*1 This Latin inscription from European alchemy is found in a circle within the famous engraving titled “The First Stage of the Great Work,” created in 1604 by the physician Hienrich Khunrath, in his book Amphitheater of Eternal Wisdom.
*2 I interviewed Krippner for this book, and he has been a good friend and colleague for many years. He has a rare kind of genius, a lively spirit, and a golden heart. You’ll find his influence throughout these pages.
*3 Doblin is the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which helps to arrange and fund psychedelic-drug research for medical purposes. I worked as a guest editor at MAPS for several years, editing their special-edition bulletins, and the interview that I did with Doblin can be found in my book Frontiers of Psychedelic Consciousness. To learn more about MAPS, see www.maps.org.
*4 Oscar “Oz” Janiger (1918–2001) was also a good friend and one of my most valuable mentors. As I mentioned earlier, Oz was the person who introduced me to Stephen LaBerge; this was at Oz’s home in Santa Monica. Oz served on the board of directors for a foundation that funded some of LaBerge’s early research, and this was how I learned about the scientific study of lucid dreaming. Oz did the LSD and creativity studies that I mentioned earlier in the chapter, and he was the psychiatrist responsible for turning many Hollywood celebrities on to LSD when it was still legal (Cary Grant, Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Anaïs Nin, et al.). The interview that I did with Oz is in my book Mavericks of the Mind, which also includes my interview with LaBerge.
*5 This is a technique that we’ll be discussing in chapter 10.
*6 I’ve never heard of anyone else doing this, and my having done so may shock some people. I’m including my experience here because it was an essential part of my healing process, and I hope that this information can be helpful to others. However, for most people, during an ayahuasca experience the desire to engage in sexual activity is probably the last thing on their mind.
*7 One of the most common visions people have while on ayahuasca is that of an anaconda slithering down their throat. In fact, when my girlfriend and I did ayahuasca for the first time and had sex all night, at one point near the beginning of the journey she had a vision of a giant serpent slithering down her throat. This then became the foundation for a running joke between us for the rest of the night, based on the double meaning of the phrase Un anaconda grande en mi boca! (A huge anaconda is in my mouth!)
*8 Its English-language common names include Thepelakano (leaves of god), bitter grass, Mexican calea, and dream herb.
*9 Throughout this book I refer to the writings of Oliver Fox, which was the pen name of British writer Hugh George Callaway.
*10 According to Barry Mile’s account in Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, “Yesterday” was not only the Beatles’ most successful song, it is the most often played song of all time. A good portion of the Beatles’ music also appears to be influenced by marijuana and LSD, with such songs as “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “Magical Mystery Tour.”
*11 Phase synchrony occurs when neuronal groups that oscillate in the gamma range enter into precise phase locking over a limited period of time.
*12 As we’ll see in the next chapter, as a “reality test” this would likely produce poor results, because one would probably feel the poker in the dream, just as in waking life.
*13 More recently, Mom’s Choice Award–winning author Renee Frances has written a series of books to help children who are “reluctant sleepers” stay in their beds at night, and the second book in her series, titled The Good Night Fairy Helps Via Change Her Dream, teaches children how to lucid dream as a way to overcome frightening nightmares. See www.goodnightfairy.ca.
*14 Following the bibliography you will find Web links to some of the forums that I’m describing.
*15 However, I do recall some semilucid dreams from around the age of seven or eight, where I would jump off the roof of my house and float slowly to the ground. I remember recalling these dreams while awake and thinking that I could secretly make anything happen, just by believing that I could.
*16 Stephen LaBerge participated in a philosophical panel discussion about consciousness that I cohosted at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1994. A DVD of this event, titled Mavericks of the Mind Live!, was transcribed and is available as an e-book on Amazon Kindle. It’s full title is Mavericks of the Mind Live! Roundtable Discussions with Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, Nick Herbert, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Ralph Abraham, and Others.
*17 This is a sensory system located in the middle ear and brain that provides the leading contribution to the body’s sense of balance and spatial orientation.
*18 When my colleague Ryan Hurd read this he remarked, “Hard to prove death by nightmare, though! The best cases we have are the sleep paralysis nightmares of Hmong refugees in the United States in the 1980s. The deaths can be interpreted as culturally reinforced death anxiety that triggered a rare, preexisting heart condition in the young men who died. It is called SUNDS, sudden unexplained death syndrome.” (See Madrigal, “Dark Side”; and McNamara, Nightmares, 5.)
*19 The Senoi are the indigenous people of Peninsular Malaysia. A book written in 1954 (Pygmies and Dream Giants by Kilton Stewart) describes their use of dreams, and in 1972 Patricia Garfield popularized the notion that the Senoi regard dream sharing and interpretation to be of high importance for health and social reasons in her book Creative Dreaming. This notion evolved into what has been called the Senoi dream theory, which is a set of claims about how people can learn to control their dreams to reduce fear and increase pleasure. The belief that the Senoi generally regard sharing and interpreting their dreams as something of high importance was discredited in 1985 (Domhoff, “Senoi Dream Theory”) when later researchers were unable to substantiate Stewart and Garfield’s findings, which had grown into a movement. This erroneous or exaggerated belief about the Senoi was a key element in developing a new orientation toward dreams that first became popular as part of the human potential movement of the 1960s and has grown into what is now called the “dreamwork movement.”
†20 In reviewing this manuscript, when my colleague Ryan Hurd read this he commented, “I don’t advocate murder in the dream either . . . [only] the right to stand up for oneself and make better boundaries, if compromised. Fighting does not have to result in killing.”
*21 My girlfriend had dreams of being chased for years, until finally she had a nonlucid dream in which she confronted the person chasing her, Freddy Krueger, and pushed him off of a balcony. Then she saw him later in the dream and said, “I don’t want you in my dreams,” and he vanished. She hasn’t had any dreams of being chased ever since.
*22 Since writing this book a few other herbs have come to my attention as potential dream enhancers, which I didn’t have an opportunity to research or try for this book. These include Celastrus paniculatus (intellect tree), wild asparagus root, Entada rheedii (African dream herb), and Tagetes lucida (Mexican tarragon).
*23 There are many genetic varieties of the cannabis plant, which can be roughly divided into two primary strains—Cannabis indica and Cannabis sativa. The two strains have unique characteristics that differentiate them from each other, both in appearance and chemistry. In general, the psychoactive effects of sativa strains tend to be more uplifting and cognitively energizing, while the indica strains tend to be more calming and sedating. However, growers have created a widely varied multitude of genetic hybrids that complicates this simple distinction considerably.
*24 To learn more about kava, see Vincent Lebot and Mark Merlin’s Kava, The Pacific Elixir: The Definitive Guide to Its Ethnobotany, History, and Chemistry.
*25 These are legal and available online from www.mastersacraments.com.
*26 I found phenibut so fascinating that I wrote an e-book about it, Phenibut: A Scientific Guide to the Health Benefits and Precautions (available on Amazon).
*27 In the days following an experience with LSD, many people also report an increased frequency of what Carl Jung called “synchronicities,” or meaningful coincidences. Both lucid dreams and synchronicities may increase in frequency due to a sustained enhancement in awareness.
*28 Available at www.ancestralapothecary.com.
*29 To learn more about Shadow, see http://discovershadow.com.
*30 It’s important to point out that the REM-Dreamer owes all of its ingenuity to Stephen LaBerge, as it’s basically a copy of the technology that he pioneered and takes advantage of his research and development.
*31 The reality-test button on this device was originally developed by Stephen LaBerge for a later model of the DreamLight. LaBerge’s assistant, Keelin, told me a story of how LaBerge reached the “aha” moment that inspired this innovation: “The ‘Reality Testing Button’ was initially conceived purely as a ‘Cue Delay Button,’ which would provide a means for holding off the flashing lights for the purpose of getting to, or returning to, sleep undisturbed. However, during early beta-testing of LaBerge’s DreamLight (the first lucid-dream induction device ever created), a surprising discovery was made. People frequently reported either dreaming of wearing the mask or of having false awakenings in which they were wearing the mask. In either case, a button push would not work as it should in waking reality because it would only be a dream button on a dream version of the device. Either nothing would happen or something odd would happen, and if one had the proper mindset to recognize this anomaly, lucidity could be achieved. It worked brilliantly as a quick reality test, hence the adopted name.”
*32 The late psychonaut Zoe7—the pen name of mind explorer Joseph Marty/Marty Joseph—wrote two fascinating books about combining psychedelic drugs and brain-wave entrainment technologies: Into the Void (2001) and Back From the Void (2005).
*33 Technologies that allow the brain to directly control a computer or robotic limb with neural impulses are currently being developed with greater and greater sophistication. (See Regaldo, “Thought Experiment.”)
*34 Stephen LaBerge suggested another, perhaps more definitive, way to check this, by asking a dream figure to do a certain type of math problem where using a carry-over number is required, because if dream figures don’t possess their own consciousness then they shouldn’t be able to perform this type of mental calculation. In a transcript titled “Conversation Between Stephen LaBerge and Paul Tholey in July of 1989,” he says, “How do you do mental arithmetic? How do you compute 5 times 5? The answer simply appears. It’s not conscious, it’s automatic. But when you have to do arithmetic that involves carrying a number, you store that number in consciousness.”
*35 Subliminal Twin is video-performance artist Hana Theobald’s clever stage name, which I think captures the mysterious relationship between the two brain hemispheres quite well.
*36 Frederic W. H. Myers died in 1901, and two years after his death his book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death was published.
*37 To learn more about Shadow and to participate in the project, see www.discovershadow.com.
*38 Noteworthy also are the similarities between this dream version of me that Becca encountered and the mute and easily cooperative physical duplicate of myself that I once encountered in a lucid dream, which I described in chapter 7.
*39 Afternote: It eventually happened that my girlfriend and I had what we believe to be a shared lucid dream. This happened in the early morning hours, after we both had episodes with sleep paralysis. I entered a stable lucid dream and soon set out to find my girlfriend. I found myself in our bedroom, where she was sleeping in her usual spot. I shook her awake excitedly, and she sluggishly came around. “We’re having a lucid dream right now,” I said. “No, we’re not,” she responded. “Check your nose and see!” I exclaimed (i.e., try breathing through your closed nostrils). Becca did this and suddenly said, “Oh, my god, you’re right—we’re dreaming right now!” Then I awoke into physical reality. A short while later, Becca woke up and remembered an uncannily similar experience as a “false awakening.” She said that she was having a lucid dream, and then thought that she had woken up in our bed. During this “false awakening” I was with her, telling her that she was still dreaming. She didn’t believe this at first, but heard me tell her to try breathing through her closed nostrils, which she did, and then she realized that she was still dreaming.
*40 In the late psychologist Timothy Leary’s “8 Circuit Model of the Brain”—which is described in many of his books, psychologist Robert Anton Wilson’s books, my own books, and those of others—an OBE occurs in the eighth and highest brain circuit: “the metaphysiological circuit,” which supposedly transcends the body by being centered in one’s atomic nuclei, rather than in the DNA of our cellular nuclei.
*41 This project actually went by a number of names over the decades that it was secretly carried out, including “Gondala Wish” and “Sunstreak.” This secret project was declassified in 1995 under executive order no. 1995-4-17.
†42 An overview of the Monroe Institute can be found at www.monroeinstitute.org.
*43 This is also an example of someone experiencing “false endings” during a psychedelic journey, which I described in chapter 4, similar to the “false awakenings” that are commonly reported with lucid dreams.
*44 For an account of my paranormal experience at the Brookdale Lodge, see the second edition of Aubrey Graves’ book The Haunted Brookdale Lodge.
*45 I’ve also noticed that sometimes when I get high on cannabis indoors my perception of the physical environment can subtly shift, so that out of my peripheral vision it appears as though aspects of the room have elongated or changed in odd, dreamlike ways. These perceptual shifts remind me of how some astral environments have appeared.
*46 Quantum physics has its origins in Max Planck’s solution in 1900 to the black-body radiation problem, and it was further developed with Albert Einstein’s 1905 paper that offered a quantum-based theory to explain the photoelectric effect. Early quantum theory was profoundly reconceived in the mid-1920s.
†47 Galaxies, of which there are between 170 and 200 billion, are clusters of stars. A galaxy can range between just a few thousand stars to over a hundred trillion. The Milky Way galaxy, where our solar system resides, contains around 500 billion stars.
*48 Schrödinger’s cat is a famous thought experiment devised by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 that helps to illustrate the paradoxical nature of a phenomenon in physics known as quantum superposition, which recognizes that multiple events can exist simultaneously prior to observation. Whether or not a cat in a sealed box has been poisoned is linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur, and before checking, both outcomes simultaneously exist.
*49 Dark matter is a hypothetical substance that is nevertheless believed by most modern astronomers to account for around five-sixths of the matter in the universe. It has not been directly observed, yet its existence and properties are inferred from its various gravitational effects: on the motions of visible matter; via gravitational lensing; its influence on the universe’s large-scale structure, and its effects in the cosmic microwave background. Likewise, dark energy is an undetectable form of energy that much of the universe appears to be mysteriously composed of.
*50 This flying ship was a hovercraft in the film, and it was named after the biblical king of the same name, the ruler of the Babylonian Empire from 634 to 562 BCE. In the Book of Daniel there is story about the king awakening from a powerful dream, only to have his memory of the dream frustratingly dissolve a few seconds later. Nebuchadnezzar believed that the powerful dream must have been divinely inspired, so he sent strict instructions to the diviners, astrologers, and wizards in his kingdom, saying that they must tell him what his dream was and what it meant or else they would all be killed. When the prophet and dream interpreter Daniel prayed to God to reveal the king’s dream and its meaning to him, and the king was satisfied with the response that Daniel gave, his life—and the lives of his fellow diviners in the kingdom—were saved. In the film The Matrix, Morpheus references the biblical king when he says, “I have dreamed a dream . . . but now that dream is gone from me.”
*51 When my colleague Rebecca McClen Novick, an accomplished Buddhist scholar, read this sentence, she remarked, “To clarify, although Mahayana does contain much of what is considered by the Theravada tradition—the other main Buddhist tradition—to be the ‘original’ teachings of the Buddha, much of it is contested by Theravada practitioners as apocryphal. The Tibetan branch of Mahayana involves a lot more ritual and tantric influence than other Mahayana traditions, such as the practices in China that were influenced by Taoism, or the traditions of Vietnam, Japan, and Korea.”
*52 I, however, see the lucid dreaming superpowers more as lures set up by a higher intelligence to help us evolve. As with psychedelics, many people are drawn to lucid dreams for pleasure-seeking thrills and unexpectedly wind up spiritually transformed by surprising mystical experiences.
*53 This delightful term was coined by Robert Waggoner in his book Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self.