The Lucid Dreamer

"Two thousand five-hundred years ago Gautama the Buddha, when asked what he was: whether an Incarnation, a God, a Deva, or a Saint, simply replied 'I am Awake.' No one had ever described the ultimate state of enlightenment in such simple terms. And when he said that he was awake, he was talking of awakening from the state which the rest of us consider our waking lives." This comes from The Lucid Dreamer: A Waking Guide for the Traveler Between Worlds by Malcolm Godwin.

I had never heard of lucid dreaming until quite recently, and I figure most people reading this will need a definition. Lucid dreaming, also known as conscious dreaming, is when someone wakes up within a dream. They're still dreaming but totally aware of and in control of what happens. Lucid dreamers usually describe their dream worlds as being as real as the waking world, and sometimes even more so. For example, flying in a lucid dream would usually feel as realistic as (theoretically) flying in real life.

That may be hard for a newbie to understand, even if they can believe it's possible. But lucid dreaming is in fact recognized by scientists, mainly thanks to Stephen LaBerge's experiments in the 1980s. And while lucid dreaming has long been known to Eastern mystics, America and Europe have finally started to catch on.

Most people will find some of this book hard to swallow, such as the assertion that Western languages have a problem with being based on nouns, causing us to perceive objects as solid simply because we have a word for them. However, if you can be somewhat open-minded, you'll find it very interesting.

The book is mainly about the role lucid dreaming has played in different cultures over the centuries. It also covers techniques for inducing lucidity, and ideas for what to do when you get there. Most interestingly, it gets into quantum physics and neurophysiology to take a look into the nature of dreams and reality, suggesting that reality itself may be a dream, one from which we can awaken.

I haven't had a lucid dream yet, but I think it's well worth my while to keep trying. Aside from being able to fly and shoot lightning bolts from my hands in a dream world that I can barely distinguish from the waking world, I'd like to get a glimpse of what Malcolm Godwin is talking about when he says life is an illusion. In his words: "In the classical Newtonian universe time is an absolute, a background against which events play in linear sequences of cause and effect...It is only when we consider the implications of sub-atomic behavior, or view reality through the eyes of a lucid dreamer, or a mystic, that such approximations become unstuck...In the world of quanta there appears to be no time, no before and no after, so questions as to when, or where, by default, have no meaning. Does this all begin to sound like a dream?"