Flood of forgetfulness

This morning’s journal entry is sparse. I dreamed all night but I don’t remember much. I was on a team of investigators. We had camera equipment set up to record the movements of someone (in a dream?) and I was in charge of diagnosing behaviors and emotions (?).

Earlier, I was caught in a flashflood and thought I came dangerously close to being swept away.

Dreamsign Catalogue:

1. Inner awareness (0/4)

2. Action (1/11)

• I was on a team of investigators. We had camera equipment set up to record the movements of someone (in a dream?) and I was in charge of diagnosing behaviors and emotions (?).

3. Form (0/12)

4. Context (0/12)

Lucid dreams for knowledge, improvement, and expression

Lucid dreaming can be a pleasurable pastime or escape from the mundane world of waking, but I’m not interested primarily in trivialities. If I hadn’t experienced such potent and blissful lucid dreams as an 8-year-old child, I probably wouldn’t even bother looking further into it. As stated in an earlier blog, I dismissed my early experiences as something natural that a child “grows out of”. Until recently, I never considered it as a possible means of benefiting the health and/or well-being of the individual.

Now at age 40, I have re-opened the box.

Click photo to read more about “How-To”

The opening chapters of LaBerge’s Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming and Tuccillo’s A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming, both include practical benefits of lucid dreaming. LaBerge’s list includes: adventure, practicing for real life, problem solving, facing nightmares, health, and understanding. Tuccillo’s list is similar: adventure, facing nightmares, creativity and inspiration, problem solving, healing, and self-knowledge. Worded and ordered slightly differently, both lists can be boiled down to essentially 3 things: self knowledge, self improvement, self expression.

Self knowledge

First, can lucid dreaming bring us to a greater awareness of who we really are? I would like to investigate this on 3 levels.

1. Who do I think I am? Can lucid dreams help reveal my self-image in different, more illuminating terms? I am somewhat of a mystery to myself, perhaps from neglect, perhaps from laziness, perhaps from fear. But if lucid dreams can show me, through content, landscape, characters, situations, who I think I am, could they also reveal my deeper self to me?
2. In my investigation is the search for and pursuit of who I really am. By manipulating my fantasy worlds, can I come into contact with a braver, more virtuous and creative being? Are there higher guides who use dreams as a meduim of revelation? Can such transformations come to bear in my waking life whereby I behave differently and get a different outcome?
3. I would like to document some measurable distinctions between the old and new. In short, can lucid dreams be a useful vehicle for the purpose of metamorphosis?

Self improvement

Properly applied knowledge leads to improvement. Can my quest as an oneironaut lead me to a more healthy, productive, and joy-filled waking life?

1. Can my nightly lucid dreaming cause physiological changes that carry over into my waking state? Or can my lucid dreams simply be a spark that lights the fuse toward improvement?
2. Can my explorations reveal hidden wisdom that can be applied to my professional life? Can these applications make a marked difference in my income? Thomas Edison would take cat naps in order to get answers to puzzling dilemmas during his work.
3. And lastly, what do lucid dreams have to offer in the way of lasting happiness? Tuccillo says, “Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Mary Shelley, even Adolf Hitler, were all influences by dream events.” What did they find? How were they enriched or inspired?

Self expression

What does lucid dreaming have to offer me in the way of adventure, enhancement, and advancement?

1. This is probably the most trivial aspects of lucid dreaming. Or is it? Can these escapades to far off and strange dimensions show me how to be a more creative and inspired being? Tuccillo writes about how Paul McCartney found the melody to his song “Yesterday” and the title to “Let It Be” both in dreams.

2. Can these lucid adventures open up opportunities to pick the brains of the likes of Newtons and Einsteins? Can my inner world offer real and life-changing insight? Can this wisdom be applied in my wake life through music, writing, and other creative outlets? For example, where did Carl Jung get the idea during his dream that he should interpret his theories to the lay public? After waking, he wrote Approaching the Unconscious.

3. The bottom line is this: Should lucid dreaming be pursued as a method to grow as a human personality? Will I benefit sufficiently from my pursuits as a fledgling oneironaut (for I have certainly not earned my wings yet!) that my time and energy is well-spent? This is perhaps a question that can only be answered on the other side of the question. Since Lucid dreaming is scientific in principle but subjective in nature, I will have to make a choice to pursue or not to pursue, and live with the consequences either way.

I’m taking Kierkegaard’s leap of faith. I hope to sprout some wings and fly.

With all of our advances in this age in technology and knowledge, no one really understands the full purpose of dreams. But if Freud is correct, and the goal of dreaming is wish fulfillment or conflict resolution, then what would happen if all the accumulated problems of our waking life truly are sent through the filter of our dream state, and instead of dreaming and forgetting, we were to get lucid and resolve them? What would happen then?

This is the key thesis of my inquiry.

Lucid flight school

After reading LaBerge last night, I resolved to dream lucid. I committed to it. I set my intention on it. I accomplished it.

The setting is futuristic, and I am a female trainee at a “wing camp”. There are several people with me, none of whom I recognize. We have been assigned to complete a jumper course, which is a matrix of 3X3 square trampoline-type mats, stacked at multiple levels. Rather than a standard flat survace, however, these mats are simply a rank and file of two-digit numbers that seem to be free floating. 20, 60, or 80 designate the number of feet you would launch when you land on it.

I am a small framed woman and decide to jump in some of the tight fitting areas to master the skill of maneuvering on air.

Although the details are hazy, I am inside an indoor recreation room, now a male. I am looking out into a larger rec area through a huge plate glass window, and I see several women playing Ping-Pong in stripper clothes. One of the “strippers” is doing something provocative with the corner of the table, and I realize that I am in a dream. Lucidity at last!

I take a few steps and launch into flight.

[One of the tasks I had assigned myself while in waking life was to focus on the vividness of the dream. Lately, every source I read about lucid dreaming talks about how a lucid dream can be as vivid as waking life.]

To my great pleasure and satisfaction, the color and clarity of the floor tiles are astonishing. But I want more proof. Taste!

I am flying now between buildings in a futuristic complex of town homes. They look more like the face of an oversized mausoleum, with rows of rectangular sections stacked upon one another in stone. The size is immense, like two huge, intricately carved cliff faces, each overlooking the other. I choose one home, which, although similarly flat at the entrance, has some pleasing porch décor, giving it some charm. I fly in and down into a small kitchen.

There on my right is a shelf full of dry food items, and I see what I’m looking for. Peanut butter Ritz crackers. I taste one, and realize that, yes, in my lucid dream state, I can taste the salt, butter, and peanut butter flavors. Interestingly, while I am chewing, I can’t launch. I have the inner realization, “Of course, I can’t eat and fly at the same time. Everyone knows that.”

After more flying and a few more brief experiences, I lose lucidity. What a ride!

Dreamsign Catalogue:

1. Inner awareness (1/4)

• I have the inner realization, “Of course, I can’t eat and fly at the same time. Everyone knows that.”

2. Action (1/9)

• I am a small framed woman and decide to jump in some of the tight fitting areas to master the skill of maneuvering on air.

3. Form (3/10)

• I am a female trainee at a “wing camp”.
• …a jumper course, … a matrix of 3X3 square trampoline-type mats, stacked at multiple levels, … a rank and file of two-digit numbers that seem to be free floating… 20, 60, or 80 designate the number of feet you would launch when you land on it.
• I am flying now between buildings in a futuristic complex of town homes.

4. Context (2/9)

• I see several women playing Ping-Pong in stripper clothes.
• One of the “strippers” is doing something provocative with the corner of the table, and I realize that I am in a dream.

Lucid salt

I had a brief lucid dream last night at 2:30am!

In my dream I was with my boys, and in particular, in the kitchen with my son, B.K.

[The environment and characters in my dream were an obvious continuation of my waking life experience last night, having my sons over for Thanksgiving dinner and a movie].

In the kitchen, I picked up a salt shaker and began dumping salt on the ground, saying, “Whenever you see me do this, it means that I am aware that this is only a dream.” While B.K. and I had a brief conversation about this, my level of awareness, or lucidity, was fluctuating, because I said something else that didn’t make sense. I told B.K., “If you ever pour salt on the ground in my dream, that will be a signal to me that you are lucid.” Of course, one of my characters being lucid in my own dream is silly. But how fascinating to recall how I was trying to instruct my own son to learn lucid dreaming.

I decided that I wanted to experiment with lucidity within the dream, thinking I might manipulate the environment or something. My apartment was strangely empty, so I felt the need to walk outside for more stimuli. First, I needed privacy, thinking interaction with people would cause me to lose awareness. So I led my sons into the back bedroom and closed them in. At this very moment I woke up.

Although my state of awareness was unstable, I felt exhilarated that I had accomplished lucidity.

Two observations: 1) In LaBerge’s book, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, he mentions that lucid dreams should be handled in an “open, flexible, and noncommanding” way. The instant I woke up, I realized that I had been too rigid and self-interested to stay asleep. Having forced my boys to be shut into a back room seems to have forced me out of the dream. 2) I felt guilt upon awakening, for trying to force my sons out of my dream, even though I was not rude, mean-spirited, or unfair in any way. This may show me something about my sense of responsibility to my boys, even in my dream state.

I checked my clock when I woke up, and it was 2:30am.

Source: http://binauralbrains.com/lucid-dreaming-binaural-beats/

My last dream of the night was about my older brother, Daniel. My dad was there too. We were in a local convenience store, and the clerk was extremely rude to my father, who had come in from out of town. I told her that she should improve her performance as a customer service agent. She made an excuse, so I told her that she had insulted my father, and then I said something very witty which I cannot now recall.

My brother had received some legal papers of some sort. Apparently some agency wanted them signed, essentially agreeing that he did not endorse his brother (me or our other brother, Donn?) as a political candidate (or something). At no time during this dream sequence did I ever become lucid.

DREAMSIGN CATALOGUE:

1. Inner awareness (1/2)

• I told B.K., “If you ever pour salt on the ground in my dream, that will be a signal to me that you are lucid.”

2. Action (1/1)

• I picked up a salt shaker and began dumping salt on the ground

3. Form (0/1)

4. Context (1/1)

• led my sons into the back bedroom and closed them in

First attempt at lucid dreaming

A lucid dream is any dream in which one, for an uninterrupted and prolonged amount of time, is aware that one is dreaming. The phenomenon had also been referred to by Greek philosopher Aristotle who had observed: “often when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream”. – Wikipedia

Your fledgling Oneironaut has some good news and some bad news. The good news is that although I don’t remember most of what I dreamed about last night, I know I dreamed a lot. This means there will be a lot of recorded activity in the weeks to come as I work out the bugs in my dream retention. When my head hit the pillow, I focused on being aware of my awareness, hoping that I could stay “awake” as I fell asleep. To my chagrin, I woke up several times realizing too late that I had been dreaming.

The last dream I had was vivid, one that I didn’t want to end. My oldest son, Jon [almost 20 years old in waking life] and I are on a bus trip. In the dream he was no more than 2 years old and such a cuddle bug.

Source: http://www.learnluciddreaming.com/

The difference between a dream, even a vivid one, and a lucid dream is that during the latter, you are aware that you are in a dream. Last night, I never reached that point, but during this last highly pleasant dream, I did experience a thought process worth mentioning.

In my dream with 2-year-old Jon, I was also aware of a future dimension where he is a lot older. Somehow it made sense in the dream that I could spend time with my son while younger in order to improve my relationship with him in his older dimension. I felt elation with the discovery that I could travel back and forth in time and effectively fix errors from the past.

I have four sons. I divorced their mother when Jon was 11, the twins were 9, and the youngest was 7. I have often felt guilty for leaving the house and disrupting their “ideal” situation and for changing my role as a father in the home. Recently Jon and I have had some tough discussions about it, and understandably he still harbors anger over the whole thing.

I am optimistic about my journey into lucid dreaming. I already detect the potential for healing in my waking life as I explore the dynamics of my own soul and psyche. Today happens to be Thanksgiving. I will have all of my sons with me tonight for dinner.

I plan to hug Jon a little longer than usual.

DREAMSIGN CATALOGUE:

1. Inner awareness (1)

• I felt elation with the discovery that I could travel back and forth in time and effectively fix errors from the past.

2. Action (0)

3. Form (1)

• In the dream Jon was no more than 2 years old.

4. Context (0)