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.

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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.

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.

Morphing orphans

The scene takes place in what may be something like my mother’s office, which is attached to a much bigger facility with several rooms and a kitchen. Several people are mulling about, preparing for what I later realize is dinner.

I am sitting comfortably in a La-Z-Boy® recliner, when several adults walk in the room with two little girls around age 2, a blonde Caucasian and an Asian. They are both dressed in onesie pajamas, the blonde in pink and the Asian in black. One of the caregivers carries the two girls over to me and seats them both on my lap. I understand that these are orphans in need of a home.

“What’s your name?” I ask the one to my left.

“Amanda,” the girl in pink answers.

“And what’s your name?” I ask the other.

“Amanda,” she says, smiling.

The blonde girl squirms to the floor, and the Asian morphs into an Asian boy around the age of 5. He is abnormally limber and performs several acrobatic tricks, the likes of which I had never seen. Everyone’s eyes are on the child as he twists and contorts and lands in a spectacularly articulated finale. Applause follows from the present onlookers.

The little boy approaches one of his caregivers and asks, “Will I ever die?”

The bewildered man says, “No… I don’t think so.” Uncertain of the proper response to such a question, the caregiver turns to me and asks, “Should I have told him yes?”

I begin to recount the story of young prince Siddhartha, and how his father carefully sheltered him from the knowledge of illness and death. Siddhartha’s first glimpse at the sight of a dying old man had a cataclysmic effect on his emotional well-being. I conclude, “Truth is best.”

I motion for the little boy to come to me. He spins and flips and stands in an impossible posture, his body behaving like elastic, expanding in length. Then he walks over to me.

“You have been given a great gift. Your body and mind can achieve many amazing and wonderful things. But there will come a day when you will no longer have this body. Most people get to keep their bodies for 70 to 100 years.”

Amanda, the blonde girl, comes in and asks me to talk about myself. “What would you like me to say?” I stand up, pick her up, and carry her into the kitchen, where my parents and others are preparing food, as she answers me by reciting a nursery rhyme all about me.

Dinner is ready. I pass the table of food and, still carrying the child, open the door to another room to check on my own kids, twin teenagers.

“Hey Dad,” Franklyn says, digging into a huge wheel of cheese. “Do you like Limburger?”

Dreamsign Catalogue:

1. Inner awareness (1/3)

• The scene takes place in what may be something like my mother’s office, which is attached to a much bigger facility with several rooms and a kitchen.

2. Action (1/8)

• she answered me by reciting a nursery rhyme all about me.

3. Form (3/7)

• The scene takes place in what may be something like my mother’s office, which is attached to a much bigger facility with several rooms and a kitchen.
• The blonde girl squirms to the floor, and the Asian morphs into an Asian boy around the age of 5.
• He spun and flipped and stood in an impossible conceivable posture, and his body behaved like elastic, expanding in length.

4. Context (1/7)

• “Hey Dad,” Franklyn said, digging into a huge wheel of cheese. “Do you like Limburger?”

WAKING NOTE:

I shared this dream with my fiancé. We had talked about possible adoption if I am not able to provide her with children. I had a vasectomy at age 26, after having 4 boys. Now, at 40, we are discussing options. Teresa mentioned that the content of the dream reminded her of a conversation she and I had with my mom on separate occasions. My grandmother is beginning to show signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. My mother seems, for the first time in her life, to be waking up to the reality of death. Like her, I have never lost anyone close to me. My fiancé, on the other hand, who is only 25 years old, lost her father several years ago. Such a profound loss changes us. Without loss, there is no knowledge or experience.

Intuition and lucid dreaming

What is intuition?

According to Google, intuition is a noun that means the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning. The origin of the word is Latin, denoting spiritual insight or immediate inner seeing.

For those of us on a quest into the inner world of the self, this is a concept worth exploring. Intuition belongs to the subconscious, like a knowing or truthful belief. Lucid dreaming is the ability to consciously interact with this inner world, and perhaps to access hidden treasures that for most people, through cultural conditioning or ignorance, is unattainable.

Paul McCartney hears the melody of “Yesterday” in a dream.

I prefer to believe that all things are within the realm of the possible, and that lucid dreaming is a way to explore the reservoir of genius, wisdom, and even perennial truth. After all, where did Galileo, Bach, Mozart, Edison, and McCartney achieve greatness? Were they just lucky? Or did they tap into something accessible to us all?

They tapped into themselves first, and shared their discoveries with the rest of the world in the form of self-expression.

Who is to say what you can or cannot do? Who is to determine the length and breadth of your accomplishments while in this brief life of waking and sleeping? What authority is to proclaim that these two modes of experience are mutually exclusive? As a dreamer in life, should you not live in such a way as to enhance your dreams? And what should come of riches inside your the dream world? Should they not also expand your waking life?

Our world is a mystery. Life is a mystery. And dreams have been far too important, revered, studied, worshiped, and interpreted for them to be of no good use. They are not meaningless, as Aristotle first proposed, or the ancients wouldn’t have used them to predict possible outcomes, heal the sick, and communicate with the gods. Dreams are not the simple effects of random neural firings, as suggested by Alan Hobson and Robert McCarley in 1977, or their contents would be devoid of artistic richness and logic, as in the example of the musician from Liverpool, who first heard the melody of “Yesterday” in a dream.

Dreams are a way to approach your hidden genius. So convinced that he had subconsciously plagiarized the melody of “Yesterday” before dreaming it in its entirety, Paul McCartney played it for friends and associates for about a month, asking if they had heard it anywhere. “Eventually it became like handing something in to the police. I thought if no one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it” (Paul McCartney quote from Wikipedia).

“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” – John Lennon