Notes on Lucid Dreaming

Notes on Lucid Dreaming

In 1986 I read the pioneering book by Stephen LaBerge on lucid dreaming, and I decided to try to induce a lucid dream. Soon I arrived at the first stage, called the false awakening: I dreamed I woke up, got out of bed, and began to dress. I tried to pull my nightshirt over my head but could not lift my arms. That made me realize I had not actually awoken but was still dreaming.

I continued to practice the techniques, but very soon I started to get interested in the subject matter of my dreams rather than in the lucidity. I wondered to myself whether it would be a good thing for me to do, to start recording my dreams and thinking about their content. It was just a question in my mind.

Very soon afterward I received a letter from a friend in New York (I was in Boston). I hadn't seen or heard from Eric T. in several years; we were not correspondents. Eric wrote that he felt compelled to tell me a dream he'd had about me. He dreamed he was walking with Meher Baba. Eric indicated to Baba that they might take a certain direction, but Baba brusquely gestured that he knew perfectly well where he was going. He headed in a different direction than Eric had pointed. Soon they arrived at a house and Baba knocked purposefully on the door. It was I who opened it.

Eric thought I would enjoy knowing that in the dream Baba had wanted to visit me with some purpose. I decided to take this as a sign that Baba was okaying my study of my dreams.

Although I went on to study the content of my dreams (I eventually joined a dream group and, when I had a very disturbing dream, quit the group and went into therapy with the leader of the group; I thereafter did five years of Jungian dreamwork in analysis), I also occasionally had a lucid dream spontaneously. I enjoyed them. I did not necessarily agree with some practitioners that one of the main aims should be to take charge of your dreams and make the outcome be what you wanted instead of what the dream seemed to want or your unconscious wanted to express. (One use was to change the outcome of nightmares, e.g., turn and face the monster and ask what it wanted.)

However, there were some times when I used the lucid dream to change what was happening. For instance, I dreamed I was at the Northeast Gathering for Meher Baba. I was carrying Baba's sadra in a carrying case that our Boston group used for archival storage of the sadra. It was rather heavy. I looked toward the cabin where I was to bring the sadra and at that moment I became lucid. I said to myself, "Since this is a dream, then I don't have to carry this heavy box to the cabin; I can simply be there in an instant just by thinking." And so I was.

Another time, I dreamed I was walking down the street in the Diamond District of NYC (47th St.). An older black woman was walking ahead of me. She appeared tired from a hard day of work. I reached out to pat her reassuringly on the back, but she slapped my hand away with irritation. At this moment I became lucid, so her rejection didn't bother me. The woman disappeared and I reached the corner and was on Broadway. This is near the Theater District. I realized that since it was a dream, I could do whatever I wanted and need not feel embarrassed about what people would think of me. So I at once loudly burst into song and dance — belting out some Broadway show tune!

Once I read a book by Charles T. Tart called Open Mind, Discriminating Mind — a collection of essays by this scientist who specializes in the study of consciousness and psi. The book has a chapter on lucid dreaming in which he summarizes the different methods of inducing one. He tells about one technique based on Tibetan practice. The Tibetan Buddhists have a practice of dream yoga, which interested me very much.

In Tibetan Buddhism, dreaming is one of the "bardos." Usually people think of the bardo as the state between death and the next rebirth (where, according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, you have a good chance of attaining liberation if you know how to do the correct meditations and remember where you are and what is happening instead of falling into a dreamlike condition in which you are beset by the negative emotions within your psyche in the form of frightening visions. But the word bardo simply means "intermediate state" (perhaps it's related to barzakh in Sufism,a word Meher Baba used in connection with intermediate forms or turning points in evolution), and any state can be a bardo, including the waking state, the meditation state, and the dreaming state. The purpose of dream yoga is to become lucid in your dreams and realize that waking consciousness is also only a dream. In this aspect it is consistent with Meher Baba's call to awaken from the dream of Maya. And Baba has told us in so many words that all this that we experience as real is nothing but a dream or a zero.

Well, in the book by Dr. Tart, he described a Tibetan method, which as I recall had to do with visualizing a red spot in your throat as you fall asleep. This required a strong ability to concentrate on the visualization and maintain it until I fell asleep. The first night these exertions resulted in no more than a sore throat upon awakening in the morning. But the second night, I had the most incredible dream. I dreamed that I suddenly realized, with the full force that you can imagine such a shocking realization would bring, that my entire life had been a hallucination that I'd had while sitting at a banquet table. I wrote to Charley Tart about it (I had edited one of his books as an editor at Shambhala Publications, so I’d had some correspondence with him) and he loved the dream and asked if he could tell it to students as an example. We agreed it was similar to a famous story of an Indian sage named Narada who asked his master "What is the meaning of Maya?" The master said, "I will explain it, but first I want you to bring me a drink of water from the middle of the stream."

While Narada was filling the vessel in midstream, the river began to flood and he was swept to the opposite shore, where he saw a young woman walking. Enchanted by her beauty, he followed her to her father's house, where he requested work on the farm. After some time, he asked the father to marry her. They had a happy life with several children. Years passed. Then a flood came and the family was swept into the waters. He tried to hold on to his wife and children, but one by one they slipped from his hands and he lost them.

He managed to get to shore and lay there exhausted when suddenly he realized someone was standing over him. He heard his master's voice saying, "Where is the water, my son? You have been gone for half an hour." Narada realized that this experience was how his master answered his question about Maya.

So the spiritual significance of lucid dreaming is the potential to help you wake up from the dream of life and draw closer to Reality.

Another idea that I got from the Tibetan teaching of lucid dreaming is that if you gain some measure of control (the ability to do as you choose instead of just being swept along by the illogical events of the dream), you can supplicate your teacher and seek teachings and blessings in a dream.

There are a number of ways to induce a lucid dream. As with many things, concentrated effort, persistence, and a genuine interest in accomplishing this will lead to success.

One other thing I stumbled upon. At the time I first started doing this, I used to sometimes take L-Tryptophan, an amino acid that was used as a supplement to aid sleep at night. I am convinced that this supplement helped induce lucid dreams because they (and OBEs) happened many times when I took it. Otherwise, I did not find it especially easy to induce lucid dreams directly. That is, a lucid dream did not necessarily follow directly from my efforts to have one. However, I believe my continued efforts caused lucid dreams to occur spontaneously at other times, even if I was not trying on that particular night.

Tryptophan was taken off the market for some years because a contaminated batch caused illness and even a death. It is now available again and is safe; but I have never been able to confirm that anyone else ever had a similar experience with lucid dreaming under its influence, though I have asked people, including authors on the topic.

One other interesting author I could mention is Scott Sparrow (who was formerly associated with ARE, the Edgar Casey organization; he has also written an interesting book about people's personal encounters of Jesus that he collected), who has written about his spiritual practice of lucid dreaming. He has some articles, book excerpts, and audio at http://www.spiritualmentoring.com/