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Lucid Dreaming | |
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Home « Hobbies « Lucid Dreaming | |
Introduction
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The expression lucid dreaming refers to the state where you are "awake inside a dream". More precisely, you are asleep and dreaming in the normal sense, but you know you are dreaming and take control of your actions within the dream. The amount of control you have within a lucid dream varies, but it can be improved with practice to the level where you feel like your dream is a movie and you are the director. Skilled lucid dreamers can wander through their dreams to explore the dreamscape, performing feats that are impossible in the waking world such as walking though walls, flying, conversing with mythical or dead people, changing the weather, visiting distant or imaginary places, role-playing, and much more at the limits of the imagination.
When I described my first lucid dreaming experiences to friends and colleagues in the late 1980s, many were very sceptical that such a thing existed and suggested that I was either misinterpreting the dreams or was not fully asleep. One friend insisted that I was astral travelling or having an out of body experience (OBE). In the following sections I will explain that the lucid dreaming state is now recognised by serious sleep researchers, and more importantly I hope to present strong arguments against the claims that lucid dreaming has links with the supernatural. Sadly, I must waste space on attacking the supernatural claims because there are so many websites, organisations and forums where lucid dreaming is considered to be a supernatural event jumbled-up in various ways with claims of astral travelling or OBEs.
My own history of lucid dreaming should illustrate its rather mundane origins and seriously hint that any supernatural claims are simply wishful thinking on the part of those people whose critical thinking abilities are flawed.
Everyone is fascinated by dreams. I often find that hours of enjoyable and animated debate can result when the topic of dreams is raised over a leisurely lunch, or at a dinner party. Everyone has an opinion regarding dreams, or has a personal favourite set of dreams that can be transformed into short stories. Some people claim that they do not dream, or never dream in colour, but this is not true. Recent scientific research has dispelled many dream myths like these, including the one that dreams take place in a few seconds. We now know that everyone dreams, including blind and deaf people, babies and animals, and we know that the elapsed time in dreams is equal to the elapsed time in the waking world.
The fascination with dreams must surely revolve around their intangible and unpredictable nature, and the quantity of historical and contemporary literature based upon dreams is a testament to the never-ending fascination humanity has with dreaming. It is claimed that many of history’s greatest ‘sages’ and ‘enlightened ones’ had lucid dreaming under such control that they could actually ‘live’ while they were asleep, and explore actions and concepts that would be impossible or meaningless in the waking world. They were probably experts at lucid dreaming.
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Further evidence of mankind’s fascination with dreams is demonstrated by the vast variety of ways in which the subject of dreams reaches into arts and literature. The artists Hieronymus Bosch, René Magritte, M.C. Escher and Salvador Dali used dreams (and nightmares) in their works or at least portrayed dreamlike states.
The genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy are fertile areas where ideas are seeded by dreams. The authors Philip K. Dick and J. G. Ballard are admired for the way they weave dreams and nightmares into their stories, often blurring the line between fantasy and reality.
Dreams can be most effectively used in movies and television, where many writers and directors have tried to capture a ‘dreamy’ or ‘nightmare’ quality, sometimes with astonishing fidelity. David Lynch's TV series Twin Peaks and Tobe Hooper's movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are notable examples. A ‘dreamy quality’ is a specific trademark of many famous directors, including Terry Gilliam (Brazil, Time Bandits), Werner Herzog (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo), Ridley Scott (Alien, Black Rain, Blade Runner), Wes Craven (The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street), and many more. Many shows and movies are entirely based upon dreams or the dreamlike state between reality and fantasy: Dreamscape (1984), Videodrome (1983), the Nightmare on Elm Street series (1984, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1989), and numerous episodes of The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Avengers, and even Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Discovery
All of my life I have experienced vivid and complex dreams, and now I realise that on many occasions I must have been lucid for a few moments but the shock of the experience always woke me up immediately. Anecdotal evidence from friends suggests that most people experience moments of lucid dreaming during their life but are usually startled awake very quickly by the strange feeling.
In 1988 I saw a TV documentary on non-commercial TV about a group of Dutch sleep researchers who had a test subject who was a skilled lucid dreamer. At first I wasn't sure what this expression meant, but we soon learn that his special skill is "waking up inside a dream". In an experiment they ask the subject to perform a specific task if he experiences a lucid dream. Upon becoming lucid, he was to move his eyeballs 5 times to the left and 7 to the right. Upon waking the subject says he dreamt he was walking along a canal in his home town and he saw a pretty girl and kissed her. It was such an improbable event in the dream that it triggered a lucid state and he remembered what the researchers asked him to do. In the dream he moved his eyes in the prescribed pattern, and sure enough, there on the recording equipment are 12 spikes of eye movement, 5 to the left and 7 to the right. This was the first recorded case of a sleeping person communicating with the outside (waking) world.
As an aside, this documentary finally dispelled some folklore from my youth where I was told that "dreams happen in a fraction of a second". It was quite clear from the research that subjective time in dreams is identical to real clock time.
NOTE--I have absolutely no details about this TV documentary I've described. Any information to help identify the show would be most welcome.
This TV documentary had a stunning effect upon me. Within a few days of seeing the TV show I had a dream where I was walking through the streets of Brisbane at night (I had been up there for work a few weeks earlier). In a typically corny way I was wearing only socks and a T-shirt in this dream and I felt embarrassed to be standing in the middle of the street. The comic idiocy of the situation hit me and in the dream I remembered the TV documentary and said to myself "this is just like that TV show I saw". BINGO! That was it...I realised I was inside a dream and I became lucid. Suddenly my fears dissolved and the night air around me became warm and tropical. I remembered that the subject in the TV show often would fly at will, so emulating him, I raised my arms in the air and started to drift upward. I rose a few feet into the air and then slowly drifted downwards as gently as a floating leaf, bouncing to a stop in my chest, body outstretched like a swimmer. I thought this was rather amusing and stood up and tried again. This time I felt more confident and relaxed and I rose 20-30 feet into the air, looking down at the people, cars and street lights below me. I was so excited by flying that I burst awake, sitting up in bed with my heart racing and a feeling of euphoria and exhilaration unlike anything I had experienced before. That was my first short lucid dream.
Practice
Soon after my first lucid dream I started looking for any documentation on the subject. I found a lot of contradictory dream interpretation books full of fortune telling nonsense that were clearly of no help. I found one serious book (name and title forgotten) written by someone who had experienced a nearly identical introduction to lucid dreaming as myself. This book described how you can help trigger lucid dreams by the technique of reality testing in which you continually ask yourself while awake "is this a dream?". Additionally, just before going to sleep you repeat a mantra like "tonight I will fly", or whatever expression you think is catchy enough to be remembered inside a dream. These techniques may sound childishly simple, but I have found that they work. On many occasions I have been in the middle of a normal jumbled dream when suddenly something happens that matches one of the reality testing scenarios or mantras and this triggers a lucid state.
From 1988 to 2002 I have experienced hundreds of lucid dreams. I find that they tend to arrive in cycles with a period of weeks or months. I have no definite proof, but I think that lucid dreams tend to occur more frequently when life is flowing well and there is less stress.
My general advice to people who want to stimulate lucid dreams is to keep the subject in your mind continuously. Discuss lucid dreams, muse over them, read about them and run mental exercises to find keyword links between waking life and the nonsense that normally happens in dreams. Nightmares can be turned around and used to trigger lucid dreams. A few times a year I might still have nightmares where I'm chased by a monster or trapped in some threatening situation (I expect many people will identify with this), but quite often the absurdity of the threat leads me to think in the dream, "this is crazy, it must be a dream, I'm dreaming", and this will trigger a lucid state. I recall many occasions where I've been running in panic from some dream threat, only to realise it was a dream, become lucid, turn around to find the threat has vanished and then I will take control of the dream and fly away. You can turn nightmares into lucid dreams.
In and out of lucidity
Many lucid dreamers I have corresponded with have backed my experience that "going lucid" is a sudden event in a dream. I often use the expression "triggered the lucid state" to describe how some event, coincidence or threat in a dream has brought about a lucid state. It seems that many other lucid dreamers have noticed the same sequence of events. It would appear that stimulating lucid dreaming is a search for the correct "trigger" that leaks from waking life into your dreams. Waking from a lucid dream is one of the most pleasant experiences I know of. Without exception I will wake with a feeling of relaxed euphoria that lasts for hours.
Lucid Themes
In almost every lucid dream the follow themes tend to recur:
This last item is rather curious and deserves some explanation. Upon going lucid I almost always experience a perceived change in the atmosphere and temperature. No matter what may be happening in the dream, I find that as soon as I go lucid the temperature and humidity rises around me. The tropical atmosphere that arrives with the lucid state is wonderfully pleasant and relaxing. I posted a question about this "tropical" effect a few years ago in the news:alt.dreams.lucid newsgroup and received a few replies about similar (but not identical) experiences. This topic remains open for further research.
"The Power"
After dreaming of flying through time and space, talking to dead relatives and seeing the world destroyed in multiple ways, it's quite tempting to think I have some kind of "power". I can understand how people who experience vivid or lucid dreams without recognising what they are can be convinced that something mystical has happened. However, I am a logical thinker with a keen interest in science, so I feel compelled to search for simple explanations for remarkable dreams without appealing to the supernatural. Almost all of the events in my dreams can be explained rationally by mixing together subject matter that have "leaked" in from the waking world of TV, movies, books and daily experiences. No matter how remarkable the dreams might be, I can usually trace back later to the sources that seeded them.
I occasionally meet my dead relatives in dreams and talk to them. In fact, such meetings usually trigger a lucid state because of their absurdity. Upon waking I realise that the relatives I meet never say anything of significance and always appear as they did when I last saw them, even if it was 30 years ago. It is obvious that I can't really hold a conversation with these relatives because they are simply characters popped-out of my memories and into a dream. They are not "entities" with minds of their own, they are incapable of independent action and can't behave in a way that is beyond my memories of them and my imagination. I can understand how a gullible person would easily think that such a dream was a mystical experience.
One morning in 1998 I was woken by the clock radio after dreaming that I was in a plane that crashed into the streets of Sydney. No one was hurt in the dream and it was actually rather comical as the plane came to rest at a strange angle with its tail jammed into the windows of a building. Then on the news I hear that a plane crashed overnight in Indonesia killing many people. Hmmm! Was it a psychic dream? I'd love to think so, but a logical explanation was easily found: I'm keen on aviation and I'm often dreaming about planes and plane crashes or accidents, and plane crashes are frequent all over the world, so one day I was bound to dream of a plane crash around the same time as a real one crashed.
Only one dream in my life remains a mystery due to the fantastic coincidence it revealed. In mid 1994 I had a long complex dream that I was in the control tower at Melbourne Airport. An old friend who is a controller walked into the tower and I hugged her and conversed with her for a short time to find out how she had been (I hadn't contacted her in real life for a few years). Suddenly I realised she was perspiring heavily and noticed she was very pregnant. I was startled and woke suddenly. The dream was so vivid that I tried to ring her at work that day and tell her about the amazing dream. I was told that she wasn't at work because she was away on maternity leave and the baby was due that week. Hmmm! Sadly, I have not been able to contact her since then and it remains a mystery how accurate my "psychic dream" was.
Drugs and Dreams
Further evidence the dreams are purely the result of biological processes, and not of external ‘mysterious forces’ can be found in the effects of ‘drugs’ upon dreaming. My only personal experience in this area was in 1994 while I was recovering from a ‘slipped disk’ (L5-S1 vertebrae prolapse). During my recovery, I was prescribed quite large dosages of Valium® and Panadeine Forte®, and the effect of these ‘drugs’ upon my dreams was predictable and fascinating: my dreams became long and continuous, almost to be point of becoming boring. When I say "long and continuous", that is exactly what I mean. The usually chaotic and fragmented nature of my dreams was suppressed and they became long (sometimes up to 30 minutes long) and continuous (like a television documentary that never wavers from a single subject). I clearly remember one dream while under the influence of Panadeine Forte where I was walking between two large buildings at either end of long road that ran alongside a railway line. As I was walking along the road I ‘became lucid’ and I stopped and looked around, at the clear blue sky, at the abandoned and silent warehouses that lined the road, at the rubble piled up in the railway yards, and I said to myself "What’s going on here? I’ve been wandering up and down this road for the last quarter-of-an-hour, and nothing’s happening, it must be those bloody tablets again".
Interpretation
Dream interpretation as performed by new age practitioners is worthless. It is quite clear that they can't agree on anything, there are no standards, and the interpretations are usually nonsensical. One book I have says that dreaming of flies means you are lying (and I've been puzzling over the link for years now). Another says that dreaming of birds is a sign of your higher spirit becoming free (whatever that means). I challenge readers to get different dream interpretation books or opinions and compare them to see how scatter-brained they are.
Summary
Lucid dreams are envigorating and exciting. You can learn to trigger lucid dreams. Lucid dreams are not mystical or supernatural experiences.
