‘People hardly ever make use of the freedoms that they have: for example, freedom of thought. Instead, they demand freedom of speech as compensation.’
– Søren Kierkegaard
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There are two ways into the world of dreams. The first is to walk in consciously, the second is to achieve consciousness while in it. These two modes suggest two ways of dealing with the unconscious mind: the largest part of the activity of our brain, and the seat of much that remains undiscovered about ourselves.
Those who work at night to explore the extent of these worlds, the Oneironauts, have names for these processes and practises. Mnemonic-Induced Lucid Dreaming (MILD) is the road suggested for beginners, and involves training the mind to think regularly during the day: ‘Am I dreaming?’ Practise of this questioning will form a habit that also takes place during sleep, and allows the dreamer to gain consciousness during a dream. Once ‘awake’ in this world, the dreamer may ride the wave of the dream all the way out: as long as he can maintain his composure. Lucid dreamers report that in these dreams, the degree of detail and vividness is no less than waking life. Individual blades of grass are clearly distinguishable, and the mind generates a sensory virtualisation that is no less convincing than the experience of materiality.
Wake-Induced Lucid Dreaming (WILD) is the more difficult practise of the two, but offers the possibility of a fully conscious cross-over into the dream world, on demand. The extraordinary power of mind and practise (or, in some cases, talent) needed to achieve this allows the dreamer to trick the body into thinking that the mind has gone to sleep, avoiding loss of consciousness by holding attention to the swirling patterns and spontaneous images that appear before the closed eyes.
I’ve never made it past those gates: but I’ve seen incredible things as I’ve approached them. First, blossoming checkerboards of lights and colours, then a ring of white fire that approaches my vision, closer and closer, until it envelops me, my heart pounding. I’ve been shown faces of people I’ve never met, towers that rise up into some unknown sky. . . or strange animals and seascapes. The spontaneous creativity of the mind in this mode has amazed me. It makes me believe that the mind wants to build, to express, and communicate.
It would be easy to think that these worlds and experiences are irrelevant: a distraction from the important stuff of working and social life, which should demand the whole of our attention. Yet to think this suggests that the unconscious mind is some ‘other’, that we can ignore, or, perhaps, an engine ‘under the hood’ that never needs to be serviced or checked. Perhaps you can go a lifetime without exploring the unconscious mind through dreams: many have. But our age is unusual in that our relative mastery of the empirical world can fool us into thinking that we have less need for spirituality, and the practises that attached themselves to religion. Yet these practises and narratives did more than we knew: they taught people to listen to their dreams, and believe in the worldview that blossoms out of the feelings of the heart. The centuries of evolution that they experienced, far from being an ‘apostasy’, fashioned them to speak the depths of human need.
I’m not getting all hazy-eyed for the past here: we’re in a stronger position today than ever, because we can see dreams in terms of a new spirituality, if you want to call it that. Call it a new psychology, if that feels better. Here are some reasons why we should listen to our unconscious mind during that 30% of our life where it has hitherto gone off wandering, alone:
1. To desire to enter the dream world is to acknowledge that we are more than our conscious mind. It is to accept that we can be more than the narratives that run along the surface of our thoughts, and those that we inherit from our culture.
2. To succeed in entering the dream world is to live a metaphor for seizing control of that which seemed out of our reach. We are reminded that we can cease to ‘sleep walk’ in life — but that every decision point is an invitation to action.
3. To explore the dream world is to find landscapes that were beyond our knowledge — to see that infinite worlds and life await, accessible to all, regardless of socioeconomic or geographical restriction.
4. To experience the dream world is to learn to enjoy and appreciate the sensory wonder of the world, and to take pleasure in the beauty that occurs between our mind and the world which has given it its form and life.
5. To wake from the dream world is to experience two awakenings in one night: to learn that life is not found in one ‘enlightenment’ event, but an eternal progression of successive vistas, which may continue until our bodies wear themselves out, and beyond.
For all who may feel that they walk along a plateau, I invite us to look over the edge of the precipice, and up into the countless galaxies of the night sky. Dreams are the wings that your mind always possessed, which will allow you, first immaterially, to soar to another vantage point: and then, emboldened, to climb down the cliff-face past the fossils of your ancestors, into the canyon where rivers flow to bring life to the valley. ‘Abundance’ is available, and more: from the plateau you may be inspired to begin to build the spaceship that will carry you or your descendants to other stars.
Wherever the conditions for survival will take us, we will travel together.
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I kept a dream journal once while trying to lucid dream and interpret my dreams. I trained myself to even wake up after each dream and write down what had happened. Okay, I was able to do that about 5 times. In the morning I’d look at what I had written and … it was illegible.
Are there any dream incubation clinics you can go to to do this stuff?
It does get easier the more times you wake… and, I find, it depends a lot on how much you want to wake up: so if you’re really expecting to be able to do it, and excited about the results, the chances are better at succeeding.
Illegibility is a problem I’ve come across, too… perhaps a dictaphone?
I don’t know of what institutions there may be that work on this stuff, but I found a great online resource at http://www.dreamviews.com/content/ . You know, if there was interest here on D&S, I think I’d be very interested in launching an oneironautical project as part of ‘Cipher’.
What is it called when you become aware you are dreaming and try to control the action of the dream? I often keep myself from doing something stupid or dying in a dream, but I’m not sure that level of control is good and isn’t exactly what you are describing.
Heidi, that’s lucid dreaming that you describe, and that is what I’m referring to in the first part of the post, WILD and MILD being acronyms for the accomplishment of that state. Interesting that you think that a high level of control in a dream could be a bad idea… I can see why you might say that – for me, too, a significant portion of the interest of the dream is that it reveals the content of the unconscious. Overpowering action in the dreamworld would obscure that, I think, and would be (almost) as useless as never being aware of the dream.
So the kind of lucidity that I’m interested in in the dreamworld is the achievement of an immediate and conscious awareness during the dream, which certainly includes the possibility of choice (as I mention in point 2 towards the end of the post): metaphorically important. Yet, it’s exploration of a world created by the unconscious that is fascinating to me – the meeting place of the conscious and unconscious minds. Neither should dominate.
I’d love to hear more of your experiences, Heidi, and if you can identify ways in which they have had an impact on your waking life.
I’ve never done it with the intention of being lucid and I’m not lucid the whole time (that’s why I wasn’t sure if we were talking about the same thing). I don’t often remember my dreams, but for the last six weeks I’ve been remembering them a lot. When I’m lucid, it is kind of like my mind protects me and I won’t let myself get in too much trouble. And, so, if I was going to, say — have an affair, run away or be attacked — my mind panics (that is what it feels like) and pulls back. I seem to be able to keep myself from dream danger, but then the dream can’t seem to go anywhere else. It loses fluidity, becomes very much like my mind going through a normal day and then I usually wake up. I’m not sure how this impacts my waking life. I’ve always felt a surge of excitement when I control the dream, but disappointment that the dream can’t continue in that kind of free association that makes dreaming so different.
It’s said that one of the hardest things about lucid dreaming is maintaining lucidity, past the exhilaration we feel once we enter the dreamworld. One trick, apparently, when you feel yourself losing presence in the dream, is to picture yourself spinning on the spot. Apparently this works with many people, to fix them in their position within the dream scenario.
The only time I’ve achieved lucidity, I remember the excitement I felt, that I was there – it was amazing – as if I’d physically arrived back in the classroom I was in for five years as a teenager, with all my old friends. My enthusiasm broke the substance of the dream within less than a minute…. but I remember the vivid reality of the projection, and the possibility of agency. I wonder why my mind chose that place to visit, and to achieve consciousness there.
Thanks for sharing your experience, Heidi. It sounds like you’re a natural, to arrive in the dreamworld consciously and repeatedly without premeditation… Undoubtedly, it’s possible with practise to maintain presence within the lucid dream state, and explore those worlds you find yourself in.
In some ways doing these kinds of exercises is like conducting an archaeological dig into your own psyche.
I absolutely agree. I see it in these terms… only perhaps, even more exciting, as it’s an archeology that is alive and can interact with your consciousness.
Who knows what we might find? But it’s certainly our history: individually, and more distantly, into our evolutionary memory.