Journeys into the Deep: Lucid
Dreaming and Lucid Surrender
...for often, when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream.1
– Aristotle
To prepare for our journey into lucid dreaming, I invite you once more to search your memory for a dream, any dream that has felt important to you. We began the first chapter looking for a shell on the seashore. Just as you held the mystery of that shell in your hand, now, with this dream, turn it over in your mind’s eye, exploring it with the lens of new insights gained from reading this book. Consider the dream in all its aspects – forms, colours, light, sensations, thoughts, actions, emotions and essence.2 How might this dream add to your understanding about yourself and your life? For now, keep your dream close at hand, like a small shell tucked in your pocket, as we shall be returning to it later in the light of our journey into dream lucidity.
Each empty shell you find on the beach once housed a living creature. Similarly, energy, movement and meaning enliven your dreams. We tap into this life force when we revisit our dreams through dreamwork. But there is another, more direct, way of engaging consciously with our dreams, through the practice of lucid dreaming – becoming aware of dreaming while the dream is taking place.
During a lucid dream, we may appear ‘asleep’ to the outer world, but within, we have ‘awakened’, sometimes in surprising ways, as happened to me in this dream:
I suddenly ‘wake up’ in my bed, where I have been sleeping, surprised to notice that the sloping attic ceiling, painted a soft blue, is now aglow with light. I feel confused as a bright morning light fills the room even though the curtains are drawn, and I know it is deep in the night. Then, I realise that I am actually dreaming. In that moment, I see that the light emanates from a figure at the foot of my bed. Instantly, I recognise Jesus. He stands quietly in a radiant white robe, illuminated from within, holding his palms open towards me. Both his humanity and his divinity are fully present. The power of his presence overwhelms me, and I awaken from the dream.
This dream marked the beginning of a 12-year period in my life during which I had vivid and increasingly lengthy lucid dreams, often many times in a night or week. My subsequent reflections on lucid dreaming derive firstly from my own ongoing experience as a lucid dreamer; secondly as a dream guide helping others to develop their dream awareness; and thirdly from scientific research in the field of lucid dreaming.
In this short account of lucid dreaming, we start on the ‘surface’, beginning with a brief overview of how the lucid brain state has been evidenced by neuroscience, conceptualised and popularised. We then explore increasing degrees of lucidity, diving into the depths of conscious dreaming towards full lucidity – a relatively unchartered zone of human experience.
Our ‘descent’ will take us from the more commonly recognised features of lucid dreams into imageless lucid dreams, a place where, as mystics describe it, only light exists. Here, we find what the great Tibetan Buddhist ‘dream yoga’ master Chögyal Namkhai Norbu advises: ‘The final goal of dream practice is to make dreams become awareness, and, there, at the ultimate point, dreams actually cease. You use your practice so that your dreams influence daily life.’3 But first let us begin with the science of lucid dreaming that has sought to track the neural activity suggestive of conscious awareness during dreams.
Although we can only truly know consciousness through our subjective experience, different states of consciousness can be objectively identified by the electrophysiological measurement of brainwaves by the electroencephalogram (EEG). In 2009, for the first time, electrical fluctuations in brain activity during a lucid dream confirmed that lucid dreaming was a hybrid neurological state, having characteristics of both waking and sleeping consciousness.4 Further research has also suggested that lucid dreaming can be associated with a gamma brainwave frequency of 40Hz, more commonly associated with highly focused waking states rather than typical dreaming.5
In normal REM dreaming, brain activity associated with emotional arousal and hallucinatory imagery increases, while the activity of the frontal cortex, normally associated with the capacity for reflective awareness and reasoning, decreases. In contrast, as the dreamer acquires lucidity, these areas of the brain ‘wake up’. In lucidity, our capacity for meta-awareness – the awareness that we are aware – makes our thinking more finely tuned and reflective.6 The presence of a 40Hz brain-wave frequency is also found in the practice of meditation, leading the distinguished sleep and dream researcher James Pagel to call lucid dreaming ‘a trainable, meditative-like state developed while in sleep’.7 We can see this shift in consciousness beginning to take place in one of my early lucid dreams:
I walk waist-deep in a creek at the base of the Eastern Sierras. Sunlight filters through the leafy covering, glimmering on the water’s surface and the creek’s golden sands. A few feet in front of me, a massive rainbow trout swims to the surface and then remains still. The trout looks too large to be a creek fish. I decide to catch the fish with my hands the way my father and I used to do when I was young, but then I realise that the fish represents the Spirit and stop myself. I notice that the trout has turned on its side, revealing a rainbow. The fish looks exhausted. ‘How,’ I wonder, ‘can the Spirit be weary?’ Then it occurs to me that the fish also represents me. I now realise that if I were awake and entering the dream through the waking dream process, then my dream guide would invite me to touch the fish. At that point, just as my finger comes to within a hair’s breadth, the trout darts down into the water. Feeling disappointed, I awake.
This dream illustrates a key feature of the lucid dream: the lucid dreamer’s insight into their experience during the dream itself.8 In my case, I realised that rather than attempting to possess the fish, I needed to interact with the rainbow trout in a more relational way. This dream also shows what the pioneering lucid dream researchers Ursula Voss and Allan Hobson have described as the sense of having ‘two selves’, the result of a dynamic integration of waking and dreaming states.9
Advances in computer technologies have led some neuroscientists to conceptualise the dreaming brain as creating a three-dimensional ‘virtual reality’ – an immersive, simulated world.10 While this is a useful analogy, it risks treating consciousness as a by-product of physics, excluding the possibility that dreaming may possess its own intelligence and qualities of being. It further precludes the idea now being advanced in some quarters that rather than consciousness being produced by the brain, the brain may be acting as a conduit for our connection to a ‘conscious universe’.11 Either way, our understanding of lucid dreaming will deepen as new technologies give us a window into a more refined and nuanced understanding of the spectrum of consciousness possible within lucidity.12
The lucid state allows the lucid dreamer to create and enact scenes of their choosing, with all the hyper-realism of waking life but without the normal constraints, e.g. flying weightlessly, changing physical form, and even having dream sex at will. More recently, studies have also indicated that lucid dreaming can improve waking activities; for example, giving inspiration for creative writing13 and music-making,14 as well as improving motor skills, including throwing darts!15
Since the mid-1970s, when lucid dreamers first used pre-planned eye movements during REM sleep to signal their lucid state to researchers,16 the literature on the phenomenology of lucid dreaming has burgeoned.17 Over half the population will recall having had a lucid dream at least once in their life; however, the percentage drops off dramatically in terms of frequency.18 Accordingly, finding ways to induce lucid dreams ‘on demand’ has become a growing enterprise, with many ‘how-to’ publications available. Technologies include using light, sound, electrical19 or chemical stimulation. However, a meta-analysis of 35 research studies on induction techniques suggested that no single technique showed a consistent result.20 Even so, the practice of mindfulness meditation in waking life, which encourages a reflective and attentive focus on ‘mindful presence’, appears to enhance the dreamer’s ability to become lucid more frequently.21
The popular Western definition of lucid dreaming describes a state in which the dreamer becomes aware that they are dreaming while asleep and can control the dream narrative. The idea that we become lucid in order to ‘control’ the dream unfortunately mirrors the Western worldview that the natural world must be ‘controlled’ rather than treated with reverence and drawn upon as a source of wisdom.
Indeed, humanity’s ambition to ‘control’ Nature is having dire consequences. As the reality of climate change looms large, Nature’s long-term fine-tuning makes human exploitation of the Earth look sadly short-sighted. Ultimately, for life on Earth to survive and flourish, we must work with Nature rather trying to dominate it. We must let Nature be our guide.22
We find a powerful parallel in lucidity, when we become receptive to what the interior landscape of the dream can teach us. By working with our dreams in lucidity, we also learn how to work with the outer world in a more cooperative and balanced way, mindful that we simply cannot, and should not, attempt to control everything.
In lucid dreams, as in life, it is tempting to be distracted by what in the Hindu faith is called ‘the veil of Maya’ – the continually changing surface layer of experience, so that we become caught up in the thrill of the ‘virtual’ world offered by lucidity, be it flying, eating our favourite food or having dream sex. In the process, we may, just as happens in waking life, be susceptible to re-enacting unhelpful life patterns as we seek to fulfil unmet emotional needs. Even so, when people spend time in the lucid dream simply having fun,23 such ‘play’ can give a person a heightened sense of consciousness that may help contribute to their personal growth.24
It follows that just as in life, the ‘surface layer’ of the lucid dream can be employed for good or ill. Yet, beyond the desires that captivate us, spiritual practices across the world teach that within the dreaming state there resides a more serene experience of pure consciousness, one that brings serenity, joy and a deep sense of Beingness. Very different from the turbulent emotions of the ego, this is the original nature of the soul.
The Sufi tradition, which has a long history of cultivat ing visionary dreaming, identifies this spiritual quest in the Islamic teaching, ‘I was a hidden treasure and I longed, I yearned, I desired to be known,’25 referring to our longing to know ourselves, and to be known, both as individual souls and as the limitless and universal Soul at the heart of creation and dreams. The more heartfelt this yearning, and the more it springs from compassion and love, the more it energises and transforms the lucid dream experience.
To initiate lucidity that reveals soul yearning, we do not need to draw on external props and inducements. A lucid dream of my own brought home this realisation to me:
I attend a lecture where a man is teaching about the phenomena of various dream experiences that are possible when a person is connected to a large black box that sits on the table before him. As he continues, I realise he is actually talking about deep lucid dreaming. I become lucid and feel moved to say aloud, ‘You don’t need this machine. All you need is your body, mind and heart.’ I feel tremendously excited by this understanding, and then I wake up.
One way to help develop the capacity for lucid awareness is by entering a non-lucid dream in the waking state with the help of a dream guide. We can then relive the dream as if in real time with the benefit of meta-awareness, while exploring the dream scenario and emotions in a safe setting. Working this way with non-lucid dreams offers the opportunity to become more patiently attentive. As an example of this process, I recall working with Louise, a woman approaching her sixties. Louise wanted to reflect on what her dreams might have to tell her about the next stage of her life. She decided to re-enter a dream in which she drifted in a small rowboat down a wide river. At first the sensation felt quite pleasant, but then she became visibly anxious about where she was heading and worried that she would tip the boat over.
To calm her, I invited her to be curious about what she had previously mentioned only in passing: the feeling of the cool breeze on her face. As she imagined the wind, she gently ran her fingertips over her cheeks. This sensation opened up a profound awareness of what Louise called the ‘fertile void’, putting her in touch with a deep feeling of joy. She realised that in her fear she had missed the comforting touch of the breeze. Reconnecting with this sensation infused her with new confidence and energised her for dealing with the changes in her life that lay ahead.
In a further dream, Louise swam underwater quite happily until she became afraid that she would not be able to breathe and abruptly woke up. In her waking dream sequence, when she re-entered the water and became concerned about her breathing, I encouraged her to breathe deeply in through her nose and out through her mouth until the tension in her body relaxed. This settled her to the point where she recognised that by using her faculty of creative imagination, she actually could picture herself breathing underwater – a liberating feeling!
Louise reported that she began to have dreams during which she could decide how she was going to respond to a situation, even to ‘rewind’ the dream scenario and re-experience the dream sequence more consciously a second time. With the development of her dream awareness, Louise recognised that far from being powerless, she could make positive choices of her own. In Louise’s own words,
It was difficult learning not to rush, but rather to stay with the ‘tiny moments’ that held such richness when I stopped long enough to be with them. Becoming aware of the air, like water caressing my face, was significant in starting to recognise ‘keys’ [to lucid awareness], as was the realisation that I could breathe and feel in my element underwater. I realised there was a lot of richness in parts of dreams I had overlooked because they had less emotional charge to them. I also realised that there were positive aspects in me and an ability to explore myself more deeply in ways I had not known before, becoming more trusting of my own process, of its wisdom and being able to surrender to that.
While we can learn to feel more able to ‘breathe’ in our dreams, it can be a further challenge to engage feelingly with what arises as we move towards lucidity. The following dream illustrates this challenge. I had worked with the dreamer, Vera, as her dream guide for a year. We begin with her dream, followed by an excerpt from the waking dream process that followed:
I was on an imposing bridge, ornate with piers and arches in black wrought iron. It felt as though it was dawn, the shimmering light, pure and peaceful. Ahead of me was a man, and for some reason he had to get further onto the bridge. There was something blocking his way. It looked something like a stile, but elaborate, so not impossible to climb over. He was having incredible difficulty trying to lift his legs and couldn’t seem to find a way over it. As I looked down, I saw the most amazing sight: hundreds and hundreds of Manta rays, absolutely enormous, the size of a large room. I was astounded by the sight, the colours of the Manta rays, the myriad shades of the palest pinks and greens, diaphanous, blending into each other as they moved, a silvery foam bubbling between them, and yet I felt this was a London bridge – this was the Thames! I was trying to attract the man’s attention to this wondrous sight: ‘Don’t worry about what you are doing, look at this!’ I cried.
When Vera re-entered the dream, I asked her what she would wish for the man on the bridge to see. She replied.
The beauty. Something magical. The power. He wasn’t interested, just fixated on getting over the barrier. I was drawn to looking the other way, and there was the most unbelievable sight: a solitary black Manta, colossal, at least the size of a five-storey building. Unlike the other Manta rays, this Manta ray was on his side, half out of the water, and going in the other direction!
‘What,’ I asked, ‘did the Manta’s gesture communicate to you?’
‘It feels how my life is at the moment filled with blackness,’ Vera responded, ‘and yet there was a majesty about this ...’ As she spoke, she made a sweeping movement with her right arm along the side of her chair, as if she were leaning over the bridge into the water.
‘Keep doing that movement,’ I prompted. ‘What does it put you in touch with?
‘It makes me want to touch something,’ she replied, ‘to be in connection with something.’
‘How would it be to touch the black Manta?’ I asked her. ‘Can you imagine that? Just let yourself breathe. How does it respond to your touch?’
She paused a long while, swinging her arm gracefully by her side before replying, ‘It allows my touch, neither likes nor dislikes it. I can feel the undulations of its body, graceful, pulsing, conveying something to me, exquisite, like an alien!’ She puzzled: ‘Something so mysterious, and yet there is this solid harsh bridge!’
‘What,’ I asked her, ‘does the bridge mean for you?’
She paused again, and then said, ‘The bridge is probably reality, grounding.’
I reflected: ‘Giving perspective, and somehow bridging dimensions.’
Vera continued: ‘The Manta came to me so that I could touch it, and because it was on its side half out of the water, and so immense, I could easily reach it.’
‘Yes,’ I noted, ‘the darkness of difficult things going on but also the transpersonal within, the darkness, black light, the mystery, all coming together.’
‘If he hadn’t been on his side,’ Vera added, ‘he would have obliterated everything.’
In response, I quoted from the Kabbalah, which teaches that ‘the Absolute withdrew itself to allow Being to exist.’
Vera continued:
When I think of the dream, it feels like my life, so fixated on the struggle, the bleak overwhelming darkness, and yet auspicious. It reminded me of the quality of the black light, the magic, the dimensions beyond, the transpersonal. Am I that man on the bridge who can see nothing but the struggle? Is there beauty, grace and delicacy within me crying to be freed? Do I have the power and majesty to survive this journey?
To begin with, it was hard for Vera to see that even when her thoughts make her anxious, her heart is nonetheless in touch with the Manta ray’s power. In this dream, Vera’s appreciation of the Manta ray’s majestic beauty increased her dream awareness. By re-engaging with the dream, she was able to interact with the Manta ray more consciously and less fearfully, enabling her to draw on the creature’s power to find strength for the challenges that lay ahead, crossing over the ‘bridge’ into a new phase of life.
In the dreamwork of Louise and Vera, we can see the beginnings of ego-surrender to transpersonal presence. Stephen LaBerge, renowned for his work at the forefront of lucid dream research since the 1980s, has observed: ‘To go beyond the ego’s model of the world, the lucid dreamer must relinquish control of the dream – surrender – to something beyond the ego.’26 As we shall see, when surrender can be maintained and even deepened within lucidity, then the imagery in the dream gives way to more ‘imageless’ or ‘dreamless’ dreaming, in which clear light, abstract forms, and an awareness of love on a cosmic level suffuses the dream. Yet, at present in the West, exploration of this kind of experience within the lucid state has only been explored by a handful of researchers and lucid dreamers, myself included.27
Interestingly, seemingly minor elements in lucid dreams can, as it turns out, play a key role. For Louise, it was the cool touch of the breeze that caressed her cheek. For Vera, it was the expansive darkness of the Manta ray. As we continue our descent into imageless lucid dreaming, I now want to explore the importance of ‘darkness’ more deeply.
Generally, darkness is thought of as the absence of light, but as shown in Chapter Five, light appears as darkness if there is no object on which the light falls. In the depths of lucid awareness, a luminous darkness that I refer to as ‘Black’ or ‘Dark Light’ prevails. Out of this luminescent expanse of darkness, shining forms emerge, emitting their own light, much as bio-luminescent creatures shine in the ocean’s darkness.
To help convey such dazzling darkness and what it can teach us, I will relate three of my own dreams that took place over a 15-year period. In this series, the imagery moves from forms to ‘imageless’ dreams. The first dream, which briefly initiated me into the presence of ‘Black Light’, came shortly before I left the United States for Poland, when I was 25.
I walk directly into the sea and realise that I can breathe in water. Far out from the shore, I come upon an immense black waterspout, spinning so fast it looks like it moves in slow motion. The water, the colour of black obsidian, shines. Numbers in bright, solid colours whirl on the darkness. I long to touch the bright blackness, but when I raise my hand to do so, fear overwhelms me, as I’m convinced that if I touch the waterspout the entire universe will fall apart. Then I awake.
In this initial dream, the shining darkness appears in the form of the waterspout, which both attracts and frightens me. My thinking mind overrides my heart-longing to touch the water-spout. Although I am aware that I can breathe in water and that I am drawn to the waterspout’s magnetism, childhood memories bring up my conditioned reaction of fearfulness in response to a powerful force, which, in the dream, is projected onto the waterspout.
As a child, I learned to believe that when I expressed some-thing deeply meaningful, it would often be angrily dismissed. Hence, my ‘world’ would collapse. This conditioned response continued into adulthood. Nonetheless, when I awoke from this dream, I could recognise that a creative power, larger than my own, moved through the mysterious waterspout and the coloured numbers that swirled upon the darkly shining water. This recognition helped me to withdraw my projections of fears from the dream imagery. After that, whenever I recalled the dream, I felt encouraged rather than frightened, and was able to express what felt important to me more fearlessly.
The next lucid dream in this series occurred 12 years later, soon after the dream of Jesus that opened this chapter. By this time, I had started training in psychotherapy, and had discovered that the frightening dreams I’d been having since childhood were in fact ‘lucid’. Because of my training, I now had the confidence to allow myself to become fully lucid. As a result, I had an entirely different type of lucid dream, something I had never experienced before and which I hadn’t realised was even possible:
Driving through the California foothills on a summer’s day, I lose control of the car. It veers off the side of the road at high speed. After a number of futile attempts to keep the car on the road, I become aware I am dreaming and calmly make the decision to give up trying to control the car.
The car goes faster and faster until it feels as if it has become a particle of light. At what seems the speed of light, the car hurtles towards a golden hillside and everything blurs together. When the car slams into the hillside, my body and the dreamscape disappear. Everywhere becomes an expansive luminous blackness. An incredible pressure and noise centres between my ‘brows’. Then all goes very silent and still. I know I have been dreaming, and I wonder if I have actually died during the dream. Although I am drawn to this infinite space, with this thought, I wake up.
Prior to this dream, I had decided that whenever I became lucid, I would trust my dreams and seek to learn from them, keeping in mind the teaching of Kahlil Gibran: ‘Trust your dreams, for in them you find the gate to eternity.’28 When I let the ‘car’ take over, I knowingly put this to the test. In this way, I felt able to overcome my instinctive fear of death. The subsequent disappearance of the dreamscape and the appearance of the mysterious darkness left me feeling more curious than frightened. By this time, I had learned for myself that a dream, as Ibn al-῾Arabī had taught in the 12th century, ‘may be interpreted within sleep itself’.29 However, I lacked an understanding of how best to maintain lucidity, especially in imageless dreaming.
Later, seeking to find the best way to extend and deepen my dream lucidity, I asked one of my dream teachers what to do when I became lucid. He simply replied, ‘When you become lucid in a dream, meditate.’ Following his advice, the next time I became lucid, I bowed my head in an attitude of surrender.
I have found that this attitude encompasses thankfulness, supplication, praise, worship and wonder. Such ‘surrender’ includes prayerfully meditating in lucidity, as well as meditatively singing and chanting sacred songs or verses, or simply waiting quietly and breathing deeply to still my mind. This attitude of heart and mind allows me to maintain a receptive stance while letting the dream unfold without attempting to exert ‘control’ over the dream. Based on many such lucid dream experiences, I decided to call this way of being in lucidity ‘Lucid Surrender’ – a subject about which I have reflected upon extensively.30
At the moment of Lucid Surrender, the original dreamscape immediately falls away, as if swept off by a mighty windstorm, unveiling an ‘imageless’ infinite space, a void of Black Light filled with emotive and even ecstatic ‘winds’. In such instances, my dream body also disappears, sometimes reappearing either as luminous darkness or else brightly coloured light. Yet in such experiences, I do not feel ‘disembodied’. On the contrary; all my physical senses intensify along with my feelings and thoughts as they align in a subtle body of light.
Gradually, I have learned how to deepen lucidity, both by stilling my thoughts and overcoming my fear of the darkness, truly a fear of the unknown. Learning to withdraw my negative projections from the darkness freed me to be more trusting and to engage with the luminous blackness and the light forms that emerged.
By the time of the lucid dream that comes next, I had already learned from numerous Black Light encounters how to maintain the attitude of Lucid Surrender. In turn, the dreams have revealed new vistas to me, as shown in the third dream in the series:
After falling asleep, I ‘awake’ to find my being lifted onto the dark winds and moved by an intense feeling of bliss. To keep my focus, I can only manage to repeat ‘Oh Holy One’. I continue to concentrate on repeating this invocation while a small pinprick of my consciousness remains curious about where the winds will take me this time.
I end up deposited, on my side, in a still, boundless place where the winds cease. There, I am surrounded on all sides by an endless black shining sea in which delicate, laser white and gold patterns form. They remind me of seafoam on a moonlit night, but infinitely more beautiful. Standing up, I notice that my limbs appear as black silhouettes against the background.
When I enter this ‘sea’, the light moves through me like breath and weaves me into its soothing power. My exhaustion and separateness melt away. I am aware that I am being knowingly held and supported. It seems, too, that the sea of light also relishes this moment. The thought comes that this exchange is to enable me to complete tasks in life and to share this sea of light with others. After some while my being is lifted back onto winds that return me to sleep, until the morning alarm wakes me.
In Lucid Surrender, I receive profound spiritual nourishment from the light forms that I encounter on the Black Light. Such dreams call to mind an Islamic teaching inspired by the visions of the Prophet Mohammed: ‘My heart has seen the Lord in the most beautiful of Forms.’31 Another Sufi teaching describes the human heart as possessing two eyes: one that sees the realm of forms in manifestation revealed by the outer light; and one that sees ‘only that which is rendered visible by the light of unity and oneness’.32 The same dual perspective of the lucid dream, in which the dreamer is both the observer and the observed, can be profoundly transformative. What begins as a feeling of fear becomes empowerment. What we think of as a crisis transforms into a mystery. What we experience as a living death brings us to a realisation of the eternal within.
If you will now return your thoughts to the dream that you recalled at the beginning of our descent into the depths of lucid dreaming, take a moment to reflect on the dream from a more ‘lucid’ perspective. For instance, consider moments in the dream to which you might have given more attention. Was there a small detail that had escaped your notice? Had you missed the opportunity to pause and look at a ‘dream being’ directly in the eyes or to ask their name? Use your active imagination to engage with the being, or even with an object that catches your attention. In retrospect, were there times in the dream when, having noticed an inconsistency within the dream or an unusual feature, you might have become more fully aware? Were their instances when you wish you had acted differently within the dream? If so, how would you have wished to act? This kind of enquiry encourages us to develop lucid insight into our dream experiences.
When responding to such questions, it is important that we do so with compassion towards ourselves, understanding that dreams invite us to participate in our dream life in a new way. Remember that if we miss the chance to act as we might wish in one dream, we will have the opportunity to do so in another! Recognise, too, that if you find it difficult to ‘surrender’ in a dream by allowing the dream to unfold, you are, nevertheless, becoming conscious of a new dimension that you are being invited to experience. But if lucidity eludes us, we can recall an insight Louise shared following on from her dreamwork with me: ‘My attitude towards dreams and the waking dreamwork has changed in that I have learned that the ability to dream lucidly wasn’t an end in itself, but that it provided another context in which one can deepen awareness.’
In learning to develop lucidity, we become able to ‘see in the dark’ and become more at ease with the unknown and the mystery of life. In recognising that much of our existence is beyond our control, we can rest assured in the knowledge that we ‘belong to more than ourselves’.33 Returning to waking life after being immersed in a lucid dream, we bring with us a consciousness of the magic of each moment and the miracle of the everyday.