A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming (6 page)

What Are Dreams?

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If the dream is a translation of waking life,

waking life is also a translation of the dream.

—René Magritte,

painter, lover of bowler hats and green apples

Each night, under the veil of sleep, with our eyes closed and

the outside world shut out, a new world appears, familiar

but different. Powerful, absurd, mysterious, frightening,

beautiful, dangerous, realistic, baffling—it’s nearly impossible to

describe what dreams are or how they make us feel. Before you can

become lucid in your dreams, you need to understand the nature

of dreams. In this section we’ll get to the heart of what dreams

are as we ask: How much do we really know about them, anyway?

Then, with your head screwed on tight, you’ll begin your journey

into the dream world.

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A CREATIVE DREAMER

Paul Mccartney woke up one morning with the tune of “yesterday” playing
in his head. “I liked the melody a lot,” he said, “but because I’d dreamed it, I
couldn’t believe I’d written it. I thought, ‘No, I’ve never written anything like
this before.’ But I had the tune, which was the most magical thing!” a dream
was also an inspiration for another Beatles classic. Mccartney describes the
experience: “One night during this tense time I had a dream I saw my mum,
who’d been dead ten years or so. and it was so great to see her because that’s
a wonderful thing about dreams: you actually are reunited with that person for
a second; there they are and you appear to both be physically together again.

It was so wonderful for me and she was very reassuring. In the dream she said,

‘It’ll be all right.’ I’m not sure if she used the words ‘let it be’ but that was the
gist of her advice.”

Dreams have fascinated us since the beginning of time. They

have always been a part of humanity’s story, guiding us in nearly

every field of endeavor. They have been studied, worshipped, and

practiced by nearly every culture throughout history.

In modern times, dreams have been responsible for at least

two Nobel Prizes, incredible scientific breakthroughs, invaluable

inventions, novels, works of art, and many other discoveries.

Elias Howe dreamed of being attacked by cannibals. He took

note of the cannibal’s spears, which had holes near the sharp tip.

Howe applied this concept to his new invention, the first working

sewing machine. The periodic table of elements was said to have

come to the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev during a dream.

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Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Mary Shelley, even Adolf Hitler

were all influenced by dream events. Whether you’re famous or

not, dreams are an important part of our lives. Through their

power, inspiration, and guidance , dreams are an amazing mystery

to us, even today.

Everybody Dreams

You don’t need to read this book to discover how exciting

dreams are. Just like every human being who has ever lived,

you dream. All of us do. It’s universal. “Dreaming ties all mankind

together,” wrote Jack Kerouac. We may differ in many other ways,

but one thing we know for sure: no matter our age, race, religion,

occupation, diet, or sexual orientation, we all dream, and we do so

every single night.

Some people lament that they don’t dream. These individuals

are sadly mistaken. What they’re really saying is that they don’t

remember their dreams, not that they don’t have any. In fact,

researchers have found we dream for about two hours each night.

Let’s take out our trusty calculators, hit some numbers and—

holy crap! During a typical lifetime that’s an average of six years

spent dreaming! Maybe you are one of those individuals who can’t

remember your dreams at all. Don’t worry, you’re still having tons

of nocturnal adventures, you just have a hard time recalling them

upon waking (we’ll help with that soon enough).

But why do we dream? Surely there must be some sort of

purpose to such a common activity? What are dreams anyway?

What is going on when we sleep, and where are we going? In our

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ultramodern world, with all of our cultural history, understanding,

and cleverness, the answer may surprise you.

We don’t know.

Understanding Dreams

There have been countless theories that attempt to explain

dreams. Modern psychology has been trying to uncover the

secret of dreaming since Freud lit the proverbial cigar of insight

in his turn-of-the-century classic
The Interpretation of Dreams.

Published in 1899, this work established Freud’s stance on dreams

and kicked off a massive change in how modern society viewed

dreaming.

In a nutshell, Freud claimed that all dreams are forms of wish

fulfillment. That is, they stem from our repressed conflicts and

desires accumulated throughout life. Dreams are our “uncon-

scious” mind’s attempts to resolve these past conflicts.

Since Freud, dozens and dozens of the brightest thinkers have

followed in the Austrian’s footsteps, attempting to understand this

experience we call dreaming. More than a century has passed since

The Interpretation of Dreams
was published, so we must have made

a lot of headway, right? Well, sort of. No single consensus has

emerged on what dreams are or why we have them. If this seems as

crazy to you as it does to us, consider that science is still unraveling

the exact purpose and function of sleep itself.

Some researchers suggest that dreams serve no real purpose,

while others believe that dreaming is essential to mental, emo-

tional, and physical well-being. Here are some of the main ideas:

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b
Our brains are like computers.
Some think dreams are a way

for us to organize information and help store memories. Just

like a computer, dreams are a way for us to “defragment” and

reorganize our minds so that we wake up refreshed and ready to

process more information.

b
Future rehearsal.
One theory believes that dreams are simply

a safe environment for us to make connections among differ-

ent thoughts and emotions, a place where we can prepare and

practice for upcoming events.

b
Randomness.
If you ever took a psychology course in college

then you’ve definitely heard about this one. The activation

synthesis model, one of the more recognized theories today,

was proposed in 1977 by scientists Alan Hobson and Robert

McCarley. According to them, dreams are just the brain’s

reaction to biological processes that occur during sleep. They

declared, “Dreams are a by-product of random neural firing

[. . .] our frontal lobe tries to organize it into a storyline.” In

essence, they are suggesting that dreams are gibberish.

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The Dream Experience

Which do you want first, the good news or the bad news? The

bad news is that our society is a bit ass-backward when it

comes to dreams. Overall, it seems that we don’t value them as the

amazing gems of human experiences that they are. As Robert Moss

puts it in his book
Conscious Dreaming,
“The typical dreamer, after waking, has no more idea where he spent the night than an amnesiac drunk.”

Some of us refer to dreams as being “childish,” “gibberish,”

and “a waste of time.” That’s just the environment we grew up in.

We tend to remember only fragments that often make no sense to

us. The bad news is that we’re told to ignore our dreams, to wave

them off as a meaningless distraction.

We would say that the modern dream theories above are not

incorrect, but they are incomplete. Science has examined only the

ground floor of a twenty-story building; there is much more to

learn about the subject. So what’s the good news? It doesn’t have

to be this way. As pioneers, we can change the course we’re on and

steer the ship in a new direction. We can develop our dreaming

skills simply by choosing to do so.

For example, when we say the word
dreams
what exactly do we

mean? Many of us, when groping for a definition, think of fleeting

images and vague feelings, random fragments of stories. And why

not? We wake up in the morning, or think about a dream later that

day, and this is how they seem—wispy and choppy.

But that first impression is only the memory of the dream. The

remembered dream is not the dream itself.

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This is a very important distinction. If you were to remem-

ber, say, your tenth birthday party or what you did two Saturdays

ago, what would those memories be like? They would be sort of

like a remembered dream: cloudy images, fuzzy or faint feelings,

minor details here and there that stick out. The memory of your

tenth birthday party would be nothing compared to the actual

experience of your tenth birthday. Just like real life events, dreams

themselves are experiences that have a present moment just like

now.

Becoming aware of this present moment is the key to lucid

dreaming.

Think of a man in a boat, looking at the surface of the ocean.

Below he sees blotches of color and shapes moving in the water

and concludes that the objects down there are just that, blotches

of color and shapes. Then he puts on some scuba gear and goes for

a swim.

As he sinks below the surface of the ocean, an entire world

surrounds him. The colors and shapes he once thought were only

glimmers are vividly alive and detailed. There are fish, coral, and

complex ecosystems that have existed all this time, right under

his nose.

If we look at dreams from the outside looking in (only the

memory of the dream), we will not grasp the full realness of

dreams. To understand what dreaming is, we need to dive into the

ocean. We need to experience them as they unfold. This is the heart

of lucid dreaming—the present-moment awareness of the dream

world.

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MINCINg WORDS

What’s the difference between the unconscious and the subconscious? The two
words are basically interchangeable; we just happen to prefer
subconscious.

Our hang-up with the more clinical word
unconscious
is that it evokes the
image of a comatose, detached vegetable. The word
subconscious,
on the other
hand, leads us to imagine a place that is hidden but still well within our reach.