1 Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (New York, NY: Dell Publishing Co. Inc., 1977), 26.
Foreword
1 www.ccpe.org.uk and www.driccpe.org.uk
Author’s Introduction
1 Adapted from the text accompanying ‘Emblem XLII’ in H. M. E. de Jong, Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens: Sources of an Alchemical Book of Emblems (York Beach, ME: Nicolas-Hays Inc., 2002), 266.
2 This question was inspired by one asked by Greta Thunberg from Sweden, who, at the age of 15, started what became a global school strike movement to stop climate change. In her words, ‘What is the point of learning facts when the most important facts given by the finest scientists are ignored by our politicians?’ See her article, ‘I’m striking from school to protest inaction on climate change – you should too’, The Guardian, 26 November 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/26/im-striking-from-school-for-climate-change-too-save-the-world-australians-studentsshould-too
3 I would like to acknowledge the inspiration of Joseph Campbell, a preeminent scholar of mythology, who in an interview observed that ‘we are the consciousness of the earth’ and that ‘the only myth worth talking about in the future is going to be one that is talking about the planet ... and everybody on it.’ See Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (with Bill Moyers), ed. Betty Sue Flowers (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1988), 32.
4 Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist and sleep specialist, makes this point in his thought-provoking Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams (UK: Penguin Random House, 2019), 280.
5 Researchers teaming up with Google Earth have used colour graphics in time-lapse imagery to depict the rate of deforestation on Earth from 2000 to 2012. From this film, we get a visceral understanding of how human activity profoundly changes the Earth. The 650,000 images from a NASA satellite allowed researchers to track the rapid deforestation, powerfully revealing the loss of 900,000 square miles (2.3 million square kilometres) of forest. Refer to M. C. Hansen et al., ‘High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change’, Science, 342, No. 6160 (15 November 2013): 850–853, doi: 10.1126/science.1244693
6 See North Carolina State University, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Department of Horticulture Science (webpage), ‘Tree Facts’, accessed 8 August 2010, https://projects.ncsu.edu/project/treesofstrength/treefact.htm
7 Cited in Walker, Why We Sleep, 296.
8 Dennis Campbell, ‘NHS Prescribed Record Number of Antidepressants Last Year’, The Guardian, 29 June 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jun/29/nhs-prescribed-record-number-of-antidepressants-last-year
9 These figures are based on data from the University of Oxford’s online ‘Our World in Data’, Global Change Data Lab (webpage), published May 2018 and updated April 2019, https://ourworldindata.org/global-mental-health. I have applied the 1 in 7 statistic to the global population of 7.7 billion as of 2019. The World Health Organization’s Investing in Mental Health puts mental health disorders at 1 in 4 of the population (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2003), 4, https://www.who.int/mental_health/media/investing_mnh.pdf
10 World Health Organization, World Health Assembly, ‘Global Burden of Mental Disorders and the Need for a Comprehensive, Coordinated Response from Health and Social Sectors at the Country Level: Report by the Secretariat’, 65 (20 January 2012): 4, https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/78898
11 Independent Mental Health Taskforce to the NHS in England, ‘The Five Year Forward View of Mental Health’ (February 2016):10, https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Mental-Health-Taskforce-FYFV-final.pdf
12 Andrew J. Watson and James E. Lovelock, ‘Biological Homeostasis of the Global Environment: The Parable of Daisyworld’, Tellus, 35B (September 1983): 284–289, doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0889.1983.tb00031.x. Also available at http://www.jameslovelock.org/?s=daisyworld
13 ‘Amsterdam Declaration on Earth System Science’ presented at ‘Challenges of a Changing Earth: Global Change Open Science Conference Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July 2001’, Global International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme Change (website), http://www.igbp.net/about/history/2001amster-damdeclarationonearthsystemscience.4.1b8ae20512db692f2a680001312.html. Four international global change research programmes joined to create this declaration: the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP); the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP); the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP); and the International Biodiversity Programme DIVERSITAS.
14 See Chapter Two, ‘The Science and Symbols of Sleep and Dreams’, for studies on the connections between dreams and wellbeing.
15 See Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman, ‘Regularly Occurring Periods of Eye Motility, and Concomitant Phenomena, During Sleep’, Science, 118, No. 3062 (1953): 273–274, doi: 10.1126/science.118.3062.273
16 Carl Gustav Jung, ‘The Practical Use of Dream Analysis’ in Herbert Read, Michael Fordham and Gerhard Adler (eds), The Practice of Psychotherapy, Vol. 16, trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series XX, Vols 1–20 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955–1992), para. 330.
17 A prayer attributed to the Lakota people of North America.
18 Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough, ‘Counting Blessings Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, No. 2 (2003): 377–389, doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.84.2.377
19 Quoted in an interview with Joseph Campbell in Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth (with Bill Moyers), ed. Betty Sue Flowers (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1998), 21–22.
20 See Anne Baring’s illuminating ‘Dreams: Messages of the Soul’, Reflections 11 (1999), accessed 8 August 2019, https://www.annebaring.com/anbar16_reflections011_dreams.htm. Baring notes that she has recounted the original version from Heinrich Zimmer’s The King and the Corpse (Bollingen Foundation, New York: Pantheon Books, 1957), 202. For a profound compilation of her thoughts on dreams and on the challenges facing humanity, see Anne Baring’s epic The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul (Dorset, UK: Archive Publishing, 2013).
21 For more on dream sharing, see Robin Shohet’s Dream Sharing: A Guide to Understanding Dreams by Sharing and Discussion (Northamptonshire, England: Crucible, 1985). The book brings to life Shohet’s observation that ‘Very often the meaning of a dream only emerges when the dream is shared.’
22 Campbell, The Power of Myth, 34.
Chapter One – The Sea of Dreams: An Exploration of Hidden Depths
1 Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea (New York, NY: Random House Inc., 1978), 17.
2 Aserinsky and Kleitman, ‘Regularly Occurring Periods of Eye Motility’, 273–274.
3 See T. Horikawa et al., ‘Neural Decoding of Visual Imagery During Sleep’, Science, 340, No. 6132 (3 May 2013): 639–642, doi: 10.1126/science.1234330
4 John Lesku, Anne Aulsebrook and Erika Zaid, ‘Evolutionary Perspectives on Sleep’ in Katja Valli and Robert J. Hoss (eds), Dreams: Understanding Biology, Psychology and Culture, Vol. 1, 3–26 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO LLC, 2019).
5 Walker, Why We Sleep, 72.
6 Robert Stickgold, J. Allan Hobson and R. Fosse, ‘Sleep, Learning, and Dreams: Off-line Memory Reprocessing’, Science, 294, No. 5544 (2 November 2001): 1052–1057, doi: 10.1126/science.1063530
7 See Josie E. Malinowski and Chris Edwards, ‘Evidence of Insight from Dreamwork’ in Robert J. Hoss and Robert P. Gongloff (eds), Dreams: Biology, Psychology and Culture, Vol. 2 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2019): 469–478; and Christopher L. Edwards, Perrine M. Ruby, Josie E. Malinowski et al., ‘Dreaming and Insight’, Frontiers in Psychology (24 December 2013), doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00979
8 See, for example, Miloslava Kozmová, ‘Emotions During Non-Lucid Problem-Solving Dreams as Evidence of Secondary Consciousness’, Comprehensive Psychology (1 January 2015), doi.org/10.2466/09.CP.4.6; and Tracey L. Kahn and Stephen P. LaBerge, ‘Dreaming and Waking: Similarities and Differences Revisited’, Consciousness and Cognition, 20 (2011): 494–514, doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2010.09.002
9 Consider the abstract of research by Erin J. Wamsley, ‘Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation’, Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports, 14, No. 3 (March 2014): 433, doi.org/10.1007/s11910-013-0433-5
10 For a neurological perspective see, Els van der Helm and Matthew P. Walker, ‘Overnight Therapy? The Role of Sleep in Emotional Brain Processing’, Psychological Bulletin, 135, No. 5 (September 2009): 731–748, doi: 10.1037/a0016570. Rosalind D. Cartwright, in her The Twenty-Four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), brings together findings from her academic, clinical and personal experience over a lifetime of research in the field of sleep and dreams. For an extensive analysis of emotional growth through psychological and spiritual development in dreams, see Nigel Hamilton, Awakening Through Dreams: The Journey Through the Inner Landscape (London: Karnac Books, 2014).
11 Ninad Gujar et al., ‘A Role for REM Sleep in Recalibrating the Sensitivity of the Human Brain to Specific Emotions’, Cerebral Cortex, 21, No. 1 (January 2011): 115–123, doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhq064
12 For a wide-ranging discussion of dreams and their role in creativity across the arts, see the section ‘Dreams and the Arts’ in Robert J. Hoss and Robert P. Gongloff (eds), Dreams: Understanding Biology, Psychology and Culture, Vol. 2 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO LLC, 2019), 641–666.
13 See Allen Hobson’s November 2009 article, ‘REM Sleep and Dreaming: Towards a Theory of Protoconsciousness’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10, No. 11 (November 2009): 803–813, doi: 10.1038/nrn2716
14 For more on the development of empathy and dreams, see Mark Blagrove, Sioned Hale, Julia Lockheart et al., ‘Testing the Empathy Theory of Dreaming: The Relationships Between Dream Sharing and Trait and State Empathy’, Frontiers in Psychology (20 June 2019), doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01351
15 Refer to Keith Hearne, ‘Lucid Dreams: An Electro-Physiological and Psychological Study’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Liverpool, England, 1978), https://www.keithhearne.com/phd-download/. Also, Stephen LaBerge, Lynn Nagel, William C. Dement and Vincent Zarcone Jr, ‘Lucid Dreaming Verified by Volitional Communication During REM Sleep’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 52 (1981): 727–32, doi.org/10.2466/pms.1981.52.3.727
16 See Ursula Voss et al., ‘Lucid Dreaming: A State of Consciousness with Features of Both Waking and Non-Lucid Dreaming’, Sleep, 32, No. 9 (1 September 2009): 1191–1200, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2737577/; and J. Allan Hobson, ‘The Neurobiology of Consciousness: Lucid Dreaming Wakes Up’, The International Journal of Dream Research, 2, No. 2 (October 2009): 41–44.
17 Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1992).
18 For a review of revelatory dreaming in Christianity, see Morton T. Kelsey’s God, Dreams, and Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Publishing, 1991). Henry Corbin provides an inspiring introduction to what he calls ‘theophanic’ imaginal visions in his Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam: Comparative Spiritual Hermeneutics, trans. Leonard Fox (West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Studies, 1999), and Kelly Bulkeley gives a wide-ranging overview in Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2008). Catherine Shainberg’s Kabbalah and the Power of Dreaming: Awakening the Visionary Life (Rochester, NY: Inner Traditions, 2005) provides a practical guide to the Kabbalistic tradition and revelatory dreams. For a thorough presentation of Jewish mysticism and practices, see Kabbalah by Gershom Scholem (New York, NY: Meridian, 1978).
19 For a detailed analysis of the inner landscape of dreams from an alchemical perspective, see Nigel Hamilton’s Awakening Through Dreams, 2014.
20 Yuval Nir et al., ‘Sleep and Consciousness’ in A. E. Cavanna et al. (eds), Neuroimaging of Consciousness (© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2013), 170, doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-37580-4_9
21 A quote from Andrew Powell’s The Ways of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Reflects: Essays on Life, Death and Beyond (London: Muswell Hill Press, 2017), xvii.
22 The scientist Rupert Sheldrake uses this term in his book Science and Spiritual Practices: Reconnecting Through Direct Experience (London: Coronet, 2017), 21.
23 See www.driccpe.org.uk. The DRI also offers educational events and courses that are open to the public. Additionally, the DRI hosts an archive of research into dreams and using dreams in research as well as teaching videos on dreams from the spiritual perspective. I also teach courses on lucid dreaming. See http://ccpe.org.uk/?page_id=126
24 Fulvio D’Acquisto, ‘Dreaming Autoimmunity: Exploring Dreams in Patients Suffering from Autoimmune Diseases’ (Master’s thesis, F. D’Acquisto, 2017).
25 Dave Billington, ‘Client Experience of the Waking Dream Process’ (Master’s thesis, D. Billington, 2014), http://www.driccpe.org.uk/?portfolio-view=1575-2
26 Judy Pascoe, ‘Drawing Dreams: The Transformation Experience of Expressing Dream Imagery as Art’ (Master’s thesis, J. Pascoe, 2016), http://www.driccpe.org.uk/?portfolio-view=drawing-dreams-the-transformational-experience-of-expressing-dream-imagery-as-art
27 Nigel Hamilton, ‘Psychospiritual Transformation: Light, Colour, and Symmetry’ in Robert J. Hoss and Robert P. Gongloff (eds), Dreams: Understanding Biology, Psychology, and Culture, Vol. 2 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2019), 634–640.
28 Marlene Botha, ‘The Transformative Effects of Colours in Transpersonal Dreamwork’ (Master’s thesis, M. Botha, 2010), http://www.driccpe.org.uk/?portfolio-view=the-transformative-effect-of-colours-in-transpersonal-dreamwork-m-botha
29 Nigel Hamilton, ‘The Personal and Therapeutic Significance of Directional Movement within the Space of a Lucid Dream’ (paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Dreams Conference, June 2017), http://www.driccpe.org.uk/?portfolio-view=the-personal-and-therapeutic-significance-of-moving-and-interacting-within-the-space-of-a-lucid-dreamnigel-hamilton-phd
30 Mary M. Ziemer [Melinda Powell], ‘Lucid Surrender and Jung’s Alchemical Coniunctio’ in Ryan Hurd and Kelly Bulkeley (eds), Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep, Vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2014), 145–166.
31 For a collection of first-person accounts of life-changing dreams, see Robert J. Hoss and Robert P. Gongloff (eds), Dreams That Change Our Lives (Ashville, NC: Chiron Publications, 2016).
32 In London, the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education, CCPE, offers therapeutic support that includes dream guidance. Contact 0(207) 266-3006. www.ccpe.org.uk.
33 An expression used by Amit Goswámí, ‘Quantum Psychology: An Integral Science for the Ecology of the Psyche’ (paper presented at the International Transpersonal Conference, Prague, 30 September 2017).
Chapter Two – The Science and Symbols of Sleep and Dreams
1 Quoted in Joseph Campbell’s The Mythic Image, Bollingen Series C (Princeton, CT: Princeton University Press, 1974), I–1.
2 The Islamic scholar, Henry Corbin, describes the Imaginal World in his ‘Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal’ in Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, 1–33. This theme will be further developed in Chapter Three, ‘Dreams, Trees and Their Roots in the Imaginal Mind: Transforming Waking Life’.
3 Cited in Tom Cheetham’s beautiful All the World’s an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2012), 161, from Jung, The Collected Works, Vol. 13, para. 207n17.
4 Nick Littlehales, an elite sports sleep coach, provides a helpful and concise recovery programme to get people back into the full benefits of good sleep in his Sleep: The Myth of 8 Hours, the Power of Naps...and the New Plan to Recharge Your Body and Mind (UK: Penguin Random House, 2016).
5 Figures from the Sleep Council’s ‘The Great British Bedtime Report’ (Chapel Hill, Skipton: UK, 2017), 2. Statistics based on a survey of over 5,000 individuals in the UK. See https://sleepcouncil.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/The-Great-British-Bedtime-Report-2017.pdf
6 Researchers speculate that melatonin may have an as yet unknown role in the absorption of the toxic by-products produced when cells metabolise oxygen, toxins that damage our DNA and cause cancer. Use of artificial light suppresses the production of the melatonin and so, in the long term, may increase the risk of breast and prostate cancer. See Thomas C. Erren et al., ‘Shift work and Cancer: The Evidence and the Challenge’, Deutsches Arzteblatt international Deutsches Arzteblatt International, 107, No. 38 (2010): 657–62, doi: 10.3238/arztebl.2010.0657
7 Cited from Marianna Virtanen et al., ‘Long Working Hours and Coronary Heart Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis’, American Journal of Epidemiology, 176, No. 7 (2012): 586–596, doi: 10.1093/aje/kws139 in Claire Caruso, ‘Negative Impacts of Shiftwork and Long Work Hours’, Rehabilitation Nursing: The Official Journal of the Association of Rehabilitation Nurses, 39, No. 1 (January–February 2014): 16–25, doi: 10.1002/rnj.107
8 Caruso, ‘Negative Impacts of Shiftwork’, 16–25.
9 Cited in the Royal Society for Public Health’s ‘Waking Up to the Health Benefits of Sleep’ (March 2016): 11. See https://www.rsph.org.uk/uploads/assets/uploaded/a565b58a-67d1-4491-ab9112ca414f7ee4.pdf
10 Ibid., 8.
11 Ibid., 9.
12 See the National Health Service, NHS, ‘How to get to Sleep: Sleep and Tiredness’ (last updated 22 July 2019), https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/sleep-and-tiredness/how-to-get-to-sleep/
13 See Listen to Your Body: The Wisdom of the Dao by Bisong Guo and Andrew Powell for a practical Daoist perspective on how best to follow this suggestion (Honolulu, HI: The University of Hawaii Press, 2001).
14 Walker, Why We Sleep, 297.
15 Walker, Why We Sleep, 275.
16 Janne Grønlie et al., ‘Sleep and Protein Synthesis-Dependent Synaptic Plasticity: Impacts of Sleep Loss and Stress’, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 7, Article 224 (21 January 2014), doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00224
17 Walker, Why We Sleep, 48.
18 For more on the science of this process, see Lulu Xie et al., ‘Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain’, Science, 342, No. 6156 (18 October 2013): 373–377, doi: 10.1126/science.1241224
19 Ehsan Shokri-Kojori et al., ‘ß-Amyloid Accumulation in the Human Brain after One Night of Sleep Deprivation’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, PNAS, 115, No. 17 (24 April 2019): 4483–4488, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1721694115
20 Andy R. Eugene and Jolanta Masiak, ‘The Neuroprotective Aspects of Sleep’, MEDtube Science, 3, No. 1 (March 2015): 35–40. PMID: 26594659
21 See early references to this phenomenon in Pier Luigi Parmeggiani, ‘Interaction Between Sleep and Thermoregulation: An Aspect of the Control of Behavioral States’, Sleep, 10, No. 5 (1987): 426–435; and J. Allan Hobson, ‘Sleep and Dreaming’, The Journal of Neuroscience, 10, No. 2 (1 February 1990): 371–372, doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI. These ideas on this are further developed in J. Allan Hobson, Charles C.-H. Hong and Karl J. Friston, ‘Virtual Reality and Conscious Inference in Sleep’, Frontiers in Psychology, 5, No. 1133 (9 October 2014): 9, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01133
22 Although dreams have primarily been associated with REM sleep, research shows that dreams do occur in non-rapid eye movement sleep (NREM). However, reported dreams tend to be shorter, less clear and, as a result, less memorable. See Jaakko O. Nieminen et al., ‘Consciousness and Cortical Responsiveness: A Within-State Study During Non-Rapid Eye Movement Sleep’, Scientific Reports, 6, No. 30932, (August 2016): 1–10, doi: 10.1038/srep30932
23 For the full story, see the article by David Cox, ‘David Karnazes: The Man Who Can Run Forever’, The Guardian, 30 August 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-running-blog/2013/aug/30/dean-karnazes-man-run-forever
24 Grønlie et al., ‘Sleep and Protein Synthesis-Dependent Synaptic Plasticity’, 3.
25 4D technology takes two-dimensional ultrasound scans, makes them three-dimensional, and adds multimedia effects as an overlay. As an example, see ‘Dreaming in the womb – 33 week fetus’, Naked Science, Science and Technology Documentary Series. Posted on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVlVcsp-ed4, accessed 8 August 2019. A playlist of Naked Science videos are available at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpWCFDSTg8dvapwbRd7AVbpNAkFXhqtyo
26 Cited in Madeleine M. Grigg-Damberger and Kathy M. Wolfe, ‘Infants Sleep for Brain’, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, Official Publication of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, 13, No. 11 (15 November 2017): 1233–1234, doi: 10.5664/jcsm.6786
27 Ibid., 1234.
28 Walker, Why We Sleep, 195.
29 Walker, Why We Sleep, 208–209. Walker includes a lively account of the research he and his colleague undertook to test his theory in which he showed two randomly chosen groups emotionally charged imagery twice and measured their brains’ emotional reactivity to the imagery. Participants viewed the imagery either in the morning and evening of the same day or in the evening of one day and the morning of the next, allowing one group to sleep between viewing the images. Those that slept showed less emotional reactivity and more activation of the pre-frontal cortex associated with logical thought.
30 Walker, Why We Sleep, 206–214. See also Walker’s original study with Els van der Helm: ‘Overnight Therapy? The Role of Sleep in Emotional Brain Processing’, Psychological Bulletin, 135, No. 5 (September 2009): 731–748, doi: 10.1037/a0016570
31 Walker, Why We Sleep, 208.
32 Quoted in Cheetham, All the World’s an Icon, 162. See also Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 14, para. 753.
33 Antonio Zadra, ‘Chronic Nightmares’ in Robert J. Hoss and Robert P. Gongloff (eds), Dreams: Understanding Biology, Psychology, and Culture, Vol. 2 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO LLC, 2019), 480.
34 Barry Krakow et al., ‘Imagery Rehearsal Therapy for Chronic Nightmares in Sexual Assault Survivors with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Randomized Controlled Trial’, Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA, 286, No. 5 (1 August 2019): 537–545, doi: 10.1001/jama.286.5.537
35 Ibid., 543.
36 Ibid., 544. See also Chapter Nine of this book, ‘Nightmares: From Fear to Freedom’.
37 For a vivid and informative account of parasomnias, refer to Guy Leschziner’s The Nocturnal Brain: Nightmares, Neuroscience and the Secret World of Sleep (London: Simon & Schuster Ltd., 2019). Ryan Hurd gives a detailed account of a specific parasomnia in his Sleep Paralysis: A Guide to Hypnagogic Visions and Visitors of the Night (Los Altos, CA: Hyena Press, 2011).
38 See Hans J. Markowitsch and Angelica Staniloiu, ‘Amygdala in Action: Relaying Biological and Social Significance to Autobiographical Memory’, Neuropsychologia, 49, No. 4 (March 2011): 718–733, doi: 10.1016/j. neurophsychologia.2010.10.007
39 Walker, Why We Sleep, 203–204. As Walker explains, apparently only 2–3 per cent of dreams actually contain imagery from the preceding day, whereas 30 to 55 per cent of dreams appear thematically related to the day’s emotional content.
40 See Rosalind D. Cartwright’s early research in this area, ‘Dreams that Work: The Relation of Dream Incorporation to Adaptation to Stressful Events’, Dreaming, 1, No. 1 (1991): 3–9. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0094312, and also her comprehensive The Twenty-Four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives (London: Oxford University Press, 2010), 162–168.
41 For a systematic study of this condition, see Antonio R. Damasio’s Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York, NY: Avon Books, 2006). Damasio describes how such a condition is found in people who seem perfectly ‘normal’ and may test high on intelligence tests but who, through brain injury, have lost their capacity to make decisions, especially significant life choices. He suggests that in decision-making, the personal and social domains will be ‘compromised’ if there is damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortices where ‘reason and emotion “intersect”’ (70).
42 Smaranda Leu-Semenescu et al., ‘Can we still dream when the mind is blank? Sleep and Dream Mentations in Auto-activation Deficit’, Brain, 136, No. 10 (1 October 2013): 3076–3084, doi.org/10.1093/brain/awt229
43 For a comprehensive review, see Tracey L. Kahn and Stephen P. LaBerge, ‘Dreaming and Waking: Similarities and Differences Revisited’, Consciousness and Cognition, 20 (2011): 494–514, doi: 10.1016/j. concog.2010.09.002
44 To obtain these statistics, David T. Saunders et al. undertook a meta-analysis of numerous lucid dreaming studies on lucid dreaming prevalence and frequency. Refer to David T. Saunders, Chris Roe, Graham Smith and Helen Clegg, ‘Lucid Dreaming Incidence: A Quality Effects Meta-Analysis of 50 Years of Research’, Consciousness and Cognition, 43 (2016): 210, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.06.002
45 Jung, The Collected Works, Vol. 10, para. 304.
46 Cited in Peter J. Forshaw’s illuminating study, ‘Curious Knowledge and Wonder-Working Wisdom in the Occult Work of Heinrich Khunrath’ in Robert J. W. Evans and Alexander Marr (eds), Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 126.
47 Peter J. Forshaw outlines the importance of the oratory to European alchemists, particularly Heinrich Khunrath, in his ‘“Behold, the dream cometh”: Hyperphysical Magic and Deific Visions in an Early-Modern Theosophical Lab-Oratory’ in Joad Raymond, Conversations with Angels: Essays Towards a History of Spiritual Communication, 1100–1700 (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 175–200.
48 Corbin presents a summary of Swedenborg’s understanding of the ‘inner breathing’ or ‘inner respiration’ in his Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, 87. Also, see Wilson Van Dusen’s introduction to G. E. Klemming (ed.), Swedenborg’s Journal of Dreams: 1743–1744 (New York, NY: Swedenborg Foundation, 1996), 18, for a summary of Swedenborg’s use of the breath.
49 The link between our personal sense of self as human individuals in space and time is thoughtfully developed in The Development of Autobiographical Memory by Hans J. Markowitsch and Harold Welzer, trans. David Emmans (New York, NY: Psychology Press, 2010).
Chapter Three – Dreams, Trees and Their Roots in the Imaginal Mind: Transforming Waking Life
1 James Allen, As a Man Thinketh (Public Domain, 1903), 54.
2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schättle (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 1977), No. 165, 39e.
3 If you would like to develop your capacity for working with images, see Dina Glouberman’s Life Choices, Life Changes: Develop Your Personal Vision for the Life You Want (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003).
4 See Martin Buber’s I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: MacMillan Publishing Group, 1958; originally published 1937), for Buber’s development of the I–Thou versus I–It ways of relating.
5 Ibid., 6.
6 See Corbin’s foundational essay, ‘Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal’ in Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, 9.
7 Ibid., 18–20.
8 Stephen LaBerge, Benjamin Baird and Philip G. Zimbardo, ‘Smooth Tracking of Visual Targets Distinguishes Lucid REM Sleep Dreaming and Waking Perception from Imagination’, Nature Communications, 9, No. 3298 (2018), doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-05547-0
9 Christopher L. Edwards, Josie E. Malinowski, Shauna L. McGee et. al., ‘Comparing Personal Insight Gains Due to Consideration of a Recent Dream and Consideration of a Recent Event Using the Ullman and Schredl Dream Group Methods’, Frontiers in Psychology, 6, No. 831 (June 2015), doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00831
10 The study ‘Visual Imagery without Visual Perception?’ by Helder Bértolo includes the dream illustration; Psicológica, 26, (2005): 173–188. The original study in English, ‘Visual Dream Content, Graphical Representation and EEG Alpha Activity in Congenitally Blind Subjects’, led by Helder Bértolo, can be found at Cognitive Brain Research, 15, No. 3 (February 2003): 277–284, doi: 10.1016/s0926-6410(02)00199-4
11 See ‘The Sensory Construction of Dreams and Nightmare Frequency in Congenitally Blind and Late Blind Individuals’ conducted by Amani Meaidi, Poul Jennum, Maurice Ptito and Ron Kupers in Sleep Medicine, 15 (2014): 585–595, doi.org/10.1016/S0926-6410(02)00199-4
12 Bértolo, ‘Visual Imagery’, 184.
13 Meaidi, ‘The Sensory Construction of Dreams’, 594.
14 Buber, I and Thou, 6.
15 See Iain McGilchrist’s remarkable study of the brain’s right and left hemispheres, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 177.
16 Ibid., 31.
17 McGilchrist notes this right-brain activation in REM sleep, citing research by John Stirling Myer, Yoshiki Ishikawa, Takashi Hata and Ismet Karacan, ‘Cerebral Blood Flow in Normal and Abnormal Sleep and Dreaming’, Brain and Cognition, 6, No. 3 (July 1987): 266–294, doi.org/10.1016/0278-2626(87)90127-8.
18 See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (First Part) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1981; originally published 1900), 49. See also Freud’s footnote No. 2 to the revised edition: ‘At bottom, dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep.’ Vol. 6, 506.
19 Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image, i–8.
20 For more on Einstein’s thought experiments, see Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (London: Simon & Schuster Ltd., 2007), especially 3–4 and 26–27.
21 Quoted in an interview with Einstein by George Sylvester Viereck, ‘What Life Means to Einstein’, Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929, pages 17 and 110, http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/wpcontent/uploads/satevepost/what_life_means_to_einstein.pdf
22 James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, Vol. 1 (Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, 2013), 18.
23 Robert Steele and Dorothea Waley Singer, ‘The Emerald Table’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 21, No. 3 (January 1928): 485–501, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2101974/?page=1
24 Henry Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufiism, trans. Nancy Pearson (New Lebanon, NY: Omega Publications Inc.), 6.
25 Quoted in Peter J. Forshaw, ‘Behold, the dream cometh’, 175. Forshaw points out in an endnote that this quote, used by Khunrath in the 1609 edition of The Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom, is attributed to Julius Caesar Scaliger. See endnote No. 1, 189.
26 Doc Childre and Howard Martin, The Heartmath Solution: Proven Techniques for Developing Emotional Intelligence (London: Judy Piatkus Publishers Limited, 1999), 33.
27 Ibid., 40.
28 Blaise Pascal in Blaise Pascal’s Penseés: Thoughts on God, Religion, and Wagers, trans. William F. Trotter, Section IV: ‘Of the Means of Belief’, No. 277 (Greenwood, WI: Suzeteo Enterprises, 2005; originally published 1660), 56.
29 Childre and Martin, The Heartmath Solution, 6.
30 Ibid., 10 and 30–31.
31 These figures are cited in Sheldrake’s Science and Spiritual Practices, 31, from Herbert Benson, The Relaxation Response (New York, NY: William Morrow, 2000).
32 The Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV® Daniel 4:9–16.
33 The Holy Bible, American King James Version, AKJV, Daniel 2:30.
34 The Holy Bible, NIV ® Daniel 4:4.
35 This translation of Rilke’s untitled poem is my own. The original version in German can be found in Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel Verlag, GmbH, 2006), 619.
36 Richard Powers, The Overstory (London: Penguin Random House, 2018), 221.
37 Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees (Vancouver, BC: Greystone Books Ltd., 2015), 10–11.
38 Ibid., 6–18.
39 See Eetu Puttonen et al., ‘Quantification of Overnight Movement of Birch (Betula pendula) Branches and Foliage with Short Interval Terrestrial Laser Scanning’, Frontiers in Plant Science, 7, Article 222 (29 February 2016), doi: 10.3389/fpls.2016.00222
40 C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2002; originally published 1933), 74. The entire sentence reads, ‘In psychic life, as everywhere in our experience, all things that act are actual, regardless of the names man chooses to bestow on them.’
41 Quoted from a letter that Einstein wrote to a father whose son had died in Silvan S. Schweber, Einstein, Oppenheimer and the Meaning of Genius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 300.
42 Jung, The Collected Works, Vol. 10, para. 304.
43 Edward F. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy (Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1994), 178.
44 For more on how this term came into common usage, see the article ‘“Dreamtime” and “The Dreaming”: Who dreamed up these terms?’ by Christine Judith Nicholls, The Conversation UK (28 January 2014), http://theconversation.com/dreamtime-and-the-dreaming-who-dreamed-up-these-terms-20835
45 For a scholarly account of the historical roots of the Australian peoples, see Josephine Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime: The Story of Prehistoric Australia and its People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).
46 Mircea Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 10.
47 Quoted in Joseph Campbell’s The Mythic Image, I–1.
48 For more on this topic, see Elizabeth and Neil Carman’s The Cosmic Cradle: Spiritual Dimensions of Life Before Birth (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2013), 225–237.
49 Allen, As a Man Thinketh, 54.
50 The physicist David Peat, in his book Blackfoot Physics: A Journey into the Native American Universe (London: Fourth Estate Limited, 1996), 287, compares the science of Western and Indigenous cultures, outlining striking parallels.
51 Presented in Roger Cook’s beautiful The Tree of Life: Symbol of the Centre (London: Thames & Hudson), 18.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid.
54 For an expansive development of this theme, see Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism, trans. Philip Mairet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
55 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. William R. Trask (St. Ives Pls, UK: Arkana, Penguin Books, 1989), 39–40.
56 The physicist Arthur Zajonc gives an enlightening overview of experiments on light involving the ‘quantum domain’ in his book Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 292–329. For a concise introduction to the subject of quantum theory refer to John Polkinghorne’s Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction (London: Oxford University Press, 2002).
57 For the complete poem see W. B. Yeats’ ‘The Two Trees’ in William Butler Yeats: Selected Poems and Three Plays, 4th edition, ed. M. L. Rosenthal (New York, NY: Scribner Paperback Poetry Edition, Simon & Schuster Inc., 1996), 17–18.
58 Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 250.
59 For more on reciprocity from the standpoint of ‘co-creative dream theory’ see Scott Sparrow’s work on ‘Imagery Change Analysis: Working with Imagery from the Standpoint of Co-creative Dream Theory’ (2013), http://www.driccpe.org.uk/?portfolio-view=imagery-change-analysis-working-with-imagery-from-the-standpoint-of-co-creative-dream-theory-scott-sparrow.
Chapter Four – The Language of Rocks, Stones and Minerals: A Case Illustration
1 From The Gospel of Thomas, presented by Hugh McGregor Ross (London: Watkins Publishing Inc., 2002), 77N. This text forms part of what has become known as the Nag Hamâdi Library, a collection of manuscripts written in the 3rd or 4th century AD and hidden away until their discovery in 1945. The collection represents writings of early Christians that were not accepted into the canon of recognised texts.
2 For a detailed presentation of ‘The Waking Dream Process’ developed by Nigel Hamilton, see his Awakening Through Dreams, 2014.
3 When working with dreams, the imagery may also present a metaphor to draw our attention to a potential medical issue. For example, the blockage in this dream could mirror a physical blockage. Because Mark touched his chest area when describing the dream, I asked him if he had any heart issues. Mark reported that he had in the past but had recently been checked and at present had no reason for concern. However, the dream alerted him to be mindful of his condition between annual medical reviews. For an overview of somatic and health issues in dreams, see Robert J. Hoss, ‘Somatic and Health-Related Dreams’ in Dreams: Understanding Biology, Psychology, and Culture, Vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO LLC, 2019), 292–301.
4 An alchemical maxim quoted in Mircea Eliade’s The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structures of Alchemy, 2nd edition, trans. Stephen Corrin (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 153.
5 Ibid., 42, 121.
6 Taken from excerpts of Sir James Jeans’ 1931 book The Mysterious Universe cited in Ken Wilber (ed.), Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Greatest Physicists (Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications Inc.), 151.
7 Quoted by Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, 158.
8 Ibid., 156–157.
9 Jung, The Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part II, para. 61.
10 Ibid., paras. 13–15.
11 The Holy Bible, NIV® Ezekiel 36:26.
12 Jung, The Collected Works, Vol. 14, para. 778.
13 Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Kahn: The Unity of Religious Ideals, Vol. 9 (Geneva, Switzerland: International Headquarters of the Sufi Movement, 1979), 229.
14 From Barbara Somers’ moving question, ‘What makes your heart sing – what brings you to your joy?’ See her book Journey in Depth: A Transpersonal Perspective, written with Ian Gordon Brown, ed. Helen Marshall (Leicestershire, UK: Archive Publishing, 2002), 34–36.
15 C. G. Jung in Aniela Jaffé (ed.), C. G. Jung: Word and Image, Bollingen Series XCVII, Vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 123.
16 The Gospel of Thomas, 50n2, 38.
17 Quoted from Kurt Seligman’s The Mirror of Magic (New York, 1948), 110, cited in Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant (eds), The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, trans. John Buchanan-Brown (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 1072.
18 Jung, The Collected Works, Vol. 16, para. 86.
19 The idea of ‘greening’ derives from Hildegard von Bingen’s favourite theme of ‘O nobilissima viriditas’ or ‘Oh most noble greenness’, a theme she celebrated in her ‘Responsory for the Virgin’. See Hildegard von Bingen, Mystical Visions, translated from Scivias by Bruce Hozeski and introduced by Matthew Fox (Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Company, 1995), 380. For the musical rendition of this piece, see http://www.hildegard-society.org/2017/04/o-nobilissima-viriditas-responsory.html or O nobilissima viriditas: The Complete Hildegard von Bingen, Vol. 3, Peter Wishart Symphony.
20 Robert A. Johnson, Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection (Kihei, HI: Koa Books, 2008), 58.
21 A quote from Robert Stickgold, Director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Harvard Medical School, in the National Geographic Magazine (August 2018) feature article, ‘The Science of Sleep’ by Michael Finkel, 40–77.
22 Khalil Gibran, The Prophet (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), 38.
23 The Holy Bible, NIV® Genesis 28:17.
24 Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, 20 and 43.
25 From William Stafford’s poem ‘Glances’ in Travelling Through the Dark (New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, 1962), 69.
26 Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, 20.
Chapter Five – Light Revisioned Through the Prism of Dreams
1 From Dante’s Divine Comedy, The Vision of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, 1321. This passage comes from Paradise, Canto 33, and this my own translation of the original Italian. To access a bilingual edition of Dante’s work, see The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Vol. 3, Paradiso, trans. Courtney Langdon (London: Harvard University Press, 1921), last updated 26 November 2019, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/212
2 Arthur Zajonc writes eloquently on this subject in his book Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 316.
3 Ibid., 184. Zajonc himself has translated this passage from Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre, or Theory of Colours, found in Erich Trunz (ed.), Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, Vol. 13 (Munich, Germany: C. H. Beck, 1982). For comparison, the translation by Charles Lock Eastlake reads, ‘...the eye is formed by the light, with reference to light, to be fit for the action of light; the light it contains corresponding with the light without.’ (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications Inc., 2016), xxvi.
4 Zajonc, Catching the Light, 1–2. Zajonc, along with colleagues, set up a science exhibit, called ‘Project Eureka’, that invited people to peer into a space filled with light in a vacuum. Then they were asked to look again after a metal rod had been inserted. The presence of light became ‘visible’ via the illuminated rod.
5 See the NASA article ‘Dark Energy, Dark Matter’, accessed 8 August 2019, https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy
6 The ‘extended mind’ theory purports that cognition extends beyond the individual mind to environmental structures ranging from objects and symbols to people, and spreads across space and time. This original theory has also been used by scientists to research extra-sensory perception. See Andy Clark and David Chalmers, ‘The Extended Mind’ in Analysis, Oxford Journals, Oxford University Press, 58, No. 1 (January 1998): 7–19, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3328150
7 I have written more on this theme in ‘Metaphoric Presence in Spiritual Dreams’ in the anthology Dreams: Understanding Biology, Psychology, and Culture, Vol. 2, 628– 633.
8 Drawn from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Act 4, scene 1, 156–157, originally ‘We are such stuff/As dreams are made on...’
9 This dream is from one of over 6,000 reports of a spiritual or religious experience recorded by the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre archive at the Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC), University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter, UK. All quotations from the archive are followed by the account number, in this case RERC 000266. I wish to thank the RERC (http://www.uwtsd.ac.uk/library/alister-hardy-religious-experience-research-centre/) and the Alister Hardy Trust (http://www.studyspiritualexperiences.org/) for their permission to access and quote material from the archive.
10 See Carl Jung’s summary of the alchemical understanding of the lumen naturae in his The Collected Works, Vol. 8, paras 388–396.
11 Ibid., para. 391. Jung cites this particular teaching from the Liber de Caducis by Paracelsus.
12 See Chapter Nine, ‘Nightmares: From Fear to Freedom’, for more on this topic. Chapter Ten, ‘A Journey into the Deep: Lucid Dreaming and Lucid Surrender’, explores the nature of Dark Light.
13 For more about this subject, Stanley Krippner, Fariba Bogzaran and André Percia de Carvalho provide an overview in Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002); Robert L. Van de Castle’s chapter on ‘Paranormal Dreams: Psychic Contributions to Dreams’ in his Our Dreaming Mind (New York and Toronto: Ballantine Books, 1994) gives many accounts and examples of research in the field, as does Dream Telepathy: Experiments in Nocturnal Extrasensory Perception by Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner and Alan Vaughan (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 2001).
14 These figures are cited from a study on ‘Spontaneous cases of psi within accounts submitted to the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre’ by Pauline Linnett and Chris Roe, which compared ESP accounts from three sources: L.E. Rhine (1962), Sannwald (1963) and the Alister Hardy RERC archive (paper presented at the British Psychological Society, BPS, Transpersonal Section, 20th Annual Conference, 16–18 September 2016).
15 The Alister Hardy Religious Experience Religious Centre archive, Account 000166.
16 Annekatrin Puhle has compiled an analysis of 800 cases of transformative experiences involving light in her Light Changes: Experiences in the Presence of Transforming Light (Guildford, UK: White Crow Books, 2013), 218.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 The dream in its entirety is quoted by Gerhard Adler in his Studies in Analytical Psychology (London: Routledge Taylor & Frances Group, 1999), 144, from Priestley’s Rain Upon Godshill, 301.
20 Ibid., 144.
21 Excerpt of ‘You Are With the Friend Now’ from I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy, Renderings of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2006), 1, used with permission.
Chapter Six – The Mystery and Magic of Colour: A Study in Blue
1 Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), ‘The Young Man with the Carnation’ in Winter’s Tales (London: Penguin Books, 2001/1942), 29.
2 The noun arkhē in Greek means a ‘first place or origin’ and originates from the verb arkhein, ‘to be the first’; typos means ‘a model, type, mark, or blow’ and refers to the ‘blow’ associated with the act of pressing an authenticating seal into wax or paint. The seal stands for the authority of the person or body who issued it.
3 Jung, The Collected Works, Vol. 11, para 557.
4 Ibid.
5 The Alister Hardy Religious Experience Religious Centre archive, Account 786
6 Bach, Illusions, 26.
7 Richard Buckminster Fuller coined this expression. Fuller, an architect and inventor, also designed the geodesic dome.
8 Nigel Hamilton made this observation about the nature of colour in dreams in a lecture on ‘Alchemical Dreams’ during my advanced training in psychotherapy at the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education, CCPE, London, 2009.
9 For the complete poem, entitled ‘Day of Color’, see John J. Brugaletta: Selected Poems (Athens, GA: Futurecycle Press, 2019), 13. I would like to thank John Brugaletta for encouraging me to write and to dream!
10 Robert J. Hoss, Dream Language: Self-Understanding Through Imagery and Color (Ashland, OR: Inner Source, 2005), 97.
11 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edition, trans. G. E. Anscombe, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), No. 129, 48e.
12 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, No. 154, 36e. By ‘geometry of colour’ he refers to our concepts of colour that we form in connection to ‘three-dimensionality, light and shadow.’ See also No. 144, 36e.
13 The company Enchroma first developed these glasses. See https://www.enchroma.com for more information.
14 You can find such scenes posted on www.youtube.com. See, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSD7-TgUmUY
15 Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, No. 224, 47e.
16 Wassily Kandinsky describes this colour effect further in his study Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M.T. H. Sadler (New York, NY: Dover Publications Inc., 1977), 28.
17 From William Blake’s poem ‘The Little Black Boy’ (1789) in Songs of Innocence and Experience, v. 13–14, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford University Press, 1970), 134. Copyright © 1967, Oxford University Press. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.
18 Andrew Harvey, The Essential Mystics: Selections from the World’s Great Wisdom Traditions (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 147.
19 From the alchemical emblem ‘The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians’ presented by Adam McLean in his The Alchemical Mandala: A Survey of the Mandala in the Western Esoteric Traditions (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press Inc., 2002), 124. See his website (www.levity.com) for an unrivalled database of alchemical treatises and emblems.
20 An analogy drawn by William C. Chittick in his Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-῾Arabī and the Problem of Religious Diversity (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 8.
21 Ibid., 58.
22 Quoted in Jim Clemmer, The Leader’s Digest: Timeless Principles for Team and Organization Success (Toronto, Canada: TCG Press, 2003), 84.
23 W. Y. Evan-Wentz (ed.), The Tibetan Book of the Dead, trans. Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 106.
24 Ibid., 107.
25 Ibid., 104.
26 Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light, 199–200.
27 For a more in-depth study of the psychological and physiological effects of natural light, see Jacob Israel Liberman, Light: Medicine of the Future (Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Company, 1991).
28 Novalis, Henry Von Ofterdingen: A Romance, Dover Thrift Editions (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications Inc., 2015), 3.
29 Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (London: Flamingo; originally published 1954), 7.
30 Ibid., 8.
31 Katherine A. Maclean et al., ‘Factor Analysis of the Mystical Experience Questionnaire: A Study of Experiences Occasioned by the Hallucinogen,’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 51, No. 4 (December 2012): 721–737, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2012.01685.x
32 The Alister Hardy Religious Experience Religious Centre archive, Account 000128.
33 From ‘Truth’ quoted in C. S. Lewis (ed.), George MacDonald: An Anthology 365 Readings (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFranscisco, 1973), No. 187, 81.
34 Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, trans. Moholy-Nagy (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), 61, Figure 87.
35 Henry Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufiism, trans. Nancy Pearson (New Lebanon, NY: Omega Publications Inc., 1994), 142.
36 An expression used by Ibn al-῾Arabī quoted by William C. Chittick in his Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-῾Arabī and the Problem of Religious Diversity, 26.
37 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. Albert G. Latham (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1908), 15.
38 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications Inc., 2006), xvii.
Chapter Seven – The Geometry of Dreams and the Dimensions of Consciousness
1 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, footnote No. 6, 29.
2 See the cover of the April 2002 issue of Discover magazine, on which a marble is used to portray the universe in its earliest stages of expansion to illustrate its feature article, ‘Where did everything come from?: Guth’s Grand Guess’, by Brad Lemley, Discover, 23, No. 4 (April 2002), 32–39.
3 For a concise explanation of the quantum void, see Frank Close, NOTHING: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
4 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love: Mother Julian of Norwich, eds. Halcyon Backhouse and Rhona Pipe (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997), 10–11.
5 St John’s, Timberhill, Norwich, enshrines St Julian’s Church, the cell where she is believed to have lived.
6 See excerpts from Louis de Broglie’s writings in ‘Aspirations Towards Spirit’, Quantum Questions, ed., Ken Wilber (Shambala Press: Boston, 2001), 122.
7 Ibid.
8 Isaacson, Einstein, 26. According to Isaacson, the preparatory school at Aarau, where Einstein chose to spend a year before attending Zurich Polytechnic, drew on the teaching theory of the Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a keen supporter of visualisations to promote learning.
9 Quoted from Kekulé’s own report in the Berichte der deutschen chemischen Gesellschaft, 1890, pages 1305–1307. The report appears in a lecture entitled ‘Kekulé Dreams’ by Dr Water Libby, University of Pittsburgh, in the first of a series of papers presented on the ‘Psychology and Logic of Research’ given at the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research of the University of Pittsburgh, 14 February–2 May 1922. See Walter Libby, ‘The Scientific Imagination’, Scientific Monthly, 15, No. 263 (1922): 269, https://archive.org/details/jstor-6552/page/n7. Although there have been inconsistencies in Kekulé’s reports of this dream over time, as Libby’s paper documents, Kekulé was known for his use of dream-based intuitions for developing hypotheses.
10 C. G. Jung, The Collected Works, Vol. 13, para. 143.
11 See Hobson, ‘Sleep and Dreaming: Towards a Theory of Protoconsciousness’, 803–813.
12 J. Allan Hobson and Karl J. Friston, ‘Waking and Dreaming Consciousness: Neurobiological and Functional Considerations’, Progress in Neurobiology, 98, No. 1 (July 2012): 82–98, doi.org/10.1016/j.pneurobio.2012.05.003.
13 Nigel Hamilton, ‘Psychospiritual Transformation: Light, Colour, and Symmetry’, in Robert J. Hoss and Robert P. Gongloff (eds), Dreams: Understanding Biology, Psychology, and Culture, Vol. 2 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2019), 634–640. Italics in original.
14 Jung, The Collected Works, Vol. 14, para. 776.
15 From Matthew Fox (ed.), Meditations with Meister Eckhart (Inner Traditions International and Bear & Company © 1983. All rights reserved. http://www.innertraditions.com. Reprinted with permission of publisher), 21.
16 Black Elk in John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition (Nebraska: The Regents Board of the University of Nebraska, 2014; originally published 1932), 26.
17 David Villaseñor, Tapestries in Sand: The Spirit of Indian Sand Painting (Happy Camp, CA: Naturegraph Company Publishers Inc., 1966), 7.
18 David Peat provides a thoughtful integration of Jung’s four-function model with the practice of the ‘sacred hoop’ among the Native American peoples in his Blackfoot Physics, 164–170.
19 From Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium, 1543, quoted in István and Magdolna Hargittai’s Symmetry: A Unifying Concept (Bolinas, CA: Shelter Publications Inc., 1994), 103.
20 Frank Close, in his book The Void, describes the Hartle–Hawking model of the universe in which time takes on the dimensional properties of a sphere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 152–156.
21 Jung, The Collected Works, Vol. 18, para. 625.
22 If you are puzzled by how light can appear as shining ‘black’, remember how pure light in a vacuum would, in fact, appear invisible and ‘black’ (refer to Chapter Five). In lucid dreams, I perceive this radiant darkness as a clear, piercing light. Chapter Ten, ‘Journeys into the Deep: Lucid Dreaming and Lucid Surrender’, will look at the phenomena of black light.
23 Jung, The Collected Works, vol. 14, para. 776.
Chapter Eight – The Power of Healing Presence in Dreams
1 Buber, I and Thou, 11.
2 For an enchanting treatise on the art of perfumery and its connection to alchemy, refer to Maggie Aftel, The Essence of Alchemy: A Book of Perfume (New York, NY: North Point Press, 1991).
3 COBUILD Advanced English Dictionary, s.v. ‘presence (n.)’ © HarperCollins Publishers, accessed 31 July 2019, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/presence
4 Carl Rogers, quoted in a 1987 interview with Michèle Baldwin published in Baldwin’s The Use of Self in Psychotherapy, ed. Michèle Baldwin (New York, NY: The Haworth Press Inc., 2000), 29.
5 John Welwood, a transpersonal therapist, has developed many teachings and practices on unconditional practice. See his chapter on ‘The Power of Healing Presence’ in Toward a Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Psychotherapy and the Path of Personal and Spiritual Transformation (Boston, MA: Shambahla Publications Inc., 2002), 141. Italics in original.
6 Cheetham, All the World’s an Icon, 173.
7 Solrunn Nes gives an exquisite overview of the tradition of icon painting using icons that she herself has created in The Mystical Language of Icons (Canterbury, UK: Canterbury Press, 2004).
8 See Genesis 18:1–15.
9 English Standard Version Bible, Hebrews 13:2.
10 Stachu is the nickname for ‘Stanislaw’ in Polish.
11 This dream comes from a collection of 208 dreams garnered from 147 survivors of Auschwitz in 1979 by the Kraków Medical Academy, Poland. The collection is housed in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum Archive. Wojciech Owczarski cites this dream in his powerful study of 51 ‘Therapeutic Dreams in Auschwitz’ that he identified from among the sample dreams and then categorised. See Wojciech Owczarski, ‘Therapeutic Dreams in Auschwitz’ in Jednak Ksiazki, Gdań ske Czasopismo Humanistyczne, 6 (2016): 86. Full text available at http://cejsh.icm.edu.pl/cejsh/element/bwmeta1.element.desklight-623ef4d8-ca2d-4ec9-9295-8c5f5ebac108. I would like to thank Wojciech Owczarski for his permission to include this dream.
12 The theologian Rudolf Otto coined this expression and describes it in full in his book The Idea of the Holy, 2nd edition, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), particularly pages 13–24.
13 Ibid., 59.
14 The Jersualem Bible 1 John 4:18, ‘In love there can be no fear, but fear is driven out by perfect love...’.
15 In Greek mythology, the goddess of love, Aphrodite, came out of the sea carried on the backs of fish. The fish symbol was used as the twelfth sign of the zodiac, Pisces. Early Christians, who viewed Jesus as a ‘fisher of men’, widely used the Greek word ichthus (fish) as an acronym for Iesu Christos Theou Uios Soter (Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour). The disciple Luke reports that Christ ate fish after his resurrection (Luke 24:42). For more associations with fish symbolism, see Chevalier and Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, 383–384.
16 My training in psychotherapy was at the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education in London, accredited by the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy. See www.ccpe.org.uk.
17 Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1991), 85.
18 See Werner Herzog’s Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (Saville Productions, 2016).
19 Teilhard de Chardin develops the evolution of what he calls noogenesis, the development of the mind, in his book The Phenomenon of Man, trans. Bernard Wall (New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers Inc., 1975), particularly pages 180–184.
20 These figures are drawn from two studies, the first by Alfonso Echazarra, ‘How has internet use changed between 2012 and 2015?’, PISA in Focus, No. 83, OECD Publishing, Paris (April 2018): 2, doi.org/10.1787/1e912a10-en, a study supported by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, established in 1961 and representing 34 member countries across the globe. The second study by Ofcom, the UK’s communication regulator, focused on the media use of adults in the UK. See Ofcom, ‘Adults: Media Use and Attitudes Report, 2019’ (30 May 2019): 6, https://www.ofcom.org.uk/data/assets/pdf_file/0021/149124/adults-media-use-and-attitudes-report.pdf
21 Cited in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s ‘Children & Young People’s Mental Health in the Digital Age: Shaping the Future’ (OECD, 2018): 8, https://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/Children-and-Young-People-Mental-Health-in-the-Digital-Age.pdf
22 For more on this theme, see Andrew Powell’s thought-provoking essay ‘Technology and the Soul in the 21st Century’ in his Conversations with the Soul. A Psychiatrist Reflects: Essays on Life, Death and Beyond (London: Muswell Hill Press, 2018), 161–179.
23 Google calls this creative programming ‘inceptionalism’. For more examples of this computer-generated artform, see https://ai.googleblog.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html
24 From George MacDonald’s The Golden Key and Other Fantasy Stories (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980), 6–7. The book’s ‘Publisher’s Note’ quotes MacDonald as having said that he did not write for children, ‘but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five’, x.
25 Ibid., 11–12.
26 In Lewis, George MacDonald, No. 1295, 139.
27 Welwood, Toward a Psychology of Awakening, 143.
28 The development of fifth generation (5G) high-speed technologies, operating at speeds 20,000 times faster than the now archaic third generaton (3G), may not only hasten our distractedness but may also harm us and the environment by means of the electromagnetic pollution in which they immerse all life. For a summary of the potential health and environmental effects of 5G EMF, see Priyanka Bandara’s and David O. Carpenter’s ‘Planetary Electromagnetic Pollution: It is Time to Assess its Impact’ in The Lancet Planetary Health, vol. 2 © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. (December 2018): 512–514, doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(18)30221-3. For a detailed meta-study see Martin L. Pall’s comprehensive ‘5G: Great risk for EU, U.S. and International Health! Compelling Evidence for Eight Distinct Types of Great Harm Caused by Electromagnetic Field (EMF) Exposures and the Mechanism that Causes Them’ (May 2018), https://www.emfdata.org/en/documentations/detail&id=243
29 Excerpt from The Way of Life: Lao-Tzu, trans. Raymond. B. Blakney translation copyright © 1955 by Raymond B. Blakney. Used by permission of New American Library, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. (New York, NY: Signet Classics, 2007), No. 21.
30 For more on this topic, see Melinda Powell, ‘Metaphoric Presence in Dreams’ in Dreams: Understanding Biology, Psychology, and Culture, Vol. 2, 628–633.
Chapter Nine – Nightmares: From Fear to Freedom
1 The Holy Bible, NIV ® Proverbs 3:24
2 See Michael Schredl, ‘Typical Dream Themes’ in Katja Valli and Robert J. Hoss (eds), Dreams: Understanding Biology, Psychology and Culture, Vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO LLC, 2019), 180–188. Schredl notes that although people commonly report these themes, studies of actual dream accounts show that the theme of being chased actually appears in only 4 to 11 per cent of dreams, and that of falling significantly less. So, although these themes appear less often in dream accounts, people report these types of dreams more readily. This may be because dream scenarios that seemingly pose a direct threat to our existence leave a deep impression and so are more easily remembered.
3 See Andréanne Rousseau and Geneviève Belleville, ‘The Mechanisms of Action Underlying the Efficacy of Psychological Nightmare Treatments: A Systematic Review and Thematic Analysis of Discussed Hypotheses’, Sleep Medicine Review, 39 (2018): 122–133, doi: 10.1016/j.smrv.2017.08.004
4 Snorre Sturlason, Heimskringla; or, the Lives of the Norse Kings, edited with notes by Erling Monsen and translated into English with the assistance of A. H. Smith (New York, NY: Dover Publications Inc., 1990), 9. This tale is cited in a delightful collection of folk legends and traditions compiled by the folklorist Dee L. Ashliman, former Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Pittsburgh, https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/nightmare.html#kuhn2 (last updated May 2005)
5 Ibid., 9.
6 See Ahmed S. BaHammam, Sohaila A. Al-Shimemeri, Reda I. Salama and Munir M. Sharif, ‘Clinical and Polysomnographic Characteristics and Response to Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Therapy in Obstructive Sleep Apnea Patients with Nightmares’, Sleep Medicine, 14, No. 2 (2013): 149–154, doi: 10.1016/j.sleep.2012.07.007. Sleep apnoea can be treated using continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy and other medical interventions. See your doctor if you think you may have this condition. You can obtain more information about this condition at https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/sleep-apnea/symptoms-causes/syc-20377631
7 For a moving and informative description of nightmares associated with various parasomnias, see Leschziner, The Nocturnal Brain.
8 See Virginie Sterpenich, Lampros Perogamvros, Giulio Tononi and Sophie Schwartz, ‘Experiencing Fear in Dreams Relates to Brain Response to Aversive Stimuli During Wakefulness’, Sleep Medicine, 40 Supplement 1 (December 2017): pE259, doi.org/10.1016/j.sleep.2017.11.759 and also the authors’ full treatment of this topic in ‘Fear in Dreams and in Wakefulness: Evidence for Day/Night Affective Homeostasis’, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, bioRxiv preprint, posted online 29 January 2019, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/534099
9 Quoted in ‘Bad dreams “help to control fear when awake”’ by Sean Coughlan, BBC, 27 November 2019, Family and Education, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-50563835
10 Plato, Phaedo, in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds), The Collected Dialogues, Including the Letters, Bollingen Series LXXI, 6th edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 67e, 50.
11 For a collection of similar dream reports in a hospice setting, see Derek Doyle, The Platform Ticket: Memories and Musings of a Hospice Doctor (Bakewell, DE: The Pentland Press, Ltd., 1999). See also Jeanne van Bronkhorst’s Dreams at the Threshold (Woodbury, MI: Llewellyn Publications, 2015).
12 See Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Truth in the Light: An Investigation of over 300 Near-Death Experiences (London: Headline Book Publishing, 1995), 3, 129–140.
13 In a television interview hosted by the BBC’s John Freeman on 22 October 1959, Freeman asked Jung, ‘Do you believe in God?’ After some reflection, Jung replied, ‘I don’t need to believe; I know.’ Later, in a reply to one Valentine Brooke, Jung elaborated on his controversial comment: ‘When I say that I don’t need to believe in God because I “know”, I mean I know of the existence of God-images in general and in particular. I know it is a matter of universal experience and, in so far as I am no exception, I know that I have such experience also, which I call God.’ In Letters, Vol. 2, 16 November 1959, ‘Letter to Valentine Brooke’, footnote No. 2, 520–523.
14 See, for example, Martin Ott, Vladimir Gogvadze, Sten Orrenius and Boris Zhivotovsky, ‘Mitochondria, Oxidative Stress and Cell Death’, Apoptosis, 12 (2007): 913–922, doi: 10.1007/s10495-007-0756-2
15 One million centimetres rounds up to 33,000 feet.
16 For an accessible summary of alchemical principles and operations as they relate to psychotherapeutic processes, see Edward F. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy (Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1994).
17 Roberto Assagioli, The Act of Will (New York, NY: Penguin Group, 1973), 106–122.
18 In his summary of Assagioli’s teachings, Mark Thurston uses the following terms to refer to the stages of will outlined in this chapter: 1) Negating Will, 2) Skilful Will, 3) Empowering Will and 4) Transpersonal Will. See Mark Thurston, Willing to Change: The Journey of Personal Transformation (Rancho Mirage, CA: We Publish Books, 2005).
19 Charlotte Beradt, ‘Dreams Under Dictatorship’, Free World (October 1943): 333–337, https://www.museumofdreams.org/third-reich-of-dreams
20 Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation, 1933–1939 (Great Britain: The Aquarian Press, Thorsons Publishing Group, 1985). I would like to thank Robin Shohet for both preserving this important work by bringing it back into circulation through re-publication in 1985 and for introducing me to it some years ago.
21 Ibid., 9.
22 Ibid., 61.
23 For the complete dream, see Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams, 100–103.
24 Ibid., 169. For a compelling study of dreams as vehicles for political action, see Sharon Sliwinski’s, Dreaming in Dark Times: Six Exercises in Political Thought (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Also, see Kelly Bulkeley’s ‘199 Dreams about Donald Trump’ for an overview of social dreaming about a President of the United States, Huff’s Post, 26 April 2017, www.huffpost.com. You can contribute your own dream at Bulkeley’s website at www.idreamoftrump.net.
25 This translation is from B. K. S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, I.2 (London: Thonsons, 1996), 45–46.
26 In a novel study on how the brain perceives beauty across the four senses of sight, sound, taste and smell, researchers undertook a meta-analysis of 93 neuroimaging studies. They found that during wakefulness the right anterior insula of the brain, which activates when we are fearful, also becomes stimulated when we perceive beauty. Given that the right anterior insula is normally associated with instinctual aversion to stimuli, no one had foreseen that this area of the brain would become active. Puzzled, the research team investigated further and found that when responding to beauty, the insula works in tandem with the orbital frontal cortex. This part of the brain ‘lights up’ when we express empathy and receive positive re-enforcement, thus producing a positive emotional response. This research suggests that the insula also plays a part in recognising what does us (and others) good, such as beauty, and, as my dream experience suggests, may help us overcome fear. See Steven Brown, Gao Xiaoqing et al., ‘Naturalizing Aesthetics: Brain Areas for Aesthetic Appraisal across Sensory Modalities’ in NeuroImage, 58, No. 1 (1 September 2011): 250–258, doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.06.012
27 Neurological studies show that gestures made in waking life precede conscious thought, as happened in my dream: the action of kneeling and bowing my head were prompted by a visceral response to the realisation of Beauty. See the section ‘The Primacy of the Unconscious Will’ in McGilchrist, The Master, 186–191.
28 Research on the use of lucid dreaming as a therapeutic intervention for treating nightmares has suggested that directly facing a threatening situation accelerates the reduction of nightmare frequency more quickly than traditional therapeutic methods. See Brigitte Holzinger, Gerhard Klösch and B. Saletu, ‘Studies with Lucid Dreaming as Add-On Therapy to Gestalt Therapy’, Acta Neurologica Scandinavica, 131 (2015): 355–363, doi: 10.1111/ane.12362
29 Krakow, ‘Imagery Rehearsal Therapy’, 544.
30 See Jaap Lancee, Victor Spoormaker and Jan Van Den Bout, ‘Nightmare Frequency is Associated with Subjective Sleep Quality but not with Psychopathology’, Sleep and Biological Rhythms, 8 (2010): 187–193, doi. org/10.1111/j.1479-8425.2010.00447.x. Cited in Annika Gieselmann et al., ‘Aetiology and Treatment of Nightmare Disorder: State of the Art and Future Perspectives’, Journal of Sleep Research (July 2018): 7, doi: 10.1111/jsr.12820
Chapter Ten – Journeys into the Deep: Lucid Dreaming and Lucid Surrender
1 Aristotle, De Somniis (On Dreams) in J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross (eds), The Works of Aristotle Parva Naturalia, trans. J. I. Beare (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1908), 462a.
2 In using the word ‘essence’, I have in mind a point made by Sarah Young regarding dreams in her article entitled, ‘“Everything Is What It Is and Not Something Else”: A Response to Professor Gion Condrau’: ‘Phenomenological investigation of the dreaming state should perhaps be regarded as an attempt at revealing the essence of dream phenomena and arriving at a correct interpretation, while accepting that this is not a possibility.’ In the Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, eds. Ernesto Spinelli, Alessandra Lemma and Simon Du Plock (July 1993): 16. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Sarah, a colleague and friend, for always bringing me back to the teachings of Médard Boss and his faithfulness to apprehending the direct essence of the dream.
3 Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1992), 67.
4 See Ursula Voss et al., ‘Lucid Dreaming: A State of Consciousness with Features of Both Waking and Non-Lucid Dreaming’, Sleep, 32, No. 9 (1 September 2009): 1191–1200, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2737577/; and J. Allan Hobson ‘The Neurobiology of Consciousness: Lucid Dreaming Wakes Up’, The International Journal of Dream Research, 2, No. 2 (October 2009): 41–44.
5 Voss et al., ‘Lucid Dreaming’, 1191. Following on from Voss’s research, in 2012 the presence of 40Hz brainwave frequency in lucid dreaming was further confirmed using EEG and fMRI scans by Martin Dresler et al., ‘Neural Correlates of Dream Lucidity Obtained from Contrasting Lucid versus Non-Lucid REM Sleep: A Combined EEG/fMRI Case Study’, Sleep, 35, No. 7 (2012): 1017–1020, http://dx.doi.org/10.5665/sleep.1974
6 See Elisa Filevich, Martin Dresler, Timothy R. Brick and Simone Kuhn, ‘Metacognitive Mechanisms Underlying Lucid Dreaming’, The Journal of Neuroscience, 35, No. 3 (21 January 2015): 1082–1088, doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3342-14.2015
7 See James F. Pagel, ‘The Synchronous Electrophysiology of Conscious States’, Dreaming, 22, No. 3 (2012): 179, doi: 10.1037/a0029659
8 Voss and Hobson, ‘What is the State-of-the-Art on Lucid Dreaming? – Recent Advances and Further Questions’ in Open MIND, eds. Thomas Metzinger and Jennifer M. Windt (Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group, 2015): 4, doi: 10.15502/9783958570306
9 Ibid., 9–10.
10 For a thought-provoking presentation on using a ‘virtual reality’ as a model for understanding the relationship between dreaming and the waking state, see Hobson et. al., ‘Virtual Reality and Consciousness Inference in Dreaming’, 2014: 1–18, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01133
11 An expression used by Dean Radin for his book The Conscious Universe: The Truth of Psychic Phenomena (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne Publishers, 1997).
12 For a paper at the vanguard of studies on this topic, see Ed Kellogg, ‘The Lucidity Continuum’, presented at the Eighth Annual Conference of the Lucidity Association, Santa Cruz, 28 June 1992, http://www.driccpe.org.uk/portfolio-view/the-lucidity-continuum-ed-kellogg
13 For an article on creative writing and lucid dreaming, see Clare Johnson, ‘Magic, Meditation and the Void: Creative Dimension of Lucid Dreaming’ in Kelly Bulkeley and Ryan Hurd (eds), Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep, Vol. 2 (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2014), 61–64.
14 See Melanie Schädlich and Daniel Erlacher, ‘Lucid Music – A Pilot Study Exploring Experiences and Potentials of Music-Making in Lucid Dreams’, Dreaming, 28, No. 3 (September 2018): 276–286, doi: 10.1037/drm0000073
15 As an example of sports psychology in lucid dreaming, see Tadas Stumbrys, Daniel Erlacher and Michael Schredl, ‘Effectiveness of Motor Practice in Lucid Dreams: A Comparison with Physical and Mental Practice’, Journal of Sports Sciences, 34, No. 1 (April 2015): 27–34, https://doi.org/10.1080/02640414.2015.1030342. See also Daniel Erlacher and Michael Schredl, ‘Practicing a Motor Task in a Lucid Dream Enhances Subsequent Performance: A Pilot Study’, The Sport Psychologist, 24, No. 2 (2010): 157–167, doi: 10.1123/tsp.24.2.157. See also Melanie Schädlich, Daniel Erlacher and Michael Schredl, ‘Improvement of Darts Performance Following Lucid Dream Practice Depends on the Number of Distractions While Rehearsing within the Dream – A Sleep Laboratory Pilot Study’, Journal of Sports Sciences, 35, No. 23 (2017): 2365–2372, doi: 10.1080/02640414.2016.1267387
16 See LaBerge et. al., ‘Lucid Dreaming Verified by Volitional Communication in REM Dreaming’, 1981 and Hearne, ‘Lucid Dreams’, 1978.
17 For an introduction to the range of experiences within the lucid state, see Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (New York, NY: Ballantine Books 1990), and Robert Waggoner, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self (Needham, MA: Moment Point Press Inc., 2009).
18 To obtain these statistics, David T. Saunders et al. undertook a meta-analysis of numerous lucid dreaming studies on lucid dreaming prevalence and frequency. See David T. Saunders, Chris Roe, Graham Smith and Helen Clegg, ‘Lucid Dreaming Incidence: A Quality Effects Meta-Analysis of 50 Years of Research’, Consciousness and Cognition, 43 (2016): 210, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.06.002
19 Interestingly, using electrical stimulation on the brain, Voss et. al. report having had some success inducing lucid dreams at 40Hz. A 25Hz stimulus also succeeded in inducing lucidity. However, such dreams were associated with control over the dream plot, whereas this was not the case in lucid dreams at 40Hz. Much remains to be learned about how the different frequencies manifest in dreams, how they are experienced by the dreamer, and the types of cognition evident in each. Voss et al., ‘What is the State-of-the-Art in Lucid Dreaming?’, 14.
20 Researchers drew this conclusion from reviewing 35 studies on lucid dream induction. See Tadas Stumbrys, Daniel Erlacher, Melanie Schädlich and Michael Schredl, ‘Induction of Lucid Dreams: A Systematic Review of Evidence’, Consciousness and Cognition, 21 (2012): 1473, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2012.07.003
21 This conclusion is based on the survey results of 386 lucid dreamers. See Tadas Stumbrys, Daniel Erlacher and Peter Malinowski, ‘Meta-Awareness During Day and Night: The Relationship Between Mindfulness and Lucid Dreaming’, Imagination, Cognition and Personality: Consciousness in Theory, Research, and Clinical Practice, 34, No. 4 (2015): 415, doi: 10.1177/0276236615572594
22 An allusion to the alchemical precept from ‘Emblem XLII’ in H. M. E. de Jong, Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens: Sources of an Alchemical Book of Emblems (York Beach, ME: Nicolas-Hays Inc., 2002), 266.
23 In an online survey of 301 lucid dreamers, 81 per cent reported ‘having fun’ as the main application of their lucid dreaming. See Melanie Schädlich and Daniel Erlacher, ‘Applications of Lucid Dreams: An Online Study’, International Journal of Dream Research, 5, No. 2 (2012): 134–138.
24 For one of the few studies on lucid dreaming and personal development, see Karen Konkoly and Christopher T. Burke, ‘Can Learning to Lucid Dream Promote Personal Growth?’, Dreaming, 29, No. 2 (June 2019): 113–126, doi: 10.1037/drm0000101. The researchers note that participants who were better adjusted to begin with experienced more personal growth as a result of their lucid dreams, and those who had lucid dreams more frequently reported more satisfaction with their lives.
25 From a hadith or teaching of the Prophet Mohammed cited in Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabī, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 114.
26 Stephen LaBerge, Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life (Boulder, CO: Sounds True Inc., 2004, 2009), 65.
27 For examples of research into this type of lucid dreaming, see Fariba Bogzaran, ‘Hyperspace Lucidity, and Creative Consciousness’ in Kelly Bulkeley and Ryan Hurd (eds), Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep, Vol. 2 (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2014), 209–231. See also Ted Esser’s fascinating summary of his research on ‘Kundalini and Non-Duality in the Lucid Dreaming State’ in the same volume, 233–263. Ryan Hurd has explored ‘Spontaneous Emergence: A Phenomenology of Lucid Dreaming’ (Master’s thesis, R. D. Hurd, 2008), http://www.driccpe.org.uk/?s=hurd. For seminal work on light in lucid dreaming, see Scott Sparrow, Lucid Dreaming: Dawning of the Clear Light (Virginia Beach, VA: Edgar Cayce Foundation, 1976) and George Gillespie, ‘Light and Lucid Dreams: A Review’ in Dreaming, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1992): 167–179, which provides an overview of his findings. Gillespie has recently published a personal account of his lucid experiences, Seeing: Beyond Dreaming to Religious Experiences of Light (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2019). Further, for a dynamic, personal exploration of ecstatic lucid experiences, see Patricia Garfield, Pathways to Ecstasy: The Way of the Dream Mandala (New York, NY: Prentice Hall Press, 1979).
28 This teaching has been a touchstone for me in relation to dreams and waking life. Gibran, The Prophet, 1951.
29 Cited in Chittick, Imaginal Worlds, 27.
30 I have written many articles about Lucid Surrender for the Lucid Dream Exchange (www.dreaminglucid.com) under my maiden name of Ziemer. I have also published a book chapter on the subject from a Jungian perspective, entitled ‘Lucid Surrender and the Alchemical Coniunctio’, in Ryan Hurd and Kelly Bulkeley (eds), Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep, Vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2015), 145–146. I look forward to publishing a more detailed book on the experience of Lucid Surrender in the near future.
31 Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufiism, 105. From a hadith or teaching of the Prophet Mohammed.
32 Hadrat Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, The Secret of Secrets, interpreted by Shaykh Tosun Bayrak al-Jerrahi al-Halveti (The Islamic Texts Society: Cambridge, UK, 2010), 56.
33 A quote from Andrew Powell’s The Ways of the Soul, xvii.
Epilogue: For a World in Need of Dreams
1 From the title of Mark Thurston’s book, Dreams: Tonight’s Answers for Tomorrow’s Questions, on the teachings of Edgar Cayce, ed. Charles Thomas Cayce (New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 1996).
2 Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys, 50th Anniversary Edition (London: Pan Books, 2009), 402.
3 See Stephen Emmet’s powerful 10 Billion (London: Penguin Press Classics, 2008), and David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future (London: Penguin Random House, UK, 2019).
4 For a compilation of time-lapse films tracking environmental changes, see the collection by the scientist Johnathan Hester, ‘Before Our Eyes: Evidence of the Changing Earth We Can See’, accessed 4 October 2019, http://www.rescuethatfrog.com/before-our-eyes/#BOE-13
5 For a positive exhortation to action, be inspired by Greta Thunberg’s No One is Too Small to Make a Difference (London: Penguin Random House UK, 2018–2019).
6 The Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre archive, Account 000128.