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Awakening to the Potentials of Lucid Dreaming

ucid dreaming comes with benefits and costs that may depend on your personal and cultural belief systems. Some believe that through lucid dreaming you can travel to other worlds or become enlightened, as Buddhist culture believes Siddhārtha Gautama did through his meditation practice. Other lucid dreamers take a more Western approach, finding value in communicating with the unconscious, removing mental blocks, and relieving ailments such as depression and PTSD. Still others believe that lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences, and astral travel are harmful portals to the dark side.

Whatever your belief systems, there is a great deal of utility in lucid dreaming—but it also has its perils. Arming yourself with knowledge about the full spectrum of lucid dreaming’s possible effects and outcomes can help you get the most out of your practice.

THE DANGERS OF LUCID DREAMING

In popular media, lucid dreaming is often portrayed in ways that are not possible, which has produced some of the concerns surrounding lucid dreams. In the movie Inception, for example, we see individuals hacking into others’ minds and leaving false memories so that those individuals unwittingly change their habits. Although whether it’s possible to share dreams is still an ongoing debate, changing or influencing someone’s personal thoughts inside of a dream is definitely not possible. However, dying in a dream—another popular movie subject—and pursuing personal desires in dreams are encouraged as a healthy, safe way to process these experiences and sensations.

Experiencing or experimenting with trauma in a dream state has been shown to be an effective way to understand the process of life and death and the realization that fear and our natural responses to fear can be controlled in healthy ways. Personally, understanding fear and mortality in dreams have made a positive impact on how I react to fearinducing experiences.

Dreams, however, can cause an individual to lose their grasp on reality if that individual’s waking reality is not grounded in a holistic practice of psychological and spiritual awareness and healthy ego development. In other words: if someone focuses entirely on his or her dreams and uses them as an escape from real life, issues will arise. This doesn’t make lucid dreaming in itself dangerous; it simply means that dreams are a means to understand reality more deeply—not a means to escape from it. Indulging in the latter will not lead to the true personal growth people are often seeking when they discover lucid dreaming in the first place.

NIGHTMARES AND FEARFUL EXPERIENCES

Any dream, lucid or not, can result in some pretty disconcerting experiences, as we have discussed earlier. We’ve all had nightmares that wake us, disoriented and spooked, with a pounding heart. When you start to consciously practice lucid dreaming, it is possible that you will become more aware of frightening dream experiences. If you are not ready for this, it can come as a shock. Worse, it can bring you face-to-face with troubling complexes and archetypes within the unconscious. Sleep paralysis, as well as hypnagogia, can create the sensation of not being able to move and induce troubling hallucinations in the process.

Additionally, false awakenings can cause some people to discontinue lucid dreaming. The idea of waking up over and over again while being stuck inside of a dream can be frustrating for some, but panic inducing for others. The best way to work through these experiences is to understand that you can’t be hurt during a dream. Remember, these experiences are all quite common for lucid dreamers. You may even wish to take a break from lucid dreaming and talk about your experiences with someone you trust, such as a fellow lucid dreamer, therapist, or counselor.

ENLIGHTENMENT

The Tibetan Buddhist practice of dream yoga has one purpose: to end suffering. Many Buddhists believe that life is based on a cycle of death and rebirth and that in order to end this continuous cycle, one must understand the true nature of reality. Although it can take years of Buddhist study and practice to even begin to comprehend this, in Tibetan culture lucid dreaming is one tool to help move through the process.

In order to do this, it’s important to realize that the dream world is made up of pure images produced by the unconscious, or what dream yoga practitioners call awareness. Once you realize that the dream world is an illusion, you can experience dreams of true awareness, or what the Tibetan practice calls a white light dream. These white light dreams ultimately lead to an understanding of reality and enlightenment. This approach to lucid dreaming can allow gifted lucid dreamers to have a more meaningful spiritual life through their experiences in the understanding of reality.

TRAVELING TO OTHER WORLDS

Many lucid dreamers firmly believe that lucid dreams take place in their own alternate reality. Once the dreamer travels through the portal of our conscious reality (a window or door in their house or place of sleep), they enter other worlds and experience real events in those realities. Some such dreamers say they have saved other worlds from destruction and taken part in Star Wars–like experiences across the universe.

One benefit of having these experiences is that the dreamer can enjoy a more adventurous life. However, we also see how they can produce problems. The degree of realism in some lucid dreams can cause some individuals to have trouble differentiating between our real world and their alternate world. If they bring personas, attitudes, or actions that would seem normal in a lucid dream into the reality we collectively know, it can have very real and sometimes long-lasting consequences.

TRADITIONAL USE OF LUCID DREAMS

If we look at history, we can see that there are ways that lucid dreaming has been used by societies to make long-lasting positive changes in the community.

Besides the Egyptians and Tibetans, dreams and lucid dreaming have been a large part of Native American cultures. In Lee Irwin’s book The Dream Seekers: Native American Visionary Traditions of the Great Plains, we see that understanding big dreams was an important part of how indigenous cultures expressed their spirituality. We also know that shamanic traditions around the world have used dreams as essential ways of discovering their spiritual relationship to the world. Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy is an exhaustive discussion of the traditional shamanic uses of dream awareness.

It seems that, in the past, dreams and lucid dreaming were a much larger part of many cultures than they are today in the Western world. In our current American culture we are encouraged to ignore our dreams as irrelevant, meaningless noise.

Rubin Naiman, of the Weil Center in Tucson, believes that cultures in which individuals integrate their dreams and lucid dreams into daily life not only have a greater understanding of their place in the community but also experience less depression and fewer cases of mental illness.

UNCONSCIOUS COMMUNICATION

The greatest benefit of lucid dreaming experiences is the ability to communicate with the mind in a more visual and unusual way. During a dream, you can conduct experiments to find out the limitations of the dream world and human consciousness. You can speak with your unconscious self or with the archetypes that contribute to the discovery of the true, integrated self. A personal relationship with the unconscious can be achieved through lucid dreaming (something that, incidentally, Sigmund Freud believed to be impossible).

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN DREAM EXPERIENCES

Because lucid dreams, out-of-body experiences, and astral projection can transform and merge into one another along a spectrum, it becomes difficult to draw hard lines between each experience. (Personally, I do not have a perfect definition for each of these states or for what state of consciousness I am in because I don’t think it truly matters.) Often during a lucid dream an individual can feel the effects of an out-of-body experience by leaving the body while remaining in control of the environment. This is closer to a lucid dream state. Lucid dreams can also transform into astral projections, in which someone can experience the astral realm and travel to seemingly infinite dimensions.

Ultimately, the levels of waking and dream consciousness—the physical, the mental, and the astral—influence one another. We all experience all the levels of consciousness simultaneously, but our awareness stays locked into one level at a time. Lucid dreaming helps us practice shifting perspectives by loosening this locked-in style of paying attention. When we hold awareness in our dreams, we are manipulating the levels outside the dream at the same time. This gives our dreams tremendous power to influence our waking lives and also shows us that waking reality can greatly affect our dreams.