Lucid Dreaming Part 16

This comical parody of spiritual cults would have its tragic aspect as well, were it not for the fact that Narayana was eventually able to progress beyond this state of inflation. He dreamed that he fell in among a group of yogis who managed to enlighten him in the following dream:

... another elderly figure from amongst the dream creatures rose from his seat and overawed the a.s.sembly with his long grey beard and his yogi's staff. He began his oration in a curious and amusing manner, though with an authoritative tone, his voice quivering with anger and his gaunt index finger pointing towards the dreamer: "What reason have you to call us your dream creatures and yourself the creator of us all? If you are our creator we say equally emphatically that so are we the creator of yourself. We are all in the same boat, and you can claim no sort of higher existence than ours. If, however, you want to be convinced of my statement, I can show you the Creator of us all, i.e., of yourself as well as ours." With these words, he struck the dreamer on the head with his heavy staff, who, in consequence, woke up and found himself lying in his bed with his mind extremely puzzled.15

The yogi's point is that the dream ego (mistaken for "the dreamer" by Narayana) is just another dream figure. The actual creator of the dream is not a part of the dream at all-being, in fact, the sleeping self.

This is an insight fully lucid dreamers realize through direct experience. They know that the persons they appear to be in the dream are not who they really are. No longer identifying with their egos, they are free to change them, correcting their delusions. As an immediate consequence of this, the self-representation of the ego becomes a more accurate map of the true territory of the self. The ego now encompa.s.ses the fact that "the map is not the territory," which makes it more difficult to mistake one's self-image for one's true self.

The fully lucid dreamer does not need to struggle to overcome his or her ego. He or she has become objective enough to no longer identify with it. In consequence, the ego now stands in proper relation to the self as its representative and servant. The lucid dreamer's ego now realizes its limitations: it knows it is only the limited part of the self that the person believes him or herself to be. Or perhaps even less-only what we can explicitly spell out about ourselves. This knowledge puts the ego's importance in modest proportion to the true, and perhaps as yet undiscovered, Self.

The fully lucid dreams we have been discussing are instances of transcendental experiences, experiences in which you go beyond your current level of consciousness. Lucid dreamers (at least during the dream) have gone beyond their former views of themselves and have entered a higher state of consciousness. They have left behind their former way of being in dreams, no longer identifying with the dream characters they play or thinking that the dream world is reality. In this way, fully lucid dreams are transcendental experiences.

Transcendental experiences are advantageous, in my view, in that they help us detach from fixed ideas about ourselves. The less we identify with who we think we are (the ego), the more likely it is that we may one day discover who we really are. In this regard, the Sufi master Tariqavi has written,

The study of the Way requires self-encounter along the way. You have not met yourself yet. The only advantage of meeting others in the meantime is that one of them may present you to yourself.

Before you do that, you will possibly imagine that you have met yourself many times. But the truth is that when you do meet yourself, you come into a permanent endowment and bequest of knowledge that is like no other experience on earth.16

Before they meet themselves, lucid dreamers are at first inclined to seek the dream fulfillment of what they believe they have always wanted. This is natural enough. Yet after too many "wish-fulfilling" dreams, where the action is motivated by the ego-a.s.sociated drives, pa.s.sions, desires, expectations, and goals with which we are so familiar, a point of satiation may be reached. Lucid dreamers may then tire of seeking their habitual satisfactions, which may have become less satisfying due to effortless gratification. They grow weary of dreaming the same dreams, and equally of being the same self, night after night. It is at this point that the need for self-transcendence may arise. Such lucid dreamers no longer know what they want, only that it is not what they used to want. So they give up deciding what to do, and resign from deliberate dream control.

Having recognized the limitations of goals determined by the ego, the lucid dreamer has surrendered control to something beyond what he or she knows him or herself to be. The form taken by this "something beyond" will vary in accordance with the individual's way of thinking. For those comfortable with traditional religions, the surrender might naturally be phrased in such terms as "submission to the will of G.o.d." On the other hand, those who find themselves uncomfortable with theistic terminology will probably prefer to express themselves differently.

If you follow the reasoning argued above for the self-representational nature of the ego, a very natural way to frame this surrender is available: giving control to your true self. Whatever you a.s.sume about the nature of your true self, surrendering control from who you think you are, to who you truly are, is likely to be an improvement. Including, as it does, everything that you know, your true or total self ought to be capable of making wiser decisions than your ego. Moreover, it knows what your ego may not-your highest goals.

Another formulation is surrender to "The Highest," whatever this may ultimately prove to mean. Such questions as whether this is a part of yourself or something beyond yourself need not be resolved at this point. It is with this term that I personally find myself most comfortable. Besides, it is, by definition, with "The Highest" that the ultimate decisions rightfully rest.

Though lucid dreamers give up control of the course of their dreams, they still require lucidity. But now they need it to respond creatively to whatever the dream presents and to follow intuitively the intentions of the higher will. The following lucid dream ill.u.s.trates the process of self-transcendence we have been discussing. Although it is one of my own lucid dreams in the sense that I awoke from it, it felt more like it had me:

Late one summer morning several years ago, I was lying quietly in bed, reviewing the dream I had just awakened from. A vivid image of a road appeared, and by focusing my attention on it, I was able to enter the scene. At this point, I was no longer able to feel my body, from which I concluded I was, in fact, asleep. I found myself driving in my sportscar down the dream road, perfectly aware that I was dreaming. I was delighted by the vibrantly beautiful scenery my lucid dream was presenting. After driving a short distance farther, I was confronted with a very attractive, I might say a dream of a hitchhiker beside me on the road just ahead. I need hardly say that I felt strongly inclined to stop and pick her up. But I said to myself, "I've had that dream before. How about something new?" So I pa.s.sed her by, resolving to seek "The Highest" instead. As soon as I opened myself to guidance, my car took off into the air, flying rapidly upward, until it fell behind me like the first stage of a rocket. I continued to fly higher into the clouds, where I pa.s.sed a cross on a steeple, a star of David, and other religious symbols. As I rose still higher, beyond the clouds, I entered a s.p.a.ce that seemed a vast mystical realm: a vast emptiness that was yet full of love; an unbounded s.p.a.ce that somehow felt like home. My mood had lifted to corresponding heights, and I began to sing with ecstatic inspiration. The quality of my voice was truly amazing-it spanned the entire range from deepest ba.s.s to highest soprano-and I felt as if I were embracing the entire cosmos in the resonance of my voice. As I improvised a melody that seemed more sublime than any I had heard before, the meaning of my song revealed itself and I sang the words, "I praise Thee, O Lord!"

Upon awakening from this remarkable lucid dream, I reflected that it had been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life. It felt as if it were of profound significance. However, I was unable to say in exactly what way it was profound, nor was I able to evaluate its significance. When I tried to understand the words that had somehow contained the full significance of the experience-"I praise Thee, O Lord!"-I realized that, in contrast to my understanding while in the dream, I only now understood the phrase in the sense it would have in our realm. It seemed the esoteric sense that I comprehended while I dreamed was beyond my cloudy understanding while awake. About what the praise did not mean, I can say this: in that transcendent state of unity, there was no "I" and "Thee." It was a place that had no room for "I" and "Thee," but for one only. So which of us, then, was there? My personal "I," my dream-ego sense of individuality, was absent. Thus, what was present was "Thee." But in that realm, "I" was "Thee." So I might just as well have sung "I praise Me ..." except that there was really no "me" either! In any case, it should be clear why I have called this lucid dream a transpersonal experience.

This brings us back to the question of whether it is possible to have the equivalent of a near-death experience without nearly dying. That the answer is "yes" should now be evident. I say this because the experience provided by transpersonal dreams (whether lucid or not) is symbolically synonymous with the process of dying to our old ways and being reborn to new lives. Whether this new att.i.tude carries over into waking life is another matter, but from the point of view of dreaming, death and transcendence are the same thing.

Let us bring this chapter full circle by giving a reply to the question, "What will we be after death?" As far as we are individuals, death appears to be the end of us. Were we to leave it at that, this would be nothing more than the "modern" view of death as annihilation. Yet the preceding pages suggest that our individuality is not our truest being, but only a representation of it. What you take to be your individuality is a mental image of yourself. "Who you think you are" is only a thought, a transient process occurring in time and s.p.a.ce, and doomed to pa.s.s like everything else that exists in time.

However, according to the point of view we have been considering, your essential being transcends s.p.a.ce and time: your transpersonal ident.i.ty transcends your personal ident.i.ty. This, your transpersonal individuality, may in the end prove identical with the nature of ultimate reality-"the s.h.i.+ning Sea" referred to above: "Possessed of all possessions, Knower of the All-Knowledge, Creator of All Creations-the One Mind, Reality Itself." At death, "the dewdrop slips back into the s.h.i.+ning Sea." Thus it may be that when death comes, although you are annihilated as an individual and the dewdrop is lost in the sea, you at the same time return to the realization of what you have always essentially been: the drop recognizes itself to be not merely the drop it thought it was, but the Sea. So to the question "What will we be after death?", the answer may be given, "Everything and nothing."

Epilogue: Alive in Your Life

At the beginning of this book I made the a.s.sertion that in our usual dream state, we are neither really awake nor fully alive. From this point of departure, I argued that until we become aware while dreaming that we are dreaming, we remain asleep within our sleep, and thus the third of our life that lies in the domain of sleep and dreams is all but lost to us. But fortunately, as every reader must know by now, this is not an unalterable condition, because we can develop the capacity to be awake in our dreams.

It is likely that what has already been said regarding the sleeping third of your life may apply, in equal measure, to the other two-thirds-the state you call "awake." Let us begin with some of the applications and implications the experience of lucid dreaming suggests for everyday life.

To what extent are the concepts of lucid dreaming relevant to waking life? The answer is that the att.i.tudes characterizing lucid dreaming have certain parallels with an approach to life that might be called "lucid living." To gain a clearer concept of what this intriguing term entails, we can proceed by a.n.a.logy, examining some of the contrasting att.i.tudes and a.s.sumptions a.s.sociated with lucid versus non-lucid dreaming.1

The most basic way in which the att.i.tudes of lucid and non-lucid dreamers differ is derived from the very definition of lucidity.

During non-lucid dreaming, you tacitly a.s.sume that you are awake; during lucid dreaming, you know you are asleep and dreaming. I believe the corresponding pair of att.i.tudes in the waking state to be as follows. On one hand, you might be making the non-lucid a.s.sumption that you are objectively experiencing reality. According to this point of view, perception seems a straightforward matter of looking through the windows of your eyes and simply seeing what is out there. Unfortunately, this traditional, "commonsense" view seems clearly inconsistent with the findings of modern psychology and neurophysiology. What you see is not "what is out there"; in fact, it isn't even "out there." What you see is only a mental model inside your head of what you perceive or believe is "out there." The lucid understanding of the nature of perception is derived from current knowledge about how the brain works. If you would like to follow this approach, I recommend the working hypothesis that your experiences are necessarily subjective: they are the results of your own construction based upon your current motivational state as well as what you see and believe of reality. In terms of visual perception, this point of view accounts for the optical illusions that can occur as a result of our expectations about the world, as well as how emotions can distort perception-causing, for instance, the camper to see "every bush as if a bear," and the lover to see "the beloved in every tree." To summarize, the more correct a.n.a.lysis of perception is that we do not experience reality directly, but rather through our models of the world. Thus, before we can see what is "out there," the visual information from our eyes must pa.s.s through a host of subjective factors such as expectations, feelings, concepts, values, att.i.tudes, and goals. It is unavoidable that our models of the world limit what we experience of reality; the more distorted our maps, the more distorted the territory will seem.

A related pair of att.i.tudes would be the tendency, while non-lucid, to a.s.sume pa.s.sively that the events of a dream are "just happening to you," versus your realization, while lucid, that you are actively creating, or at least significantly contributing to, what happens in your dream. The corresponding waking state att.i.tudes are exactly parallel. What was just said of your dream state applies equally to your waking state, if you subst.i.tute "experience" for "dream."

As a consequence of this pa.s.sive att.i.tude while non-lucid, you might hold the belief that the rules of your dream game are entirely determined by an external reality principle. As a non-lucid dreamer, you would thus remain earthbound due to your belief that gravity is a universal law of physics-even in your own dream. But if you are lucid enough to know that dream gravity is a mere convention, you are free to take it or leave it, flying at will. Lucid dreamers regard other "laws" of the dream world in a similar fas.h.i.+on-as self-made rules that could well be changed if there were a reason to do so. Here, the corresponding att.i.tudes in the waking state do not translate as directly as those we have so far considered. In this case, I believe the non-lucid att.i.tude is that the situation you are experiencing is defined and determined by external factors generally beyond your power to alter to any significant extent; if you hold this view, other people and the accidents of fate determine what happens to you. In contrast, the lucid att.i.tude is that you define how you experience the situations of your life. So whether you view a given dream as a nightmare or an opportunity for self-integration is up to you, just as whether you view a given situation in your waking life as a trial or a challenge.

A final pair of contrasting att.i.tudes is the mindfulness that distinguishes lucidity from its contrary. Mindless habit is not necessarily an undesirable condition, although habitual mindlessness undoubtedly is. The main advantage that conscious behavior offers over habitual behavior is increased flexibility. However, if the situation is one of relatively constant circ.u.mstances that demand unchanging responses, habit is a more economical approach. Mindless responses are fine, as long as they fit the situation. However, if the situation is one of relative unpredictability or novelty, being mindful-knowing what you are doing-will more likely be advantageous.

Life presents us all with a mixture of the expected and the unexpected; whichever you get, it is obviously important for you to be able to respond with your most adaptive form of behavior. Since mindlessness and habit are easy, while mindfulness and consciousness require effort, you are far more likely to fall short in the areas demanding consciousness than you are likely to be too mindful when you should be automatic, although this also can happen. It is therefore likely that you would benefit from an improvement in your capacity to be conscious. Because mindfulness or lucidity seems harder to attain in the dream than in the waking state, practice in lucid dreaming should be especially effective in improving your waking capacity for mindfulness.

Idries Shah, the foremost contemporary exponent of Sufism, was once asked to name "a fundamental mistake" that most people make. He replied: "To think that [we are] alive, when [we have] merely fallen asleep in life's waiting room."2

It is a traditional doctrine of esoteric psychologies that the ordinary state or consciousness we call "waking" is so far from seeing things as they are in "objective reality" that it could be more accurately called "sleep" or "dreaming." Bertrand Russell comes to much the same conclusion by a very different path: "If modern physics is to be believed," the philosopher writes, "the dreams we call waking perceptions have only a very little more resemblance to objective reality than the fantastic dreams of sleep."3

Philosophers aside, if you were asked, "Are you awake now?" you would probably reply, "Certainly!" Unfortunately, feeling certain that we are awake provides no guarantee that we are awake. When Samuel Johnson kicked a stone as if to say, "We know what's real," he was expressing this sense of certainty. Yet Dr. Johnson could have dreamed he kicked a stone and felt the same. The illusory sense of certainty about the completeness and coherence of our lives leads us to what William James described as a "premature closing of our accounts with reality."4

How do you know that you are awake right now? You may say you remember waking up from your last night's sleep. But that may merely have been a "false awakening," and you may fool yourself now by dreaming that you are not dreaming anymore. Perhaps what we take to be "true awakenings" are really just another degree of partial or false awakenings. A novelist has similarly argued:

Why, my friend, should these successive degrees not exist? I have often dreamt that I was awakening from a dream, and in a dream I have reflected on the preceding dream: on waking, I was then able to reflect on my two dreams. Owing to its greater clearness, the second one was a sort of waking in relation of the first. And as for this real waking, who is to say that it will not appear to me as a dream one day in its turn in relation to an even clearer view of the sequence of things? ... So many things here below remain confused and obscure to us; it is impossible that the true waking state lies here.5

Once more, let us try to really ask ourselves, "Are we awake?" You will note how difficult it is to genuinely raise the question. To ask sincerely whether we are really awake requires honest doubt-however slight. And this is no easy matter for most of us. But doubting the indubitable is the business of philosophers. As Nietzsche put it, "... the man of philosophic turn has foreboding that underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed, and that therefore it is also an appearance."6 Indeed, Schopenhauer considered his own propensity at times to regard both people and things "as mere phantoms and dream-pictures" as the very criterion of philosophic ability.7

How might we not be fully awake? It may be that we possess a higher sense (let us say, a form of intuition) that ordinarily remains asleep when our lesser, though better known, senses awake. Thus, as was suggested above, the experience we call "awakening" and consider complete may in fact be only a partial awakening. As Orage has written,

It may be feared that there is something morbid in the foregoing speculations; and that an effort to see our waking life as merely a special form of sleep must diminish its importance for us and ours for it. But this att.i.tude towards a possible and probable fact is itself morbidly timid. The truth is that just as in night-dreams the first symptom of waking is to suspect that one is dreaming, the first symptom of waking from the waking state-the second awaking of religion-is the suspicion that our present waking state is dreaming likewise. To be aware that we are only partially awake is the first condition of becoming and making ourselves more fully awake.8

Given the virtual impotence of mere philosophical reasoning to raise the genuine suspicion that we are only partially awake, it is fortunate that there is another, more effective, means of approaching the question. This other approach, as will by now come as no surprise, is lucid dreaming. Lucid dreams can plainly show us what it is like to think we are awake and then to discover we are not. J. H. M. Whiteman's book, The Mystical Life, provides an example of the most extreme form this discovery can take. Professor Whiteman explained that he thought his nocturnal mystical experience was stimulated by the meditative state in which he listened to the performance of a celebrated string quartet on the previous evening. The concert so moved him that for a few moments, he seemed to be "rapt out of s.p.a.ce by the extreme beauty of the music," and for a little while was caught up in "a new state of contemplation and joy." Afterward, White-man remembered going to bed "peacefully composed and full of a quiet joy." With day residue like this, we may well imagine he was about to have an interesting night! His first dream of the night appeared, at the beginning, to be rather irrational. "I seemed," he wrote, "to move smoothly through a region of s.p.a.ce where, presently, a vivid sense of cold flowed in on me and held my attention with a strange interest. I believe that at that moment the dream had become lucid. Then suddenly, ... all that up to now had been wrapped in confusion instantly pa.s.sed away, and a new s.p.a.ce burst forth in vivid presence and utter reality, with perception free and pin-pointed as never before; the darkness itself seemed alive. The thought that was then borne in upon me with inescapable conviction was this: 'I have never been awake before.' "9 It is unusual for lucid dreamers to be driven as far as Whiteman's conviction of never having been awake before. But it is not at all unusual for lucid dreamers to experience similar feelings in reference to their previous dream lives. In fact, this is how the first experience of extended lucidity strikes most people; they are astonished to realize that they have never before been awake in their dreams.

Lucid dreaming can be a point of departure from which to understand how we might not be fully awake-for as ordinary dreaming is to lucid dreaming, so the ordinary waking state might be to the fully awakened state. This capacity of lucid dreams, to prepare us for a fuller awakening, may prove to be lucid dreaming's most significant potential for helping us become more alive in our lives.

At the beginning of this book, I spoke of a treasure of incalculable value: a precious jewel. If you find it, "you come into a permanent endowment and bequest of knowledge ...": you discover the secret of who you really are. Lucid dreaming may have something to contribute to your finding yourself, as does this ancient traditional tale, which is said to contain all wisdom in its various levels of interpretation:

THE PRECIOUS JEWEL.

In a remote realm of perfection, there was a just monarch who had a wife and a wonderful son and daughter. They all lived together in happiness.

One day the father called his children before him and said:

'The time has come, as it does for all. You are to go down, an infinite distance, to another land. You shall seek and find and bring back a precious Jewel.'

The travellers were conducted in disguise to a strange land, whose inhabitants almost all lived a dark existence. Such was the effect of this place that the two lost touch with each other, wandering as if asleep.

From time to time they saw phantoms, similitudes of their country and of the Jewel, but such was their condition that these things only increased the depth of their reveries, which they now began to take as reality.

When news of his children's plight reached the king, he sent word by a trusted servant, a wise man:

'Remember your mission, awaken from your dream, and remain together.'

With this message they roused themselves, and with the help of their rescuing guide they dared the monstrous perils which surrounded the Jewel, and by its magic aid returned to their realm of light, to remain in increased happiness for evermore.10

The Future of Lucid Dreaming