense. Having myself moved beyond the image level, I know there is more to lucid dreaming. See flying

Link to List of Chapters – Link to Part 2

Lucidity – The New Frontier

Lucidity Part 5

Sleep is a strange country. In it we lose sense of self in unconsciousness. 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. See Answer to Critics

This condition, usually called “lucid dreaming” holds in it enormous possibilities and advantages unavailable in normal 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 unconsciously. But what would it be like to travel that deeply beyond sensory input, that deeply into the substrata of the mind and bodily functions with awareness? What would it be like to enter sleep with critical faculties, with active curiosity, and some ability to direct what we found? What would it be like to carry the bright torch of personal awareness into the depths of the usually unconscious body and mind?

Well, for some it is like an exploration of an archaeological dig, except it isn’t dead bones or fragments of a long past we find. But living experiences of the different levels of our past. See Levels of Awareness

Here is a frontier a few people have crossed. Like the frontiers of sea and sky that past generations conquered, this frontier of the mind 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 if we are courageous enough to go on such a journey. See Archetype of the Search for Self

If we use the image of a large building to represent the mind and body, the upper levels above ground depict waking awareness and physical activity. But beneath ground level, in the place of sleep and the unconscious, there is far more space than above ground.

In these further spaces of the mind people have found access to the motivations, fears and responses that lie behind their waking success or failure. They have a gateway to the roots of creativity and innovation that can enrich their everyday life. The processes of our body, usually beyond control, can be influenced to improve health.

As one lucid dreamer described, “I literally woke up in sleep, and I could observe how my body was dealing with a chest infection, and how a rigid attitude I had was creating tension in my neck, and thus interfering with the healing process.”

Another lucid dreamer said that this new state is like a wonderful play area, or a gymnasium for the mind and emotions. This enabled him to stretch or enlarge his abilities, his perspectives, in a way that was difficult in waking life.

In brief, some of the possibilities of lucidity are:

1 – The ability to do the “housework” of your mind and emotions, cleaning up old conflicts, unhelpful responses and habits that generated in childhood.

2 – The possibility of working with the processes of healing in the bodymind and thereby enhancing your health.

3 – The unconscious has long been recognised as being a major resource used by great artists and musicians. So lucidity opens this treasure house of creativity.

4 – The unconscious is the generator of helpful hunches, of intuition and wider perception. This is partly because it holds the whole library of our memories and experience. It also creates new patterns of connectivity between previously unconnected pieces of gathered information. So lucidity brings a new sense organ.

5 – Quantum physics has begun to show that the roots of our being are not in the atom — the material object that led to our view we are only a body that lives and dies. The new view suggests that the very foundation of our being lives beyond time and space. In fact many lucid dreamers appear to experience or explore this condition. This enables them to witness events away from their sleeping body. Out of body and near death experiences are part of lucidity

6 – Real scientific research has helped to clarify how lucidity can be accessed. There are clear methods one can use to reach toward this personal experience of crossing a new frontier into an enlargement of our world and our abilities. This need not remain something only experienced in sleep.

See: Life’s Little Secrets; Techniques for Exploring your Dreams; for further suggestions Dream Yoga and Lucid Dreaming

Link to List of Chapters – Link to Part 6

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

Dreams Death and Dying – Eastern cultures describe death and dying.

In most of the great faiths and traditions of the world, there are similar teachings about the relationship with the dead. The Egyptian Book of The Dead, one of the oldest books in the world, explains how the soul of the dead person is brought before the gods and has to answer their queries. The Tibetan Book of The Dead gives detailed instructions for a living person to read to the dead. The text explains how the soul of the person will face his or her own deeds, thoughts and fears in a new way, and will come face to face with the gods. It explains how each of these can be best dealt with. Even the recent investigation into near-death-experiences echoes this theme of the person facing their deeds when they have died.

Although The Tibetan Book of the Dead arises from a very different cultural standpoint than that of the West, it is more than simply a strange or superstitious document. It encompasses a profound attempt to look at the subtle side of the human mind and speculate on what we face in death. See Levels of Awareness

In ancient China, the tradition of ancestor worship was of tremendous importance. Here again we see the personal value of relating to the dead. Most aboriginal races have a similar strong feeling of connection with, and remembrance for, their dead. In Catholic Christianity, there are a whole series of sacraments linking one with death or the dead. From the very first, baptism aims at bringing one into a new relationship with God, and making one ready for direct and conscious entrance into Heaven at death. The sacrament of the Mass applies not only to the living but also to the dead: Mass by the living being given for the dead.

This question of what fate human consciousness faces at death is in fact explored by most past races. Looking at these ideas from the standpoint of what we now know about sleeping and dreaming, perhaps some light can be thrown on these ancient ideas.

Two possibilities may exist in sleep, and therefore perhaps in death also. One is that we may penetrate sleep with self-awareness, as happens occasionally in lucid dreams. The other is that we may be carried along by images and emotions, influences and drives, whether we like it or not, as occurs in nightmares. Some of the images and experiences may be beautiful, and some may be terrible. In using this approach to understand ancient texts about death, it is helpful to clarify exactly what it is we experience in a dream. Whether what we experience is beautiful or terrible, are they anything more than tremendous experiences of virtual reality? If they are not, then any horror or beauty we meet are self-created. If this can be accepted, that the apparently real people we meet in dreams are not more real than the experience of colour we have when we look at a rose – considering that we are not seeing the colour, but nerve impulses sent by the eyes to an area of the brain where it is translated into what we apparently see – then we are dealing with our own unconscious creations. But this still leaves us with the question of what is the difference between that and our so called waking experience. Possibly the only big difference is that our waking experience is less prone to change than the dream state. See You Are a Dual Being; Dreams are a reflection of your inner world; Inner World

The Eastern texts mentioned state that if we lack the ability to stand back from involvement in these swirling impressions and fail to see them for what they are, we will be carried wherever the seeds of thought, emotion and fear move us. This much is not speculation. We need very little examination of our own experience to see how time and again our ability to coolly respond to situations is swept away by unbidden emotional or physical responses. If we can see these powerful feeling reactions, or subtle influences for what they are – our own swirling thoughts, emotions and sense impressions – we enter another level of experience entirely. In this sense our identity is like a small boat swept along in a rushing river. The river in this case is our sense impressions, our emotional responses triggered by glandular secretions such as the adrenals, and our imagination or anxieties. See Avoid Being Victims

If you can accept for a moment that when you are totally involved in a dream, you are immersed in experiencing your own largely unconscious attitudes, fears, longings and ideas are external realities, then it gives a starting point to explore these ideas about death. We can begin to understand from our own observable experience rather than from subtle oriental philosophy.

The example of a nightmare you have experienced at some time will be helpful in this. During the nightmare you were almost certainly convinced that it was real. All your actions and feelings also arose directly out of feeling that the nightmare was an external reality, and not a play of internal emotions and fears. Most likely only waking was able to begin dispersing the fear you felt. But supposing you had become aware in your nightmare that what you were facing was not an illusion, but a projection of internal memories, past experience and attitudes. What would that be like?

It is not necessary to speculate too much on this, as many people have been able to become lucid in this way. (See: Buddhism and Dreams for some examples.) What people meet who have done this is a breaking through the apparently real images and events of the dream into direct personal insight. In other words the images of the nightmare give way to direct memoirs of past events that lay the foundation of feelings out of which the nightmare arose. For instance Robert Van de Castle writes that when he has helped people explore nightmares about a ghost, it has always led back to the childhood memory of a parent coming to the bedroom and lifting them or moving them to prevent bed wetting. See Our Dreaming Mind by Robert Van de Castle.

Such direct experiences also help us understand what happens when we fail to face the images of a nightmare, or in fact any other troubling fears and anxieties. We know from personal experience that they remain to haunt us. They continue to influence the way we deal with life, with opportunity, with relationships. It is this influence in the present arising out of the past that Eastern peoples call karma.

 

interaction of past and present

If we create a scheme of the levels of the mind in meeting a nightmare, first of all we meet the dreams images. In most cases this is as far as we go. Our experience of the dream people or creatures is that they are as real as any object or person we meet while awake. Because of this we react to them as if they are real, and can harm us.

So at this first level of interaction we are victims of the virtual reality of the nightmare. Our actions and reactions arise out of acceptance of the reality of the dream characters and situation.

Moving to the next level, from the experience of people who become lucid in their dream, the characters, drama and objects of the dream are experienced as a projection from our own past, from our own fears or imaginations. So the nightmare can be equated with life events. Using the Eastern term of karma, we can say that in the nightmare we are experiencing our karma – outflow of past experience and events.

The doctrine of Karma in Eastern cultures states that our experience of life and its events depends upon the actions, thoughts, desires, longings, that have become built into ourselves from the past – this life and others. When we break through the images or surface life events, we come to the realm of Karmic influences. That is, we discover the pattern of past habits, attitudes, fears, pains, plans and aspirations that have projected into our conscious life and its events.

Therefore this second level of experience is one of penetrating what is at first an apparently external virtual reality, and in penetrating it discovering the influences, the processes or energies that create it. I have summed this up by using the word karma. So we begin to see the karmic influences out of which our life is woven.

Imagine what it would be like to penetrate deeply into your own mind in this way. Again, many people have done it, so it is not a ‘What if’? When it happens the events and directions we have taken in life are seen to be the outworking of deeply etched patterns of behaviour; of passionately made decisions, perhaps from the experience of betrayal; out of lessons learned sometimes over generations of our family. Our conscious biases, opinions, abilities, fears, failings and illnesses, are seen to emerge from this matrix of past experience.

If we think of our past deeds as a colour transparency in a projector, and our conscious self as the screen, we gain an idea of this. Hatred, love, fear, built into us in the past, act as images on the transparency, influencing, colouring, the life-giving energies of our being. If we experienced something that has hurt us sexually or emotionally, and we thus deadened parts of ourselves rather than face our pain, then our present sexuality and emotions will be lacking the full outflow to that degree. These blockages are dense areas on the transparency of our Karmic nature, blocking the light. The light itself is all the range of our experience, sensual, sexual, emotion, mental and spiritual. This is not altogether a good analogy, because our Karmic matrix may contain frozen lumps of our life energy.

If we could consciously meet our fears or pains, our passionately felt decisions of the past, we might arrive back to awareness of the ‘transparency’ or matrix. In the Catholic sense, we would have now ‘admitted’ to consciousness – to ourselves – our past ‘sin’ or error. Becoming conscious of such patterns often wipes them away. In modern psychological terms, awareness transforms. If we see some of the ancient teachings in this light they are less esoteric, and more easily understood as amazing expressions of past psychological insight.

 

healing force

Coming back to the experience of a nightmare, or in fact any dream, while we are alive we can wake up. But what ancient cultures say is that when we die we cannot wake from this world of dreaming, or perhaps of nightmare. This is precisely why masses are said, or why teachings of the East expound ways of helping the dead find their way out of the apparent reality of a strange and perhaps disturbing environment.

In the ‘Bardo Thodol’ (Tibetan Book of The Dead) the dying or dead person is told to hold himself or herself in the Clear Light, without letting anything such as thoughts or karmic influences claim them. What this means in today’s terms is that a living person reads to the dead, telling them not to get lost in their own thoughts and feelings. They are told that underlying the apparent reality of the ‘dream’ or mental landscapes and environment they find themselves in, is the clear consciousness without form. All the mental images and emotions, terrors and wonders experienced, are things the mind creates. But it is all a moving torrent of experience that is not ultimately satisfying. Only the clear consciousness gives the person an experience of their fundamental nature.

In Christianity this clear light is called Christ the Redeemer.

If we gain some concept or feeling of the power that has grown us from conception onwards; that has unified the millions of body cells; that organises all the functions and organs of our body and mind, we have an understanding of this unifying power. Modern psychology has also shown us how hate, fear, shock, jealousy, interfere with this activity as it attempts to keep us whole and healthy.

If we think of the totality of our past experience as the karmic matrix mentioned, we might see even more clearly how hate, fear, shock, jealousy interferes with the principle behind our own growth and stable existence. The Catholic sacraments look upon the negative influence of this karmic matrix as our ‘state of sin’ and tell us Christ can redeem us.

When we experience the power of this internal life principle in the way healing or ‘redemption’ takes place in us during and after illness, our awareness of its power and reality becomes very great. It is the energy that upholds our existence, and which we can either, co-operate with or work against.

The ‘Bardo Thodol’ calls this the Secondary Clear Light. In experiencing it we are aware of the effect of the Clear Light and its power on and in us. But we are not conscious of the Light itself. The ‘Bardo’ says that very few people can actually remain fixed in the Clear Light itself. The reason being that it is formless, impersonal, and transcendental.

Again, in the ‘Bardo’ it says, ‘The common people call this the state wherein the consciousness principle (object knowing principle) hath fainted away.’ These teachings declare that if we cannot hold onto this condition, we drop into the next level, which is experiencing the effect of the Clear Light. If this is not possible to maintain, we drop into our karmic matrix. If this is not maintained, we become lost in images and ‘dreams’ arising from the karma we have gathered, i.e. our loves, hates, fears, and aspirations. This means we are back in the nightmare situation. 

four levels

Looking at the previous statements, we can see that four levels of experience are defined. These four levels are not difficult to understand if we look at our own experience of waking and sleeping. If we once more look at sleep, we will perhaps understand what the ‘Bardo Thodol’ is saying. For instance, experiments in sleep laboratories have shown that when we sleep, at first we drop into a deep dreamless state. Then we gradually move to a condition nearing waking consciousness in which we dream.

In dreamless sleep our ‘object knowing’ self disappears. There is only ‘being’, pure consciousness, without images, emotions or sense of self. We experience it every night when we sleep. So it is not anything strange or unknown. But because we usually lose any sense of our ego in this ‘dreamless sleep’ state, we usually say we were unconscious or asleep. Nevertheless, we went into the void of dreamless sleep, and we emerged from it again. Some people even mange to maintain a level of awareness, as in lucid dreaming, and so carry back a memory of the void.

Those people, who have melted into the void and carried back awareness of it, describe it as the basic level of existence, universal, imageless consciousness. Another way of attempting a description is to say it is unchanging and self-existent, as opposed to the ever-changing experience of our senses, emotions and thoughts, all of which are linked with other phenomena, and so not self-existent.

Because few of us can even begin to grasp that this daily experience of dreamless sleep, this seeming absence of being, as a reality – The Reality – we cannot, do not wish to, are frightened of, maintaining it. As the Bardo explains, most of us cannot maintain the Clear Light, so we enter again into the acceptance of the world of sensory experience, of dreams.

Working from outside in, if we break through the experience of our senses and dream images to the karmic matrix, and dare to meet the passions and pains out of which our life is woven, we have now woken up at the dream level. At this point we are no longer completely dominated by, and at the mercy of, the passions and pains that previously moved us unconsciously. See Steiner Life after death

From here we can begin to see why the sacred teachings of many races have said the living can help the dead. In their book ‘Dream Telepathy’, Krippner and UlIman tell of their years of scientific research into the sensitivity of sleeping persons to the thoughts of others. Their research at the Dream Laboratory of Maimonides Medical Centre in New York has now become world famous.

Many people who were not a part of Krippner and Ullman’s research have also noted how the thoughts or prayers of others frequently alter the pattern of their dreams.

 

We can understand this further if we think of it in the terms used generally in these articles. The state of hell can be thought of as being personally submerged in the images and experiences of one’s own violence, hate, terrors and incohesiveness.

Purgatory is the same as this, but with one main-difference, the personality before death had, through baptism and confirmation (i.e. opening consciousness to and fixing it in a transforming influence) contacted the unifying principle. The expressed power of the Clear Light, God, has the effect of integrating and redeeming the images and energies we would otherwise become lost in or possessed by, in the sleep or death state.

Free will, for nearly all of us, is missing at that level, as is the ability to stand apart from the images. Nevertheless, those who have contacted and opened consciousness to the unifying power causing their existence, find the nature of their dreams changing. The integrating power is actually opened to even in dreams, and relates us differently to the images and events being faced. This psychological fact seems to explain a great deal about he theological catholic statements in regard to the power of baptism and the laying on of hands to give a different ‘quality’ to the soul, and making the difference between being lost in hell, or being capable of direct or indirect entrance into heaven. If we equate baptism and confirmation with the opening of consciousness to the unifying principle, these statements can be understood.

consciously work on a dream

The question of helping the dead is one of the clear will of the living, being used to pierce through the confusing images of the dream state, to aid the central ego of the person to open to the influence of God. We can achieve a very clear impression of what this means when we ourselves consciously work on a dream, or directly face images we ran from during sleep. Consciousness can decide to do things that are not possible during sleep.

It has been said above that if the unifying power has been a conscious experience, the quality of dreams is changed. It is also true that when our conscious understanding of dreams is clarified, another type of change occurs.

A different approach results, which leads to seeing beyond dreams to their causes. This relationship between our own conscious understanding and our sleep experiences also appears to exist between the living and the dead. They complement each other in a very real sense. For waking consciousness limits, defines and decides. In this way it can direct energies through understanding them.

This rational defined and separate consciousness is generally better developed in occidental peoples, and has been the basis of our technological culture. The interior sleep awareness is unlimited, ranging through space and time, possible and impossible, fact and fancy. It is not defined.

Almost any dream one attempts to analyse has a great power of avoiding final analysis. One can only arrive at general understanding. This is more the tone in which the oriental peoples are masters. Then one cannot easily go beyond the visible or obvious; the other tends not to be tied down to defining in external abilities or creations their interior life.

help of prayer

If we therefore pray for the dead, in the sense of opening ourselves and them to the unifying principle, this releases a power into the condition they may find themselves in. Such prayer will aid in releasing them from images and psychological difficulties being experienced. Also, if we have a clear View of the after death state, and talk to our dead as the Tibetans and others do, this brings to them the clarity of our consciousness to aid them. We, in return, through this subtle contact, receive impressions of wider awareness and understanding. If the experiments of non-physical communication between the living were practised and remembered, some idea of how this communion is experienced will be yours.

In Spiritualist ‘rescue circles’, someone with this type of sensitivity acts as the connecting link between the living and dead. The group then throws the light of their waking consciousness, argument and explanation, into the experience of the dead person being helped. Thus, those trapped by suicidal urges, ignorance of their situation, uncontrollable desires or fears, are aided to find release.

Subud members also practise what they call a ‘latihan’ (spiritual surrender to the unifying power) for the dead. They say that the dead have very intimate contacts with their living family. If one of their family opens to the unifying principle, or life force, and thus becomes themselves more integrated, this influences the condition of the dead. If this surrender to God is done in the name of the dead person, family or not, it has, they say, a tremendous power to help, and ‘wake them up’ in death.

Although all these methods are very different in outer form, we can see a thread of similar aims and ideas passing through each. Something to be dealt with later on, but not out of place here, is to say that the dead have a similar relationship to us as our own sleep consciousness. This is only an extension of what has already been said, but may easily be overlooked. To put it into a few words: the dead are now parts of our own interior, and often unconscious, being. They are aspects of our own total psyche. The insight, love, prayer, release of healing power, or attempt at understanding we bring to them, influences them in precisely the same way it influences ourselves.

The ‘cult of the dead,’ as it is sometimes called, if persisted in long enough in an attempt to aid a soul through the miasma of unconscious truth and error to the Clear Light, is also a legal spiritual path. The soul we help to the clear light is a part of our greater being, and its attainment is for us also a consciousness of the highest. If there is a criticism, it is only that most such attempts give up at the level of communicating chit chat and proof of survival.

‘When through illusion,’ says the Bardo, ‘I and others are wandering in the false images, Along the bright light-path of undistracted listening, reflection and meditation, May the Gurus of the Inspired Line lead us:

May the etherical elements not rise up as enemies; May the watery elements not rise up as enemies; May the earthy elements not rise up as enemies; May the fiery elements not rise up as enemies; May the airy elements not rise up as enemies; May the elements of the rainbow colours not rise up as enemies;

May it come that all the sounds in the death state be known as one’s own sounds;

May it come that all the Radiances will be known as one’s own radiances;

May it come that the Clear Light will be realised in the state of death.’

See: Near Death Experiences Journal; Near Death Experience; Levels of Awareness; Journeying Beyond Dreams and Death

Dream Meetings or Sharing Dreams

If you and I decided that tonight during sleep we would meet in our dreams, could we do it?

The question confronts us with something that is much more than a bizarre possibility.  It is an invitation to challenge the very structure of our scientific view of who we are and what consciousness is. It is a challenge of current medical and psychological convictions about life.  It would also be a Columbus voyage to a new world of possibilities and experience.

Is there any point though in attempting what, according to prevalent concepts, is impossible?

Ann, a woman I recently met, told me that one morning at work a colleague whose name was June, said, “I had a terrible dream last night.  It was so vivid.  In it my elder sister pushed me against a wall and stabbed me with a pair of scissors.”  Later in the day the sister phoned because she was troubled by an awful dream she had experienced.  She said that in it she had pushed the younger sister against a wall and stabbed her with scissors.

Despite its aggressive nature, this dream is an excellent example of two people meeting in and sharing the same dream.  That June’s dream occurred on the same night as that of her sister; that both dreams had the same interaction and showed the use of scissors, make it difficult to class the dream as purely coincidental.

Celia Green, who from 1958 to 1960 held the Perrott Studentship in Psychical Research of Trinity College, Cambridge, has made a special study of this type of dream.  In her book Lucid Dreams, she quotes the following experience of Oliver Fox.

I had been spending the evening with two friends, Slade and Elkington, and our conversation had turned to the subject of dreams.  Before parting we agreed to meet, if possible on Southampton Common, in our dreams that night.  I dreamt I met Elkington on the Common as arranged, but Slade was not present.  Elkington and I both knew we were dreaming and commented on Slade’s absence.  After which the dream ended, being of very short duration.  The next day when I saw Elkington I said nothing at first of my experience, but asked him if he had dreamt.  “Yes,” he replied, “I met you on the Common all right and knew I was dreaming, but old Slade didn’t turn up.  We had just time to greet each other and commented on his absence, then the dream ended.”  On interviewing Slade we learned that he had not dreamt at all, which perhaps accounted for his inability to keep the appointment.

Fox goes on to say that people have tried to explain away his experience by saying that he expected to meet his friend and so dreamt it.  “But” he points out that “if expectation is to explain the experience, then I expected to meet Elkington and Slade, while Elkington expected to meet Slade and me.  How is it then expectation failed us both in regard to Slade?”

In 1962 Dr Montague Ullman obtained grants that enabled him to set up a full-scale dream laboratory to test the validity of such dreams as Fox’s.  Situated within the Department of Psychiatry at Maimonides Medical Centre, and with the assistance of Dr Stanley Krippner, the research was committed to exploring telepathic communication in dreams.  The form of most experiments was to have a waking ‘sender’ concentrate on a randomly selected photograph or painting, while a sleeping ‘receiver’ dreamt.  In one such experiment Dr Robert Van de Castle as the receiver dreamt of seeing what appeared to be a bed roll.  “That faded out, and I seemed to be walking through some doors and standing straight ahead of me were three men.  They were standing equally distant apart.  They were dressed in short-sleeved blue shirts and berets, and they looked very tough.”

The target painting was Man With Arrows and Companion by Bichiter.  It is of three men.  At the feet of one is a bundle tied up in cloth.

Scientifically the results of Ullman’s research have created the realisation that dream telepathy is an observable phenomenon which deserves further research.  Experiments such as those of both Fox and Ullman have shown that the possibility exists of meeting in a dream, and receiving or transmitting information.

The work with dreams that my wife Hyone and I do, places as in the midst of people’s dream experiences and the inner life of human beings.  My own special interest has been human potential, and we have both been conducting research of our own into dream meeting. In the early days of my interest in dreams I had the experience of apparently leaving my sleeping body while I was living in Germany, and standing before my mother in London.  I felt wide-awake and completely different to the usual dream like qualities.  I was able to clearly observe the room in which I stood.  My mother sat alone, knitting.  The family dog lay asleep in front of the gas fire in our sitting-room.  Despite my loud calls attempting to make my mother aware of my presence, she remained unconscious of me.  But my dog awoke, saw me, and barked in joyful recognition, jumping around the spot where I stood.  I later confirmed that my mother had been alone and knitting that evening, and the dog had awoken from sleep and for no apparent reason barked and jumped around the back of the sofa, where I believed myself to have stood.

This and other dream experiences caused us to start our experiments in dream meeting with a sense that it was possible for some sort of real meeting to take place.  Being aware of the symbolical nature of dreams, we recognised of course that dreaming about somebody else did not constitute a meeting.  We wanted to find out what was real about attempts to meet and share, and whether there is usefulness in it in one’s everyday life.

At the beginning our experiments were with each other.  The very first night produced a dream for each of us in which the other figured.  This is fairly common except for two aspects of the dreams.  Although Hyone frequently dreams of me, I seldom dream of her.  Also, both dreams were about subtle but important feelings or attitudes that stood in the way of a fuller and more trusting relationship in our everyday activities.  My dream showed me carrying on my back an old wardrobe that had stood in the bedroom of a house in which I had lived with my first wife.  In the dream Hyone had asked me to move it. There is a suggestion in this dream that I’m still carrying around attitudes from my first marriage — old furniture – and Hyone is asking me to deal with this.

Hyone’s dream showed her involved with weaving woollen materials.  The feelings she associated with the dream were to do with her creativity and a sense of value as a person.  She realised that she felt part of her still lacked expression, so was not involved in our relationship.

Our subsequent experiments followed the same pattern.  And although our expectations had directed us toward a dramatic meeting within the intangible substance of dreams, the reality of the pattern that emerged, although different, was just as amazing.

So wishing to explore further we joined a professional experimental group made up of psychologists and lay people.  We also organised a small group ourselves.  The professional group was run by Poseidia Institute (1945, Lascin Road, Virginia Beach, 23454, USA).  The team involved the experiment lived in different parts of the USA and Europe.  Distance didn’t seem to matter.  The Institute gave monthly goals, and then acted as a facilitator and physical contact point.  There was also a monthly assessment and receipt of reports mailed by other team members.

Our own team had a slower pace and mutually agreed goals.  So far nobody has hit the jackpot of a lucid meeting.  On the professional team dreams are seldom explored for their feelings and associations.  Hardly any of us had met or known each other previously, and many of the dreams appear random or unconnected with the goals.  Those that do, have an apparent connection with themes of either searching for the group, or concern over exposure or intimacy.

In our small group, in which conscious personal connections had already been made, there was an amazing number of dreams that correspond to the set goals.  Here are two dreams that illustrate this. The goal of this first experiment was meeting.

I am walking down steps to a basement flat to meet the group.  At the bottom of the steps a psychiatrist is working with a man who is obviously embarrassed at exposing his inner self in public.  I go past into the meeting, concerned over what there is of value I have that I can share with them.

The goal of the next dream was lucid meeting — being aware you are dreaming.

I walked into a room looking for the people I was to meet.  There were people talking, who told me the group I wanted was in the next room.  On entering I saw the people I was looking for on mattresses on the floor.  They were asleep except for two or three.  These had small pointed caps like Tibetan Llamas. I understood this meant they could remain awake in their sleep. We talked, and then began to attempt to wake the others.

Fox’s dream was both lucid, and a verifiable meeting.  But Fox had an unusual ability in this area.  The experimental dreams quoted are not as lucid, not verifiable, but they are experiments exploring such dreams by people with no particular talent.  Therefore there are two outstanding features about them.  Firstly it is interesting that so many of the dreams are directly related to the goals; and secondly, that the overall themes seem to be about problems in regard intimacy or being lucid in the dream state.

In a tentative summary of the experiments so far, we believe that the part of us that dreams is deeply concerned with relationships.  Whether in regard to sexual partners or functional groups such as a team or business, dreams portray the subtle but important fears, irritations or attitudes, that stand in the way of greater cohesiveness or unity of efforts.  This suggests to us that the unconscious part of us expresses drives to do with kinship, the powerful yet often overlooked internal forces of reproduction, or survival through mutual trust and endeavour.  Our unconscious is an expression not only of our fundamental processes of life, such as cellular unity and symbiosis, but also of the racial experience of family and group bombs.  For instance, my dream with my mother is much more lucid and powerful than my other dreams of meeting.  The “hits” are more frequent when one works with those already known or has a working relationship with, such as Fox’s and the second group.

It seems trite to say that from within us we have had urged toward intimate and trusting relationships — after all, that’s what marriage, friendship and cooperative action around the world are.  But the dreams stresses to us that it is fundamental to our nature to attempt to form bombs, not simply through shared physical sex, or working together in a theme, but at a deep level where we can trust somebody with our life, and share our most intimate feelings.  In fact, just as we can emerge physically and sex, so there seems to be an intimacy and merging of feelings, or of purpose.  Just as we see in later such unlikely relationships of trust as the crocodile and the burden that sits in its open mouth and cleaners is team, so human beings at hand unconscious level of tentative forms similar mutually satisfying groupings, which enhance their survival and influence.  The difficulties surrounding such intimacy are highlighted in the dreams of meeting.

Corporations and governments use this principle of bonding informing international alliances and agreements.  This enhances other survival and influence, but unfortunately misses out the factor of mutual respect of trust.

As individuals attempting a more satisfying marriage, or as a group attempting to work together effectively, we believe you can improve the quality of your togetherness by attempting to meet your dreams, and noting the response.

Creativity – Doorway to the Wonderful Fire

While staying in London with one of my sons I had the following strange dream and experience. In the dream I was a young man living in Italy. The surroundings gave me the impression of it being during a period several hundred years ago. I was walking through the streets of a town. As I did so I was thinking about the liver disease I had and about my plans to move to another town where a learned doctor lived that specialised in liver complaints. I wanted to not only be his patient but also his student, to learn what he knew about liver illnesses.

As I walked I started to sing Ave Maria – I believe it is Gounod’s version. My singing was beautiful, exhibiting wonderful voice control and expression of emotion. I am not sure of the sequence of this but there was a building I was looking at. People wanted to have the building restored but could not raise the money. So I had painted a huge mural on the building depicting scaffolding covering the house. This attracted public attention and interest in the house, and so money was raised. I realised that I was not just an artist but also an architect and musician.

It was on this thought, and with Ave Maria still sounding its lovely quality that I realised I was dreaming and became awake enough to observe and think about what was happening. I realised that as a musician I had very great ability as a composer, and decided to compose an ‘Ode to Mozart’. No sooner had I decided this than the music poured through my consciousness. So much so I heard it as if listening to an orchestra or record. The music soared and moved in a wonderful expression of human vision and transcendence. As this occurred I could observe the process of creativity or composition, which was spontaneous to an extraordinary degree. It appeared that by asking for or seeking the composition I had opened a window in my mind. Through it I could observe a huge and unlimited sea of mind or consciousness. In it was all that has ever existed, merged and yet distinct. Every human talent and thought was in it alive and vital. My ‘Ode to Mozart’ drew on this unfathomed depth of being. I knew as I observed this that the music itself, although precise and clear and Mozart’s own work, proclaimed the human ability to leap beyond boundaries into this immense and apparently limitless world of experience – to allow the mind to soar and fly, to move beyond its own conceptions and rejoice.

I wanted to test this amazing ability and asked the huge mind how I could compose ‘modern’ music. What followed was like being instructed. The thoughts arose as if I were being told, that music was a reflection of basic life processes. Using the example of a simple life form in the beginning of evolution, such as a single celled creature or a crystal, this was like one note sounding over and over. After doing this over and over for infinite repetition, the process of life stumbles upon or manages a slight change in itself. This is when the single celled creature develops other attributes and moves toward multiplicity of cells. This would be like the playing of different notes over and over. Then maybe another basic process has learned to play three different notes, and if these two meet they play a more complex music together.

To this meeting was added theme upon theme until an orchestral music was built up, and I was told, “This is your body, with its many different processes playing together.” Or it could be likened to society in which so many opposing ‘themes’ in the end form a whole.