This is the introductory section of the book. It explains what we're doing and why. There are no exercises in this part, as that begins with "day 1," but any and all feedback is welcome. Enjoy!
The mandatory
What is lucid dreaming?
section of the book
I tried to leave this section out of the book because it is a section I have read dozens of times in the various lucid dreaming books that I’ve come across over the last 15 years. They’ve all got it, just like they all bring up that infamous tool, the Reality Check, and promise that it will magically transform your talent as a lucid dreamer. So when I started writing this book, I absolutely did not want to include this section, rewriting what I had already read ad nauseum. But (and here it comes), the simple fact remains that some people will pick up this book having never heard of this phenomenon called lucid dreaming, thus leaving me the worthwhile task of introducing them to that subject which has consumed the majority of my adult life. For those individuals, I include this section here, just for you. And for the rest of us, I’ll keep it as short as possible. Because while this book may start like any number of existent books on lucid dreaming, you will soon discover that after this first section, we rapidly depart from the known, and begin our exploration of uncharted shores.
So without further ado, lucid dreaming is that slippery, delicious, wily, extraordinary state in which one sees and understands that he is dreaming, while being in a dream. By becoming aware of the dream, a certain measure of choice and free will is regained by the dreamer. Beginning lucid dreamers delight to learn that they can exercise control over the dream environment, creating, shaping, and transforming the dream according to their will. The dream for them becomes a personal playground in which they can act out any whim or desire that may occur to them. From flying through space to light saber duals, vacationing in Paris or spelunking on the moon, a cup of coffee with Abraham Lincoln, or an intimate encounter with Marilyn Monroe, the only limits are the imagination.
To more advanced lucid dreamers, the dream evolves into a type of laboratory, a curiosity, or a puzzle, a place from which to try and derive meaning, uncover truths about oneself, delve into the depths of the psyche, or perhaps hone and refine skills that are used upon waking. Activities here range from self-inquiry to learning to dance, deciphering reality to practicing speeches, and for the artistic, composing or creating art while harnessing the full potential of the mind and imagination working in harmony. All creative, academic, or psychological pursuits can be performed in this wonderland of the mind.
But what lies beyond these preliminary aspects of the dream? A few books hint at dream yogas and realms of buddhas and perhaps some ultimate truth, some ultimate consciousness that lies waiting for us on the far edges of lucidity. This realm, they claim, is reserved for the seasoned dreamers, those persistent few that dedicate themselves to the art, undergoing a slow purification and transformation. After years of hard work, so we read, the dream becomes a doorway to enlightenment. And here we encounter gurus, yogis, monks, shamans, and those rare individuals who can pick up a blade of grass and understand the cosmos. The dream world, at our most lucid, becomes a reflection of the waking world, just as the waking world becomes a reflection of the dream world.
Whichever motive brought you here, welcome. There are many reasons to begin this quest for Lucid Dreaming, and the reasons do not ultimately matter. What matters is having heard the numinous call, the primal urge to experience what at first seems to be an extraneous domain, full of wonderments and mysteries, but which is ultimately experienced as a return, a delightful coming home of the soul each night after a long day of walking in the dream we call Life.
Uncharted waters
Having concluded the mandatory introduction to lucid dreaming, an all too familiar tone struggles to establish itself. MILD, WILD, and other old techniques, the bread and butter of lucid dreaming manuals, demand to be placed in the subsequent chapters. Yet that road has been well trodden, and we know where it leads… to weeks of frustration with perhaps a moment of success or two, followed by an inevitable loss of interest as our minds find something else upon which to focus that gives more immediate rewards. I don't want to write another book on lucid dreaming. Those shores are well explored. For myself, having been chasing this lucid dreaming mirage for now over 15 years, I have come to one certain conclusion regarding the instructional materials currently available: they don't work.
Now, it's not that they don't work at all. In fact, many of the texts and techniques have withstood the test of time precisely because they do work. More specifically, they sort of work. Occasionally. Sporadically. For some people. And almost by accident. Many of the most accomplished lucid dreamers report success rates of about 5-10%. In other words, a few lucid dreams a month is an achievement you can look forward to after years of dedication and labor. But why do we settle for this? Why have we come to believe that this is simply the way of things? If we applied those success rates to just about anything else (airplanes, medications, electronics, educational programs, etc), we'd quickly have a problem involving angry customers, lawsuits, and a search for a better product.
Yet for some reason, 5-10% is acceptable in lucid dreaming. It's what's expected. Years of hard work for little to no pay off. So to me, rather that compiling yet another collection of random dream tricks and philosophy, it seems expedient that we first question the most basic premises of our lucid dreaming practices and procedures. One of the inevitable side effects of lucid dreaming is a questioning of realities, a reevaluation of what has long been assumed to be so. And in the advanced stages of lucid dreaming, not only does this questioning begin to affect our sense of identity and our view of the world, but it begins to pull the rug out from all the concrete foundations upon which we construct our reality.
In our current view of reality, lucid dreaming is a difficult task. Except for a lucky few, it is a skill that requires extraordinary amounts of practice and dedication in order to begin to reap its rewards. And so this worthy task, this impossible trick of realizing that one is dreaming, becomes a giant mountain for which we must prepare and train before beginning the long slog of a journey that may or may not someday result in our ascending the heights and enjoying the view.
Yet any lucid dreamer worth her salt will know that things are not always what they seem in the dream. And while we weren’t looking, a curious thing happened in that last paragraph. Even writing it, I almost missed it. There was an innocent sentence fragment. Undoubtedly, some of the more observant will have tripped over those few words and paused. The more cunning will have even posed the question that now gives us a foothold, a place to stand as we survey our current predicament. Proficient lucid dreaming is an arduous task… except for a lucky few.
If there were a way to somehow discover the rug upon which our ideas of lucid dreaming are built, and then to subsequently grab ahold of that rug and pull with all our might, we might just reveal something: a secret door, a simple thing, an elegant thing through which we may step from being accidental lucid dreamers with minimal success to intentional lucid dreamers who confidently step from one realm to the next, at will.
Now secrets are tricky things. If they were easy to discover, they would have been found out long ago and we'd already hold the keys to the dreaming realms. But, as their name implies, they are secret. They're hidden, sometimes in plain sight, and sometimes in forgotten places, under seas, or lost in time. To find a secret is no small feat. It requires cunning, and sometimes courage. So before we go charging off in search of some nebulous secret (which I’ve already done many times), let us save ourselves some time and trouble and first consider whether or not this would even be a worthwhile pursuit, and if so, where we could begin to look for such a secret if it exists at all.
The fact is, secret is a rather obfuscating word. They’re small things, but things that can change everything. As our intent now begins to take shape, we find ourselves perhaps gearing up for an inevitable quest, an adventure into lucid realms, but when that adventure is over, what do we end up with? What are we really after?
What we’re really after is a breakthrough in the art and science of lucid dreaming.
The answers are in the outliers
While secrets may sound easy, breakthroughs sound like much more work. Breakthroughs, however, are also very easy things, provided you know exactly where to look. Luckily for us, we already have a good idea of where to start. Earlier, we stumbled across our lucky few, those rare individuals who fall outside of how we expect things to be. We know they’re out there, we just don’t know what they have to offer us yet.
After getting a master’s degree in chemical engineering, I spent a number of years in a lab working as a scientist. Any time a scientist doesn’t know what to do with a new set of data, the first thing he does is put it all on a graph and see what can be seen. Data by itself doesn’t do much good. Only when the whole field of data points is laid out do we begin to see the patterns that exist that allow us to construct an accurate model of reality.
curve.jpg
Now if there were a way to accurately measure people’s talent as dreamers, and plot that talent out for a cross-section of global population, we’d undoubtedly end up with a bell curve, the normal distribution we commonly come across in most studies. In section 1, we have the people with no dreaming talent whatsoever. In section 2, the lucid dreaming novices, those who experience growing dream recall with an occasional low-level lucid dream. Sections 3 and 4 are the bulk of lucid dreamers, they diligently perform their reality checks, use MILD, WILD, and other common tools, and at their peak, achieve a 5-10% lucid dreaming success rate. In section 5, we have our highly talented, dedicated dreamers, those born with an innate penchant for lucid dreaming who apply consistent effort and get extraordinary results. And finally in section 6, we have our truly lucky few, enigmatic Tibetan monks, enlightened gurus, and other beings we tend to ignore. Most never studied lucid dreaming, they simply do it at will.
We tend to ignore the outliers because they’re not like us. They’re the 0.1%. They’re so far removed from our day-to-day life that they have no room in our lucid dreaming paradigm. For those of us caught in sections 2, 3, and 4 of our curve, the answer is, and always has been, more Reality Checks, more diligent dream journaling, and harder work. Only by following that recipe do we have any hope of progressing along the curve and improving our talent as lucid dreamers. We struggle to enter section 5 and might even spend the next 10 years, hoping to join those ranks. The idea of section 6 isn’t even considered as a real possibility.
Breakthroughs, however, aren’t concerned with the middle area of the curve. Sections 2-5 are entirely unimportant because the really interesting things happen in the outliers. These are the areas that fascinate scientists precisely because they don’t fit into our current worldview. When we look in the outliers, the common answers don’t work. Paradigms begin to break down, and other explanations have to be pursued. If you’re looking for a way to describe most things, a comprehensive viewpoint, you just forget the outliers, throw them out, and you have your model. You have the common world (not the real world), the most easily accessible, easiest to explain viewpoint on reality. Every now and then, some scientist, some explorer, will journey far into the outliers, those forbidden realms, and that’s when breakthroughs happen. He comes back saying the earth is round, or the earth isn’t the center of the universe, or there are things smaller than atoms. He comes back from the outliers and shakes everything up. He is Bilbo returning from the Lonely Mountain, loaded with treasures and gold that will transform his sleepy little village and awaken its inhabitants to undreamt of possibilities. Only by looking in the outliers do we have a chance of discovering something new.
So what lies in our lucid dreaming outliers? On the one end, we have the non-dreamer. These individuals, despite the findings of science, insist that they do not dream, lucid or otherwise. I have worked with only a handful of dreamers from this category, but found that they all shared one thing in common: they lived life completely trapped in their head. Reason, while being a valuable tool, completely dominated every aspect of their existence. Mental machinations governed their lives, leaving no room for feeling or interaction with the world except on an intellectual level. For each of them, the journey of healing involved an uncovering and integration of deeply wounded parts of the psyche.
On this end of the spectrum, the world exists entirely within the mind. Interaction with the world is done inside a mental space where everything is recognized, categorized, labelled, and put into the appropriate box. Anything that is come across that can’t be filed according to the existing system, is quickly deleted and discarded from consciousness, or threatens a breakdown of the entire artificially constructed system. Life within the mental box is safe, understood, and known. The very existence of a dream realm threatens the stability of this type of system. A lucid dream realm, even more so. And so, to stay within the safety of the confines of their mind, these dreamers push away all memory and experience of dreams. Rather than undergoing the healing potential that dreams can offer, they barricade themselves in their safe spot, their prison, and live life vitally cut off from the richness of the feeling world.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have gurus and buddhas. These equally rare individuals are much harder to figure out. They don’t fit into our molds. Their behavior can be odd, erratic, and illogical. To see the world through their eyes would be an extraordinary experience. The worries and concerns of life seem to wash off of these otherworldly human beings. They glide through life, mysterious, and from the outside, their lives appear to be magical. While the alleged non-dreamers live in the head, the buddhas seem to live brilliantly in the Moment. In Alan Wallace’s recent book, Dreaming Yourself Awake, he mentions certain sects of Tibetan monks who spontaneously become lucid dreaming experts. Through their practice of shamatha, favorable conditions arise that naturally induce lucid dreams. In my own travels, I have met remarkable teachers in various traditions from Native American medicine to esoteric branches of Hinduism who were also capable of amazing feats of lucid dreaming. While they didn’t set out to study lucid dreaming, it occurred as a side-effect of their spiritual practices.
In section 6, lucid dreaming is a spontaneous phenomenon. It arises, unbidden, a seeming side-effect of intense spiritual practice and dedication. Whatever processes these gurus and shamans underwent, it seems to have allowed easy access to the lucid domain. But just as we expect decades of hard work before admittance to section 5 as dreamers, the inhabitants of section 6 have spent decades of hard work in order to get where they are. While becoming an enlightened yogi may be a conceivable way of entering the forbidden dreaming realms of section 6, it is at once dismissed as an unworkable path for those of us that don’t want to live in caves.
Now that we know what lies in the outliers, between these two polarities, we find the rest of us, ordinary human beings. We dream more than the non-dreamers, but we have yet to enter the dream realms of the buddhas and other enlightened beings. We’re caught in the middle, struggling between dreams of sleep and dreams of wakefulness. The very idea of learning secrets from gurus leaves a bad taste in the mouth, as these are known to be long, futile quests involving unwanted chastity and repeated whacks in the head with sticks. So our breakthrough absolutely must not involve running off to some temple or cave and undergoing years of meditation and training. We’re not setting out to become buddhas, for that already seems an impossible task. Rather, can we, like Prometheus, sneak into their realm and bring back some fire to light our way? We can’t become gods, but if we’re really clever, maybe we can steal from them…
Now where does one go to steal fire from the gods? Where should one look to find their secrets? Secrets, as mentioned earlier are “hidden, sometimes in plain sight, and sometimes in forgotten places, under seas, or lost in time.” While the secrets we seek may be rare, we know they haven’t been lost to time. We encounter sages and savants from all walks of life who have happened upon one or many of these precious jewels. Similarly, we intuitively know that there is no secret text to find, no long-forgotten string of magic words that, upon reading, will transform our minds and give us access to our Promethean prize. We aren’t setting out on a journey into jungles or shipwrecks or caves. We know this because the secrets are found time and time again, by unrelated individuals from unrelated traditions in every part of the world. There is only once place then where things must be hidden, everything must be in that infinitely elusive location, hidden in plain sight, right before our eyes. This is the only place it can be. A treasure of monumental importance, invisible to all but those who know it’s there and those who know how to look. There is nothing to find other than what has been there all along. There is nowhere to run off to, nothing to uncover, buried and forgotten in years of mud. There is no secret location, no hidden vault containing chests of lucid dreaming secrets. Our obscurantists were extremely clever, they left us clues all over the world, they pointed the way so that anyone, anywhere, in any time could follow the trail and discover the way home. Our quest then is to discover the clues, and follow where they lead.
So we are setting out to steal fire from the gods, and we find that the fire is right in front of us, just outside of sight and grasp. We are being cunning from the start, but already realize we may need more than just cunning before this adventure truly begins. So what is the key to this whole thing? How do we unlock the secrets of dreaming?
The Nature of a Key
If we are to find the master key to lucid dreaming, we must once again pause and figure out of what form it may be. Man has a knack for creativity and devices. He will invent machines to perform simple tasks, and it is of no surprise that he has already constructed elaborate gizmos with flashing lights and detectors, wireless signals and computer chips, with which to try and pry open that place hinted at by Buddhas. From lucid dreaming apps to masks, there are many “lucid dream now!” approaches for sale. Similarly, man goes to great lengths for shortcuts, mixing chemicals and compounds, vitamins and minerals, synthesizing powders and pills with which to force the gates. But these types of chemical strivings are ultimately unfulfilling. The Three Jewels of the Tao weren’t purchased in three easy payments of $29.99. While these types of aids may occasionally allow us to stumble into the Dream with their assistance, we are left with an aftertaste that smacks of counterfeit.
Forgoing the machinations of the intellect, other men may seek out those aids of Nature. Plants, potions, and various fungi, handed down from shaman to shaman across the centuries. These Teachers, these Medicines, can certainly open the Gates of Dreaming, but do we remember the way back? Do they cause the transformation we seek, or do they simply point and show us what is possible?
No, we seek a different kind of secret. Not a trick, vision, magic pill, or a temporary stepping into Lucidity. Rather, we seek a secret that truly frees us and transforms us, that allows us to cast off all crutches, all dogmas and beliefs, so that we may step into the Dream at will.
The more we consider the nature of this secret that we're looking for, the more we are confronted with the fact that it cannot lie outside of us. It is not a technology or anything else that can be bought and paid for with coin. It is not a magic pill or any other short cut that would require repeated refills. It must already be innate to every human being. It must be born with us, hard-wired into our DNA. For if it is anything else, we will always be dependent on it and we will never freely dream in the outliers.
The secret therefore must lie within, not in some obscure body part or chakra, but in consciousness. It can be in no other place. The eyes that will allow us to see what is hidden in front of our eyes must lie in consciousness. We must learn to see what is beyond seeing, we must learn to hear what is beyond hearing, and the journey to this ever-present realm of lucid sights and sounds, the entrance to the dreaming realm of buddhas, is a journey through consciousness. And this journey isn’t one we’re familiar with. We know it must be new, and we know it must lead in unexpected directions. A transformation must take place. Like Bilbo, we must discover just exactly what we are made of. Old world views and outdated modes of consciousness must be cast off to make room for the new. In order to see with new eyes, we must learn to unsee that which is already seen. For how can we see with new eyes if we are still looking with the old?
Upside down beginnings
The quest now truly begins to take shape (the hunt is on!), but we are again faced with the question of where to start. How do we come upon some secret of consciousness that has long been hidden in front of us that allows us access to those areas of lucid dreaming talent most commonly associated with enlightened monks? The question at once seems ridiculous and impossible. How did we even arrive at such an idea? Once again, we must revisit the outliers. It was here where we first conceived that a breakthrough in the art and science of lucid dreaming might be possible. Although we are not trying to become buddhas, there may be some prize of consciousness that we can pluck from their realm and bring back to our own. Wise men and women from many different traditions share in a remarkable lucid dreaming talent as a side-effect of their spiritual pursuits. While we’re not necessarily interested in their many paths, we are interested in the shared side-effects of those paths. And since we find these individuals in the outliers, the answer regarding where to start looking for clues must lie in the outliers as well.
Looking to the outliers is actually a common practice when trying to uncover things hidden in plain sight. Whether it’s decoding Templar architecture or finding the esoteric secrets within a mystical text, the answers are always in the outliers. You just have to look for the incongruities, the breaks in the pattern, the things that just don’t seem quite right. And once you start poking around in those areas, you realize that the rest was just distraction and the juicy stuff was right in front of you all along. The detection of these incongruities is an art because we naturally tend to dismiss them. The following text found floating around the internet, claims to be from a study at Cambridge University and demonstrates the capabilities of the mind to reorder reality in order to see what it expects to see.
“THE PWEOR OF THE HMUAN MNID. Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”
Our minds rearrange (or sometimes eliminate) the bits of reality that don’t fit what we expect to see, and they are either “righted” or made invisible. Someone has to point them out and get us to stop seeing what we expect to see. Only when we really look, when we look without expectation, do we have a chance to see what is before us. The mind has to be trained to see, but once we’ve overcome that hurdle, we can confidently head down our path, picking up additional clues along the way.
Care must be taken because the clues are easy to miss. Dreamsigns are really big clues that can cause a dreamer to become lucid. Major incongruities like “I see a pink elephant flying in my bedroom” are exactly the kinds of signs that can cause a dreamer to pause and think, “Hey, elephants don’t fly! I must be dreaming!” The appearance of a flying pink elephant can often be enough to trigger a high level lucid dreaming experience. Unfortunately, the mind can overwrite even the biggest of dreamsigns, as I found out in the following dream from May 2002.
Our minds are more than happy to overwrite even common sense in order to persist in whatever reality or state of consciousness we happen to be in, but as we train ourselves to look for the incongruities, we start to notice that they’re everywhere. G.I. Gurdjieff, the influential spiritual teacher of the early 20th century, said that man “sees the world not as it is, but upside down.” Only by uncovering the incongruities in our perceptions do we have a chance of seeing things the way they truly are.
So what are the incongruities that surround lucid dreaming? We must now begin to reexamine everything we know, or think we know, and see if anything stands out. The pattern we’re looking for will be something like this….
NORMAL * NORMAL * NORMAL * NROMAL * NORMAL * NORMAL
Our natural tendency will be to dismiss the incongruities as unimportant or unexciting, but we must resist this tendency and inspect them more closely. These are the outliers in our experiences, the outliers in reality. They are the things that if we question, if we really begin to reexamine, may just hold the very key we’re looking for.
The current practices in lucid dreaming (the practices that don’t always work), tend to have one thing in common: they’re us in this world trying to remind ourselves to become lucid in the next “world.” Reality checks, MILD, all of the old tricks, seem to follow this idea. These are the tricks of sections 2-4, and it is of no surprise that those who use them remain in sections 2-4. The inhabitants of section 6 don’t go around performing reality checks every hour on the hour.
So rather than revisiting old tricks, let us look somewhere new. Let us not learn about lucid dreaming by reading about lucid dreaming or reminding ourselves to lucid dream the next time we see a clock, let us instead find a better teacher. If you wish to learn the secrets of a yogi, you enter the cave and spend time with the yogi. You study him, imitate him, and look for the incongruities to find where he’s saying what can’t be said. If you wish to learn the secrets of a shaman, you go into the jungle and spend time with a shaman. Again, you study her, imitate her, and look for the incongruities to find where she’s saying what can’t be said. Does it not make sense that to learn the secrets of lucid dreaming, we go into the dream, study it, imitate it, and discover the incongruities where it too is saying what can’t be said?
End of Section 1. All text (c) C.A. von der Mehden, 2014.
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The mandatory
What is lucid dreaming?
section of the book
I tried to leave this section out of the book because it is a section I have read dozens of times in the various lucid dreaming books that I’ve come across over the last 15 years. They’ve all got it, just like they all bring up that infamous tool, the Reality Check, and promise that it will magically transform your talent as a lucid dreamer. So when I started writing this book, I absolutely did not want to include this section, rewriting what I had already read ad nauseum. But (and here it comes), the simple fact remains that some people will pick up this book having never heard of this phenomenon called lucid dreaming, thus leaving me the worthwhile task of introducing them to that subject which has consumed the majority of my adult life. For those individuals, I include this section here, just for you. And for the rest of us, I’ll keep it as short as possible. Because while this book may start like any number of existent books on lucid dreaming, you will soon discover that after this first section, we rapidly depart from the known, and begin our exploration of uncharted shores.
So without further ado, lucid dreaming is that slippery, delicious, wily, extraordinary state in which one sees and understands that he is dreaming, while being in a dream. By becoming aware of the dream, a certain measure of choice and free will is regained by the dreamer. Beginning lucid dreamers delight to learn that they can exercise control over the dream environment, creating, shaping, and transforming the dream according to their will. The dream for them becomes a personal playground in which they can act out any whim or desire that may occur to them. From flying through space to light saber duals, vacationing in Paris or spelunking on the moon, a cup of coffee with Abraham Lincoln, or an intimate encounter with Marilyn Monroe, the only limits are the imagination.
To more advanced lucid dreamers, the dream evolves into a type of laboratory, a curiosity, or a puzzle, a place from which to try and derive meaning, uncover truths about oneself, delve into the depths of the psyche, or perhaps hone and refine skills that are used upon waking. Activities here range from self-inquiry to learning to dance, deciphering reality to practicing speeches, and for the artistic, composing or creating art while harnessing the full potential of the mind and imagination working in harmony. All creative, academic, or psychological pursuits can be performed in this wonderland of the mind.
But what lies beyond these preliminary aspects of the dream? A few books hint at dream yogas and realms of buddhas and perhaps some ultimate truth, some ultimate consciousness that lies waiting for us on the far edges of lucidity. This realm, they claim, is reserved for the seasoned dreamers, those persistent few that dedicate themselves to the art, undergoing a slow purification and transformation. After years of hard work, so we read, the dream becomes a doorway to enlightenment. And here we encounter gurus, yogis, monks, shamans, and those rare individuals who can pick up a blade of grass and understand the cosmos. The dream world, at our most lucid, becomes a reflection of the waking world, just as the waking world becomes a reflection of the dream world.
Whichever motive brought you here, welcome. There are many reasons to begin this quest for Lucid Dreaming, and the reasons do not ultimately matter. What matters is having heard the numinous call, the primal urge to experience what at first seems to be an extraneous domain, full of wonderments and mysteries, but which is ultimately experienced as a return, a delightful coming home of the soul each night after a long day of walking in the dream we call Life.
Quote:
Uncharted waters
Having concluded the mandatory introduction to lucid dreaming, an all too familiar tone struggles to establish itself. MILD, WILD, and other old techniques, the bread and butter of lucid dreaming manuals, demand to be placed in the subsequent chapters. Yet that road has been well trodden, and we know where it leads… to weeks of frustration with perhaps a moment of success or two, followed by an inevitable loss of interest as our minds find something else upon which to focus that gives more immediate rewards. I don't want to write another book on lucid dreaming. Those shores are well explored. For myself, having been chasing this lucid dreaming mirage for now over 15 years, I have come to one certain conclusion regarding the instructional materials currently available: they don't work.
Now, it's not that they don't work at all. In fact, many of the texts and techniques have withstood the test of time precisely because they do work. More specifically, they sort of work. Occasionally. Sporadically. For some people. And almost by accident. Many of the most accomplished lucid dreamers report success rates of about 5-10%. In other words, a few lucid dreams a month is an achievement you can look forward to after years of dedication and labor. But why do we settle for this? Why have we come to believe that this is simply the way of things? If we applied those success rates to just about anything else (airplanes, medications, electronics, educational programs, etc), we'd quickly have a problem involving angry customers, lawsuits, and a search for a better product.
Yet for some reason, 5-10% is acceptable in lucid dreaming. It's what's expected. Years of hard work for little to no pay off. So to me, rather that compiling yet another collection of random dream tricks and philosophy, it seems expedient that we first question the most basic premises of our lucid dreaming practices and procedures. One of the inevitable side effects of lucid dreaming is a questioning of realities, a reevaluation of what has long been assumed to be so. And in the advanced stages of lucid dreaming, not only does this questioning begin to affect our sense of identity and our view of the world, but it begins to pull the rug out from all the concrete foundations upon which we construct our reality.
In our current view of reality, lucid dreaming is a difficult task. Except for a lucky few, it is a skill that requires extraordinary amounts of practice and dedication in order to begin to reap its rewards. And so this worthy task, this impossible trick of realizing that one is dreaming, becomes a giant mountain for which we must prepare and train before beginning the long slog of a journey that may or may not someday result in our ascending the heights and enjoying the view.
Yet any lucid dreamer worth her salt will know that things are not always what they seem in the dream. And while we weren’t looking, a curious thing happened in that last paragraph. Even writing it, I almost missed it. There was an innocent sentence fragment. Undoubtedly, some of the more observant will have tripped over those few words and paused. The more cunning will have even posed the question that now gives us a foothold, a place to stand as we survey our current predicament. Proficient lucid dreaming is an arduous task… except for a lucky few.
If there were a way to somehow discover the rug upon which our ideas of lucid dreaming are built, and then to subsequently grab ahold of that rug and pull with all our might, we might just reveal something: a secret door, a simple thing, an elegant thing through which we may step from being accidental lucid dreamers with minimal success to intentional lucid dreamers who confidently step from one realm to the next, at will.
Now secrets are tricky things. If they were easy to discover, they would have been found out long ago and we'd already hold the keys to the dreaming realms. But, as their name implies, they are secret. They're hidden, sometimes in plain sight, and sometimes in forgotten places, under seas, or lost in time. To find a secret is no small feat. It requires cunning, and sometimes courage. So before we go charging off in search of some nebulous secret (which I’ve already done many times), let us save ourselves some time and trouble and first consider whether or not this would even be a worthwhile pursuit, and if so, where we could begin to look for such a secret if it exists at all.
The fact is, secret is a rather obfuscating word. They’re small things, but things that can change everything. As our intent now begins to take shape, we find ourselves perhaps gearing up for an inevitable quest, an adventure into lucid realms, but when that adventure is over, what do we end up with? What are we really after?
What we’re really after is a breakthrough in the art and science of lucid dreaming.
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The answers are in the outliers
While secrets may sound easy, breakthroughs sound like much more work. Breakthroughs, however, are also very easy things, provided you know exactly where to look. Luckily for us, we already have a good idea of where to start. Earlier, we stumbled across our lucky few, those rare individuals who fall outside of how we expect things to be. We know they’re out there, we just don’t know what they have to offer us yet.
After getting a master’s degree in chemical engineering, I spent a number of years in a lab working as a scientist. Any time a scientist doesn’t know what to do with a new set of data, the first thing he does is put it all on a graph and see what can be seen. Data by itself doesn’t do much good. Only when the whole field of data points is laid out do we begin to see the patterns that exist that allow us to construct an accurate model of reality.
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Now if there were a way to accurately measure people’s talent as dreamers, and plot that talent out for a cross-section of global population, we’d undoubtedly end up with a bell curve, the normal distribution we commonly come across in most studies. In section 1, we have the people with no dreaming talent whatsoever. In section 2, the lucid dreaming novices, those who experience growing dream recall with an occasional low-level lucid dream. Sections 3 and 4 are the bulk of lucid dreamers, they diligently perform their reality checks, use MILD, WILD, and other common tools, and at their peak, achieve a 5-10% lucid dreaming success rate. In section 5, we have our highly talented, dedicated dreamers, those born with an innate penchant for lucid dreaming who apply consistent effort and get extraordinary results. And finally in section 6, we have our truly lucky few, enigmatic Tibetan monks, enlightened gurus, and other beings we tend to ignore. Most never studied lucid dreaming, they simply do it at will.
We tend to ignore the outliers because they’re not like us. They’re the 0.1%. They’re so far removed from our day-to-day life that they have no room in our lucid dreaming paradigm. For those of us caught in sections 2, 3, and 4 of our curve, the answer is, and always has been, more Reality Checks, more diligent dream journaling, and harder work. Only by following that recipe do we have any hope of progressing along the curve and improving our talent as lucid dreamers. We struggle to enter section 5 and might even spend the next 10 years, hoping to join those ranks. The idea of section 6 isn’t even considered as a real possibility.
Breakthroughs, however, aren’t concerned with the middle area of the curve. Sections 2-5 are entirely unimportant because the really interesting things happen in the outliers. These are the areas that fascinate scientists precisely because they don’t fit into our current worldview. When we look in the outliers, the common answers don’t work. Paradigms begin to break down, and other explanations have to be pursued. If you’re looking for a way to describe most things, a comprehensive viewpoint, you just forget the outliers, throw them out, and you have your model. You have the common world (not the real world), the most easily accessible, easiest to explain viewpoint on reality. Every now and then, some scientist, some explorer, will journey far into the outliers, those forbidden realms, and that’s when breakthroughs happen. He comes back saying the earth is round, or the earth isn’t the center of the universe, or there are things smaller than atoms. He comes back from the outliers and shakes everything up. He is Bilbo returning from the Lonely Mountain, loaded with treasures and gold that will transform his sleepy little village and awaken its inhabitants to undreamt of possibilities. Only by looking in the outliers do we have a chance of discovering something new.
So what lies in our lucid dreaming outliers? On the one end, we have the non-dreamer. These individuals, despite the findings of science, insist that they do not dream, lucid or otherwise. I have worked with only a handful of dreamers from this category, but found that they all shared one thing in common: they lived life completely trapped in their head. Reason, while being a valuable tool, completely dominated every aspect of their existence. Mental machinations governed their lives, leaving no room for feeling or interaction with the world except on an intellectual level. For each of them, the journey of healing involved an uncovering and integration of deeply wounded parts of the psyche.
On this end of the spectrum, the world exists entirely within the mind. Interaction with the world is done inside a mental space where everything is recognized, categorized, labelled, and put into the appropriate box. Anything that is come across that can’t be filed according to the existing system, is quickly deleted and discarded from consciousness, or threatens a breakdown of the entire artificially constructed system. Life within the mental box is safe, understood, and known. The very existence of a dream realm threatens the stability of this type of system. A lucid dream realm, even more so. And so, to stay within the safety of the confines of their mind, these dreamers push away all memory and experience of dreams. Rather than undergoing the healing potential that dreams can offer, they barricade themselves in their safe spot, their prison, and live life vitally cut off from the richness of the feeling world.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have gurus and buddhas. These equally rare individuals are much harder to figure out. They don’t fit into our molds. Their behavior can be odd, erratic, and illogical. To see the world through their eyes would be an extraordinary experience. The worries and concerns of life seem to wash off of these otherworldly human beings. They glide through life, mysterious, and from the outside, their lives appear to be magical. While the alleged non-dreamers live in the head, the buddhas seem to live brilliantly in the Moment. In Alan Wallace’s recent book, Dreaming Yourself Awake, he mentions certain sects of Tibetan monks who spontaneously become lucid dreaming experts. Through their practice of shamatha, favorable conditions arise that naturally induce lucid dreams. In my own travels, I have met remarkable teachers in various traditions from Native American medicine to esoteric branches of Hinduism who were also capable of amazing feats of lucid dreaming. While they didn’t set out to study lucid dreaming, it occurred as a side-effect of their spiritual practices.
In section 6, lucid dreaming is a spontaneous phenomenon. It arises, unbidden, a seeming side-effect of intense spiritual practice and dedication. Whatever processes these gurus and shamans underwent, it seems to have allowed easy access to the lucid domain. But just as we expect decades of hard work before admittance to section 5 as dreamers, the inhabitants of section 6 have spent decades of hard work in order to get where they are. While becoming an enlightened yogi may be a conceivable way of entering the forbidden dreaming realms of section 6, it is at once dismissed as an unworkable path for those of us that don’t want to live in caves.
Now that we know what lies in the outliers, between these two polarities, we find the rest of us, ordinary human beings. We dream more than the non-dreamers, but we have yet to enter the dream realms of the buddhas and other enlightened beings. We’re caught in the middle, struggling between dreams of sleep and dreams of wakefulness. The very idea of learning secrets from gurus leaves a bad taste in the mouth, as these are known to be long, futile quests involving unwanted chastity and repeated whacks in the head with sticks. So our breakthrough absolutely must not involve running off to some temple or cave and undergoing years of meditation and training. We’re not setting out to become buddhas, for that already seems an impossible task. Rather, can we, like Prometheus, sneak into their realm and bring back some fire to light our way? We can’t become gods, but if we’re really clever, maybe we can steal from them…
Now where does one go to steal fire from the gods? Where should one look to find their secrets? Secrets, as mentioned earlier are “hidden, sometimes in plain sight, and sometimes in forgotten places, under seas, or lost in time.” While the secrets we seek may be rare, we know they haven’t been lost to time. We encounter sages and savants from all walks of life who have happened upon one or many of these precious jewels. Similarly, we intuitively know that there is no secret text to find, no long-forgotten string of magic words that, upon reading, will transform our minds and give us access to our Promethean prize. We aren’t setting out on a journey into jungles or shipwrecks or caves. We know this because the secrets are found time and time again, by unrelated individuals from unrelated traditions in every part of the world. There is only once place then where things must be hidden, everything must be in that infinitely elusive location, hidden in plain sight, right before our eyes. This is the only place it can be. A treasure of monumental importance, invisible to all but those who know it’s there and those who know how to look. There is nothing to find other than what has been there all along. There is nowhere to run off to, nothing to uncover, buried and forgotten in years of mud. There is no secret location, no hidden vault containing chests of lucid dreaming secrets. Our obscurantists were extremely clever, they left us clues all over the world, they pointed the way so that anyone, anywhere, in any time could follow the trail and discover the way home. Our quest then is to discover the clues, and follow where they lead.
So we are setting out to steal fire from the gods, and we find that the fire is right in front of us, just outside of sight and grasp. We are being cunning from the start, but already realize we may need more than just cunning before this adventure truly begins. So what is the key to this whole thing? How do we unlock the secrets of dreaming?
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The Nature of a Key
If we are to find the master key to lucid dreaming, we must once again pause and figure out of what form it may be. Man has a knack for creativity and devices. He will invent machines to perform simple tasks, and it is of no surprise that he has already constructed elaborate gizmos with flashing lights and detectors, wireless signals and computer chips, with which to try and pry open that place hinted at by Buddhas. From lucid dreaming apps to masks, there are many “lucid dream now!” approaches for sale. Similarly, man goes to great lengths for shortcuts, mixing chemicals and compounds, vitamins and minerals, synthesizing powders and pills with which to force the gates. But these types of chemical strivings are ultimately unfulfilling. The Three Jewels of the Tao weren’t purchased in three easy payments of $29.99. While these types of aids may occasionally allow us to stumble into the Dream with their assistance, we are left with an aftertaste that smacks of counterfeit.
Forgoing the machinations of the intellect, other men may seek out those aids of Nature. Plants, potions, and various fungi, handed down from shaman to shaman across the centuries. These Teachers, these Medicines, can certainly open the Gates of Dreaming, but do we remember the way back? Do they cause the transformation we seek, or do they simply point and show us what is possible?
No, we seek a different kind of secret. Not a trick, vision, magic pill, or a temporary stepping into Lucidity. Rather, we seek a secret that truly frees us and transforms us, that allows us to cast off all crutches, all dogmas and beliefs, so that we may step into the Dream at will.
The more we consider the nature of this secret that we're looking for, the more we are confronted with the fact that it cannot lie outside of us. It is not a technology or anything else that can be bought and paid for with coin. It is not a magic pill or any other short cut that would require repeated refills. It must already be innate to every human being. It must be born with us, hard-wired into our DNA. For if it is anything else, we will always be dependent on it and we will never freely dream in the outliers.
The secret therefore must lie within, not in some obscure body part or chakra, but in consciousness. It can be in no other place. The eyes that will allow us to see what is hidden in front of our eyes must lie in consciousness. We must learn to see what is beyond seeing, we must learn to hear what is beyond hearing, and the journey to this ever-present realm of lucid sights and sounds, the entrance to the dreaming realm of buddhas, is a journey through consciousness. And this journey isn’t one we’re familiar with. We know it must be new, and we know it must lead in unexpected directions. A transformation must take place. Like Bilbo, we must discover just exactly what we are made of. Old world views and outdated modes of consciousness must be cast off to make room for the new. In order to see with new eyes, we must learn to unsee that which is already seen. For how can we see with new eyes if we are still looking with the old?
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Upside down beginnings
The quest now truly begins to take shape (the hunt is on!), but we are again faced with the question of where to start. How do we come upon some secret of consciousness that has long been hidden in front of us that allows us access to those areas of lucid dreaming talent most commonly associated with enlightened monks? The question at once seems ridiculous and impossible. How did we even arrive at such an idea? Once again, we must revisit the outliers. It was here where we first conceived that a breakthrough in the art and science of lucid dreaming might be possible. Although we are not trying to become buddhas, there may be some prize of consciousness that we can pluck from their realm and bring back to our own. Wise men and women from many different traditions share in a remarkable lucid dreaming talent as a side-effect of their spiritual pursuits. While we’re not necessarily interested in their many paths, we are interested in the shared side-effects of those paths. And since we find these individuals in the outliers, the answer regarding where to start looking for clues must lie in the outliers as well.
Looking to the outliers is actually a common practice when trying to uncover things hidden in plain sight. Whether it’s decoding Templar architecture or finding the esoteric secrets within a mystical text, the answers are always in the outliers. You just have to look for the incongruities, the breaks in the pattern, the things that just don’t seem quite right. And once you start poking around in those areas, you realize that the rest was just distraction and the juicy stuff was right in front of you all along. The detection of these incongruities is an art because we naturally tend to dismiss them. The following text found floating around the internet, claims to be from a study at Cambridge University and demonstrates the capabilities of the mind to reorder reality in order to see what it expects to see.
“THE PWEOR OF THE HMUAN MNID. Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”
Our minds rearrange (or sometimes eliminate) the bits of reality that don’t fit what we expect to see, and they are either “righted” or made invisible. Someone has to point them out and get us to stop seeing what we expect to see. Only when we really look, when we look without expectation, do we have a chance to see what is before us. The mind has to be trained to see, but once we’ve overcome that hurdle, we can confidently head down our path, picking up additional clues along the way.
Care must be taken because the clues are easy to miss. Dreamsigns are really big clues that can cause a dreamer to become lucid. Major incongruities like “I see a pink elephant flying in my bedroom” are exactly the kinds of signs that can cause a dreamer to pause and think, “Hey, elephants don’t fly! I must be dreaming!” The appearance of a flying pink elephant can often be enough to trigger a high level lucid dreaming experience. Unfortunately, the mind can overwrite even the biggest of dreamsigns, as I found out in the following dream from May 2002.
“I believe I'm outside our house in Arkansas. The house isn’t the same, but it feels like Arkansas somehow. I'm looking up at the sky and noticing the full moon. Except there are two of them. There are two full moons looking down at me. I am surprised and trying to figure out some explanation that would cause me to see multiple moons. I think there must have been some announcement or something in the news and I just missed it. It seems like I would have heard this kind of thing from someone before now though, so I go inside to ask.”
Our minds are more than happy to overwrite even common sense in order to persist in whatever reality or state of consciousness we happen to be in, but as we train ourselves to look for the incongruities, we start to notice that they’re everywhere. G.I. Gurdjieff, the influential spiritual teacher of the early 20th century, said that man “sees the world not as it is, but upside down.” Only by uncovering the incongruities in our perceptions do we have a chance of seeing things the way they truly are.
So what are the incongruities that surround lucid dreaming? We must now begin to reexamine everything we know, or think we know, and see if anything stands out. The pattern we’re looking for will be something like this….
NORMAL * NORMAL * NORMAL * NROMAL * NORMAL * NORMAL
Our natural tendency will be to dismiss the incongruities as unimportant or unexciting, but we must resist this tendency and inspect them more closely. These are the outliers in our experiences, the outliers in reality. They are the things that if we question, if we really begin to reexamine, may just hold the very key we’re looking for.
The current practices in lucid dreaming (the practices that don’t always work), tend to have one thing in common: they’re us in this world trying to remind ourselves to become lucid in the next “world.” Reality checks, MILD, all of the old tricks, seem to follow this idea. These are the tricks of sections 2-4, and it is of no surprise that those who use them remain in sections 2-4. The inhabitants of section 6 don’t go around performing reality checks every hour on the hour.
So rather than revisiting old tricks, let us look somewhere new. Let us not learn about lucid dreaming by reading about lucid dreaming or reminding ourselves to lucid dream the next time we see a clock, let us instead find a better teacher. If you wish to learn the secrets of a yogi, you enter the cave and spend time with the yogi. You study him, imitate him, and look for the incongruities to find where he’s saying what can’t be said. If you wish to learn the secrets of a shaman, you go into the jungle and spend time with a shaman. Again, you study her, imitate her, and look for the incongruities to find where she’s saying what can’t be said. Does it not make sense that to learn the secrets of lucid dreaming, we go into the dream, study it, imitate it, and discover the incongruities where it too is saying what can’t be said?
End of Section 1. All text (c) C.A. von der Mehden, 2014.
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