EXPLORING THE SECRET REALM OF THE WAKING DREAM
Dormiens vigila.*1
While sleeping, watch.
As children, we’re all taught to sing:
Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.1
However, when we get older, we rarely reflect on the meaning of these powerfully succinct lines. What does it mean that “life is but a dream”?
According to Hindu philosophy, all that we perceive is maya, illusion, while modern neuroscience tells us that everything we ever experience is just a series of mental constructs, models, or simulations of reality created in our brains from a massive sea of electrical sensory signals. However, these insights do not mean that the world we see around us isn’t real. Rather, it just means that things are not what they initially appear to be.
One of the first lessons we learn from lucid dreaming is that the dream world appears to be every bit as real, or unreal, as the physical world we inhabit during our waking hours. This understanding has profound philosophical and spiritual implications that we’ll be discussing in this book. But first let’s take a look at what lucid dreaming is, how we can use it to improve our daily lives, and how it relates to shamanic healing.
WHAT IS LUCID DREAMING?
Having a lucid dream means that you become self-aware and “awake” within a dream, that you realize you are dreaming while it is happening. This means that during the dream you are in full or partial possession of your higher cognitive reasoning, critical faculties, rational mind, and intellectual abilities. With this extraordinary sense of awakening comes (1) a clear perception of the continuity of oneself between waking and sleeping; (2) access to one’s waking-world memories while dreaming; and (3) the ability to significantly influence what happens within the dream.
There are degrees of lucidity; it’s a continuum of awareness and memory across states of consciousness, from what has been described as “prelucidity” to “superlucidity.”2 One can be aware that one is dreaming, that his or her body is lying soundly in bed, but still be bound by unrealized psychological restraints in the dream realms. It takes practice to realize that you have the ability to influence and change the world around you in a dream, and discovering the limits of these superpowers is what all the fun is about.
Although reports of people experiencing lucid dreaming are found in religious texts that go back thousands of years, the phenomenon was not identified in a scientific publication until 1913, by Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden.3 However, the first detailed reports of experiments in lucid dreaming come to us from the French sinologist Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys—who also coined the term lucid dream in his native tongue as rêve lucide. In his 1867 book Les rêves et les moyens deles diriger (Dreams and How to Guide Them),4 Saint-Denys describes his many adventures while lucid dreaming and shares the results of his experiments as well as his personal methods for navigating and controlling the dream environment.
The first signals ever scientifically recorded from a lucid-dream state occurred in 1975 at the University of Hull, in England, when lucid dreamer Alan Worsely signaled to dream researcher Keith Hearne by making prearranged Morse Code–like eye signals (now known as left-right-left-right, or LRLR, signals) from within the dream state to an eye-movement recording device, while hooked up to a brain-wave monitor.5 EEG patterns verified that Worsley was asleep when he made these signals, yet there were clearly defined eye movements recorded that corresponded to the prearranged pattern. Then in 1978, Stanford University sleep-lab researcher and psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge independently conducted virtually the same study using himself as a test subject, and also delivered LRLR signals from within a dream state to an eye-movement recording device while hooked up to a brain-wave monitor.6 The scientific history of lucid dreaming will be discussed in detail in chapter 3.
The widespread publication of LaBerge’s work helped to popularize the notion of lucid dreaming, and this was how I first heard about it. I interviewed LaBerge in 1992 for my book Mavericks of the Mind after meeting him at the home of our mutual friend, the psychiatric researcher Oscar Janiger, who conducted the LSD and creativity studies discussed in chapter 1 of this book. Before reading LaBerge’s book Lucid Dreaming, I had been regularly having lucid dreams several times a month since I first began doing psychedelic drugs and plants as a teenager.
Lucid dreaming can be an unbelievably magical experience, every bit as solid, vivid, and real as anything in waking life (perhaps even more so), giving people the opportunity to genuinely experience whatever they please, without any physical or social consequences. When I interviewed LaBerge he told me that lucid dreaming is like “high-resolution virtual reality.” The sense of freedom from physical and social constraints can feel exhilarating beyond words, and upon first encountering a lucid-dream state many people immediately rush off to do two things—fly high above the world, and then have sex with their ideal lover. Motivated people can spend years living out their wildest fantasies in lucid-dream adventures: soaring through outer space or exploring underwater oceans, flying through walls and passing through solid objects, materializing anything out of thin air, changing environments, shifting form, or making any living or dead, real or imaginary person instantly appear. Some of these many, seemingly unlimited possibilities will be discussed in chapter 4.
However, as we’ll learn in this book, although fantasy-fulfillment dreams can certainly be great fun and may have important therapeutic value, this stage is just the beginning of one’s adventures with lucid dreaming. If you stick with lucid dreaming, and discipline yourself to systematically explore this state, over time it can become a powerful path to greater awareness, heightened creativity, spiritual awakening, and communication with what is best described as simply “the Other.” But one need not have these lofty goals in mind to enjoy lucid dreaming, and for it to have practical applications in our lives.
HOW CAN WE USE LUCID DREAMING TO IMPROVE OUR DAILY LIVES?
Although fun and worthwhile as an experience unto itself, lucid dreaming can also be so much more than mere entertainment. For example, lucid dreaming can help with healing from both physical and mental illness. Psychotherapeutically, it can be used to help us confront the fears in our personal nightmares and heal from emotional traumas. There is also compelling evidence that actions performed in lucid dreams can help us heal from bodily injury.
Some people also use lucid dreaming to learn new skills or to rehearse a particular professional activity such as athletic training, public speaking, or music performance. Lucid dreaming can dramatically enhance creativity and fuel the imagination by increasing our access to the vast unconscious (or “other conscious”) regions of the mind. Many artists, writers, inventors, and scientists report using lucid dreaming as a way to be more innovative with their work and come up with new ideas. We’ll be hearing from some of these creative people in chapter 2.
Dreaming with greater awareness can help us develop our natural psychic abilities, facilitate profound mystical experiences, and reveal hidden knowledge about ourselves and the world. Some of the people I’ve spoken with report experiences with lucid dreaming that appear to be every bit as life-transforming as a powerful psychedelic, mystical, or near-death experience. It seems that lucid dreaming may also be useful as a tool for exploring the Jungian collective unconscious, for developing genetic/DNA awareness, for retrieving archetypal-mythic racial memories, or for navigating the higher mind of the biosphere. Some dreams appear to transcend our personal lives and allow us to tap into a collective sense of something larger than ourselves. We’ll be examining these ideas more in chapter 10.
Becoming lucid in dreams may help us explore the ever-looming questions that stem from our basic sense of philosophical ignorance, of not knowing who or what we truly are, how we arrived here, or what our lives are really about. Self-aware dreaming can also be used for healing psychological dissociation and for recovering and integrating lost fragments of our minds, our elemental or multiple personalities. This is an idea that we’ll be taking a look at in chapter 7.
It appears that lucid dreaming may also allow us to connect with other people in previously unimagined ways, through a shared, Internet-like mental space or psychic virtual reality that transcends our physical bodies, and that in a quantum way connects everyone through the core of our minds. The notion of a collective dream space reported by oneironauts (dream travelers or dream explorers) is similar to what many psychonauts (those who explore psychedelic states of mind) describe as “hyperspace” after ingesting a strong dose of the psychedelic substance DMT, or after drinking ayahuasca, a subject we’ll be discussing in chapter 1.
In chapter 6 we’ll be exploring some mind-boggling new technologies that will enable us to dial in and tune our brains to the lucid-dream state, allowing us to send “text messages” from our lucid dreams to people in the waking world. We’ll see why it won’t be long before we can digitally record our dreams and share them with one another over the Internet, making our experiences in the dream realm ever more social and communicable.
But perhaps most importantly, as I mentioned, lucid dreaming offers us a golden path toward spiritual development; in fact, techniques for developing this as a learnable skill have been an important part of Tibetan Buddhist practice for more than a thousand years.
HOW DOES LUCID DREAMING RELATE TO SHAMANIC HEALING?
Lucid-dreaming skill development, or “dream yoga” practice, is an important part of Vajrayāna (Tantric) Buddhism, as well as in the Bön religion and other Eastern philosophical systems. Tibetan Buddhists have used lucid dreaming “as a means of experiencing the illusory nature of personal reality, and as one part of a set of practices said to lead to enlightenment and the discovery of the ultimate nature of self.”7
Contemporary Buddhism in Tibet evolved out of earlier religious traditions, one of which was called “Bön.” Bön predates Buddhism, and is the oldest known form of religion in Tibet. It appears to have developed from even earlier, more shamanic, or pagan-like spiritual traditions.
Shamanism is a term that refers to the ceremonial healing and spiritual guidance practices of indigenous people around the world. Like social insects that have genetic castes for various occupations, it appears that human tribes are similarly organized by DNA intelligence, and they will naturally produce a shaman within tribal societies.
A shaman is first and foremost a healer, a medicine man or woman who uses medicinal herbs (some with psychoactive properties) and rituals to treat physical, psychological, and social problems within the tribe. The shaman generally combines these treatments with repeated drumming, chanting, singing, and/or dancing that produces a psychological trance state or enhances an altered state of consciousness. Shamans also provide personal and social guidance for the tribe. One can effectively argue that many of our highest cultural achievements as a species—in science, medicine, art, philosophy, and spirituality—evolved from the shamanistic instinct in early human societies.
The two primary states of consciousness that a shaman works with in healing practices are what have been commonly described as “channeling spirits” and “out-of-body journeying,”8 which, as we shall see in later chapters, are both related to lucid dreaming in different ways, while lucid-dreaming practices themselves are incorporated into many shamanic traditions around the world. Native American healer Rolling Thunder has said that lucid dreaming can be a more reliable source of shamanic visions than psychedelic plants,9 and intentional dreaming is an inherent part of many indigenous shamanic systems around the world.10 Peruvian-American anthropologist Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998) wrote extensively about lucid dreaming as being an important component of his shamanic training in his popular books about the teachings of a Yaqui shaman-trickster named Don Juan Matus.11 Russian psychiatrist Olga Kharitidi writes about how a secret brotherhood of shamans have long utilized lucid dreaming as a method to heal from traumas in Siberia.12
Ibn El-Arabi, a thirteenth-century Sufi master, spoke about the importance of “controlling one’s thoughts in dreams.” He said that this would produce “awareness of the intermediate dimension,”13 which he considered to be of great benefit. Dream prophecy is woven into the ancient scriptures of the Hebrew Bible and the Koran, and the role of symbolic messages in dreams are crucial to many religions. Eckankar—a religious movement that began in 1965 and is based on the “light and sound of God”14—is devoted to gaining spiritual insight from dreaming, which it views as a form of “soul travel.”
During ayahuasca healing ceremonies, shamans say that they call in the spirits of different plants and beings as well as offer protection to participants by singing and whistling sacred invocation songs called icaros. These icaros are often reported to come to the shamans in their dreams. I suspect that our experiences with shamanic states of consciousness are helping to bring the dream world closer to the waking realm, and that lucid-dreaming experiences are helping to bring greater waking awareness into the dream realm. Notably, the key to success in both realms appears to be the same: belief in oneself and in the power of one’s imagination.
In the pages that follow I’ll be explaining how these two different worlds are cross-fertilizing and merging with each other, and how this inter-realm unification of worlds may be part of our purpose as human beings in the larger scheme of things. In this book I’ll be primarily referring to ayahuasca-based shamanism, which originated in the Amazon jungle of South America; I’ll be discussing how my personal experiences doing ayahuasca in Peru essentially cured me of childhood post-traumatic stress disorder.
Ayahuasca is a powerful, mind-altering brew composed of plants that work synergistically to produce a state of consciousness that many people describe as a kind of waking dream, and it is during this experience that Amazonian shamans perform their healing ceremonies. As with Tibetan Buddhism, lucid dreaming is really a branch of shamanism; it is one pathway for the shaman to access knowledge or healing power from other realms of existence or higher forms of intelligence.
Shamans see themselves as travelers between worlds that are accessible in what psychiatrist Stanislav Grof would call “nonordinary states of consciousness.” These states of consciousness can be reliably produced by shamanic plant brews, psychedelic drugs, drumming, dancing, chanting, fasting, meditation, and lucid dreaming. During these states of altered consciousness shamans say that they can telepathically communicate with plant and animal spirits, the ghosts of ancestors, disembodied beings, angels, demons, deities, extraterrestrials, the biosphere, and one’s higher mind. Others use different explanations, like “untapped portions of our brains,” or “God,” in trying to better understand the mystery behind what appears to be independently operating intelligences that speak to us in dreams and on shamanic voyages and seem to understand us better than we understand ourselves.
As we’ll be discussing more in chapter 1, recent brain-scanning research at Germany’s Goethe University reveals that psilocybin, the psychedelic substance in magic mushrooms, activates a primitive network in the brain, one linked with emotion. Most interestingly, several parts of this primitive neural network, such as the hippocampus and the anterior cingulate cortex, become simultaneously activated by psilocybin in a way similar to the brain-activation pattern observed when people are dreaming. It seems that psychedelic experiences are like waking dreams, and it’s noteworthy that many people report having lucid dreams in the nights that follow a shamanic or psychedelic experience. I suspect that there’s a largely unexplored connection between lucid dreaming and psychedelic experiences, and it is this intuition that prompted me to write this book.
ONEIRONAUTS, PSYCHONAUTS, AND SHAMANS EXPLORE THE SAME REALM OF INNER SPACE
Many of the subjects who were given the psychedelic substance DMT in medical researcher Rick Strassman’s 1990–1995 study at the University of New Mexico believed that they were communicating with intelligent nonhuman entities while under its influence.15 DMT appears to be a hormone and neurotransmitter, or a chemical messenger, that is naturally found in the human body and reaches its highest levels in the bloodstream at around 3:00 a.m. No biochemist has been able to explain what DMT is doing in the human organism or in so many species of animals and plants, but some researchers suspect that the mysterious molecule might influence our dreaming.
DMT is also one of the primary components of ayahuasca, and it is largely responsible for the extraordinarily rich and meaningful visions that people generally see during the experience. Strassman and other researchers have wrestled with the notion of whether or not the beings that people encounter on DMT have an independent existence in some alternative dimension, or whether they are simply projections of our own minds.
Anyone who has personally experienced an encounter with these seemingly hyperdimensional beings knows that this is a very tricky philosophical question to answer. The same philosophical conundrum exists with lucid dreams. Not only can we meet characters in our lucid dreams who can convincingly claim to have independent minds and personalities, we eventually discover that the entire landscape of our dreams, like the shifting tapestry of an ayahuasca vision, is actually a living intelligence that we can communicate with. This living intelligence is what psychologists ironically call the unconscious or what Jung calls the collective unconscious, and it appears to be the same entity that, depending on one’s cultural context, some people describe as their higher self, the Other, an alien, the dormant parts of the brain, divine intelligence, the mushroom spirit, the Mother, DNA, the Goddess, or God.
However, what’s most intriguing is that over time, with both shamanic voyaging and lucid dreaming, one begins to develop a dialogue with this cosmic mind—what author and lucid-dreaming expert Robert Waggoner cleverly calls the “conscious unconscious.”16 From the perspective of our experiences with lucid dreaming and shamanic journeys it appears that the universe is an intelligent living organism, a conscious being that we can paradoxically both unify and dialogue with. It seems that this cosmic mind is always communicating with us, if only we’d listen. She speaks to us through a metalanguage of symbolic events and synchronicities in our lives, in our dreams, and in our psychedelic experiences. This same transcendent awareness orchestrates events behind the scenes of our waking lives, in our dreams, throughout all of reality, and is simultaneously the source of one’s primal awareness that is entangled with one’s basic sense of self. Most curiously, our tiny egos can dialogue with this grand intelligence through our lucid dreams and mystical experiences.
The primary source of illumination for understanding how lucid dreaming and psychedelic healing operate will come from our study of the brain. Further development of these powerful shamanic skills will arrive with the newly emerging electronic technologies that are merging with our nervous systems, and rapidly expanding the potential of our minds. Recent polls conducted by Swansea University psychologist and dream researcher Mark Blagrove indicate that more people are having lucid dreams now than ever before. The increase may be “between 10 and 40 percent since the 1980s,” reports Blagrove.17 This research suggests that around 80 percent of people will recall having a lucid dream at some point in their lives. But what is going on in all these dreaming brains?
WHAT HAPPENS IN OUR DREAMING BRAINS?
In chapter 2 we’ll be exploring the physiology of sleep and dreaming, with a specific focus on lucid dreaming and how dreams relate to shamanic states of consciousness. Recent research demonstrates that the fastest brain-wave frequencies ever recorded by human beings occur during lucid dreaming. These ultrafast brain waves in the gamma range operate at frequencies as high as 50 Hz, or 50 cycles per second. This contrasts with waking consciousness, when our brains generally operate at frequencies between 14 and 40 Hz, and during sleep, when brain-wave frequencies tend to cycle between 4 and 14 Hz. So this research suggests that when we are lucid dreaming we may actually be more conscious or self-aware than we generally are in normal waking consciousness.
Using transcranial electrical stimulation to generate gamma waves in an area of the brain known as “the prefrontal cortex,” researchers at J. W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, were able to induce lucid dreaming in their sleeping volunteers—so it appears that the technology to faithfully produce lucid dreams on command is really just around the corner. In chapter 6 we’ll be exploring the possibilities of transcranial electrical brain stimulation, as well as the currently available electronic technologies like the REM-Dreamer, to help us lucid dream. We’ll also be looking at ancient and recently developed psychological methods for inducing lucid dreaming in chapter 4, along with other new technologies for improving lucid dreams, and we’ll explore how different herbs, drugs, and supplements can enhance dreaming. I have personally tried around three dozen herbs and supplements that can help with lucid dreaming, which I’ll be reporting on in chapter 5.
Intriguingly, psilocybin and ayahuasca tend to slow down brain waves, not speed them up, and they appear to shut down areas of the left hemisphere of the brain. Also, acquired savant syndrome—extraordinary mathematical or other mental abilities that suddenly appear after traumatic brain injury—usually occurs after damage to the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere of the brain, which governs symbolic, linear thinking, may also have a dominating effect on the brain, suppressing the creative, psychic, or unknown abilities of the more intuitive, whole system–thinking right hemisphere of the brain. In other words, it may be that psychedelics shut down dominant parts of the left brain that suppress the hidden talents of the right brain, and perhaps dreaming is really a doorway into the unrevealed dimensions of the mind. We’ll be discussing this possibility in chapter 1.
TELEPATHIC DREAMS, OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCES, PSYCHIC PHENOMENA, AND MUTUAL DREAMING
In chapter 8 we’ll explore the mind-expanding possibilities of shared dreams, dream telepathy, and mutual lucid dreaming. Research by psychologist Stanley Krippner*2 and psychiatrist Montague Ullman has produced compelling evidence indicating that people can seemingly transfer thoughts or mental imagery to someone who is dreaming. Additionally, dream researcher Linda Lane Magallon has collected many dozens of mutually verified reports from people who have shared dreams in some form or another. Some people report meeting in nonlucid dreams, others report having uncannily similar “meshing” dreams, while some advanced dreamers actually report meeting one another in mutual lucid dreams. As one example of the mainstreaming of this idea, the 2010 film Inception was inspired by the notion of being able to lucidly share dreams.
The flexibility of time and space will be explored in chapter 9, as time and space appear to operate very differently in the metaphysiological dream realm. Some people report living for days, weeks, or even years as another person, all within the span of a single Earth night! The relationship between out-of-body experiences and lucid dreaming will also be explored in chapter 9, where I’ll share my personal experience with these mysterious states of consciousness.
RESEARCH, INTERVIEWS, AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
In this book I blend over thirty years of personal experimentation with altered states of consciousness with expert opinions gathered from numerous interviews and a comprehensive compilation of summarized scientific research about the relationship between lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences, and shamanic healing. What this book offers to the community of established lucid dreamers that is missing from the other wonderful books on the subject is a deeper exploration of the relationship between psychedelics, herbs, drugs, nutritional supplements, and lucid dreaming. We’ll be looking at the interface of shamanic experiences with visionary plants and psychedelic drugs, and guided, intentional, lucid, or interpreted dreaming, to see how both can be used for healing the mind and body. I include excerpts from some of the many interviews I’ve done with experts on consciousness, dreaming, psychology, unexplained phenomena, and physics, so my approach is interdisciplinary. Both formal and informal researchers on the cutting edge of lucid-dream knowledge were interviewed for this volume, including Stephen LaBerge, Charles Tart, Stanley Krippner, Robert Waggoner, Rupert Sheldrake, Ryan Hurd, Clare Johnson, Dean Radin, Rick Strassman, Daniel Siebert, Stanislav Grof, and the late Terence McKenna.
Along with covering the basic physiology of sleep and dreaming, I’ll summarize the leading psychological theories about why we dream and review all of the major lucid-dream research to date. A map for exploring the mysterious territory of our minds will also be offered in this book, and in chapter 7 I’ll provide some basic guidelines for interacting with the strange characters we meet in our dreams. Finally, we’ll reflect on the philosophical and spiritual implications of lucid dreaming as a way of better understanding the true nature of reality.
Lucid dreaming is a potent psychedelic experience that no government can ever outlaw. No one can prevent you from lucid dreaming. People may try to belittle the experience by saying “it was just a dream,” but anyone who has experienced lucid dreaming knows better. It is an open window into higher dimensions of reality, a space-twisting portal, a magic mirror that anyone can climb through and go into their own personal universe. Dreaming with an open third eye can lead to some of the happiest and most profound states of consciousness that a human being can experience, and this can help to improve our individual lives and the world. Waking up in our dreams can be more enchanting than any fairy tale, more liberating than any social or scientific revolution, and more fun than any earthly adventure.
And it can happen to you tonight . . .