Lucid dreaming.
Oh, for this one reason (and a few others, I admit) I wish there had been YouTube when I was a teen.
I’d have gleefully experimented with lucid dreaming, reality shifting, astral travel, OBEs, you name it when I was teenager. Life would have been so full! I may have been cooler, even, in the kind of way that was considered uncool then in the town where I lived, but would have anyway been objectively cool.
But life goes the way it goes, and trends rise and fall as they will, and as a 40-something year old (okay, almost 50 year old) who decided to change her career path at mid-life from content marketing to dreamwork and mysticism, I’m not too disappointed with the increasing popularity of lucid dreaming.
I’ve written before about some of my own experiences with lucid dreaming, which have been pretty limited and entirely spontaneous.
While I went through a short period about a decade ago of attempting out-of-body adventures and lucid dreaming, this practice came to a halt following a terrifying encounter I still can’t explain.
I had accidentally discovered a type of breathwork during a nap one afternoon that generated an out-of-body experience. When I tell people about this, I use words like ecstatic and erotic. What I mean is: it felt really, really good. Unlike anything else really good I had experienced before.
Unlike an ice cream sundae, unlike winning an award, unlike getting the job I was interviewing for or the boy I was chasing. Unlike sex. I suppose similarities could be drawn to euphoria-producing drugs, but I wouldn’t know, since I’ve never taken any.
I had experienced something like this only once before in my life, also spontaneously, also during a nap, about ten years prior.
This time, it was so unexpected, and honestly, so pleasureful, I wanted more.
I then spent many subsequent Friday afternoons trying to recreate it.
I succeeded on some occasions, but one Friday afternoon, my breathwork-instigated OBE was interrupted by a foreboding presence that seemed to be lurking in my dark bedroom. I made myself wake up.
Soon after, I had an almost-lucid dream encounter during night sleep with an even more terrifying being. I didn’t like these meet ups. Also, I wasn’t mentally prepared at the time to take on confronting them: I was a mother of three young children, with a full-time job, in graduate school, in a foreign country.
I also did not have a spiritual teacher or a community of like-minded practitioners back then to support me or help me feel safe on a journey that would likely force me to face darkness, literal and psychological. So I quit.
As lucid dreaming has slowly become more popular, I’ve felt pretty braced and sometimes defensive about the topic as a result. It feels to me sometimes that people may be immersing themselves in waters they’re not truly prepared to swim.
Perhaps that’s just my bias based on my own negative past experiences and fears, or maybe it’s the maternal instinct in me, worried for young people who are increasingly vulnerable to irresponsibly created content online.
I suppose I also possess some judgment inside of me. I take dreamwork and dreaming very seriously. I worry that some lucid dream content creators don’t, or are simply producing how-tos with the sole intent of attracting followers, of gaining more influence. But this is the case online with most subject matter, these days, isn’t it? I can’t, and shouldn’t, mother everyone or monitor their choices.
Recently, I’ve felt less resistant and more curious about actively engaging in lucid dreaming by choice and with intention.
At the annual conference last July of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, I sat in on a few lucid dreaming talks given by some of the most respected and well-known researchers of lucid dreaming, including Jayne Gackenbach, Robert Waggoner, and Stephen LeBerge, as well as less-known, but also impressive practitioners and researchers. Those panels — especially the ones that illustrated evidence for how lucid dreaming can be used to work through grief and mental health crises — may be part of the reason why I’m softening to lucid dreaming as a beneficial practice for myself and others.
A second reason I’m opening up to lucid dreaming is an increasing understanding of the importance of lucid dreaming in the mystical traditions I am studying, and whose practitioners and teachers I have great respect for. Intentional dreamwork, like meditation, has been a critical (though less publicized) component of Jewish mystical practice, and has been a feature of certain lineages of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, as well, known as “dream yoga.”
The third reason, and likely driving force of my growing interest in the pursuit of lucidity in my dreams, is the fact that my lucid dreams are happening with greater incidence on their own…and I kind of like them. I like it especially in the moment I realize I am dreaming. I love saying the words: “Oh, this is a dream.” I love the clarity of my senses and the joy that arises for me inside the dream immediately after I say those words. I love how the scene changes, how the colors become more vivid, how the atmosphere thickens. I feel giddy. I feel invigorated by something that feels both ethereal and grounded in some kind of seeming physicality.
It’s not just the sensory high and sense of empowerment of these lucid dreams I’ve grown attracted to, but also the insights and reflections about myself and my reality upon waking from dreams where I had, seemingly, more choice.
All dreams are rich in potential for insight and healing.
However, there is a magical combination when we find ourselves aware we are dreaming, and less attached to the outcome of our actions or behavior, as dreams often allow us to be.
To be clear: most of us believe there is less consequence to our actions in our dreams than there would be in waking life.
As a result, when we are aware we are dreaming and we are faced with a choice, we may choose differently in a lucid dream than we would in waking life.
You’d be surprised at how you choose differently. I have been.
In recent weeks, I’ve had four or five spontaneous lucid dreams. That’s a lot for me. Half were during naps (which seem to be when they happen more often for me, and for some others.) The other half were inside of night sleep, in the middle of a series of non-lucid dreams.
In one of those dreams, once I became lucid, I chose to wake up. I didn’t like how a guy was looking at me. In another lucid dream, I had to work really hard at staying lucid. I was so engaged in the sensory experience of “nowness” while dreaming a place from my past that I almost lost my lucidity. Eventually, I did lose it. (I needed to use the bathroom, in waking life, too, and became attached to my story about the dirtiness of the toilet at the diner I was visiting.) In a third lucid dream, I became egomaniacal, insisting not just on changing the narrative for myself, but for all the other characters in the dream scene as well. I paired them all off, willed them to make out with each other.
Who is this dream me, I wonder? The one who acts with less concern of consequence? Or, at least, different concerns? The one who delights in flying from room to room as if I’ve beat nature? The one who forces strangers to couple?
I’m not sure who she is, but I am very curious about her. I’m wondering about her behaviors in dreams, and how they are different than the choices I would make in waking life. I am wondering if she is Me-me, or just Dream-me. I am intrigued. Will emboldened Lucid Dream Me start seeping into my waking life? Or, will she not? Satisfied instead in simply having the dream stage on which to playact those behaviors out. We shall see.
I would be insincere if I said that my venturing more into the world of lucid dreaming was solely for research and personal growth. It’s mostly for that. But I’m also there for the glee.
I’m definitely down for as much glee as this life allows, both in waking life and in dreams.
