Healing, dreams of the dead and lucid living
As this is the final chapter I feel that we’re ready to venture deep into the ocean of wonder and weirdness that surrounds lucid dreaming. But let’s start by dipping our toes into the incredible – but very real – potential of lucid dream healing.
We learned earlier that we can use lucid dreaming to work with nightmarish mental trauma, but now let’s see how we can use it to work with physical trauma too. Just as we can use the ‘total visualization’ of the lucid dream state to heal our minds, let’s now explore how we can use it to heal our bodies. There’s growing evidence (both scientific and anecdotal) to suggest that once we become lucid we can engage physical healing responses while we sleep.
Thousands of people have been helped in their recovery from illness by various types of waking-state visualized healing. One such method involves patients imagining their body’s immune system manifesting in the form of coloured light, which can then heal their diseased cells.
A 2008 study published in the Journal for the Society of Integrative Oncology demonstrated how this type of visualized healing can even help reduce the risk of recurrence of breast cancer. Several other studies have shown that visualized healing can help to reduce stress, enhance the immune system’s effectiveness and lessen pain in many patients.1 However, many of these techniques are limited in that they’re dependent on our ability to visualize – which will vary from person to person.
Lucid dreaming solves this problem because a lucid dream is the most vivid and complete visualization we may ever experience. This means that engaging visualized healing methods within the lucid dream may prove far more effective than in the waking state. The teachings of Tibetan Buddhism agree with this point too, as it’s believed that visualizing in a lucid dream is ‘far more powerful than simply visualizing in the waking state’.2
The esteemed dream researcher Jayne Gackenbach, from Virginia University in the USA, cites examples of lucid dream healing of everything from nicotine addiction and hives to weight loss. There’s an overwhelming body of evidence in Robert Waggoner’s book Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self to corroborate the potential of lucid dream healing too, and Toltec-Mexihca teacher Sergio Magaña has seen his students cure themselves of thyroid disease and nerve damage through lucid dream healing.
Personally, I’ve healed everything from addictive behaviour patterns to ear infections through lucid dreaming and have recently even been able to treat my shortsightedness through similar means. I haven’t worn my glasses for over nine months now.
So how do we heal ourselves once we’re lucid? If you wanted to heal your ear, for example, then once lucid you could apply hands-on healing within the lucid dream (often, white light will flow out of your hands at this point) and call out statements of healing intent such as, ‘My ear is healed, my immune system is boosted!’
If you wanted to send healing to another person, you could simply call out statements of healing intent for them while lucid: ‘May Diana be happy and well! May Diana be free from disease!’, or perhaps even call forth a projection of the person into your dream and then apply hands-on healing directly.
One man believes in the power of lucid dream healing more than most, in part because it helped to cure him of kidney disease.
Dreamer: Bruno, Argentina
Age: 32
The lowdown from Bruno: ‘In late 2011 doctors found I had a kidney disease called chronic renal failure. The diagnosis was that I had to receive a kidney transplant or otherwise I’d need dialysis within a few years. Due to the illness I started to meditate, and through that I discovered lucid dreaming. I can’t say I’m sure that it was only this particular lucid dream that modified the deterioration of my kidneys but it did play a major role. I think the healing was also due to the many insights I received through meditation – I needed to change my perspective towards my kidneys – but then those meditations led me to learn lucid dreaming, so it’s all connected, I guess.
‘When I began to practise lucid dreaming it helped me to appreciate that the self was not as real as I thought it was, and so I realized that the story of me and my illness was unreal too. Letting go of the “poor me” story helped me to release the power of the disease too.’
Bruno’s dream report: ‘It was a short dream, actually. I was walking through an ancient hall of marble and suddenly I became lucid. I felt something hit me from behind and fall to the floor. Instantly I recalled my dream plan: heal my kidneys.
‘Once I was lucid I placed both my hands behind my back, over the area of my kidneys, and I started to radiate healing energy specifically to them. Then I felt what seemed like an electric current moving out of my hand and reaching into my back and kidneys. It felt like a kind of tickling sensation. This lasted about 10 seconds. Then I woke up.’
Life after the dream: ‘The whole process lasted more than a year but I can tell you that after that lucid dream, my kidneys stopped deteriorating and my creatinine level remained around 6.5 – which is stable – for nine months.
‘After the lucid dream I had an insight too: I realized that I don’t have to ask for the kidneys to heal; instead I need to thank them for how well they have worked so far. So I started sending them the energy of “thanks for keeping me alive all this time”, rather than “please heal now that you’re diseased”.
‘I think it was the sum of many things which made the kidneys stop deteriorating; it all started with the reconciliation with my kidneys and my situation, but the lucid dream was the last, vital step.’
Bruno’s experience is inspiring, not only because it’s such a practical example of lucid dream healing but also because he saw that the lucid dream was only part of the process and that a new perspective of ‘lucid living’, which both his meditation and lucid dream training led to, played just as vital a role in the healing process.
At present we’ve barely scratched the surface of the full potential of lucid dream healing, but with future research, and the growing popularity of the subject, I believe that within a few years we may be able to apply it to a much wider range of ailments and perhaps use it as part of the treatment of some of the more serious conditions.
Remember the ocean of weirdness that I promised we’d plunge into? One of the weirdest waves within this ocean of intrigue is something I like to call ‘the other 1 per cent’. I’m not talking about the elite 1 per cent of society here, but rather the elite 1 per cent of your dream which may well be made of something other than you.
I’m a firm believer that the vast majority of everything in our lucid dreams is made up of a projection of our own minds. A reductionist view of this would be that because scientists can now tell us what we’re dreaming about from looking at our brain activity3 (yup, its true, check the references section for more information), the brain plays a part in creating our dreams, meaning that dreaming, and lucid dreaming too, are at least in some part a product of our brain.
Although I believe that the brain is far more a receiver of consciousness rather than a creator of it, I do believe that dreams are predominantly products of our individual psyche. However, there’s a small but crucial portion of our lucid dream experience – maybe 1 per cent, maybe more like 10 per cent, for those who know how to invite it in – that seems to come from something beyond our personal mindstream.
From the thousands of dream reports that I’ve heard, Tibetan Buddhist sources and my own research, it seems that the 1 per cent is primarily made up of universally existing archetypes of the collective unconscious, and from the universal mind which lies beyond that.
As well as this, the 1 per cent can also be made up of the energy, or at least the energetic imprint, of dead relatives to whom we had a strong connection. I know this all sounds pretty far out, but please just do a reality check and bear with me.
Although the vast majority of dead relatives who we meet in our lucid dreams are simply projections of our mind sourced from our memory, this is not the case 100% of the time.
The Buddhist meditation teacher Rob Nairn once speculated that our ancestors may leave a ‘shroud of habitual patterns that survives after death’ – an echo of their energy with which we can sometimes communicate after they’ve died. Communication with the energetic resonance of a dead relative can be difficult from the convincing solidity of the waking state, but if we can enter the more refined and flexible mental space of the lucid dream then it may be much easier.
In fact it seems that once we’re lucid, on rare occasions we can often become a kind of ‘light in the darkness’ to which a recently dead relative might be attracted as they struggle to comprehend their after-death experience. If you do receive contact from a dead relative in a lucid dream then it’s just as important to assure them that they are dead as it is to tell them that they are loved. Until they can accept that they are dead they may not be able to move fully through the after-death process. And even if who you are meeting in the lucid dream is just a projection of your own mind, then it’s still important to say that, too, as a way to allow your own mind to let go of its grief and attachment.
Another slightly less spooky aspect of the 1 per cent is that which is made up of spiritually awakened individuals. It seems that a side effect of full spiritual enlightenment is the capacity to enter other people’s dreams. But how about the rest of us? Is it possible for everyday, ‘non-fully enlightened’ people to enter your lucid dreams too? Yes, but only if you’ve set your intention to let them in. Your lucid dreaming mind is heavily encrypted, much more so than your waking mind in my opinion, so don’t worry about negative entities entering, because the enlightened energy required to be able to enter another’s dream without their knowledge negates the potential of them getting in anyway.
You won’t need to ask. If you experience an aspect of the 1 per cent while you’re lucid you’ll know about it. They’ll feel inherently different to everything else in the dream and have a presence that’s tangibly dissimilar to all the other dream characters.
If a hologram suddenly popped up in front of you now, however realistic-looking it was you’d be able to tell me that it was a hologram, right? How? Because the energy of a hologram is tangibly different to that of a living being. So it is with the 1 per cent in our dreams.
One of my first experiences of the 1 per cent was after a period of misguidedly trying to enslave my unconscious. When I first started teaching lucid dreaming I felt totally out of my depth, I was only 25 years old and I felt as if things were happening much quicker than I’d planned. As a way to compensate for this lack of control I started to assert as much control as I could over my lucid dreams.
One of my favourite tricks was to yell out ‘Stop!’ and to watch the entire lucid dream freeze before me, Matrix style. I would then walk around the dream characters as they were frozen in place and look up at the dream birds, frozen in the sky. I could feel that this put the unconscious under huge tension, but I continued regardless.
One night I was in the middle of a lucid dream, about to yell ‘Freeze!’, when out of nowhere an old Tibetan woman walked into the dream and tapped me on the shoulder. She felt different to anything I’d ever encountered previously in the lucid dream state. She looked at me and said: ‘Stop controlling your dreams. We don’t like it.’ It was me who then froze. I stood in shock as I asked myself, Who the hell is WE?
It seems that the Tibetan woman who entered my lucid dream may have been part of that 1 per cent: a universally existing archetype (the wise woman) of the collective unconscious who’d kindly come to show me the error of my ways. Who the mysterious ‘we’ was that she referred to I still don’t know.
Let’s look now at a fine example of not only the 1 per cent but of how lucid dreaming can be used as a tool for self-reflection and letting go of judgement.
Dreamer: Millie, UK
Age: 32
The lowdown from Millie: ‘My dad died when I was 12 and ever since I learned about lucid dreaming I wondered if it would be possible to meet him in a lucid dream. I couldn’t stop thinking about how amazing it would be to do that now I’m an adult. I wanted to see if he knew about what goes on in our lives and if he approved of it all. I think the approval thing was especially important for me.’
Millie’s dream report: ‘I was just having a normal dream and then I started flying in it. Flying is my dream sign so I knew to do a reality check. I looked at my hand and flipped it over. It went all funny-looking and I became lucid.
‘There was a gap in the sky and I knew that through it was some sort of deeper level of lucid dream, or even maybe a portal to something beyond. It was brighter and I knew that I had to get to it. Then, BAM! I broke through into this new dream space and it was so bright and colourful.
‘Instantly I knew that now was the time to ask to see my dad. Next thing I knew there he was, just standing there with my dog Pip, who passed away years ago too. They were standing outside the community hall near our house, but it all looked a bit different. So there he was, my dad. But it wasn’t like a projection of my dad, or like he was part of the lucid dream, it was as if it was actually my dad. When I saw him we hugged and it felt so real!
‘The first thing I said was, “Dad! You look exactly the same!” The lucidity was really stable and as we walked together we chatted about life and I said to him: “Do you know what we’re all up to, Dad? Do you see us?”
‘“Yes, I know everything that goes on, Millie, and I’m very proud of you all,” he replied with a smile.
‘I didn’t dare ask him about what he thought of my time as a pole dancer, though! I think this might have been one of the main reasons for me to see him, actually. When I first started stripping I always had “What would my dad think of this?” in the back of my mind. Maybe deep down I’ve been searching for some sort of approval from him and that’s what this meeting in the dream was about. He didn’t mind, though – he knew about it and was still proud of me.
‘Then he showed me into a house and told me that he lived there now. It was in a row of houses near our house in real life. We went inside and he had a table ready for dinner out in the garden. He’d always loved eating outside. He’d cooked us paella – his favourite.
‘The lucidity was still so stable and we were sitting outside talking about life and eating and then suddenly it became cloudy, the light changed and I knew it was coming to an end. I felt myself being pulled back to waking reality so I shouted, “Bye, Dad!” before I got sucked out of the dream and woke up in bed.’
Life since the dream: ‘Now I’m thinking about it, as well as it being great to have met my dad again, I’m sure that meeting him in the lucid dream was a way for me to get his blessing on the way I chose to live my life. I know it’s a lifestyle no father would really want his daughter to have, but in the dream he seemed so accepting and wasn’t judgemental at all. He loved me regardless.
‘Anyway, the pole dancing led to the photography career so it was all for the best in the end. It was nice to be able to let go of judgements though, and know that he loves me whatever path I take.’
Millie’s dream is not only a moving example of interaction with the 1 per cent, but also of lucid dream healing, as it allowed her to let go of self-doubt and judgement and to make peace with herself. Also, her father was right to be proud of his daughter, as she is now one of the world’s leading pole-dance photographers. Check out www.millierobson.com to see her work.
As we learnt back in Chapter 1, lucid dreaming is all about making friends. It’s not about manipulating the unconscious or controlling our dreams, it’s about befriending our unconscious and extending the hand of friendship to our inner dreamer. The majority of our potential is stored in the unconscious mind and so if we can make friends with the unconscious we not only step into a creative power as yet untapped but, as I mentioned previously, we also make a very beneficial ally.
Carl Jung believed that the ‘unconscious mind could be experienced as a living, numinous presence, a constant companion’4, and that the pinnacle of psychological completion was to learn how to relate to the unconscious, how to know the unconscious and how to befriend the unconscious. And what’s the best way to do this? Jung was unequivocal: by exploring our dreams.
If you engage dream work with this motivation then every time you write down a dream, every time you become lucid within a dream and every time you even try to become lucid within a dream you’re sending a strong and definite message to your unconscious mind – one that says, ‘I want to know you. I’m interested in what you’re saying. I want to be friends.’
It’s no coincidence that people start to feel more creative, more empowered and more whole when they begin working with their dreams. These are all side effects of making friends with the powerhouse of psychic energy that ‘you’ share your mind with.
This attitude of friendship towards our night-time dreams can be extended to include the shared dream of waking life. If we open ourselves to a sense of curiosity, interest and friendliness to the waking dream we may find that it responds in the same way that our unconscious does: the dream becomes more vivid, more insightful and more lucid.
One of the concepts that I explore in depth in Dreams of Awakening is the concept of ‘lucid living’: being lucid in the big dream – the shared dream of waking life. In a beginner’s guide such as this I’m wary of delving into the subject too deeply and yet it’s an essential point to touch on as we approach the end of the book.
So what’s lucid living all about? Once we establish a stabilized lucid dreaming practice, we’re learning a new habit of recognition and of ‘seeing through illusion’ that can help us to become aware not only of our dream projections but also of our waking projections. This is how we begin to live lucidly, because we start to recognize our psychological projections in the same way as we recognize our dreams.
Carl Jung believed that the majority of our problems are caused by being unaware of our psychological projections. Projection has been described as ‘a psychological defence mechanism in which we unconsciously project our own unacceptable qualities onto others.’ But how does it work? By not knowing that we’re projecting our blame onto others we needlessly create suffering for both them and us.
By not knowing that we’re having others’ expectations projected onto us we strive to please them while hurting ourselves. So if there were a practice that could directly help us to recognize projections, and to see them for what they are, wouldn’t that be worth learning? Well, that practice is lucid dreaming and your learning has already begun.
The late Tibetan lama Traleg Rinpoche said that ‘to recognize that you’re dreaming while you’re dreaming is a big step forward in your practice because you can use that same technique in your daily life too. This is the main teaching of dream yoga: to learn how to recondition the mind in this way. If we do this through the practice of dream yoga it encourages us to be more spontaneous… more creative, more positive.’5
When I was 16 I didn’t get into lucid dreaming to become more aware, I got into it for fun. But after a couple of years of messing around in the playground of my mind I started to see the world a bit differently. I couldn’t forget the experiences of my lucid dreams, and even though I was mainly using them for sex and skateboarding I was becoming aware that I was skateboarding around my mind and that I was gaining access to the very fabric of my consciousness while I slept.
What if I could gain access to the fabric of waking reality too? Could I find a way to bring the manifestational power of the lucid dream state into the waking state? Questions like this began to come up again and again. This was compounded when, at 19, I started looking at Tibetan Buddhism and its concepts of the dreamlike nature of waking reality.
And so began a new chapter of my lucid dream training, one that eventually led me to engage in a lifetime project of waking up, stepping out of self-deception, and finding a way to move beyond the seeming limitations of life. For as we learn to wake up in our dreams, we start to wake up in our lives.
One woman whom I witnessed first-hand enter into an experience of lucid living was Ester, a jazz singer from Brazil who told me of a lucid dream that not only brought tears to my eyes as I read it but left me with a feeling that this dreamer had changed forever, entering into a raised vibration of lucid living that seemed to have affected her at a very deep level.
Dreamer: Ester, Brazil
Age: 31
The lowdown from Ester: ‘I’d been asking the Holy Spirit, the higher energy – whatever you want to call it – for advice about what to experience in my next lucid dream. I asked for anything that would help me in my spiritual path. I could never have expected what happened, though.’
Ester’s dream report: ‘That same night I started having recurring dreams that I was going to die, but every time the moment of my death came I became lucid and then either I woke myself up or changed the dream. I didn’t want to die – even though I knew it was a dream, it felt so real and I was afraid of death. I had these dreams for three nights, each time faced by death and each time becoming lucid and changing the dream.
‘Then, one evening while I was meditating, I realized something. The Holy Spirit wanted me to die in a lucid dream because I asked it to show me what would help me on the spiritual path! So before I went to sleep that night I told the universe that I was ready for this.
‘That was the night it happened. I dreamed that I was in a car with a guy who wanted to harm me. We left the car and he killed me. But as I lay there dying I began to feel such love for him and I saw this amazing, beautiful light coming in my direction. It was brighter than the sun and suddenly my body disappeared into that light and I realized that the light was everything that had ever existed. The light was everything.
‘I became the light and felt how it was constantly expanding. The light was infinite. There wasn’t any thought, feeling, or sensation; I wasn’t a body anymore. There was no separation, no need of being something else, no need for the mind, and no need for time or perception.
‘The light was everything there ever was and it was nothing at the same time. This light was forever, expanding itself constantly, peacefully. Everything was light and I had become the light. I don’t know how long this lasted. Then, suddenly, a very tiny idea of a world apart from that light seemed to appear, and I saw the world appearing again like a video game being reloaded. In an instant I was awake, in my bed, but the light was still with me, filling up the room.’
Life since the dream: ‘Ah, Charlie, since that dream I’ve been flying! Now I know that nothing can be apart from God! We are divine energy! We are inseparable, now as one. It’s hard to say in words but I feel now that this life is a dream and that our experience of this body is a dream. We remain forever part of the light. We never left home. We were always safe.
‘Since that dream, now that I know the truth, it’s amazing how easy it is to forgive the things that used to affect me. I live as if I’m lucid. It’s so easy to talk to the universe, to get back to nature. Love remains so strongly in me.
‘Every moment of my life now is like a lucid dream. I see that we’re awakening in the dream together. Lucid dreaming has expanded my mind and I’m very happy for it coming into my life. Going to your workshops has opened a door for me. I’ve started to feel lucid in my everyday life, seeing life as an energetic form, just like my dreams.
‘I look at people now and wonder how such beauty could appear so limited. Lucid dreaming is actually expanding my mind into a higher consciousness while I’m awake. And for this I’m very happy.’
Ester experienced a truly life-changing lucid dream that exemplifies just how profound our lucid dream training can be, and how the phrase ‘just a dream’ is so strongly negated once we become fully conscious within our dreams and commune with the divine potential that resides within.
Lucid living doesn’t mean we lose touch with reality and think that life doesn’t matter because it’s all a dream anyway. It means quite the opposite, in fact – it means that we reconnect fully with the shared, dreamlike experience of waking life and start treating every other person, creature and thing as we would in our lucid dreams, with acceptance, friendliness and kindness.
There’s one man who has explored this concept of lucid living more than most; in fact he even wrote a book about it. He’s the author of over 30 books on gnostic philosophy, the world’s religions and how to be more awake in everyday life. He’s an embodiment of his teachings, and he also has a wonderful surname.
When you dream lucidly you appear to be a character in your dream, but you’re also conscious of being the dreamer; you know you’re the awareness within which the dream is arising.
Lucid living is similar but occurs in the waking state. If you want to live lucidly be conscious of the character you appear to be in the life-dream, and also of your deeper identity as awareness within which all your experiences are arising.
To become conscious of your deeper identity as awareness move your attention from the sensations and thoughts you’re experiencing to the ‘I’ of awareness, which is the experiencer witnessing this moment. This can seem tricky because the ‘I-witness’ is formless. It has no shape or colour. It makes no noise. The ‘I’ of awareness can’t be known as an object within your experience, because it’s the subject of all you’re experiencing. It can’t be seen because it is awareness that is experiencing looking. It can’t be heard because it is awareness that is experiencing listening. Awareness can't be known as an object within your experience, because it is the subject of all you are experiencing.
If you want to live lucidly become conscious of being the formless presence of awareness that is witnessing all that you’re experiencing right now.
In a dream you appear to be a separate individual among other separate individuals. Yet if you dream lucidly you see that they are all manifestations of your deeper identity as the dreamer. From this perspective you’re one with everything and everyone in your dream.
If you want to live lucidly be conscious in the waking state that you’re also separate and not-separate from others and the world. You appear to be a separate individual within the dream of life, but as awareness you’re one with all that’s arising within the life-dream.
There’s often the assumption that once we experience oneness the separateness will disappear, but this is not the case. As in a lucid dream the oneness and the separateness coexist. Allow the paradoxical possibility of being both separate and not-separate at the same time and see what happens.
Philosopher Tim Freke is the author of Lucid Living and runs experiential retreats internationally. See www.TheMysteryExperience.com for more information.