Index
Exploring The World Of Lucid Dreaming (Stephan Laberge)
You are not what you see, hear, think, or feel; you have these experiences. Perhaps most essentially, you are who is aware. You are always at the center of your multidimensional universe of experience, but you are not always consciously aware of yourself. Briefly repeat the exercise with the following difference: At the same time you attend to each of the various aspects of your experience, be aware that it is you who is noticing these things
use your collection of dreams to find peculiarities (dreamsigns) that appear often enough in your dreams to be reliable signposts of the dream state. Your list of dreamsigns will help you succeed with the lucid dream induction
in lucid dreams, estimated dream time is very nearly equal to clock time; that is, it takes just as long to do something in a dream as it does to actually do it.
dreaming of doing something is equivalent to actually doing it. This finding explains why dreams seem so real. To the brain, they are real.
Although the tendency of our culture has been to ignore dreams, dream experiences are as real to us as waking life. If we seek to improve our lives, we would do well to include our dream lives in our efforts.
dream—emotional reactions are important clues in the dream world. Record anything unusual, the kinds of things that would never occur in waking life:
I was dreaming! With the realization of this fact, the quality of the dream changed in a manner very difficult to convey to one who has not had this experience. Instantly, the vividness of life increased a hundredfold.
People don’t become lucid more often in the presence of dreamsigns because of a normal tendency to rationalize and confabulate—they make up stories to explain what is going on, or they think, “There must be some explanation.” Indeed, there must be, but too rarely does such a halfawake dreamer realize what it actually is
There are four primary categories. The first one, inner awareness, refers to things that dreamers (egos) perceive as happening within themselves, such as thoughts and feelings. The other three categories
people naturally seem to categorize their experiences in dreams. There are four primary categories. The first one, inner awareness, refers to things that dreamers (egos) perceive as happening within themselves, such as thoughts and feelings. The other three categories (action, form, and context) classify elements of the dream environment. The action category includes the activities and motions of everything in the dream world—the dream ego, other characters, and objects. Form refers to the shapes of things, people, and places, which are often bizarre and frequently transform in dreams. The final category is context. Sometimes in dreams the combination of elements—people, places, actions, or things, is odd, although there is nothing inherently strange about any item by itself. Such strange situations are context dreamsigns.
Goal setting works.
Exercise Without Movement by Swami Rama
The challenge, then, is how to activate the critical faculty before bed so that it remains sufficiently primed to function properly when it is needed to explain some strange occurrence in a dream.
This is done by asking yourself whether or not you are dreaming while you are awake.
Any time you come in contact with something that resembles a dreamsign, test your state. Whenever anything surprising or unlikely occurs or anytime you experience unusually powerful emotions, or anything dream like, test your state.
“Am I dreaming or awake?” Don’t just automatically ask the question and mindlessly reply, “Obviously, I’m awake, “ or you will do the same thing when you actually are dreaming. Look around for any oddities or inconsistencies that might indicate you are dreaming. Think back to the events of the last several minutes
The moral here is not to take anyone else’s word for it: test your own reality!
In my experience, the best test is the following: find some writing and read it once (if you can), look away, then reread it, checking to see if it stays the same. Every time I have tried this in my own lucid dreams the writing has mutated in some way. The words may no longer make sense or the letters may turn into hieroglyphics.
attempt to think of all our experiences as dreams and to try to maintain unbroken continuity of consciousness between the two states of sleep and waking.
Practice the exercise a dozen times or more during the day at your selected times and also whenever you find yourself in a situation which is in any way dreamlike, for example, whenever something surprising or odd happens or you experience inappropriately strong emotions or find your mind (and especially memory) strangely unresponsive.
Do you have any trouble remembering what just happened? If so, you may be dreaming. Read some text twice. Don’t conclude that you are awake unless you have solid proof (for example, the writing stays the same every time you look at it).
After having satisfied yourself that you’re awake, tell yourself, “Okay, I’m not dreaming, now. But if I were, what would it be like?” Imagine as vividly as possible that you are dreaming. Intently imagine that what you are perceiving (hearing, feeling, smelling, or seeing) is a dream:
Decide in advance what you would like to do in your next lucid dream.
taking a critical look at the nature of reality a few times a day is an enjoyable habit to cultivate.
Once you establish a systematically critical attitude in your waking life, sooner or later you will decide to try a state test when you are actually dreaming. And then you will be awake in your dream.
When facing the challenge of remembering to do something, we can increase the likelihood of success by (1) being strongly motivated to remember and (2) forming mental associations between what we want to remember to do and the future circumstances in which we intend to do it. These associations are greatly strengthened by the mnemonic (memory aid) of visualizing yourself doing what you intend to remember.
before attempting MILD, you need to prove to yourself that you can indeed remember to do things while awake. If you are like most people, you are used to relying on external reminders and therefore need practice in remembering intentions using only your own mental power.
Your goal is to notice the next occurrence of each event, at which time you will perform a state test: “Am I dreaming?” So, if your target is, “The next time I hear a dog bark, “ when you hear this next, note it and do a state test. You are aiming to notice the target once—the next time it happens.
At the end of the day, write down how many of the four targets you succeeded in noticing
strategies for inducing lucid dreams by carrying an idea from the waking world into the dream, such as an intention to comprehend the dream state, a habit of critical state testing, or the recognition of a dreamsign. These strategies are intended to stimulate a dreamer to become lucid within a dream.
The more lucid dreams you have, the easier it will become to have them.
Perception (what we see, hear, feel, etc.) depends to a great extent on expectation. In a certain sense, what we perceive is what we most expect. Expectation takes many forms; one of the most important is context.
Another important influence on perception is recent experience.
Personal interests, occupations, and personality can strongly influence people’s experience.
Expectation biases perception in the direction of how you think things really are.
Another important factor that influences perception is motivation. Our motivations are our reason for doing things.
“What bread looks like depends upon whether you are hungry or not.”
Strong emotions motivate behavior and influence perception.
Having a motive or emotion biases your perception toward seeing things as you wish them to be.
mistake strangers for their beloveds. In general, motivations drive people to act to achieve goals or the satisfaction of some specific need. Having a motive or emotion biases your perception toward seeing things as you wish them to be.
In general, motivations drive people to act to achieve goals or the satisfaction of some specific need. Having a motive or emotion biases your perception toward seeing things as you wish them to be.
“a kind of informal, private unarticulated theory about the nature of events, objects, or situations which we face. The total set of schemas we have available for interpreting our world, “ writes the Stanford psychologist David Rumelhart, “in a sense constitutes our private theory of the nature of reality.”
We assume a great deal about the world, much more than we observe about it directly.
inferences are only limited by creativity and stamina, that Nasrudin was serious at the same time as he was joking.
there are schemas for everything.’’Just as theories can be about the grand or the small, “ writes Rumelhart, “so schemas can represent knowledge at all levels—from ideologies and cultural truths to knowledge about what constitutes an appropriate sentence in our language to knowledge about the meaning of a particular word to knowledge about what patterns of [sound] are associated with what letters of the alphabet.”^ Schemas are connected to one another. A certain schema, such as “spectator at an opera, “ automatically brings into play a great number of other schemas.
When we construct a dream world we expect that it will resemble past worlds we have experienced. Thus, dream worlds are almost always equipped with gravity, space, time, and air. Likewise, recent experience influences dreaming in the same way it influences waking perception. Freud called this “day residue.”
The Last Wave (a film about dreaming).
If your assumptions are mistaken and, as a result, your schema fails to model the world accurately, what should happen is a process of theory revision and schema modification that the renowned psychologist Jean Piaget called “accommodation.” Your accommodated schema will now better fit the facts, and you will have slightly more knowledge than you did before. If we always accommodate our schemas to new information, our worlds will continuously expand as our schemas become increasingly comprehensive, adaptable, and intelligent. Unfortunately, people don’t always accommodate their schemas in the face of new information. . We may not even see the new information, exactly because it doesn’t fit the assumptions of our schemas.
bird schema, we may suffer from the same self-perpetuating myopia when we attempt to reduce new concepts to fit our current understanding.
we may suffer from the same self-perpetuating myopia when we attempt to reduce new concepts to fit our current understanding.
If you want to become a lucid dreamer, however, you must be prepared to accept the possibility that a “strange pigeon” may be a bird of an altogether different feather, and that sometimes the explanation for anomalies is that you are dreaming.
In dreams even more than elsewhere in life, if you think you can’t, you can’t. As Henry Eord said, “Believe you can’t, believe you can. Either way you’re right.”
As long as you are actively and perceptually engaged with the dream world, you are less likely to make the transition to the waking state.
The idea of focusing on something in the dream in order to prevent awakening has independently occurred to several other lucid dreamers.
Why should dream spinning decrease the likelihood of awakening? Several factors are probably involved. One of these may be neurophysiological. Information about head and body movement, monitored by the vestibular system of the inner ear (which helps you to keep your balance), is closely integrated with visual information by the brain to produce an optimally stable picture of the world. Because of this integration of information, the world doesn’t appear to move whenever you move your head, even though the image of the world on the retina of your eye moves.
the following advice for dreamers who have just awakened but yearn to return to their lucid dreams: “Eie very still—don’t move a muscle! Relax and wait. The dream will return. I’ve had dozens of lucid dreams in a row with this method.”^
Whenever I decide I want to awaken from a lucid dream, I simply lie down on the nearest dream bed, couch, or cloud, shut my dream eyes, and “go to sleep.” The usual result is that I immediately wake up, but sometimes I only dream that I wake up, and when I realize Fm still dreaming, I try again to wake up “for real, “ sometimes succeeding at once, but sometimes only after an amusing sequence of false awakenings.
Think, daydream, or otherwise withdraw your attention from the dream, and you are very likely to awaken.
Paul Tholey has experimented with fixation on a stationary point during lucid dreams. He found that gaze fixation caused the fixation point to blur, followed by dissolution of the entire dream scene and an awakening within four to twelve seconds.
make sure you have your problem or wish firmly in mind before sleeping.
Your intention should be the last thing you think of before falling asleep.
“vivid, imagined events produce innervation in our muscles that is similar to that produced by the actual physical execution of the event.
There is, however, an important difference between dreamed action and imagined action. When we are awake, the neural impulses to the muscles created by imagining an action must be somehow attenuated to keep us from acting out what we imagine.
whole, healthy, and holy come from the same root
to the ideal of health. It is no accident that the words whole, healthy, and holy come from the same root
the words whole, healthy, and holy come from the same root
Achieving wholeness requires reconciling all aspects of one’s personality. Integration, however, need not be only a matter of repairing malfunctional relationships between the different parts of the personality. It can also be a natural developmental process.
Dreaming is an endogenous process of psychological growth, change, and transformation.
Remember that evil, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder. As the Afghan Sufi master Hakim Sanai observed eight hundred years ago: If you want the mirror to reflect the face, hold it straight and keep it polished bright; although the sun does not begrudge its light, when seen in a mist it only looks like glass; and creatures comelier than angels even seem in a dagger to have devil’s faces.
if anything appears in your dream world that causes you discomfort, you can take its presence as an opportunity to investigate that problem and see if you can resolve or accept whatever it is that repels you.
it is important that you firmly set your intention to do so while awake. Otherwise, you may find that in the emotional heat of the dream, you will lack the willpower to face your fear.
Mindlessness, in contrast, is a state of reduced awareness, in which people process information from their environments in an automatic manner. They rely on habitual categories and distinctions without reference to possible novel aspects of the information, resulting in behavior that is rulegoverned and rigid. According to Eanger’s research, “much of the behavior we assume to be performed mindfully instead is enacted rather mindlessly;… unless there is a welllearned script to follow or effortful response to make, people may process only a minimal amount of information to get them through their day.
Two men looked out from prison bars; One saw mud, the other stars.
Hypnotic dreamers are almost always at least partly lucid in their dreams, and in the deeper states, like lucid dreamers, they experience imagery as real. Deeply
My findings are that healing is possible in lucid dreams.
the manner in which we perceive the world may not be inadequate, given the senses we are employing; it may simply be irrelevant because we are employing the wrong senses.
“a person must control his thoughts in a dream. The training of this alertness… will produce great benefits for the individual. Everyone should apply himself to the attainment of this ability of such great value.
“Experiences we gain from practices we do during our dream time can then be brought into our daytime experience. For example, we can learn to change the frightening images we see in our dreams into peaceful forms. Using the same process, we can transmute the negative emotions we feel during the daytime into increased awareness.
“A further step leads him to the knowledge that the essential nature of form and of all things perceived by the senses in the wakingstate are as equally unreal as their reflexes in the dreamstate, both states alike being sangsaric, “ that is to say, illusory.
that the dream state and waking state both use the same perceptual process to arrive at mental representations or models of the world. These models, whether of the dream or physical world, are only models. As such they are illusions, not the things they are representing, just as the map is not the territory, and the menu is not the meal.
Nasrudin went into a bank to cash a check. The teller asked him if he could identify himself. “Yes, I can, “ Nasrudin replied, taking out a mirror with which he scrutinizes his features. “That’s me, all right.
a monk boasts to Nasrudin, “I am so detached that I never think of myself, only of others. “ Nasrudin replies, “Well, I am so objective that I can look at myself as if I were another person; so I can afford to think of myself.
The less we identify with who we think we are, the more likely we are to discover who we really are. In this regard, the Sufi master Tariqavi wrote: When you have found yourself you can have knowledge. Until then you can only have opinions. Opinions are based on habit and what you conceive to be convenient.
The way people approach seeking the Divine also affects their experience.
It’s ordinarily very difficult to conceive how you might not yet be fully awake, unless you have had experiences
I do not regard lucid dreaming as a complete path to enlightenment. Perhaps in the hands of the Tibetan Buddhists, with the right guidance, and combined with other necessary techniques, seekers could use lucid dreaming to take them to their spiritual goals. However, I see it primarily as a signpost pointing to the possibility of higher consciousness, a reminder that there is more to life than people are ordinarily aware of, and an inspiration to seek a guide who knows the way.