Every once in a while I have a lucid dream, a dream where conscious awareness is present. These are treasures for me, partly I suppose because they are a novel mental state, and I'm naturally curious about such things, but I think it's also because I think it is always good to become more aware and more conscious. Normally in the dream state and while sleeping, awareness is fettered, but in lucid dreams the chains are loosened. I had a lucid dream a while back where I suddenly found myself aware that I was dreaming, while driving a car. So, and this must be my mind's natural tendency, I decided I was going to control the dream and make something happen. I decided to make the car move straight up into the air. What actually happened was that the front end of the car moved slightly up in the air, the dream broke, and I woke up.
This morning I had another lucid dream of a similar character. While the dream was not lucid, I dreamt that I found a snake in my mala (string of prayer beads) which I thought was kind of neat, but when I went to remove it, I realized it was actually a giant earwig. So I went to brush the earwig away, and realized that there were three of them. When I went to brush them away, they started crawling and I realized each of them was also three smaller earwigs. Around this time, I had the insight "I'm probably dreaming right now." At this point, I was actually brushing away lots of dead insects from my text holder while sitting out on the front porch. I got rid of them all, which felt good, because it symbolized eliminating my negativities and obscurations, and true to form, decided to consciously do something in the dream. I thought that maybe I could see the Buddha, so I looked up into the sky, and I saw a roughly circular lighter area in the sky, which I though maybe was the Buddha, but not directly perceivable to me because of karmic obscurations. (Several stories like this appear in Buddhist texts, where Buddhas go unseen due to karmic obscuration.) But then the dream broke and I woke up.
I'd like to try to maintain the lucidity of such dreams longer than I have, and the idea seems to be that I shouldn't try to control the dream so much, but just enjoy the ride. These dreams occur so rarely for me that it's hard to practice having the right attitude. Ah well. I'm sure something will develop.
3 comments:
Learning how to lucid dream can take a bit of time and effort, but as you get better at it, it's definitely worth the effort!
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I get lucid dreams on occasion. I find that sometimes another spirit is communicating with me through dream symbolism. Once in a while God communicates with me in a dream.--s29
There is also the idea that you only think you are lucid dreaming. Of course, this traps you in a sort of circular logic; but is a dream in which you have awareness that it is a dream really any different from another dream? How can you tell that you are having any real, conscious effect on the dream?
I sometimes have lucid dreams; once I realize it's a dream, I usually try to fly or at least levitate. But I don't have any reason to suspect that the processes that are active and making dream decisions when I am not aware that I am dreaming are any different from the processes running during a lucid dream.
In other words, how do you confirm that the lucidity is not in fact another layer of dream or itself an illusion? And if there is a fundamental difference between lucid and nonlucid dreaming, might you be interfering with a vital process by pursuing more awareness in your dreams, as Richard Feynman's lucid dream anecdote suggested?
All that said: I have two types of lucid dreams: the lucid regular dreams and the lucid nightmares. In the lucid regular dreams, I sometimes try to do something that should be possible since all is possible in the dream world, but I can't quite do it. This is part of what makes me suspect that the lucid dream is just another way of my mind working out its frustrations and quandries. The lucid nightmare takes the form of embedded dreams. I wake myself up from an unpleasant dream, and it is several "minutes" before I realize I am still dreaming. Of course, it can take several iterations of awaking into another dream before I actually manage to wake up. The feeling of disorientation I get from that type of dream sometimes stays with me for some time after I wake up.
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