As the parent of a newborn baby (ain’t he cute?), my sleep these days is pretty much toast. Seven weeks in, I’ve accepted that I’m not going to sleep for a period of more than two hours at a time for the foreseeable future.

But I’m not sleep deprived; I’m getting about seven hours of sleep a night, sometimes more.

Still, I’m not waking up refreshed at all.

That’s because I’m actually suffering from sleep fragmentation, in which multiple awakenings throughout the night limit the amount of restorative sleep I get. Deep sleep and long bouts of REM are on the decline, and more of my night consists of light sleep.

This distinction is important as it puts me in the same camp as millions of other insomniacs who do not feel rested when waking up in the morning, despite having lain in bed for eight hours or more. The most common causes for insomnia – besides having a baby in the house – include diabetes and health conditions with chronic pain.

And more recently, financial anxiety.

Undiagnosed sleep conditions like sleep apnea and restless leg syndrome are also big sleep zappers because they cause hundreds of awakenings a night that are so short they aren’t remembered.

This is a good night with an infant. Sleep measured with my Zeo device.

This descent into the territories of insomnia has made me sensitive to the attitudes I hear in the media and around town everyday that seem to make light of the importance of sleep.

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

“Sleep is for the weak.”

Ah yes and my favorite: “Real men don’t need sleep.”

The masochismo is intense, and culturally enforced. I used to work at an office where co-workers would brag about how little sleep they got the night before, as a badge of honor of how busy they were. (They were shitty employees too).

Sleeplessness is more than an irritation. It’s actually been declared a public health crisis. Apparently for every twenty people who think they can get by on five hours of sleep, only one of them is correct and the other 19 are chronically sleep deprived.

Let’s be absolutely clear: our culture does not care if we sleep.

It makes me really angry. And because I’m presenting suffering from constant sleep fragmentation, my brain is less able to process positive emotions and more likely to make me fly off the handle.

Screw it, here’s my rant:

Society actually profits from our sleeplessness, because when we’re tired, we eat more, work more, buy more, and watch more media.

When our base needs aren’t being met and our hormonal systems are out of whack, we are more likely to fill this void with consumer products, drugs and distractions.

In my opinion, this is not a conspiracy, and although the effect appears more sinister than mere benign neglect, it’s probably more about short-sighted returns on human capital.

Because if businesses were really interested in productivity, (Workers with fatigue cost employers more than 10o billion dollars compared with workers without fatigue), we’d have sleep rooms in every business park.

If our culture really looked out for our health, teenagers would be allowed to sleep in. Aviation officials would be allowed to take naps. Doctors would have less grueling internships, resulting in less life-threatening errors.

And new dads would be less grumpy, because there would be shorter lines at the cafe.

I am not exaggerating: sleeping in is a revolutionary act.

So let’s act in solidarity and take back our world, one nap at a time.

We’ll start the revolution here. Comment below and share your most inappropriate, ahem, revolutionary napping act.

The asclepieion on the island of Kos, where Hippocrates trained in dream interpretation.

Dream incubation is the art of inviting a dream into your life for problem solving or healing. The term comes from the Latin incubare, which means to lie down upon, or as we say today: just sleep on it.

How does this relate to lucid dreaming? Lucid dreaming induction can be thought of a specific form of dream incubation in which we are not looking for a dream message, but a specific form of dream cognition: self-awareness mixed with the magical thinking of the dreamworld.

The Great Forgetting

The practice of dream incubation is well documented throughout the ancient world, with deep roots in our Western culture. Over the centuries, however, Christianity slowly began pulling away from the idea that dreams can contain wisdom, leading to a loss of this important ability.  

But the writing is literally on the wall.

Statue of Aesclepius from the National Archaeological Museum, Athens, Greece. CC: DerHexer, 2008.

The work of archaeologists and classicists has reconstructed the Western practice of dream incubation based on ruins, documents and statues. During the Hellenistic era (the first three centuries of the Common Era), the practice took place in dream incubation temples that were staffed by priest-physicians.

In fact, dream temples made up the single most popular spiritual healing institution in the Mediterranean world. These restful sanctuaries were designed to produce dreams that provided healing wisdom—and also instant cures—if we are to believe the boasts of ancient graffiti.

The dream healers of ancient Greece were also surgeons and herbalists, teaching their young doctors the art of empirical observation coupled with an environment of safety and spiritual cleansing.

Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, learned from his dream healing mentors to make empirical observations rather than simply following untested beliefs.

By the way, Hippocrates also wrote a medical dream dictionary that focused on a number of common dream symbols that indicate bodily ailments.  So cool.

The divine figure associated with these dream temples is Aesclepius, the Greek god of healing. When doctors take the Hippocratic oath today, they still give thanks to Aesclepius and his daughters.

Aesclepius was commonly depicted standing with a large staff with a snake curling up it, identifying his origins as an earth spirit related to healing and the animal powers.

5 reasons why the ancient dream temples are relevant to lucid dreaming

•    Sleeping practices. Clients slept on special ritual dreaming beds known as klines. More like a couch, the kline often included a stone neck or head rest, facilitating clients to elevate their heads and sleep on their backs. These sleeping styles are known today to encourage lighter sleep, more awakenings, as well as longer experiences in REM sleep.  Given the universality of sleep biology, it seems as if Aesclepian temples directly encouraged vivid dreams as well as realistic hypnagogic hallucinations.

•    Disruption of circadian rhythms. When those seeking healing crossed the threshold of the healing sanctuary, they entered an inner sanctum where sleep and prayer intertwined until a strong dream came. This pattern can also seen in Native American vision quests,  where disrupted sleep (and attempts at night-long vigilance) leads to powerful visions often involving visitations with larger-than-life figures.

•    Positive expectation. Clients hoped for and actively sought an interaction with a healing figure.  Priests and priestesses also whispered in the ears of the sleepers to encourage dreams of Aesclepius. Today we know that dreams can incorporate sounds and suggestions into the dream narrative, as well as smells. LaBerge’s DreamLight may be considered a modern variation of this technique.

•    Relaxation and cleansing. Before the intense dreaming incubations began, dreamers relaxed in baths, walked around the beautiful gardens around the temple, and took naps. They were removed from their everyday life in order to focus on healing. They also adhered to a cleansing diet while staying at the temples, further setting the stage for ritual purification in the final part of the healing process.

•    Good dreamsigns. Snakes roamed the temple unmolested. As an ancient symbol of healing, snakes are at the center of the Aesclepian worldview. Dreams about snakes were taken to be dreams of Aesclepius himself. So, physician-priests made good use of the startling presence of snakes. According to lucid dreaming educator Tim Post, this is the perfect example of an effective dreamsign: one that is focused, meaningful and has an element of the bizarre.

Introducing Lucid Immersion

This article is drawn from the Lucid Immersion Blueprint, which will be available for download Thursday, December 8! UPDATE: January 2, 2012.

Drawing from the wisdom of dream cultures like the Aesclepian sanctuaries, as well as the latest in lucid dreaming research, Lucid Immersion Blueprint is a home study course. 

The Blueprint sets you up with a container of mindful and structured rituals to effectively stimulate greater self-awareness in the dreamworld…. and waking life.

At night, the veil is thin. The spirits are marching. Cold air blankets their arrival. Through the mists, a figure emerges. He is a stranger, cloaked in dark spun wool, his face obscured. He stands next to your bed and you strain for recognition.

The light shifts, shadows warble, and then you see his face.

No it can’t be.

It is your face.

The encounter with the spirit double, or the doppelgänger, has been recorded for thousands of years.

Today, with our spiritual literacy reduced to memories of fairytales and Disney films, the doppelgänger encounter is often fearful and terrifying. It’s usually mistaken for a ghost or malevolent spirit. But because we are shamed for seeing spirits in the 21st century, most do not share their stories, furthering their cognitive dissonance and isolation.

Facing off with a willful entity when you are alert and awake is not necessarily a ghost encounter. These visions have biological origins. Most doppelgänger encounters occur at the bookends of sleep, either just after falling asleep or when waking up out of a dose.

The vision occurs in stage 1 sleep, and is known as a hypnagogic hallucination. Making matters even creepier, some people have hypnagogic hallucinations for minutes after waking up, even after getting out of bed and walking around the house.

This stuff happens.

But I like the term hypnagogic vision better, because “hallucination” carries some heavy baggage that what you’re seeing is random, unreal and unimportant.

Nothing can be further from the truth.

The doppelgänger encounter occurs in times of stress, at life’s crossroads, and especially during times of emotional upheaval. They often carry messages and portents that the conscious mind does not want to hear. They can be insistent, angry, or stone cold in demeanor.

Sometimes they know information that we simply did not have access to. This unsettling truth is unexplainable by the current paradigm of science.

Do they have access to the other side, to our Higher Self, or is some other “psi” phenomenon at work, such as telepathy or clairvoyance? 

It’s really a matter of personal belief and I don’t have an agenda to press on the matter.

In any case, we are hard-wired to interact with these entities. Seeing spirits is part of our genetic make up,  an aspect of neurotheology, which accounts for the human universal experience of seeing spirits as well as other cross-culturally documented extraordinary experiences.

This doubling of self is also the core of interpersonal psychology:  a social trait shared by all the upper primates in which we recognize that other people have consciousness and free will. We invoke group dynamics namely by projecting our personal self onto the others around us and interacting in a dialogue of give and take.

The doppelgänger —and in fact many dream figure relationships—is an artifact of the same process, in which the self splits itself into two or more ego mirrors.

As the recently passed James Hillman said, “The gods are real.”

The Celtic tradition of the Double
It’s autumn in the Northern hemisphere, the season of the final harvest. In Celtic traditions, we just passed through Samhain, from which our Halloween myths are largely based.  For these people, the doppelganger was well known in all its forms.

In Medieval Europe, where Germanic and Celtic traditions blended together, three souls were recognized for each person.

The hamr is the animal soul, which dies with the body, and can also be sent out as a physical double. This is the province of sorcerers and shaman.

Second, they recognized the Hugr, or spirit, roughly corresponding to our Latin based tradition of the animus and spiritus.

Lastly, the fylgja is the spirit double, often seen as a female protector.

The fylgja leaves the body at will, and was associated with sleep and trance states. Today’s accounts of autoscopy and out-of-body experience parallel these early accounts of facing one’s own double.

However, in the Celtic tradition, the fylgja can fly great distances, and be employed to gather information, paralleling what is now called remote viewing by contemporary consciousness researchers. 

French medieval literature professor Claude Leconuteux suggests that the spirit double has many disguises. These real life experiences can be found in many fairytales and epic tales that feature encounters with werewolves, fairies, witches and little people.

The Doppleganger Today
Modern encounters of the double can also involve aliens, zombies, and vampires. Without a tradition to ground us, many are terrorized by their own doubles as they project fear and loathing onto the hallowed encounter.

But something interesting happens when you realize that in order to communicate with you, the creature must contain some part of yourself.

Granted, a part of your self that may see farther and into realms the conscious mind does not understand well in the waking rational world.

The following doppelgänger encounter is drawn from my upcoming mastermind guide Lucid Immersion. As dreamer Lee Adams explains, his doppelgänger occurred from a sleep paralysis-initiated lucid dream.
——————————
“I had been having a high occurrence of sleep paralysis along with hypnagogic experiences. I had a discussion with my Buddhist teacher about the experiences and how I often overcome the sometimes-terrifying visions with a fear tactic (running at them, scaring them off). He suggested that I just be with what ever it is, and learn from it rather than scare it off.

So the next night I tried what he said. I experienced sleep paralysis and soon had a type of OBE:

I walked outside my room and walked into the hallway. I felt the sense that something was coming, that horrible feeling of the bad what ever it is (energy) is on its way. Sure enough, down the hall I saw what looked to be a zombie, stumbling his way in my direction.

I had a rush of fear sweep over me but soon calmed myself down as I remembered what my teacher had told me. I walked up to the zombie and told him to stop. I said, sit with me. He sat down.

As he and I sat down I noticed that he looked a lot like me, but just had a sad face on him. I asked him what was wrong. He said he was disappointed. I asked what he was disappointed about, and he said he didn’t know, he was just disappointed.

I thought to myself, “this must be myself, and my disappointment in life that created this type of being.” I looked down the hall as I started to feel that normal terror feeling once again. Sure enough another zombie was walked in our direction. I told the new zombie to sit with us. He sat down.

As he sat down I noticed that there were cables that came out of the zombies. I took the cables and swapped them between each other. They seemed to morph into each other as though something was fixed. As they did this I woke up.

Adams has this to say about his experience: “With a little guts and a little understanding we can learn a lot about our fears. Accepting them often is better than always trying to change them.”
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To clarify, I’m not suggesting that all encounters with ghosts, ancestors and snaggily-toothed demons are “merely” fearful projections of the ego. It’s more slippery than that, and less certain.

All I can say for sure is that a piece of us is always present during encounters with the mysterious “Other,” be it doppelgänger sighting, hag attack, angel visitation, or exchanging pleasantries at the bus stop with a neighbor.

Understanding this interpersonal reality can level the playing field, and make communication with the Other more fruitful.

Which is why respect, gratitude, and compassion is the soulful way to be with one another, in dreams, visions and in waking life. Especially when the face turned towards you is gnashing its teeth.

To receive notification about the upcoming publication of my Lucid Immersion Blueprint: a holistic guide to conscious dreaming, subscribe to my blog here.

First image credits: Doppelganger by AbbyLadyBug

This is the second article in a series that starts with the question: Is lucid dreaming safe? One of most frequent arguments against lucid dreaming is the notion that lucidity disturbs the process—and the function—of dreaming.

It’s a strange critique, because the function of dreaming remains unknown. But for many clinical practitioners, dreams are thought to perform psychological duties that are best left untouched by the “tainting” force of self-awareness.  The dream is a beautiful wilderness, destroyed by the civilizing effects of the waking ego. Can lucidity destroy our inner nature?

The Roots of Distrust
The clinical dis-ease of lucid dreaming may in part be rooted in dream theories of the fathers of psychology: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud only mentions lucid dreaming in a tiny note in his later editions of Interpretation of Dreams. Freud never experienced lucid dreaming, and did not have a chance to read the works of his lucid dreaming contemporaries Frederic Van Eeden and Hervey de Saint Denys.

Freud never had a lucid dream

Freud was skeptical. He thought it a “secondary revision” of memory. Furthermore, he thought that if it was possible, it would only censor the dream’s message, a process he called the dreamwork.

Carl Jung also never directly commented on self-awareness during the dream. For Jung, dreams reflect a lifelong maturation of the personality called individuation. Some Jungians today argue that lucidity disturbs the process of individuation by putting the dream ego in control of something that is much more powerful and ancient than we could possibly understand.¹

It’s always been a bizarre position, seems to me, as some styles of lucid dreaming have much in common with Jung’s method of active imagination, a way of interacting with the dream from a relaxed waking state. As Jungian psychotherapist James Hall and psychiatrist Andrew Brylowski noted in 1991, in both active imagination and lucid dreams, we can enter into a fruitful dialogue with spontaneous imagery and narrative.

Lucidity as Tainting the Dreaming Mind

There’s three main issues with this idea that lucidity is damaging or somehow unnatural.

First, lucid dreams are not the same as control dreams. You can be lucid and not in control of either the dream environment or the dream body. And you can regularly direct the dream’s direction without lucidity. Dream control is a separate skill than maintaining self-awareness in the dream. They often come together, but this may be a culturally-entrained association.

Regarding lucid control dreams, the unconscious mind is still doing most of the heavy lifting anyways. Awareness, choice, and occasional bouts of dream-stomping magic don’t add up to dream generation. Robert Waggoner says it best, “does the sailor control the sea?”

But, are some control dreams denying the dream’s voice–I would venture yes. I do not have a doom and gloom perspective about this co-creative work, however. Lucid control dreams can be worked therapeutically like any other dream. Ironically, lucid control dreams dovetail right into one of Freud classic theories about dreams: that they can reveal conscious wishes.

Secondly, this myth rests upon a false dualism: that the dream is an unconscious process, and lucid dreaming is a conscious one.

This notion assumes dreams are experiences that happen to us, in which the dream ego makes few choices but rather is dragged along by the force of the dream.

We continue to think, reason, and focus our attention in dreams

Studies in cognitive psychology paint a different picture, in which dream narratives have been shown to be full of choices, thoughts, and active decision making. Thinking about feelings, wondering about choices, and other kinds of complex dream thoughts are called “meta-cognition.” A 2010 study by Tracey Kahan and Stephen LaBerge found that dreams have similar levels of meta-cognition awaking life experiences.

That’s a startling claim, showcasing a couple things:
1. Dreaming thought is much more complex than we’ve given it credit for.
2. Waking life is not as lucid as we might expect!

In this light, lucid dreaming is not a conscious dream, but a more conscious dream.

Seriously, if dreaming was wholly unconscious, we would not remember the experience. Are all dreams we remember tainted by consciousness?

Spontaneous Lucid Dreaming

The last issue I have with the view that lucid dreaming is a conscious corruption of the dream is that many people, myself included, have had spontaneous lucid dreams throughout their lifespan.

Because lucid dreaming is a learnable skill, critics of lucid dreaming (who more often that not have not experienced it for themselves) have assumed that it is only through “tricks and tactics” that the rational ego injects itself into a dream, proceeding to muck up the works.

But spontaneous lucid dreams are fairly common: many lucid dreamers have the experience and then later learn that this ability has a name. According to one early study, 20% of the population have spontaneous lucid dreams once a month.² Even the master of lucidity induction, Stephen LaBerge, had his first lucid dream as a child, long before he began his studies about lucid induction methods.³

And of course, consciousness in dreams has been around for thousands of years before modern psychology could tsk-tsk. We were probably lucid dreaming in the Stone Age, given that our brains have not changed much, if at all, in the last 100,000 years.

Lucid dreaming is natural, and there’s room for consciousness in our dreams. Awareness does not imply exploitation, because the dream is not an untouched wilderness.

We already live here.

Next up: is lucid dreaming evil or sinful?

Notes

¹ For a dated, but still relevant, review of contemporary dreamworkers and therapists who have argued against lucid dreaming, see Shafton’s Dream Reader p. 470.

² Snyder, T. J. & Gackenbach, J. (1988), Individual differences associated with lucid dreaming. In J. Gackenbach and S. LaBerge (Eds), Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain (pp. 221-259). New York: Plenum Press.

³ The Mind at Night: the new science of how and why we dream by Andrea Rock, p. 50

First Image (cc) Wilderness by Elido Turco – Gigi

Sigmund Freud is considered the father of dream science, even though most of his dream theory is largely discredited today. But from the get-go Freud assumed that dreaming was an expression of the mind-brain system, a premise still widely accepted by scientists, psychologists and philosophers today. Still, in popular culture, we still hear the question asked, “Do dreams have meaning? or are they random bits of brain trash?”

So let’s take a look at the neurological and cognitive evidence, focusing on the brain layer by layer. Many parts of the brain contribute to the experience of dreaming: from the lower brain and upwards to the middle and higher brain structures. Nihilists may gnash their teeth, but judging by the theories coming out of neuroscience today, it appears that meaning is built into the fabric of dreaming itself.

The Lower Brain Structures REM sleep
Evolutionarily speaking, the brain stem is the most ancient part of the human brain, shared by all vertebrates.  In 1977, Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley discovered that electro-chemical pulses from the brain stem create the architecture for REM sleep.  Not all dreams occur in REM sleep of course, but it is this stage of sleep that provides the relatively active mind state where many of our remembered dreams occur. These brain stem pulses create the substructure of the dreaming experience, including how long the REM period lasts.

The idea that these brain stem pulses are essentially randomly generated has been misinterpreted by many a journalist to mean that the content of dreams is also randomly generated or “meaningless.” Rather, this hypothesis suggests that the function of dreaming is primarily physiological. Psychologists don’t dispute this. And as Hobson himself has clarified, he does think that dreams have psychological meaning—in fact Hobson has kept his own dream journal for decades.

What about the idea that dreams are the defragging of the brain — the process of deleting information? This theory comes to us from Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison in 1982, known as the “reverse learning theory of dreams.” While it conveniently mirrors computer science, the evidence for defragging as the function of REM is rather poor, and most scientists do not support it today.

The Middle Brain Integrates Emotions
When dreaming sleep begins, the middle brain becomes an electro-chemical fireworks display of activity. In fact, the middle brain is so active in REM sleep that Hobson (1999) has appended his theory of brain generation  to suggest that it may be just as responsible for the structure of dreams as the lower brain. This part of the brain is shared by all mammals.  Also known as the limbic system, it regulates emotional responses and cravings. During dreaming, the middle brain is more active than it is in waking life, so you could say that emotional intelligence is the guiding structure here.

Fear is a primary emotion in dreams

One part of the middle brain is especially active: the amygdala, a walnut-sized lump that philosopher Rene Descartes, and later Emmanuel Swedenborg, once thought was the seat of the soul.  Today, we call the amygdala is the seat of emotion, and especially fear, due to its role in maintaining fight or flight responses.

But why so emotional? Dream researcher Rosalind Cartwright argues that we are replaying old memories and updating them with information from recent experiences.  This is emotional logic: it’s not about cause and effect, but emotional correspondences. Cartwright’s laboratory research suggests that most dreams are negative in emotion, the most common ones being fear, anxiety, anger and confusion.

This idea is mirrored in the evolutionary theory of dreaming, which supposes that dreams rehearse possible threats. Threats from the past are important data in this sense, showcasing how a dream can both be about the past and future simultaneously.

The Higher Brain Takes a Nap

So, when we’re we are in dialogue with a talking bear, how come we usually don’t realize that we’re in a dream? Neuroscientist Allen Braun (and company) published a provocative finding in 2002 using new evidence from brain imagery scans. They discovered that, during dreaming sleep, the higher brain is essentially offline. The higher brain is the newest part of the brain –the cortex—and humans have the most grey matter, as well as the most infolded grey matter, in this layer than all the other mammals. Braun argues that the prefrontal cortex—which generates language, logic, and critical thinking–is taking an electro-chemical siesta while we argue with that talking bear.For whatever reason, we largely accept the bizarre landscape around us.

Working memory may be out to lunch, but something is oddly familiar when we are in the dream itself. Perhaps, as depth psychologist James Hillman argues, there’s a part of ourselves that belongs in the dreamworld, and is quite comfortable with the rules of the realm.

Something similar happens in other highly creative states. For example, a recent fMRI study (Limb & Braun, 2008) showed reduced activation in the prefrontal cortex when expert jazz musicians were spontaneously jamming compared with when they were playing memorized pieces. From this perspective, dreaming sounds like a flow state as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, not a deficiency in cognition.

Keep in mind, some critical thinking still occurs in dreams, as we actually co-create dreaming outcomes when we “work around” the weird plot changes and bizarre visual imagery that the other parts of the brain throws our way. Indeed, cognitive psychologist Tracey Kahan has amassed plenty of quantifiable evidence that we have meta-cognition in dreams. Metacognition used to be thought of as the pinnacle of waking thinking, and dreams were assumed to be completely devoid of it. Kahan’s data shows that we still think about our feelings, ponder decisions, and wonder about what’s going on around us in the dreaming narrative.

The extreme of this trend in metacognition, of course, is lucid dreaming, which is when the dreamer knows “this is a dream.”  Scientifically validated by Stanford psychophysiologist Stephen Laberge, lucid dreaming is marked by conscious choices, active thought, and logical reasoning in the dream. This claim was recently strengthened by researcher Ursula Voss in 2009, who along with her colleagues from Neurological Laboratory in Frankfurt, Germany, published strong evidence that the brain has heightened activity in the frontal and frontolateral areas during these “self-aware” dreams.

But where is the meaning? You decide, literally.

As cognitive psychologist Bill Domhoff has quantitative shown, the content of our dreams largely matches our interests, worries, and preoccupations from waking life. Domhoff’s evidence supports the continuity hypothesis for dreaming, one of the most widely supported modern theories of how dream content is formed, experienced in the moment, and interpreted upon awakening.

In my world, reviewing theories about how the brain creates and interprets the dreaming experience does not reduce dreaming to “only” a biological event. Rather, a holistic approach to dreaming must integrate the material, the psychological and the transpersonal to reflect the depth of our experience.

Today the question is not do dreams have meaning but rather emerges as:

what do you find meaningful?

References

Allan Hobson and R. McCarley, The Brain as a Dream State Generator: an Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis,” American Journal of Psychiatry 134 (1977), 1335-1348.

Psychology Today: Dreaming up a good mood

Voss, U., Holzmann, R., Tuin., Hobson, J.A. (2009). Lucid dreaming: a state of consciousness with features of both waking and non-lucid dreaming. Sleep, 2009 Sep 1;32(9):1191-200.

Balkin, Braun, Wesensten, Jeffries, Varga, Baldwin, Belensky, Herscovitch, 2002. The process of awakening. Brain, 125, 2308-2319

Kahan, Tracey and Stephen LaBerge. Dreaming and waking: Similarities and differences revisited. Conscious and Cognition, 2010

Limb, C. J., & Braun, A. R. (2008). Neural substrates of spontaneous musical performance: An fMRI study of jazz improvisation. PLoS One, 3(2), e1679.

First Image credit: Brain coral by bsmith4518

In the late 1990s, I trained as a field archaeologist. For the better part of a decade, I was part of a merry crew that roamed the forests and mountains of the US, surveying for archaeological sites and excavating them. My work took me from the swamps of South Carolina to the high deserts of California, and many places in between. During this period of time, which I know refer to as “my twenties, God bless them,” I wondered about the role of intuition in discovering and interpreting archaeological sites. After all, archaeologists, and all researchers, make decisions based on gut feelings and intuitive leaps that lead to new discoveries. However, we’re not really taught how to develop our intuitive abilities because this and other non-rational ways of knowing are swept under the methodological rug in our scientific culture.

This is a missed opportunity, to say the least.

In 2006, I visited Ometepe Island in Nicaragua, home of one of the largest collections of undocumented prehistoric rock art in the world. During a month of volunteer fieldwork, I decided to put my ideas about intuition to the test by using lucid dreaming and nature observation techniques in the field to complement my empirical studies. I thought perhaps that these methods would help me discover my biases as I projected my imaginal realm onto an ancient rock art site.

But much more actually happened, and in some ways, what I learned is still unfolding. Basically, the stones taught me how to become more aware, spurring  lucid dreams that taught me how to view the stones more authentically. It was a process of intunement.

Digging In

Spiral, faces, and whirls make a large part of the art. Note the damage of the stone, exfoliation, caused by fire damage from historic field burning. The stones are in danger.

Ometepe Island is a volcanic island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua. The rock art is beautiful and mysterious, pecked onto basaltic boulders in centuries past by a number of pre-Columbian cultures. It’s full of spirals, circles, and abstract meanders, as well as animals and human figures. The entire island is sacred ground, topped by two enormous cone volcanoes. The cultural creators have long vanished, as Nicaragua has a devastating history of colonialism.

I stayed for a month at a coffee cooperative/hostel to record petroglyph sites. By the way, if you’re into excellent, organic, fair trade coffee that hasn’t been burnt to a crisp a la Starbucks, this roastery buys Ometepe beans and ships from Washington State. Proceeds support the island cooperative.

My field work opportunity was with the Ometepe Petroglyph Project.  We did the usual site reports with standard recordation: sketches, photography and GPS mapping. Then, after the day’s fieldwork was over, I spent my evenings sitting at one particular petroglyph site close to the hostel.

This spiral was my entrance stone to the site. It encourages moving inward and outward in a lucid flux.

Over the next couple weeks, I re-recorded this site too, which has a collection of 20+ petroglyphs on a dozen or so boulders. Honestly, though, I spent more time with my notebook closed than open at this site. I soaked in all in, following the advice of writer and mythic cartographer Paul Devereux, who suggests in his 1992 book Earth Memory that ancient sites “can only be made by the observer becoming immersed in the sites, their positioning and their ambient topography.”

During my first visit, I was immediately drawn to a large spiral image on the edge of the site. It beckoned me to sit with it awhile. I did so, and the rock drew me into a quiet contemplation that I engaged in almost every day for the next two weeks. Then the lucid dreams about the rock art began.

A lucid dream:

“I see a pecked petroglyph – a long meander that I follow with my gaze. It’s not on a rock, just an image of a line that snakes around, coming into being as I follow it. Also, there is a strong feeling of texture, as if I am tracing it with my finger. But there is no dreambody– the best I can describe it is as if I am ’seeing‘ the texture, or feeling the vision. It is synesthesia.”

Crossing Thresholds

Ten days later, I was in the field, looking for a prerecorded site so we could GPS it. Along the way, we found some new petroglyphs. We had to laugh, and record these new ones too. The island is simply saturated with sacred art. I went off by myself, looking for more new glyphs. The sun was straight overhead so the boulders had no discernible markings. Then I had an impulse to touch one large flat stone with my fingers. I ran my fingers over the rough stone and detected a smooth spot in a slight depression. I followed it as it ran in a tight circle. Suddenly, a spiral motif suddenly appears to my eyes as my fingers found its contours. It rippled into view like a mirage.

Only later did I realize that this waking moment mirrored the dream I had the week before: “an image of a line that snakes around, coming into being as I follow it.” I believe this sort of occurrence, this doubling, is more than coincidence, but a kind of cognitive tuning made possible through my daylight meditations and nighttime dream incubations. The tactile image crossed a threshold, from my dream into my waking life.

These sorts of things happen all the time, but we’re usually not aware of them. By enacting the process of archaeodreaming, however, this anomaly—and many others—became consciously available to me. At the end of my trip, it’s no exaggeration to say I was a better field archaeologist and I felt intimately connected with the ancient art of Ometepe Island.

Lucid Dreaming as Shared Space

Lucid dreaming, the art of self-awareness during the dream, can be an opportunity to investigate the local landscape. It’s not about dream control, but about directing focus towards a desired object or concept, and then watching to see what happens once the wish is planted. So it’s more about setting an intention, and then witnessing and interacting with the results. What comes up in the dream space? What emerges?

In a ecopsychological context, these dreams are more than a “simulation” of the landscape, but can also be seen as real exchanges, the shared imaginal space between my awareness and the landscape.

Rock Art as Maps of the Mind

In this case, I was focusing on prehistoric rock art, which are cognitive artifacts that spring from the land and also from the minds of people long since gone. More so than heaps of ancient trash and crumbling walls, rock art expresses mental constructs and symbols that lay behind the day-to-day business of living. In this way, rock art gives up a unique glimpse into the structure of prehistoric minds and how cosmology constructs spaces and places.

The stones remember.

While dreaming of the stones did not show me cultural levels of understanding for this rock art (ie I’m not arguing for psychic archaeology here), the dreams did reveal to me more than my biases. They showed me some unique perceptions –anomalies–I had during the day that I had consciously rejected. Paired with the non-linear information gathering from my elongated site visits that incorporated nature meditations, the dreams provided a forum for my creative mind to interact with the unusual dimensions of the rock art site, relating it to the landscape through the senses.

Sacred Sites and Altered States

In other words, I became attuned to the site, so it could express itself in relationship to me. That’s what one criteria for what makes an archaeological site a sacred site: the intact ability for the site to still affect change in human consciousness. In this pilot study, these intuitive methods revealed the potential importance of the boulders’ acoustic profiles for shifting consciousness. The stones were pecked, and this sound could have produced desired trance effects for the glyph’s artists through acoustic driving.

As many archaeologists have correlated abstract geometric imagery with altered states of consciousness, the question here is what states of mind were encouraged, and how were they achieved? It’s just a theory at this point, but a testable one, and that’s the point: intuitive methods can lead to new falsifiable hypotheses.

I will provide more information about my method in a future post, as it’s easy enough to do if you are looking for a way to allow your mind a multi-dimensional access to sacred sites you are visiting, or any research project that you are deeply involved in.

This article is drawn from my essay “Dreaming with the Stones: the rock art of Ometepe Island,” in the anthology Rebearths: conversations with a world ensouled, edited by Craig Chalquist. An academic presentation of this project will be published in the March 2011 edition of the journal Anthropology of Consciousness, 22(1) as “Integral archaeology: process methodologies for exploring prehistoric rock art on Ometepe Island, Nicaragua.”

All images (c) Ryan Hurd 2011

Lucid dreaming research is growing up. At least, that is Allan Hobson’s take on the recent burst of scientific studies published on conscious dreaming. Once a myth of Carlos Castaneda, and then a topic guaranteed to instantly transport researchers to the margins of academia, lucid dreaming has become a hot topic for neuroscience and cognitive psychology because it promises to isolate one of the hardest-to-pin-down objects of all time: consciousness itself.

In the 2009 article “The neurobiology of consciousness: lucid dreaming wakes up,” Hobson reviews the last twenty years of lucid dreaming research as moving from tenuous self-reports to empirical observation via brain activity. The result is not only viable research, but fresh inspiration for a new science of consciousness. This post reviews Hobson’s take on this exciting trend.

Paradox of lucidity

Let’s look back. Stephen LaBerge’s early work at Stanford (1981) empirically demonstrated that it is possible to be self-aware in the REM sleep state (and let’s not forget Keith Hearne, who was the first to signal lucid dreaming in a sleep lab in 1978, or Robert Oglivie and company, who also demonstrated lucid dreaming in REM that same year).

Many doubted this finding because the conceptual problem is so hard to wrap your head around…. how can one be asleep and aware simultaneously? Slowly, the scientific community, emboldened by the growing interest in a new science of consciousness, accepted that being awake and aware are two different concepts.

40Hz empowerment and consciousness

Now, a new generation of brain technology supports LaBerge’s original claim that lucid dreaming is not a new-age fantasy or a “micro-awakening” from sleep. EEG sampling is more sensitive than ever. In 2009, Ursula Voss and company from the University of Frankfurt found a unique brain signature: a 40Hz spike in brain activity in the frontal lobe during lucid dreams. Read my riff about this study here.

What makes this 40Hz finding so intriguing, argues Hobson, is it has previously been correlated with waking consciousness—as well as meditation and hypnosis, I should add. Waking consciousness is not just one state, either, remember, but continuously shifts around between linguistic thinking, emotional day dreaming, focused attention and problem-solving, and creative flow states that are quite dreamy in their own right. This connection of lucid dreaming to meditation has been noticed before (most notably by Harry Hunt and later Allan W. Wallace), who have further drawn parallels between lucid dreaming and the states of consciousness sought after in Eastern mystical traditions.

In between worlds

"Dazzling LEDs and lightbulbs" by Russell Bernice

We’re zeroing in on something that philosophers and scientists have been looking for since Descartes saw his first pineal gland: the seat of the conscious mind. Recent brain imagery experiments on lucid dreaming performed by German researcher Michael Czisch found more evidence for unique activation patterns during lucid dreaming that exceeds “normal” dreams, not only in the frontal lobe but also parietal and temporal structures. Voss’s team noticed this too.

What does this mean? There’s some strong synchronous firings going on during lucid dreaming that researchers don’t quite understand yet, but we can say for sure that lucid dreaming is a globally activated state that parallels other classically defined states of waking consciousness in terms of its complexity and coherence. It appears that lucid dreaming is a bridge between the imagination of the dream state and the insight of our most prized conscious states. We are literally in between two worlds. In fact, Hobson is now leading the charge that lucid dreaming deserves to be called its own state of consciousness, separate from ordinary REM dreams.

For Hobson, the implications are not only philosophical but also address psychiatry’s founding aim to heal and ease the suffering of mental illness. For example, because lucid dreaming is a learnable skill, the ability to self-monitor 40hz power could open the doors to learning how self-awareness can mediate behavior, identity and those other classic markers not only for sanity but for creativity and high-functioning genius.

This is the first essay of several more than will explore the new neuroscience of lucid dreaming.

Intro image: Light sphere by piji

References

Hearne, K. (1978). Lucid dreams: electrophysiological and psychological study. Doctoral dissertation: Liverpool University.

Hobson, A. (2009). The Neurobiology of Consciousness – Lucid Dreaming Wakes Up. International Journal of Dream Research, 2(2), 41-44. Retrieved from http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/IJoDR/article/viewFile/403/pdf_1

LaBerge, S., Nagel, L., Dement, W., Zarcone, V., (1981). Lucid dreaming verified by volitional communication during REM sleep. Psychophysiology, 20: 454-455.

Olgivie, R, Hunt, H., Tyson, P., Lucescu, M., Jeankins, D. (1978). Searching for lucid dreams. Sleep Research, 7: 165.

Voss, U., Holzmann, R., Tuin, I., & Hobson, J. A. (2009). Lucid Dreaming: A State of Consciousness with Features of Both Waking and Non-Lucid Dreaming. Sleep (Rochester), 32(9), 1191-1200. Associated Professional Sleep Societies, LLC. Retrieved from http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2737577&tool=pmcentrez&rendertype=abstract

Hypnagogia is the imagery, sounds and strange bodily feelings that are felt at “sleep onset.” This is a simplification though, as researchers have noted hypnagogic imagery in the lab at periods of quiet wakefulness as well as stage 1 sleep. Others have correlated hypnagogia with pre-sleep alpha waves and also REM intrusion into sleep onset. The truth is that the wake-sleep transition is still not understood. And neither are its trippy visuals.

Few people remember hypnagogic imagery. This stage is so slippery, it may only last a few seconds. But its imagery is well-recorded by dream enthusiasts from centuries past: whispy lights, multi-dimentional geometric objects, or a sudden image like a stranger’s face or a teddy bear. Occassional fully-articulated dream scenes do manifest, but they are disconnected, usually a single image or moment, rather than a long narrative plot as we see in REM-style dreaming.

Strange noises, voices and rushing sounds are typical, as well as weird mechanistic sounds like beeps and boops. Others hear their name called, as if from the next room. Sometimes it’s pleading, other times, accusing. By the way, this stuff can happen coming out of sleep too, in which case it’s called hypnopompic imagery. (Imagery, in this sense, includes sounds and bodily feelings.)

Some hear music — I personally have had lucid hypnagogic orchestras from time to time, with the ability to listen passively or focus on a particular instrument to induce a solo. These concerts have  included classical music, jazz, and even down-tempo darkwave electronica, each time filling me with awe and joy upon awakening.

Entoptica - by Ryan Hurd, 2005, acrylic: inspired by my hypnagogic imagery

Lastly, the bodily sensations felt during hypnagogia are just bizarr-o. Feelings include floating, falling, and being separated from your body. Many OBEs occur from sleep onset. Then there’s the hypnic jerk, that sudden awakening right after a full-dream immersion such as walking down the stairs and tripping or driving in a car and hitting the bumper of the car in front of you. Bam!

Some people are haunted by the hypnagogic imagery. Rather than lasting only  few moments, it goes on and on for long stretches of time. They may open their eyes and still see the dream imagery overlaid –and sometimes — interacting with the physical environment. The most common nightmarish visions are creepy-crawly insects, like roaches crawling upon the walls and on the ceiling, dropping on to the bed. Sometime hypnagogic sufferers sense the “invisible presence” felt in sleep paralysis visions, but overall the mythological and humanoid entities are more rare for non-paralyzed hypnagogia.

Creativity and Discovery

Many inventors, artists and scientists have reported eureka! moments that came during a quick snooze. In fact, Thomas Edison and Salvador Dali both had methods in which they incubated hypnagogic dreams on purpose, according to Deidre Barrett in the Committee of Sleep.

Most famously, chemist August Kekulé came to understand the structure of the benzene molecule after falling asleep in front of the fire, and seeing a classic ouroboros: a series of molecules made out of snakes, with one swallowing another’s tail.

The Hypnagogic Brain

The neurological relationship to hypnagogic imagery has been pondered over for decades. One of Freud’s contemporaries, Henry Silberer, a brilliant dream researcher in his own right, thought that hypnagogic imagery is the clearest example of autosymbolism, in which whatever we’re thinking right now is converted into a visual metaphor. Psychologist Harry Hunt noted that the imagery is less like REM dreaming imagery and more closely resembling the stuff seen during meditation, sensory deprivation (the Ganzfeld Effect) and especially the psychedelic ecstasy from LSD or psilocybe. Medical researcher Rick Straussman suggested in DMT: The Spirit Molecule that the pineal gland gives up a precious jewel of endogenous DMT when we enter into a hypnagogic trance that is characterized by predominant THETA brainwaves.

The thalamus, which is ordinarily not this red.

Another promising finding comes from a 2010 study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Researchers suggest that hypnagogic imagery is not tied to brain activity in the frontal cortex but to the deactivation of different parts of the brain at sleep onset.  Neuroscientists have long known that different parts of the brain “go to sleep” at different times, but until recently it was not known that  thalamus goes off-line before the cortex, often with several minutes in between.

Because of the thalamus’s role in processing visual imagery as well as spatial information, this could explain why we feel awake still when suddenly some bizarre imagery drifts across the visual field. Perhaps without mediation by the thalamus, we are made consciously aware of not only autosymbolic visual imagery, but also bodily and spatial feelings as well.

Finding the Balance

Some readers of this blog have shared how 5-HTP and melatonin can be used to prevent runaway hypnagogia. This is a more gentle approach than the pharmaceutical answer, which includes dream-killing antidepressants. Still, this is an option for those plagued by unwanted hypnagogic hallucinations.

On the other hand, hypnagogia can be willfully promoted as a meditative state. I know one meditator who regularly has 20+ minutes of hypnagogia, which she uses for artistic inspiration and spiritual practice. Like lucid dreaming and remembering dreams in general, this takes willpower and patience. Sleeping on your back promotes HH, but be careful, as this can promote sleep paralysis as well.

Try taking naps in the afternoon as well, and avoid alcohol or caffeine for a few days to strengthen your sleep architecture.Once mastered, sleep paralysis can lead the way to more hypnagogic adventures.

Reference

Thalamic deactivation at sleep onset precedes that of the cerebral cortex in humans Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2010 February 23; 107(8): 3829–3833.

The Committee of Sleep by Deidre Barrett, PhD.

DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman, MD.

CC First Image: Psychedelic Cactus” by vgm8383

My US readers are preparing for Thanksgiving, the traditional harvest meal to celebrate family and friends. And most of us that sit at the Thanksgiving table will probably want a serious nap after eating. While the tryptophan in turkey is often blamed for this holiday nap effect, actually it’s more complex than that.

What is tryptophan? It’s an essential amino acid. Turkey has tryptophan. But so do the buttered biscuits, the cheese, the deviled eggs, and Aunt Bethany’s famous garlic mashed potatoes.  Other meats like chicken, ham, fish and beef are high in tryptophan, too. It’s well represented in the dessert category, as well, including chocolate cake, pumpkin pie and banana fritters.

But all this tryptophan is not directly responsible for the family exodus from the dining room to the den. Actually, that’s probably due to old-fashioned carb-loading.

Here’s how it works. All those carbohydrates spike your insulin levels. This stimulates the uptake of large amino acids in the bloodstream — except for tryptophan. This gives you a suddenly high level of tryptophan in the blood, which crosses the blood-brain barrier and enters the central nervous system. From here all that excess tryptophan is synthesized into serotonin. Much of this serotonin is further transformed by the pineal gland into melatonin–and it’s the melatonin that brings on the snooze.

A natural jet-lag remedy

The convenient thing about melatonin is that it appears to be a natural jet-lag hang-over cure. So if you’ve taken a red-eye to see your family over the winter holidays, make sure you have a tryptophan-rich bedtime snack on friday night too. This could be a small turkey sandwich, a cup of cottage cheese, or a glass of warm milk. Excess melatonin can decrease the time it takes to get to sleep as well as strengthen the architecture of sleep: so you’ll wake up less often in the night. People report feeling more energetic the day after they take melatonin as well.

Bizarre Dreams and Lucid Dreaming

I'm not sure what is more bizarre: dreams caused from eating tryptophan-rich foods, or an actual turkey.

What really interests me about the tryptophan-melatonin partnership is that they can bring on bizarre and vivid dreams. About ten years ago, dream researcher Tracey Kahan and associates from Santa Clara University ran a two-week study looking at changes in dream content after taking 6mg of melatonin supplement, compared to placebo. The melatonin-subjects’ dreams were analyzed to contain more “transformations of objects” and “overall transformations.” Kinda trippy.

There’s also a heavily documented link between melatonin and REM latency, the time between REM sleep phases, which is the stage of sleep most remembered dreams come from. Coming full circle, Tore Nielsen and company (2010) from the Montreal-based Dream and Nightmare Laboratory have noted an association between the REM sessions that follow long latency periods and the increased level of nightmares and disturbing dream imagery in general.

This REM effect therefore could make melatonin a potential aid for inducing lucid dreaming, albeit it bizarre and nightmarish lucid dreams. More weirdness in dreams means more chances to recognize “This is creepy and weird–hey, I’m dreaming. And I can fly!”

So is this really all by random chance that traditional harvest feasts involve carb-loading and tryptophan-rich foods, served for days-on-end with the seasonal sleep-overs of close family and friends?  I argue that harvest feasts also function as dream incubation sessions. Our culture has set us up to live together, dream together, and share it all in the mornings — just like the old days, if only for a night or two, before we go back to our neolocal lives.

So when Aunt Bethany says, “More potatoes, hon?”, that’s an invitation to dream a little deeper tonight.

Yes, ma’am.

References

Kahan, T.L., Hays, J., Hirashima, B., & Johnston, K. (2000). Effects of melatonin on dream bizarreness among male and female college students. Sleep and Hypnosis, 2(2), 74-83.

Nielsen TA, Paquette T, Solomonova E, Lara-Carrasco J, Popova A, Levrier K. (2010).  REM sleep characteristics of nightmare sufferers before and after REM sleep deprivation. Sleep medicine, Feb;11(2):172-9.

US Department of Health and Human Services: Melatonin for Treatment of Sleep Disorders

First Image Attribution (CC): Sleeping by kaibara87

This is guest post by psychotherapist and author Scott Sparrow.

A client of mine once dreamed that she was lying in bed. A man dressed in a robe, with a hood covering his face, walked up and stood beside her bed. He said, “I want your heart.” Visualizing the man ripping her heart from her chest, the woman awoke in terror.

She asked what countless people have asked upon awakening from such a dream, “Who was that man? What does this mean?” If she had posed this question to a frequent lucid dreamer, he or she might disregard the dreamer’s preemptive search for an interpretation,  and say, “Too bad you didn’t become lucid. Then you could have realized that it was only a dream.”

A therapist, looking at the dream as an indication of past trauma, or unrealized potentials, or both, might ask in classic noninvasive fashion, “What are your associations to this figure? How might he serve as a metaphor for some aspect of your life?”

If the dreamer had simply become lucid, she could have responded fearlessly, or simply woke up. Her fear would have subsided with the realization that the man and his disturbing words were only part of a dream. Or, if the dreamer had acquired in retrospect the insight that the man portrayed, for instance, the dominating, Apollinian quality of maleness, she may have realized that her sense of self was feeble in the presence of such strength, and she may have associated her fear with actual past events and relationships.

What’s Missing

Lucid dreamers and psychotherapists are quick to dismiss each other's perspective but each have what the other lacks

Both of these approaches — of the lucid dreamer and the dream analyst — have merit and can produce meaningful results, but what is lacking in both of these orientations is the balancing perspective of the other. In my experience, lucid dreamers can be too quick to go off in search of something more desirable.  It’s their dream after all, so why not bag the old dream and go in search of a new one?

And therapeutic dream analysts, especially those of a psychodynamic bent, may remain stuck trying to discern the meaning of the imagery without regard for the dreamer did, or could have done, to alter the dream’s outcome.

As an early lucid dreamer, I was passionate about the possibilities of experiencing higher states of awareness, and dream interpretation was initially not very important to me. My little book, Lucid Dreaming: Dawning of the Clear Light (ARE, 1976)––an outgrowth of my master’s thesis––went to the heart of what I considered the ultimate lucid experience: communion with the white light. I was largely uninterested in the unresolved conflicts to which dreams often alluded.

To give some sense of my priorities as a hot-shot lucid dreamer, I once told a psychoanalytically trained colleague the following dream:

I am on the streets of a Mexican town with my two best friends. We meet a beautiful woman, who could be a prostitute. We flirt with her, and them make arrangements to visit with her that evening. Just as we say goodbye to her, I notice my father standing nearby in the shadows. I know that he has overheard our conversation with the woman, and I can discern his disapproving look even in the low light. But just as we stand facing each other in silence, there is an explosion to the east. We both turn and see an orb of white light the size of several suns hovering 50 feet above ground. I look at my father lit-up face, and can see that he has forgotten the tension that was between us. I become aware that I am dreaming as the light begins to approach and pass over us. Then there is another explosion, and the light appears again to the east. This time, a strong wind begins to blow in its direction, and I am pushed along toward it until I lose my footing and fly up into the light.

When I shared this dream with my psychoanalytically trained friend, he immediately seized upon my relationship with my father, and wanted to ask probing questions regarding my sexuality and my father’s values. I was shocked that he would trivialize such a profound experience. I grew increasingly irritated with his questions, and cut short our conversation.

Somewhere in my late 20s, however, I began to shift to the therapeutic side of dream studies. Not only was I encountering my own powerful unfinished business in non-lucid and lucid dreams alike, but I began to pursue a career as a psychotherapist, working with individuals for whom the prospects of having a lucid dream seemed as remote as winning the lottery.

At first, I was convinced that if my clients could achieve lucidity in dreams depicting their life struggles, the therapeutic process could be greatly accelerated. I tried on many occasions to introduce lucid dream induction as a therapeutic intervention. While some of my clients were successful in having memorable and therapeutic lucid dreams, the great majority of them were not.

The Revelation

A breakthrough came for me in the form of a realization about ordinary dreams. In working with  clients on a day-to-day basis, I began to notice that dreamers already exercise considerable reflective awareness in their non-lucid dreams. In retelling their dreams, dreamers exhibit the kind of deliberate thinking that characterizes waking cognition, but everyone seemed to have overlooked that fact. Just because dreamers aren’t lucid, I concluded, it doesn’t mean that they are always passively involved in the dream’s unfoldment and outcome. To the contrary. I wanted to shout from the housetops that dreamers were not merely “recording secretaries” in the dream, but were reflective and clearly influencing the outcome of virtually every dream!

It was right in front of our eyes, but neither the lucid dreamers who seemed overly focused on lucidity per se, nor the content-oriented dream analysts who remained devoted to analyzing the imagery, seemed cognizant of this feature of ordinary dream reports.

To me, it was an astounding fact, upon which an altogether new theory of dreaming could be developed.  I was talking about this “revelation” 30 years ago, and have never stopped talking about it. It’s simple: If the dreamer is reflective and thus capable of exercising a wide array of responses, and if these responses actually alter the course of the dream as they seem to do, then all dreams can be seen as an interactive, relational process, and analyzed from the standpoint of relational dynamics.

So from this point of view, systems-oriented family therapists are probably better at analyzing the dream than psychodynamically trained therapists.

A Co-creative Model for Dreaming

I wasn’t the first to articulate a cocreative, relational model of dreaming and dream analysis. I found a kindred spirit in the work of Ernest Rossi, who in his seminal work, Dreams and the Growth of Personality, announced that “there is a continuum of all possible balances between the self-directive efforts of the dreamer and the autonomous creation of the dream content.”

In this pithy statement, Rossi basically said that there are two systems interacting in every dream–the dreamer and the source of the imagery. (To those of you who are interested in brain science, you will probably think of the two prevailing positions on dream generation – but that is a vastly complex debate, which exceeds the scope of this essay.) By positing these two somewhat distinct co-contributing elements in the dream, he laid the groundwork for a view of the dream as an interactive, relational, and co-created event.

This view of dreaming make full lucidity less necessary for good things to happen, and treats it as a special event within a continuum of awareness that is readily observable in ordinary dreams. It also suggests that the dream content, as a largely autonomous creation, may ultimately elude the understanding and control of even the highest states of lucidity.

A relational view of dreaming can also threaten the traditional clinical view that dream images can be analyzed as static content, unaffected by what the dreamer is feeling, thinking, and doing in the dream. What kind of interpretive conclusions can we draw if the dream imagery is in constant flux, tethered to and influence by the dreamer’s responses? One can no longer say, “this means…,” but instead has to describe the dream process in such terms as, “this is what happens when you respond in this way.”

Although this approach can frustrate a person’s needs for “answers,” it underscores personal responsibility and unacknowledged competencies, as well as approaching the dream as an unfolding relationship.

Editor’s note: This is part I of an introduction to a new relational method of dreamwork called the Five Star Method. Stay tuned for part II which goes into detail about each of the steps for this way of working with dreams.

About the Author

G. Scott Sparrow, EdD is a psychotherapist and Associate Professor at University of Texas – Pan American, and the author of many books including the classic Lucid Dreaming: Dawning of the Clear Light.  His website for dream mentorship is the DreamStar Institute.