Lucid Dreaming

We shall explore the boundaries of Securus Locus as we share personal examples, if any, of Lucid Dreaming – a dream state marked by an actual awareness of being in that dream and coupled, in some cases, with the ability to control the dream itself. A reported estimate of fifty percent of adults have experienced at least one such lucid dream and five percent do so once a month.

Our focus article Living In A Lucid Dream sets the stage, starting with a rather surreal account – but aren’t they all? – of her own lucid dream and then going on to some of the research in the way the brain “roars to life in the darkness.” The brain, you see, moves along the spectrum of consciousness with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex waking up after REM sleep.

But never mind all that as we, perhaps, relate our own experiences with the described dream condition where thoughts constitute reality and we become this free-floating hallucinating Id, unfettered by normal physical constraints within this world of no consequences. Welcome to an area – testing the boundary of poetry, myth, even sanity – that might itself be central to the creative process. You may have witnessed the power of the subconscious that time you went to bed thinking of an intractable problem only to find it to have largely been solved with some blinding insight the next morning.

No wonder this phenomenon has intrigued many, from Buddhists to Descartes to today, with the proliferation of “Oneironauts” or dream explorers using techniques not unlike mindfulness to understand the underlying weirdness, mystery, and associative logic. It even includes the possibility of active communication by an outsider with those in such a dream state.

Philosophers suggest that a dream is a “self-in-a-world” experience and, with that, there is a dream ego, raising questions about higher consciousness. After all, our interactions with the “real” world are essentially mediated through our limited sensory organs and shaped by our subjective internal landscape so convincingly as to be invisible. In that sense, it is suggested, the dream state isn’t that different from the waking experience.

Okay, back to earth, we learn from the dream gurus that dream control can be a learned skill to be applied in those moments between wakefulness and sleep known as the hypnagogic state (click: Guardian, Lucid Dreaming). Just be aware that certain techniques, such as the bizarre-sounding “critical state testing” method to establish a baseline awareness (counting your fingers and plugging your nose to be sure you’re really awake) suggest some discretion.

Let us compare notes. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.