As this book is a beginner’s guide, we haven’t explored many of the more advanced implications of lucid dreaming – in relation to the spiritual path, the nature of reality and out-of-body experiences – but if you want to take your exploration further, do check out my first book, Dreams of Awakening, which offers a more comprehensive and far-reaching journey into lucid dreaming on the spiritual path.
However, in this introductory guide we’ve laid a solid foundation for your lucid dream training and you now have a fully stocked toolbox of techniques that contains everything you need to be a lucid dreamer.
We sleep for a third of our lives, but are awake for two-thirds of it, so if lucid dreaming doesn’t directly affect the time that we spend awake then maybe it’s not such a big deal after all? But it does change our waking lives and I’ve seen it change thousands of people’s lives for the better. Just think of the huge changes that have been made by the subjects of our case studies: curing nicotine addiction, choosing a new career path, embracing the shadow, healing kidney disease, letting go of judgement and waking up to a spiritual breakthrough.
The defining characteristic of each one of those people was not that they are especially talented lucid dreamers but that they opened themselves up to a possibility that their dreams were more powerful than they’d ever imagined. They wanted to ‘see beyond the well’ – just like the frog from toolbox 1.
Essentially, I see the lucid dream state as a laboratory of self-development in which we train in our dreams to help engage the shared dream of waking life with more lucid awareness. What you do in your lucid dreams can create major psychological shifts that affect your waking life in remarkable ways.
Over the past year, as I have been writing this book, I’ve had the privilege to work with people who are using lucid dreaming to really push the boundaries of healing and psychological development. One young man who hears voices in his head has used his lucid dreams to actually meet up with personifications of these voices, and integrate and befriend them, which has led to a significant decrease in the frequency and negative tone of the voices. Another young man approaching death from cancer is using lucid dream training to prepare himself for his coming death. A quadriplegic friend of mine has been using his lucid dreams to do all the things his body can’t do anymore: running, swimming and mountain biking. And an ex-soldier who came on one of my retreats has said that he felt he had integrated more of his psychological baggage in a 4-day lucid dreaming retreat than he had in years of therapy. We are barely scratching the surface of what is possible through lucid dreaming.
At my workshops I always say: ‘The greatest benefits of lucid dreaming come not in the dreamtime but in the daytime,’ as our psyche integrates the changes we make in the lucid dream state into our waking mind. But how does this work exactly? Every time you fly through the sky in a lucid dream you’re creating a new habit of mind that’ll allow you to fly beyond your limitations in the waking state. Every time you walk through a wall in a lucid dream you’re implanting a revolutionary new possibility into your psyche that says, ‘what seems to be solid is not always so’. Every time you integrate and embrace your shadow and inner demons in the lucid dream you’re creating new perspectives which will make it easier to face the ‘demons’ of self-doubt and fear in your everyday life.
On top of that, lucid dreaming helps you to get to know yourself better, and once you know yourself better you can better help yourself to be a kinder and more beneficial person. Also, by getting to know your own psychology you’re getting to know the psychology of others and so become better equipped to help them too.
We soon learn that we’re all in this together – dreamers in the same dream – and that everybody is trying their best, however flawed their best may seem. So, let’s make friends with the other dream characters and with the Great Dreamer: the Universal Mind that dreams this shared dream into being.
My hope is that by reading this book, which has simply touched upon the huge and important subject of lucid dreaming, you too have been helped to ‘see beyond the well’ and are now able to appreciate just how powerful the lucid dreaming mind can be.
So dream on, dreamer, and keep moving fearlessly towards the ocean, knowing that the time has come to leave the well and to see the oceanic vastness of your own potential. Follow your dreams, they know the way …