A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming (37 page)

does that say about me?”

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There may be some aspects of your inner reflection that you

won’t like. Don’t worry if you discover these things. That’s the

whole point of the dream, to raise your present level of awareness.

The beauty is that once you see something and are aware of it,

you can change it. Abraham Maslow understood this idea when he

said, “What is necessary to change a person is to change his aware-

ness of himself.” What are your dreams about and how do they

make you feel? What could they be trying to tell you? The experi-

ences you have within the dream can be a very personal wake-up

call.

Like a mirror, lucid dreaming is simply a tool we can use to

examine the limiting beliefs or subconscious tendencies that might

be holding us back. In one way or another, we’re all on a journey

to find out who we are. Lucid dreaming can be used to reconnect

with our past selves, to find out our true purpose, to tap into deep

wisdom, and to learn more about this strange thing we call real-

ity. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll move forward in life with

conviction.

No matter what your journey is, what your religion is, where

or how you grew up, dream exploration can be a way to understand

who you truly are.

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Summary

•   Make the conscious choice to pay attention to your inner 

life. This involves your dreams, thoughts, feelings, and any 

subconscious beliefs you hold.

•   Peer into a dream as if you’re looking into a mirror and reflect 

upon what you see. The more awareness you have of yourself, 

the more deliberate you can be with your thoughts and actions.

•   Lucid dreaming provides us with a unique opportunity to explore 

our inner selves consciously and to seek knowledge or guidance 

once we’re there.

•   With lucid dreaming we can begin merging our subconscious 

with our conscious minds, thus revealing and understanding more 

about ourselves.

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20

Waking vs. Dreaming

“Thoughts are Things,” and powerful things at that, when they are

mixed with definiteness of purpose, persistence, and a burning desire.

—Napoleon Hill,

successful writer who wrote about success

While writing this book, our experiences with lucid

dreaming sparked a shift in our realities. Our lives

became significantly altered—not just our dream

lives, but our day-to-day lives as well. Experiences in the

dream world forced us to ask some curious questions: What is

the relationship between the physical world and the dream world?

Can the lessons and principles we learned as lucid dreamers apply

to our waking lives? What can dreams, and specifically the lucid

dream experience, tell us about ourselves and the world?

As we explored these puzzles we found that there are indeed a

lot of correlations between dreaming and waking. We think these

connections will be helpful to anyone who’s looking to improve his

or her daily life. In this chapter we’ll take a look at a few of these

correlations.

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We Are All Together

Sure. We’ve all heard this before. We’re all one. We get it. Yet in

the dream state, this lofty philosophical idea is something that

you can actually experience. In dreams, everything, from a rock

to a feather to a dream character, is imbued with a consciousness.

Everything is you and you feel this intimate connection. Even the

air around you, the space between things, feels like it is alive and

conscious. How else do you think you could conjure up an object

or a dream character out of thin air? We don’t mean this philo-

sophically. In the dream world, everything is connected.

What about the real world then?

The above story is

amazing, but what’s more

I was standing on a roof and looking at

amazing is that Jordan had

a cityscape. I had a wave of clarity rush 

this experience in the wak-

over me, and the world around me and 

ing world. We might expect

myself  seemed  to  expand.  I  was  able  to 

to feel a personal connection

understand my place in the bigger picture 

and felt in deep connection with the uni-

to everything in our own

verse around me. I was in a relationship

dreams, but when we have

with everything—even the air around me 

those same moments of clar-

felt  embedded  with  this  very  intimate 

ity while we’re awake, it feels

presence,  which  was  my  own.  I  felt  like 

as though there’s a vast web

I  was  both  creator  and  observer  of  my 

connecting everything.

entire  world.  I  felt  empowered  as  chills 

This idea is no secret.

and  vibrations  went  through  my  entire 

being. It was truly incredible and brought 

Spiritual masters and mystics

me to the point of tears. —Jordan F.

have told us for centuries that

everything is more closely

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connected than our physical boundaries would seem to suggest.

Everything looks separate, of course. There is me and then there is

you and there’s a dog and there’s a couch. All separate. But throughout

time, many religions and even some scientists today will tell you that

separation is an illusion.

The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise
life on Earth, the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the
crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under
extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars—the high mass ones among
them went unstable—in their later years they collapsed and then exploded,
scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. Guts made of carbon,
nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. So that
when I look up at the night sky and I know that yes, we are part of this
universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both
of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact,
I look up—many people feel small because they’re small and the Universe
is big—but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.

There’s a level of connectivity.

—Neil deGrasse Tyson,

astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium, cosmic celebrity

<•=

So we’re connected to everything else in existence—each other,

nature, and the big ol’ universe. It’s a nice idea, but how does

one feel connected to the universe on a regular basis? Do we have

to meditate in a cave for thirty years and become enlightened to

feel this? Do we have to take drugs and “trip out” every time we

see a flower? Do we even need to have a lucid dream every night?

Many of us don’t have the time or affinity for all that.

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Let’s refer to our friend Abraham Maslow. He believed that if

we look at only what’s psychologically wrong with us, we won’t get

the full picture of who we are. Maslow performed a radical psy-

chological study: he looked at individuals with great mental health

instead of people with serious psychological issues.

What was so interesting about these acclaimed “self-actualizers”

was that they frequently experienced what he called “peak experi-

ences,” high points in life when the individual was in harmony

with himself and his surroundings. These moments were often

accompanied by intense clarity, feelings of ecstasy, wholeness, and

a connection to the world. The average person may experience a

few of these moments spontaneously throughout his lifetime, but

according to Maslow these self-actualizers were able to have peak

experiences daily.

How do you become a self-actualized person? It’s easier said

than done. You can’t force a peak experience after all. While we

don’t have a road map to experiencing the world as a connected

web of cosmic beauty, a good place to start is to take what you’ve

learned from the dream world and apply it to your waking life. In

other words, to live lucidly.

WALKING AROUND IN A DREAM

The next time you’re out and about in the world, imagine that you’re dreaming
and that everything and everyone is really just a part of you. Like the dream
world you’ve come to know so well, pretend that you’re surrounded by your
own internal landscape. 

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Lucid Living

Let’s wake up! Let’s wake up in our relationships,

let’s wake up where we work, let’s wake up in where we live.

—Fariba Bogzaran, PhD,

artist, dream researcher, writer

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Have you ever driven to work only to pull into the parking

lot with the puzzled and anxious realization “How did I just

get here?” With little recollection of the fifteen-minute drive you

wonder, “Did I stop at traffic lights? Was I speeding?”

Your memory draws a blank.

Some of us go through the motions of life automatically. We

fill our days with routines and errands. Our buzzing minds are

anxious about the future or regretful about the past. We let others

dictate our reality, letting life chug on by like a runaway train.

It’s as if we’re in a dream, wandering aimlessly in a kind of

sleepy trance.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things

which escape those who dream at night.

—Edgar Allan Poe,

macabre American poet, fan of ravens

<•=

The goal of lucid dreaming is not to sleep away your life, but to

bring this increased awareness into your everyday existence.

When we learn to become lucid in our lives, we become more

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aware of our surroundings, more aware of our reality and how we

are engaging with it, shaping it, communicating with it. Being

lucid in the waking world means being mindful of your actions,

decisions, and choices. It means being so vividly engaged with life

that anything that came before seems like a hazy dream.

Tenzin Rinpoche, in his book
The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and