Fringe-ology (34 page)

Lucid Dreaming and Its Most Potent Lesson for Science and Spirituality

Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake.

—William James, “The Energies of Men”

I
  lay down, planning to put myself to sleep while meditating. I was midway through my trip to Hawaii, on day five of the workshop. My mind was relaxed and focused on LaBerge's suggestion for a simple mantra:
The next time I'm dreaming, I'll remember to recognize that I'm dreaming.

I'm not sure how long I kept that mantra going. But I distinctly remember the strange sensation of feeling myself disconnect from my body, like a plug pulled from its socket. Then I began to drift, downward, through the floor of the bedroom. I passed through the wood with a subtle, satisfying friction, expecting to see the first story of the building I slept in—the refrigerator, the chairs lining the wall, the screened exit door. But instead I saw . . . stars.

I was in outer space.

And just like that, I was lucid.

There was no need for a state test, no need to ask any questions at all—and again I felt that sensation of zapping into another reality, of going to sleep in one world and coming to, suddenly, in another.

Points of stars appeared in sharp relief, out in the distance. Strange mists, collections of gas, floated pretty as dandelion seeds in the air. My body felt suddenly solid and real. My muscles tensed slightly as I dropped gracefully through the sky. The sensation of descent was so realistic, I even felt my dream hairs stand up on my dream arms. And after a few moments of enjoying all this, I looked down to see where I was headed.

I could see something in the distance, a squarish platform coming into view, but couldn't quite make it out. I felt hyperconscious now. And I knew that was a good thing. As LaBerge had advised us, the version of reality we create when we dream is incredibly tenuous. Look away from an object, and turn back, and its nature can change entirely. LaBerge has developed some techniques to stabilize the dream. My favorite is the act of rubbing my “dream hands” together, like I'm trying to warm them over a fire.

Why does that work?

Well, remember, the dream is much like waking consciousness, without sensory input from the waking world. Rubbing the dream hands together provides the brain with sensory input
from the dream world;
and those sensations create a greater sense of reality, helping the dream persist. But in this dream, of falling through the sky, the air flowing over my skin kept the dream world stable. There was no need to rub my hands at all. And after a few more seconds, I could finally make out what lay below me: the squarish shape I saw was a giant Monopoly board.

A Monopoly board as big as a small island in the Pacific.

As I continued falling, I could see the content of the squares running along its perimeter. There was no Park Place and no Broadway, no Go to Jail square. In fact, all the squares surrounding the board contained images of a man, and a woman, together, in different silhouetted poses. And in the dead center of the board, there was a hole. I was headed straight for it.

I should stop here, for just a moment, to remark that I now count this dream as among the most incredible experiences of my life. I say this because until I had spent long minutes lucid, inside of a dream, I had no idea the power such an experience could hold. The sensory reality of everything I saw was just one aspect: yes, the colors and shapes and the feel of the air rushing around me were incredibly vivid and tactile. And then there is the carnival-like nature of the dream: because no physical law can constrain, existence becomes a kind of boundless circus—life as a character inside of a sci-fi movie or video game. But more profound than any of this is the feeling of finding myself inside an entirely subjective experience—only to find that this interior world seems to be as big as the universe itself.

I got comfortable and began to experiment. I willed myself to move left, right, back, forward, even up. But then I chose a course of action: LaBerge had advised us to approach our dreams with a curious spirit; and when I had attained lucidity in this dream, I had been dropping downward, toward the Monopoly board below; so I wondered what my subconscious mind had cooked up for me; and with a kind of happy,
banzai
recklessness, I again allowed myself to fall. Immediately, like an elevator cut loose from its cabling, I plummeted downward.

I fell faster than before. And in just seconds, I passed through the hole at the board's center. There was a momentary blackness. The walls of the hole I'd dropped into were all around me. And then I was out. Immediately, I saw a second game board beneath this first one. And again, as I drew near, I could make out the details: the squares on this board were filled with images of machinery—cogs and wheels, gears and crankshafts. I passed through the hole in the center of that board, too, like passing through a highway tunnel with the lights out. And beneath that was a third board. But this one was fundamentally different.

Even from a distance, I could see there was almost nothing written on this board. And after a few seconds, what detail there was became clear: all the squares were empty but one, which contained the illustrated image of a single man in midstride. This man appeared in the upper left-hand corner of the board, and again in the center there was another hole. But between these two features was the thing that got my attention: a single word, printed in big, capitalized letters:

HELL

Instinctively, I panicked.
This hole,
I thought,
is the entrance to hell.
I started flying upward, away from the board. I was raised Catholic, after all, and these concepts still hold a primal sort of power. But then I remembered why I had come here—to explore the dream world, and moreover to explore myself. All the dream images I saw, the dream sounds, were just constructs of my own mind. So whatever hell lay below me, it was one of my own creation.
This is a dream,
I reminded myself.
I'm safe.

I let myself go again. I began dropping toward the HELL hole and actually tried to interpret a dream—for the first time ever—
while
I was in it.
Does this dream mean,
I thought, interpreting it literally,
that if I stay on my current path, I'm going to hell?

But another thought occurred to me, just as automatically:
No, there is no hell
.

I changed my attitude. I told myself I should be excited. And by the time I closed in on the darkened opening, I found myself feeling much the same way I do on a rollercoaster—filled with anxiety and the expectation of a coming thrill. I was about to see HELL—and live to tell about it. And a moment later, I was inside the hole. Blackness enveloped me. The only sensory input I received was the dream air rushing around my dream face. Then I saw flames below me, flickering. And I even felt the heat. But at this point, I spoke to my own dream:
No,
I said,
this is just what I expect to see. What am I really here to see?

And suddenly, in an instant, the flames were gone. In fact, I landed. I had come to a stop. I was face down on the floor of a room, in the same position I had fallen. I lifted my dream body, from the torso up, in a push-up position, to look around. My knowledge of where I was came to me, immediately, in the strange way knowledge often arrives in a dream—as an inexplicable flash of insight.

This, I realized, was my maternal grandfather's bedroom. This surprised me because it hardly even
looked
like my grandfather's bedroom. There was a sink in his room, an odd feature, and this room had a sink, too. But beyond that, there was little resemblance. His room was neat and orderly. This room was cluttered, with racks of clothes and bottles of alcohol. And as I took all this in, I had another thought, which seemed to make everything else fall into place:
Oh,
I said aloud, in the dream world.
This is my foundation
.

A tremendous surge of energy rose within me. I felt like there was something I'd been looking for, something that had never quite been clear to me, and now I had all my answers. If the beginning of the dream, before attaining lucidity, felt like disconnecting from a socket, this was like plugging back in. Every fiber of my being seemed alive with electric current. And that was it. The dream was over.

I opened my eyes. This mental image of my grandfather's room, cluttered and unrecognizable, gave way to the sight of my own well-ordered room in Hawaii. I transitioned from one reality to the next in a seamless instant. I had no sense of “waking up” because I had already been awake and aware the whole time. It was as if someone had just switched the computer program I had been running.

I thought for just one beat, and an interpretation of the dream came to me, which I shared that day for the workshop participants and LaBerge in Hawaii. But I'm not going to write about it here. Because all the interpretation I did afterward felt anticlimactic. Over the next few days, in fact, I tried out different ideas but none ever took. What had mattered was the
experience
of the dream. I felt as if I had really touched my own foundation—and the sensation had been electric.

But LaBerge had something more to say on the subject—the Mad Hatter answering questions I hadn't even asked.

T
HE WHOLE TIME
I was in Hawaii, I was curious to suss out LaBerge's take on paranormal topics. But for much of the workshop, he seemed to let opportunities to
go there
go sailing by. I wondered if he had made a kind of tactical decision. After all, the acceptance of lucid dreaming has been hindered by its long association with the paranormal, an association that will likely never go away. Robert Waggoner, for instance, has built a sturdy niche for himself in the community of lucid dreamers by arguing that some of the dream characters we encounter may enjoy an objective, independent existence. By way of contrast, LaBerge's own writings on lucid dreaming continue to stand out for their comparatively materialistic scientific outlook.

I was surprised, then, by a lecture he gave on the topic of telepathy. “The question comes up a lot,” said LaBerge, “because people report these kinds of strange experiences, both in and outside of dreams, in which they seem to gather information outside the normal sensory channels.”

LaBerge, however, had something more than anecdote to share. His story was about a scientific experiment.

LaBerge had been asked, he told us, by a branch of the American military, to study whether people could gain accurate information about the waking world in lucid dreams. And so he helped to construct an experiment, volunteering to do double-duty as one of the subjects. “I didn't expect to succeed,” LaBerge said. “But I figured it was worth a shot. People had been reporting
some
success in these matters, and though I was doubtful, I decided to see for myself.”

I won't go into all the details of the experiment here. But dreamers, including LaBerge, were charged with opening up an envelope in a lucid dream, examining its contents, and awaking to write a detailed report. In each case, the dream envelope they were supposed to open had a real-life corollary. And the goal of the experiment was both simple and wild: Would the contents of the sealed, waking-life envelope, when opened, match the contents of the envelope opened
in dreams?

According to the experiment's protocol, each dreamer had a 20 percent chance of scoring a hit, purely by luck. But the hit rate produced by the experiments was 33 percent. Further, dreamers were more than three times as likely to score a close match with the target image than any
non
-target image. “I have to admit I was greatly surprised by these results,” said LaBerge. “But the statistics seem to demonstrate that
something
is happening here.”

LaBerge also showed us a particularly evocative example of success from his own archives of that experiment. Upon awakening from his own lucid dream, he drew a series of wavy lines and four words:
sandy, patchy, dark, light.

When the sealed envelope was opened later, without LaBerge's presence, the target image turned out to be a set of rolling sand dunes, with heavily shaded areas offset by patches of bright sunlight.

As LaBerge acknowledged, any one example of success could be dismissed as coincidence. Maybe even this spot-on match was just that. But the experiment he took part in rules out coincidence as any sort of explanation for the results as a whole. “We found compelling results,” said LaBerge, “that were, statistically, significantly above chance. But the results we got were similar to other credible research, in that whatever's going on here can't really be operationalized. There is some other way of knowing then our standard senses, it seems, but it's a weak signal—and hard to pick up on.”

After that lecture, I caught up to LaBerge before he could leave and asked him what we were to make of this. Like anyone else, I'd had experiences of my own that could have been put down to prophecy—or more likely, mere coincidence. One woman in class even shared a story about dreaming of a fatal accident that befell a young boy
before
it happened. How should someone view a potentially telepathic experience when it could just as easily have been random chance?

“I'd say,” said LaBerge, “that if you believe you have picked up on information in this way, the appropriate response is to
believe
what the experience is telling you. In other words, let it open your mind to the fact that there is more to this world than we know.”

And so, over time, it was clear to me that LaBerge was more complicated than I had known; he even told us of a lucid dream he had in which he asked to see his highest self and flew, in his dream car, to a place he could only describe as a “holy nothing, a beautiful nothing, an ecstatic nothing.”