The three pillars, career paths and creativity
Now that you’re beginning to ‘see beyond the well’, dream deeply and spot your dream signs, you’re probably becoming aware of just how bizarre your dream world can be. The most important thing to remember is that whatever comes up in your dreams is totally okay, and that whatever dream content you bear witness to is fine, just as it is.
Scary dreams, sexy dreams and violent dreams are all simply expressions of the dreaming mind and should not be judged on the basis of our waking-state sensibilities. This attitude of non-judgemental openness forms the basis of the way I teach lucid dreaming at my workshops, and also of my ‘three pillars’ approach.
I’ve taught thousands of people lucid dreaming, and through observing them I’ve come to realize there are three main qualities that lead to a balanced, beneficial and fruitful lucid dreaming practice. Engagement of these qualities is what separates the tourists from the travellers: those who lucid dream just for the scenery and those who do it to discover new realms of possibility. These qualities are acceptance, friendliness and kindness: the three pillars of lucidity practice.
Once we become aware of our dreams we need to accept that everything we’re experiencing, or at least 99 per cent of it, is part of our own mind. However disturbed, violent or dark the contents of the dream may seem, we must try to understand that it’s just part of our own oceanic psyche and simply wants to be seen. The unconscious mind wants us to bear witness to it, but to do that we have to drop the notion that the dream is somehow separate from us.
When people find something ‘bad’ or unpleasant in their dreams, lucid or otherwise, they often think that it’s their duty to try and change it, or ‘put it right’. This is unwise and unnecessary, because simply by bearing witness to these disowned aspects of our unconscious we allow repressed parts of our psyche to become integrated naturally. It’s just as the great Indian spiritual teacher Krishnamurti once said, ‘The seeing is the doing.’ But this is dependent upon accepting whatever is seen to be part of us.
I spoke to mindfulness expert Rob Nairn about this recently, and he told me that ‘the conditions for change are created instantaneously by acceptance, whereas non-acceptance creates internal struggle and psychological conflict because we’re literally fighting our Self’. He added that ‘the psychological force of seeing is all we need to do to have insights. We need do nothing more than bear witness to the mind’s display with acceptance.’1
It’s important to say that the use of the word ‘acceptance’ here doesn’t mean the approval or endorsement of negative mind states or situations. Acceptance is a quality of mind that is a prerequisite to engaging compassionately a situation and being able to work with it.
I’ve met some dreamers who believe that dark external forces are entering their lucid dreams when in fact they’re simply meeting their own ‘shadow’ – an amazing opportunity for lucid dream integration so often lost through a basic lack of acceptance. We’ll explore shadow integration fully in the next chapter.
Once we accept that 99% of everything we’re experiencing in the lucid dream is part of our own psyche, we can then engage the second pillar of our practice: friendliness. This means unconditional friendliness towards all situations within the dream, good and bad. Friendliness towards ourselves, friendliness towards the dream characters, towards seemingly ‘negative’ manifestations and positive ones. Having an attitude of friendliness will open up a whole vista of the dream once hidden from view.
The Tibetan Buddhist master Mingyur Rinpoche says: ‘If you reject a negative mental emotion it will become your enemy, but if you indulge it then it becomes the boss of you. So what do we do with a negative emotion? What’s the best method? Face it, make friends with it!’ So it is with our lucid dreams. If we accept that almost everything in the dream is us, then why would we ever not be friendly to it?
And finally, the third pillar of a stable lucid dreaming practice is kindness. Be kind to everything in the lucid dream, for it’s all you. Well, 99 per cent of it is you. And what about that crucial 1 per cent that might be something other than your own mind? More about that later, but until then, be kind to that too. As the Dalai Lama famously said: ‘Be kind wherever possible. It is always possible.’
By cultivating these three mental attitudes of acceptance, friendliness and kindness as part of our lucid dream training, they become three pillars, holding up the entire structure of our lucid dream practice and providing shelter from the winds of dualistic superstition that so often blow through our waking mind.
Another aspect of mind that many people are unwilling to accept as theirs is that of their inner creative genius. Through lucid dreaming we can get to know this genius on its home turf.
The lucid dream state is a great place to get creative, as it offers us ‘direct contact to the remarkable creative reserves of the human mind’.2 But how does this work? Well, our dreams are powered almost exclusively by the right hemisphere of the brain, which specializes in creativity, imagination and non-linear thought processing. Neurologists tell us that the right hemisphere is ‘by its design, spontaneous and imaginative… [a place in which] our artistic juices flow freely without inhibition or judgement’.3
Often, however, our lack of awareness in dreams means that we miss out on the creative potential that our dreaming mind offers. If only we could tap into that creative genius in real time. Once we become lucid though, we can. Lucidity brings a strand of left-brain cognizance into the dream, meaning that we can intentionally engage the dream’s right- brain creativity.
All this makes the lucid dream state the perfect place for reflecting on life choices and asking for creative advice from the unconscious mind. From a Tibetan Buddhist point of view once we’re lucid we’re actually closer to our fully enlightened nature than while we’re awake, meaning that any creative endeavours we engage in while lucid might offer a depth of perspective unmatched by waking-state rumination. For more information about tapping into the enlightened potential of the lucid dreaming mind, check out my first book Dreams of Awakening.
The unconscious mind sees much more than we do, and so it has much larger resources of knowledge from which to offer solutions to our daily life challenges. What career path should I take? How can I be of most benefit to those around me? How would that character in my new book feel in this situation? These are just some of the creative questions we can explore within the infinite originality of the lucid dream state.
One woman who knows more about creative lucid dreaming than most is British author Dr Clare Johnson, who wrote a PhD on the link between lucid dreaming and the creative process. Clare used her lucid dreams to take on the personas of characters in the novel she was writing – as a way to experience their thoughts and feelings.
She has also asked her unconscious mind to help with plot revisions in her books, and has even used the lucid dream state to win the famous ‘Dream Telepathy Contest’ at the International Association of the Study of Dreams annual congress. Let’s hear some of her top tips for dream creativity.
A balance between the unconscious and the conscious is recognized as the brain state where creative thinking happens, whether we’re awake or asleep. In a lucid dream you can consciously experience the mesmeric cinema of your unconscious at play, so simply watching your ‘dream film’ and seeing how it responds to your thoughts and emotions is a stimulating artistic resource. You can bring weird and wonderful images, plotlines and adventures back to the waking state and turn them into art and stories.
Nudging the lucid dream can trigger a specific creative reaction. Decide to find a magic box full of ideas or ‘things never created before’, ask the dream for help with a project, or walk into an art gallery intending to see a painting you love and then memorize every detail until you wake up. Expectation and intent are powerful forces in lucid dreaming: if lucidity is stable and you fully expect to receive creative inspiration, you will.
In lucid dreams it’s easy to do this as you’re in the wild, original world of the unconscious where the critical self has much less of a voice. So draw on the natural creativity of lucid dreaming to perfect your snowboarding in a replica of the waking world, or practise a new art form.
Try glass-blowing, sculpting, singing in the voice of an opera singer or swooping and twirling through a dance sequence. There are no limits! Lucid dreaming can expand your life experience and give you the confidence to experiment with new art forms in waking life.
Associative thinking and creative problem-solving can reach great heights in lucid dreams. Ask the dream directly for help and you may find a voice booms an answer, or you’ll be shown a scene or an image that answers your question. If nothing happens, open a door and expect to find the answer behind it. Lucid dreamers have received creative help in everything from computer programming and video-game design to health issues and relationships.
Here’s my Lucid Writing Technique: close your eyes, bring your attention to your breath, and relax into a light trance. Then focus on a lucid dream image and allow it to move and transform in your mind’s eye. You can guide this mental imagery if you want, or just see what happens.
When you feel ready, open your eyes slightly, just enough to be able to write down what you see. Write as fast as you can, without thinking critically. Let the writing go wherever it wants to go. Lucid Writing can trigger new ideas, dissolve artistic blocks and resolve nightmares, and it’s a fun way of exploring the creative energy of lucid dreams.
Dr Clare Johnson’s novels, Breathing in Colour and Dreamrunner, are both lucid dream-inspired. Visit www.clarejay.com for more information about her work.
The Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson had a novel approach to dealing with writer’s block. He would ask specifically for a dream containing the essence of his next story. On one such occasion he dreamed a dream that would provide the basis of his famous Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.4
The enlightened knowledge that we all possess can often seem quite inaccessible in the waking state, but through lucid dreaming we can reach it much more easily, and perhaps even access the transpersonal collective wisdom which lies beyond the dream.
It seems that, in a lucid dream, when we ask a dream character a question we’re asking it of the tiny aspect of our psyche that particular dream character represents. This means that the answer we get will be inherently limited. But if we ask the dream itself (by calling the question out to the sky or any other open space in the dream) then the answer may be sourced from a far broader and more powerful aspect of our dreaming mind.
I encourage you to trust the wisdom of your own unconscious. Not blindly, of course – for we need to be sure that we don’t interpret the often symbolic language of the unconscious too literally – but we can still learn to heed its advice because once we’re lucid it’s not ‘just a dream’, it’s communication with our inner wisdom.
So, if there’s a certain issue or non-beneficial mind pattern that’s holding you back in your waking state, you can choose to explore creatively that issue within the safety of your own dream. You can even go into the lucid dream state and make a request such as, ‘What shall I do with my career?’, as the subject of our next case study did, with life-changing results.
Dreamer: Nina, UK
Age: 29
The lowdown from Nina: ‘I was really stuck for what to do, career-wise. I felt as if I was just stagnating in my job as a dance teacher – although I enjoyed it, I felt it wasn’t really challenging me every day. I’d had quite a few dreams in which I’d become lucid and would ask the dream, “What shall I do with my career?” Often nothing would really happen, but I stuck with it and after the third time of asking I got a really big answer.’
Nina’s dream report: ‘I was dreaming that I was in my bedroom. I looked out of the window, saw that it looked different and then I became lucid. I flew out of the window and asked the dream, “What should I do, career-wise?” Then I floated down the building and looked through the window into a room. In there, I could see a very clear image of me sitting on the floor, surrounded by books and reading to young children. Then I woke up. I felt a bit confused as to what the lucid dream signified, but I took it to mean I should work with children.
‘In light of that dream, I started to apply for various roles working with children, but I didn’t get anywhere with it. Then, a few weeks later, I randomly saw a teaching role come up in a primary school near my home. It wasn’t with the kind of youngsters that I’d seen in the dream, but it was still a job working with children, so I applied for it.
‘The night before the interview, I had another lucid dream. Once lucid I called out to the dream: “Shall I do this job?” Suddenly, in the sky above me, the stars rearranged themselves into a constellation that clearly spelled out the word “yes”. I then called out to the dream, “Can you help me to get the job please?”, to which the stars rearranged again to form the words “Yes, millions.” It was amazing! And then I woke up.’
Life since the dream: ‘The next day I went to the interview and was told that the job I had applied for was already taken but one with young children had just become available. I applied for that one instead and ended up getting the job. I love my new role and it all makes sense now. I spend my days sitting on the floor surrounded by books and reading to young children, just as I’d seen myself doing in my lucid dream.’
When Nina emailed me this dream, I was moved to tears. Not only was it such a powerful example of how the unconscious often sees much further and much more clearly than our conscious mind does, but it also resonated with a dream of my own in which I, too, asked my unconscious what I should do with my life. It told me to trust in myself, take a leap of faith and have the confidence to follow my passion for lucid dreaming. I did just that. Lucid dreaming really can make your dreams come true.
So, now that we’re beginning to see just how life-changing and creative lucid dreams can be, this seems like a great time to get back to the toolshed and learn some of the most powerful techniques for inducing them: reality checks, the Weird technique and the Columbo method!
TOOLBOX 3: LOOKING CLOSELYBecoming lucid in our dreams is a training based primarily on recognition: recognizing that what we thought was real-life is in fact a dream. As part of our training in recognition we need to start looking closely in both our dream and waking lives…
This next section is where some of you might think I’m one spanner short of a toolbox. Then I give you the full explanation and you think I’m a little less crazy, but still crazy. Then you have a dream in which you experience what I’m about to tell you, and you email me at 4 a.m. saying: ‘You’re not crazy! I saw my hand change!’ Let me explain…
One of the most common entries into a lucid dream is simply spotting a dream sign and becoming lucid. But sometimes, even though you’ve spotted a dream sign and are sure that you must be dreaming, the rest of the dream looks so realistic that you simply can’t accept that you’re in a dream. This is when you need something called reality checks.
Dr Stephen LaBerge and the researchers at the Lucidity Institute in California have scientifically verified that there are certain things that are virtually impossible for the human mind to replicate consistently within the pre-lucid dream state (the state just before you’re lucid), and so these can be used to confirm reliably whether or not you’re dreaming. Reality checks will almost always be performed in the pre-lucid dream state, because if you’re conscious enough to think, I should do a reality check, then you’re often almost lucid already.
There are lots of different reality checks, but I’ll take you through some of my favourites:
During a dream, the brain is working flat out to maintain the projection of our elaborately detailed dreamscape in real time, and although it’s amazingly good at this, once pre-lucid it often struggles to replicate the detail of an intricate image (such as a piece of text or an outstretched hand) twice in quick succession. So, if we try to make it engage in such a replication, it will provide a close but imperfect rendering, and it’s the acknowledgement of this imperfect rendering that makes us lucidly aware.
Let’s explore those three reality checks in more depth:
If you think you might be dreaming, but you’re not 100 per cent sure, look at your outstretched hand within the dream, then quickly look away and look back at it again. Alternatively, watch your hand as you flip it over and back again. Either way, your brain will usually struggle to reproduce an identical projection of your hand, so on second glance it may be a strange shape, perhaps missing a finger or two, or look dappled or transformed.
When you look at your hand twice in a row the dreaming brain tries its best to reproduce exactly the same image, but it doesn’t quite have the processing speed to do so perfectly. The variations are multiple, but the result is singular: if you really expect your hand to change, it will change.
I know the hand-checking thing can sometimes be a bit hard to imagine, so let me break it down for you:
Within a pre-lucid dream it’s virtually impossible to read any text coherently twice in succession. LaBerge’s research laboratory found that in lucid dreams text changed 75 per cent of the time as the dreamer was reading it and 95 per cent of the time on second reading.5
So, you’re in a dream and you think you might be dreaming, try to read something. The text will often be unintelligible, move around as you’re reading it, or in some cases just fade away altogether. All these are signs that you’re dreaming.
Just as the mind struggles to reproduce text, so it also struggles with the highly detailed screen of a smartphone or a computer, which will often seem blurred and transformed in a pre-lucid dream as the dreaming mind struggles to project it accurately.
I know it sounds crazy, but it’s often impossible to read a digital watch, successfully operate any form of digital or electrical appliance or switch a light on and off. This works on the principle that if you flick a light switch within a dream you’re asking the dreaming mind to project an exact replication of the dreamscape but in a totally different light and shadow setting, literally at the flick of a switch. This is something that it finds almost impossible to do.
Remember: If you think you might be dreaming but want to be 100 per cent sure (before you try to fly through the sky) look at anything with a detailed pattern – such as your hand – twice in a row and if it changes you’ll know for sure that you’re definitely dreaming.
Although opportunities for reality checks will often crop up in your dreams naturally, they’re usually only engaged once you spot a dream sign and need confirmation of your present reality. You can, however, actively hasten the process by getting into the habit of conducting reality checks while you’re awake. This is the basis of the Weird technique – a deceptively simple method through which I have the majority of my lucid dreams. Here’s how to do it:
Whenever you see something weird or unexpected in your daily life take a moment to think, That’s weird, could I be dreaming right now? Then perform a reality check and, as long as your hand doesn’t grow an extra finger or morph into a baby elephant, you can be sure that you’re definitely not dreaming. This sets up a habit that’ll crop up in your dreams too, but in your dreams the hand will change and you will become lucid.
Let me elucidate further with an amusing example. A rather weird-looking friend of mine, a Buddhist monk, was at an interfaith conference recently and a young lucid dreamer took one look at him (in his weird robes, with his weird shaved head, and his weird inner calm) and then did a reality check by looking at his hand, flipping it over and back again.
My monk friend – who knows all about lucid dreaming and the Weird technique – thought to himself, That’s weird, I’ve just been reality checked and then proceeded to do a similar reality check to make sure that he wasn’t dreaming! Weird, eh?
Lucid dreaming specialist Daniel Love has calculated that ‘11 per cent of our mental experience each day is spent dreaming’. He says, ‘Just to clarify, this is not 11 per cent of sleeping activity but 11 per cent of your entire daily experience each and every day.’6 This means that every time we apply the Weird technique we have around a one in 10 chance that we’ll actually be dreaming.
No reality check technique works 100 per cent of the time, and not every dream is full of obvious dream signs, so what can you do if your hand doesn’t change but you’re still sure you’re dreaming? How can you spot a dream sign if the dreamscape is seemingly devoid of them? Well, you can bring out your notepad, scrunch up one eye and say, ‘And one more thing…’
Think back, if you can, to the 70s TV homicide detective named Lieutenant Columbo. This guy didn’t have flashy forensics, he just possessed a sharp mind that took in every detail of the environment while checking the facts and looking closely. That’s just how we need to be if we want to solve the mystery of the lucid dream.
The Columbo Method is fundamentally based on looking closely. Here’s how to do it:
The primary mystery we’re attempting to solve is the question, ‘Am I dreaming?’, but this is an ongoing adventure with many other avenues to explore. We must attempt to stay lucid in every area of our life – both waking and dreaming – if we are truly to solve the mystery.
As any detective will tell you, to get to the truth of a matter you’ll need to employ certain mental tools. Educate yourself in the skills of awareness, critical thinking, logic, deduction, mindfulness and data gathering, as these should all become part of your detective’s toolkit. As with muscles, the more you exercise these skills, the stronger they will become.
While it’s often easier to accept things at face value, remember this is exactly the kind of lazy thinking that leads to non-lucid dreams. So question what you’re told, question your own assumptions, question the facts, question everything.
Get into the habit of looking for answers and searching for facts. Treat life like a classroom, full of new things to learn. Be prepared to discover new ways of thinking and occasionally to throw out old ideas. As a side effect, you’ll also become a far more interesting person.
As a detective of life, you’ll need a keen eye and a thirst for evidence, as you’ll never be quite sure where the trail of clues will eventually lead. Becoming aware that you’re dreaming is only the tip of the iceberg and, if you choose, it may be the start of an adventure that can open your mind to the kaleidoscopic wonder of the universe.
Daniel Love is the author of Are You Dreaming? Visit www.exploringluciddreams.com for more information about his work.
