Lucid Dreaming Q & A
Where can I learn how to lucid dream?
There is an excellent list of resources at Stephen LeBerge’s Lucidity Institute
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Why should I learn to lucid dream?
People want to learn to lucid dream for many different reasons, depending on who they are and their level of development. A young child may learn to lucid dream to gain control of their lives when they experience little or no control in their waking lives. Some people learn to lucid dream for status; it can be a good pick-up line; others to problem solve or to be more productive with more of their time. Some people learn to lucid dream to face their fears; others for the sheer fun and excitement of it; others t0 test the limits of the possible; others to experience life as a dream; others to grow spiritually in one way or another. Some people believe that the ability to lucid dream implies higher order spiritual development.
Your motives will determine what you make of your lucid dreams. If you don’t know your motives you will misperceive your lucid dreams. The more that you understand why you want to lucid dream the less likely you are to interpret them in a self-fulfilling, self-validating way.
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“This morning i had several lucid dreams… in one of the last dreams there were two gentleman, who introduced themselves, i want to say they were Indian. I have a feeling they weren’t self aspects.. I just remember the feeling of being with them, it was so exhilarating, i was almost in a state of disbelief. They did most of the talking. But i cant remember what was said. What do you think of this? Is it possible that they were guides? Is it possible they could be energies from somewhere else? Do you believe this is possible in the lucid state?
Your dream guests could be guides or energies from somewhere else. They could be “real.” They could be self-created and you are simply deluding yourself to think that they aren’t. Freud might say they could be day residue. Others might reduce them random to nerve firings in the hippocampus. Maybe it’s the devil tempting you to waste your time wondering about your dreams. Who is right? Who is wrong?
Integral Deep Listening says a couple of things about this common concern that everyone struggles with sooner or later. Spirit doesn’t differentiate between subjective and objective, true and false, real and illusory; humans do. Spirit is only interested in how much we are out of our own way so that spirit can more fully awaken to itself through us. When we cultivate core qualities associated with waking up, such as confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing, we tend to be more awake and more out of our own way.
Why look at dreams if they don’t tell us what is real and true?
Look at your dreams to learn spirit’s agenda for your life. In order to do this you have to stop making assumptions about what is real and true and instead suspend your judgments, ask questions, listen to the answers, and apply those in your life that make sense to you. No one character will reflect truth with a capital “T” or reality with a capital “R,” even if it scores tens in all six core qualities. It will have its own perspective on what is true and what is real. The more you interview the more the experience of the elephant will emerge from the testimony of individual blind men.
Second, we, meaning our waking identity, have our biases. Your waking identity has an agenda. It wants a dream to mean a certain thing, or it is afraid that a dream will mean a certain thing, like you are crazy, or that they are delusions, or that you really should look under your bed for monsters. Your waking identity wants to have a dream or lucid dream figure be real and meaningful to help you feel more secure, that life is meaningful and that you know what that meaning is. On the other hand, you want dream “objects” to just sit there and be a road to drive over, a key to turn in a lock or a sky to act as a nice backdrop. You don’t want them to muck up your nice, clear picture of the dream by giving you their opinion.
What you will discover if you simply apply the IDL interviewing process to your own dreams and lucid dreams is that you cannot trust your own judgment about these things. That’s scary. You don’t want that. You want to believe in yourself and believe that you know who you are and what you should do. Paradoxically, if you want those things, you have to be willing to give up your closed-minded attachment to the way you see the world. You need to consult the opinions and perspectives of your dream characters. Therefore, ask not only such dream characters as your “Indian-like men,” whether from a lucid dream or otherwise; ask impartial third parties in the dream – the floor, a tree, a lamp, etc., what is their opinion regarding their reality.
In IDL interviewing we ask this as,
(Character), you are in this person’s life experience, correct? They created you, right? What aspect of this person do you represent or most closely personify?
Any character is always free to respond, “No. You didn’t create me. I really am your great-grandmother/the devil/the White Sister Galadriel from the planet Mongo.” If they say so, why not take their word for it? That being the case, the character can still personify this or that aspect of yourself, and probably does. They have some relationship to you, and they have some meaning in your life, other than their apparent literalness. What is it? You’ll never know if you don’t ask.
What will I discover when I ask?
There are four possibilities: you may get validation that your dream/lucid dream characters are guides or external energies, gods, devils, angels, beings from another dimension, or deceased entities. You may get validation that they are aspects of yourself. You may get validation that they are both. you may get different validations from different characters that you interview.
What do I do in that case?
As a rule of thumb, go with the consensus of the self-aspects that score highest in the six core qualities. They score higher than you do, so trust them, take their advice, and see what happens. If you do and it turns out badly, complain. Take them to task. Ask them why you should listen to them if they are going to lie to you.
Can I find out what’s real and true by learning to lucid dream?
If you associate the more real and the more true with the external and the objective and the less real and the less true with the internal and the subjective, as most people do, then to get your attention and wake you up, spirit will produce external and objective experiences for you, even in your dreams. The result is that you will be convinced that a character in a dream is not part of yourself or that you really did visit Rigel 12 last night.
What has happened is that you’ve missed the point. As stated above, spirit doesn’t distinguish between external and internal, real and illusory, true and false. Spirit is simply doing what it needs to do to get your attention so you will wake up. But instead of waking up and listening you jump to conclusions. You make interpretations even in your lucid dream. You slice and dice the experience to fit your assumptions, presumptions, and foregone conclusions. By nature you will tend to take the raw data of life and fit it into categories you already understand, whether or not those categories do violence to the actual experience. (They generally do.) You will habitually tend to do this whether you are awake, dreaming, lucid dreaming, or meditating,
Aren’t I always going to interpret my lucid dreams and come up with meanings? Do I have any choice?
All you can do to compensate for this inevitable, natural, and often very useful human proclivity is to be aware of it and to attempt to counteract it by asking more questions and jumping to fewer conclusions. It doesn’t mean becoming a skeptic. It doesn’t mean never having opinions or prejudices or never reaching conclusions. It simply means to ask more questions and to take a rather jaundiced view toward your opinions, particularly the ones you hold most dear. You need to do this when you are dreaming and lucid dreaming, not just when you are awake.
What do you mean, “Ask questions of characters in dreams, lucid or otherwise?
For example, one student dreamt, while taking a class in Dream Yoga/Integral Deep Listening, of seeing a huge sperm whale swimming off shore. She asked in the dream, “Whale, are you there for me?” ”He jumped up over a railing out of the ocean to land in front of me on the highway.” A powerful dream indeed. So when you ask questions, you may not get back verbal answers. Characters may respond by changing how they relate to you in the dream.
Notice that lucidity is less important here. What is important is that you ask questions in your dream, whether you are lucid or not. What this does is wake up your dream self in a broader way, because it integrates it with your larger dream identity – the other parts of yourself that express themselves in a dream.