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.
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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.
- 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?
- 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?
- 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?
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
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