This blog is about:
Awareness in the dream state
Developing the psychological, emotional & mental wellbeing
Exploring the subconscious
Understanding the psyche – Freud & Jung
Controlling your dreams
What if we could use the time we normally spend sleeping, to learn, to grow, to solve problems and connect with our deep authentic selves? What if we stopped being frightened about life after death and became practised in inhabiting the astral plane instead? As Tantra teacher Morgan Arundel explains in this article, through lucid dreaming we can open up an exciting new world of many dimensions and possibilities.
What is Lucid Dreaming?
Lucid dreaming is when we become aware that we’re dreaming. So we can wake up in the dream state. And when we do that, we gain a certain amount of control over the dream that we’re having. We can even change the characters, we can control how the dream is unfolding, or the environment of the dream. So essentially, lucid dreaming is about having awareness during the dream experience.
Why practice Lucid Dreaming?
There are many reasons why we may want to practice lucid dreaming. First of all, the experiences that we have in the dream world can be as rich and as fulfilling as the ones we would have in our waking state. We can have dreams of flying, we can have dreams of meeting people, meeting friends, we can have erotic dreams, we could have dreams of exploring exotic landscapes. And they are experiences that can, as I said, be really as fulfilling as the ones that we might have when we’re awake.
But more than this, we can use it as a way of deepening our own personal development. We can go through healing in the dreams, we can get to know ourselves more emotionally and mentally, we can even learn skills. And so it can be used as a way of developing our own psychological, emotional, mental well-being.
The source of our dreams
As to where the content of our dreams comes from, this depends on what perspective we take it from, or who we listen to. From the psychology point of view, the dreams are coming from the subconscious mind, and they are a way that the psyche is communicating with us. The famous psychiatrists like Jung and Freud placed great importance on the dream content because they considered that it was a way that somehow our psyche was trying to tell us things, and by examining that, we could reveal different aspects of our behaviour and help to overcome emotional mental issues. So they paid great attention to that.
From the yogi point of view, it’s more than just coming from the mind. There is another dimension of reality that we are exploring, that the dream world is part of the astral world. So we are exploring that as well.
The fear factor
Some people can find it scary intimidating that anything can happen and that they don’t have control. But once you start to gain control and you start to be aware of some of the ways that a dream unfolds, then you can be less frightened by it and actually more excited by it. Because then it starts to become something that you can play with, something that you can have amazing experiences in.
Many people have had, for example, the flying dream. That’s quite a common one, where you feel this weightlessness of flying and you’re moving through the air and travelling over a landscape. And even if it’s not a lucid dream, when you wake up from such an experience you feel great. You feel like you have had a genuine experience as if you were having it in your day-to-day life. So that can be a really wonderful way to have these kinds of exploration experiences. And it can be very exciting to know that you can actually explore a world and have those kinds of experiences.
The history of Lucid Dreaming
The term ‘lucid dreaming’ is one that arose in the early 1900s, it came from a psychiatrist who coined that term who was doing a lot of studies, looking at how dreams could be used to heal mental disorders or discover more about the individual’s emotional and mental well-being.
But this is something that’s been explored by different traditions for thousands of years. If you think about it, dreaming is something that we all know that we do, and that would be a fascination to humans since the dawn of our evolution. And so there has been a lot of interest in that. The yogis from the different yogi traditions for thousands of years have explored the dream world and have written about it extensively, and they have their own understanding of what’s going on there. So it’s a bit of a combination of these traditions that have been exploring the dream and astral world, such as the yogi tradition, and also the modern research that’s done into dreaming and into lucid dreaming specifically.
Learning to control your dreams
There are many techniques to control your dreams, but the idea is that first you start becoming more aware that you are in a waking state of consciousness and that the dream state is just another state of consciousness. So it’s like there’s one thing that we don’t do a lot of in our day-to-day life: we don’t question “am I awake?” We don’t think “what state of consciousness am I in right now?” That’s not something we do commonly.
But actually, we are just living in one state of consciousness, and the dream state is another one. So part of becoming lucid is just becoming more aware of the state that we are in now and then questioning that. We can even ask ourselves that question: “Am I dreaming now? Or am I awake? Am I dreaming or is this my waking state?” And then if we start to do that a bit more habitually, it becomes more second nature to us. And then there’s a greater chance that we’ll do that when we’re in a dream state. And then that’s one of the first points of actually waking up in the dream, to question “well hang on, this is a dream.” And then the next thing is to be able to develop the awareness in the dream.
Mastery the techniques of Lucid Dreaming
I’m often asked if it is difficult to master the techniques of lucid dreaming. The answer is both yes and no. You can have a basic experience of lucid dreaming. Just about everyone has had dreams where we’ve been semi-lucid, where you are very aware – it’s the first stage of the lucid dreaming. Afterwards you have great recall for example, and you feel a different state from the kind of dream that you had. So that’s the first stage of lucid dreaming – where your dream recall is really good and you can remember a lot of details about the dream, and it feels just more like an ordinary memory of something that you did.
So this is something that you can develop quite easily, and I think it’s very easy for most people to start having these kinds of semi-lucid dreams. The next stage starts getting a little bit trickier, where you start having full awareness. And I know in my own practice, that was the first thing: getting awareness in the dream but not having a lot of control over what’s going on. So that’s the next level; you get a kind of awareness of your dreams but then you still don’t really have control over what’s going on. Then to get to that next level where you can start to control the environment, the characters, the narrative, how the story of the dream is unfolding, that takes a little bit more practice.
*by Morgan Arundel