Introduction to Lucid Dreams.

Lucid Dreaming

".......and I suddenly realised that I was conscious and aware of my situation, in a dream. I was floating high over a city and approaching a building which was large. I willed myself to go through the wall and found myself in a factory, floating near the ceiling. There were lots of people down below on the factory floor, and although I could see them, they apparently could not see me. Having a wonderful sense of freedom and control of the situation, I decided to go down closer and see what was being manufactured. I willed the body to descend downwards, and was in the process of coming closer to people, when it seemed to slow down and get harder to move........then, all of a sudden.....whoosh.....and it all ends" [OOBE]

"...and then I said to myself THIS IS A DREAM and there was a sudden surge of energy within my whole being, like a computer hard drive being fully loaded with data. I was walking on the footpath, and then I willed myself to fly. I took off and flew over a young boy approaching on a push-bike. I said HELLO to him, my voice sounding loud and booming, not like my normal voice at all. He seems frightened and almost fell from the bike, loosing some of his balance...............".

The above is an example of a lucid dream I experienced many years ago, a dream where control and expression of the dream state is "given" to the person dreaming for a time. These rare experiences (perhaps now on the increase with new methods and technology) are apart from the normal dreamers awareness of happenings on awakening. The main precedent of the Lucid Dream is that the participant has the ability to affect the dream's events, characters, and the emotional tone in the setting.

Going back to the 4th century-BC, the philosopher Aristotle made reference to these "flavour" of dreams in his treatise "On Dreams". Later, in AD 415, Saint Augustine made reference to recording Lucid dreams of a friend, and eight centuries after that, Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote about the distinct Lucid dream from the normal. In 1867, Marquis Hervey de Saint-Denis wrote a book called "Dreams and How to Guide Them", summing up his twenty years of dream research and analysis. He said that good dream recall, the ability to will himself awake, and an awareness of the dream state had given him a measure of dream control. Sigmund Freud praised the professor's work in his book in the second edition of "The Interpretation of Dreams".

From the early 1900's, a Dutch psychiatrist and sleep researcher, Frederik Willem Van Eeden recorded his Lucid dreams, and eventually made the findings known in 1913 to the British Society for Psychical Research, which encompassed 352 dreams. In an entry (1904) in his dream diary, he notes; "I dreamt that I stood at a table before a window. On the table were different objects. I was perfectly well aware that I was dreaming and I considered what sorts of experiments I could make. I began by trying to break glass, by beating it with a stone. I put a small tablet of glass on two stones and struck it with another stone, yet it would not break. Then I took a fine claret glass from the table and struck it with my fist, with all my might, at the same time reflecting how dangerous it would be to do this in waking life; yet the glass remained whole. But lo! when I looked at it again after some time, it was broken." The delayed shattering of the glass gave Van Eeden...."a very curious impression of being in a fake-world, cleverly imitated, but with small failures. I took the broken glass and threw it out of the window, in order to observe whether I could hear the tinkling. I heard the noise all right and I even saw two dogs run away from it quite naturally. I thought what a good imitation this comedy world was. Then I saw a decanter with claret and tasted it, and noted with perfect clearness of mind: 'Well, we can also have voluntary impressions of taste in this dream-world; this has quite the taste of wine.'" Going one step further, Van Eeden speculated that this dream body might be an astral body, an ethereal reproduction of his physical self. Although he was a scientist, he was ready to accept the possibility of a connection between the world of the occult and lucid dreams. It was not until the 1980's that the scientific community gave a little credence to Lucid Dreams, mainly due to the efforts of Stephen LaBerge. He devised methods of increasing his incidents of Lucid Dreams with the MILD technique (mnemonic induction of lucid dreams), gaining a 400% increase. Later he devised a method of signalling back when he was in the middle of a Lucid Dream, using bio-feedback equipment to trace vertical eye sweeps. He even managed to send back his initials via an electromyograph...an instrument which measures muscular activity. He sent the message with morse code, tightening his left hand equalled a dot, and tightening the right equalled a dash.

At present, La Berge is considered one of the leading psychophysiologist and investigators/promoters of Lucid Dreams. He is a Stanford University scientist, high technology entrepreneur, and guru on the subject, running from the Lucidity Institute in Palo Alto California. He published a book in 1985 called "Lucid Dreaming" which is in its ninth printing and has sold in excess of 120,000 copies, and a follow-up with writer Howard Rheingold called "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" in 1990. He compares Lucid Dreaming with that of virtual reality, except that with the former we are using the best computer available.....the human mind. The experiments he has conducted show that dream activities - including singing, counting numbers, and sex - evoke much the same neural and physiological responses as corresponding experiences in real life. La Berge says that with practice, virtually everyone can learn how to have Lucid Dreams, and learn to control them. At the very least, the "entertainment" value is second to none. The Institute also promotes the use of a variety of hardware/software items for helping individuals attain Lucid experience.

The descriptions of Lucid Dream experiences are generally amazing; colour and light, according to Van Eeden more intense and sensations in general are heightened, much more than normal dreams. It is said that when a Lucid Dream does occasionally inspire negative emotions, they, like the more common positive feelings, are also unusually strong. Van Eeden's recollections are filled with words such as bliss, gratitude, piety, thankfulness, serenity, and calm. An Englishman Hugh Calloway, known by Van Eeden, reported that during his first Lucid Dream; "the vividness of life increased a hundredfold......never had I felt so absolutely well, so clear- brained, so divinely powerful, so inexpressibly free."

Apparently, as a Lucid Dream draws to a close or lucidity fades, the dreamer frequently dreams of waking up. Such a false awakening can occur dozens of times within a single dream.

Don Juan had Carlos Castaneda as his apprentice, and was introduced to dreaming and then lucid dreaming by training. Don Juan, according to the literature, would strike Castaneda at a certain part of his back, causing him to move his "assemblage point", the key to multi-dimensionality. He would constantly lose the discrimination as to whether he was dreaming or not. One method he used for recognising this was to ask the question "Am I dreaming"? as he looked at his hands. this method is considered to be a reality check, unusual hands being a dreaming rendition.

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