It’s easy to be nonchalant about how nobody gets enough sleep these days, but the impact on our children is real. Most kids in the US and UK are overtired, and most teens are in a state of constant sleep deprivation. In fact, Generation Z (currently ages 14-19) are the least likely of all people to get an adequate amount of rest. Don’t blame the economy, the stress of school, or helicopter parenting. The real culprit may be the device you’re reading this article on.

Okay, that was a bit polemic, I admit.

Often, the poison points towards the cure. According to my Google analytics, almost 1 in 3 of my readers access this blog with a mobile device. Ironically many of the blog’s topics include strategies for getting better rest, and this information is being delivered by the very technology that steals our sleep.

This article is not about judging (after all, it’s 2:30 am and here I am blogging away), but about finding the right balance for technology in our private lives.

For the sake of argument, below are some choice statistics about kids, sleep and connectivity (computers, phones, TV and tablets).

Some caveats: many of these statistics come from small studies, which means we need even more studies to replicate the findings and apply the trends to larger population groups. Also, remember that studies show correlations…not necessarily causation.

Even still, a disturbing trend is revealed: today’s children are being socially entrained to continuously devalue the need to rest, just like we do, in part due to the new, always-on, digital lifestyle.

Kids and Bedroom Connectivity

• 43% of school-aged children have a TV or computer in the bedroom¹ 
• On average children go to bed 30 minutes later when a TV or computer is in the bedroom¹
• Children with a TV/computer in their bedroom also watch one hour more of media a day²
• 60% of adolescents and teens use mobile devices after “lights out”³
• 18% of teens between ages of 13-18 are awoken by cellphone calls, emails and texts several times a week.⁴
• 77% of teens between ages 13-18 are using computer the hour before trying to go to sleep.⁴

What is the result of this saturation of media and hyper-connectivity?

You may be tempted to think that looking at a computer and texting your friends before bed (and during the middle of the night) is simply this generation’s version of the flashlight and the comic book.

I think it’s worse. In fact, scientists have a new term for the effects of digital media on our sleep/wake patterns: “junk sleep,” or continuously disrupted sleep.⁵

In short, constant connectivity damages our sleep health and affects kids’ academic performance, emotional well-being and possibly their physical maturation.

Effects of Being Wired 24/7 on Kids’ Sleep Health

• Teens require 9-10 hours sleep a night on average, but get 7.5-8 hours.⁶
• 61% of teens between 13-18 are getting less than 8 hours sleep a night⁴
• Teens and adolescents who use their mobile device several times a week are 5X as likely to be very tired during the day⁴
• Use of mobile devices after lights out related to many sleep problems, including: short sleep duration, subjective poor sleep quality, excessive daytime sleepiness, and insomnia symptoms⁷
• Playing exciting video games before bed also reduces sleepiness and amount of REM sleep⁸
• Sleep deficiency in children and teens increases the risk of obesity and diabetes. ^{9, 10}
• Sleep deficiency may impair healthy growth¹¹

Okay that’s the bad news.

I’m the type that gets fired up by doom and gloom. For me, it’s a swift kick to keep building the way I want to live, and safeguard the values I want to pass on to the next generations.

It’s an uphill battle because society shuns sleep. Maybe we can’t convince schools to start later –at least not most of them, and not yet– but we can draw stronger boundaries with electronics through our own action. 

Meanwhile around the world, the much anticipated video game Diablo III is launching, guaranteeing no teen will sleep for the next month.

So what can we do?

How to balance the amazing advantages of the digital lifestyle with the need for sanctity and a time to turn it all off and get some rest?

In that spirit — not of limitation but of balance — here’s some ideas for cleaning up the junk sleep, one home at a time.

5 Ways to Improve your children’s sleep (and yours too).

1. New Household rule involving no mobile use one hour before bed. This is the first step in creating your bedroom sanctuary, a topic I discuss at length in my ebook Enhance your dream life.

2. Establish a charging station for mobile devices in a public area, shifting electronics away from the bedrooms.

3. Even better: Move the TV and computers out of the bedroom – make it media free-zone except for special occasions

4. If necessary, consider collecting cellphones each night. More effective for the younger set. For teens, that may be too punitive. Save for special restrictions!

5. Clean up your own digital life and live by example. That’s what we absorb from our families: not what we say, but what we do.

Do you have any other ideas? What has worked for you in keeping the digital demons at bay in your home? Please leave a comment!

Online Resources

Sleep For Kids

Kids Health.org

National Sleep Foundation

References

1. National Sleep Foundation: Kids sleep less with TV or computer in their bedroom

2. Reuters: Children with TVs in their rooms sleep less: study

3. Van den Bulck, J. (2007). Adolescent Use of Mobile Phones for Calling and for Sending Text Messages After Lights Out: Results from a Prospective Cohort Study with a One-Year Follow-Up. Sleep. September 1; 30(9): 1220–1223.

4. National Sleep Foundation. Sleep in America Poll, 2011.

5. BBC: Junk sleep damaging teen health

6. National Sleep Foundation: Teens and Sleep

7. Munezawa T, Kaneita Y, Osaki Y, Kanda H, Minowa M, Suzuki K, Higuchi S, Mori J, Yamamoto R, Ohida T. (2011). The association between use of mobile phones after lights out and sleep disturbances among Japanese adolescents: a nationwide cross-sectional survey. Sleep  Aug 1;34(8):1013-20.

8. Higuchi S, Motohashi Y, Liu Y, Maeda A. (2005). Effects of playing a computer game using a bright display on presleep physiological variables, sleep latency, slow wave sleep and REM sleep. Journal of sleep research, 14(3):267-73.

9. National Institutes of Health: What are sleep deprivation and deficiency?

10. Kristen L. Knutson,  Karine Spiegel,  Plamen Penev, and Eve Van Cauter (2007). The Metabolic Consequences of Sleep Deprivation. Sleep Medicine Review. 2007 June; 11(3): 163–178.

11. J R Davidson, H Moldofsky, and FA Lue (1991). Growth hormone and cortisol secretion in relation to sleep and wakefulness. Journal of Psychiatry Neuroscience. July; 16(2): 96–102.

First image (CC): Sleeping preschooler by sdminor81

This book is may be heavy, but it’s really approachable for an academic text.

That’s an accomplishment for a book that essentially takes on the weighty task of summing up the topic of dreams in cross-culture perspective, including the evolutionary impact of the dreaming mind on our species, history, religion and art. Laughlin does this remarkably well, and he tells some great personal stories along the way.

There’s really only a few people in the world who have the personal experience and the scholarly prowess to single-handedly write an anthropology of dreams. In fact, no one has attempted this feat in a generation or longer.

Personal and Academic

Chogye Trichen Rinpoche (1920–2007)

Laughlin, a professor emeritus at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, has decades of fieldwork experience with dreaming cultures, including locales such as Nepal and Uganda, and, on his home continent, he is an expert in Navajo shamanism.

His interest in dreaming grew over the years as he also worked intensely with several dream yoga systems, including Tibetan Buddhism under the direction of Chogye Trichen Rinpoche. So for Laughlin, dreaming is no academic matter, but a personal avenue for growth and exploration into the deep structures of the mind.

This personal perspective is woven into all chapters of Communing with the Gods (published by Daily Grail Press), and it serves to bring the intense ideas and sophisticated discussions back to earth. This method of storytelling is not only fascinating, but it actually exposes one of the book’s core concepts: that dreaming is an experience of the conscious mind, first, and a cultural construct second.

To say it another way, dreaming is living. And when we discuss our dreams, it’s critical to give this primary respect to our gritty, personal, embodied moments of life that happen to take place in the dreaming state of consciousness.

From this grounded approach, Laughlin gives a history of dreams in anthropology, and then spends the bulk of the book reviewing the current anthropological theories of dreams as they intersect with actual dreamers in actual cultures.

Integrating the science of dreaming

As many have noted before, there is no current “big theory” in the anthropology of dreaming; researchers tend to follow their own interests and illuminate only part of the mystery and the promise of dreaming. Laughlin’s wide knowledge base really comes in handy at this junction, as he is able to respect many lines of inquiry into dreaming, without prizing one over another.

In this way, the overarching psychological truths of Carl Jung are on par with the very personal work with lucid dreamer George Gillespie, and the neurological work of sleep scientists is contextualized with the findings of ethnographers.

This alone is very helpful… but Laughlin goes further, as he presents this information in a way that builds his central argument, which is the presentation of his own theory of dreaming, which he calls the neuroanthropological theory of dreaming.

 The Neuroanthropological theory of Dreaming

Laughlin trained as a neuroscientist, and then became an adept ethnographer. These two strands of knowledge combine with his embodied experience to form his theory of how dreaming is processed in the brain and how the experience of dreaming is applied across cultures.

Laughlin seems to be a pragmatist at heart

In Laughlin’s view, and I wholeheartedly agree, no theory of dreaming that doesn’t include the mechanisms of the brain AND the evolution of the human animal AND the weird and wonderful application of dreaming as a social medium AND the full spectrum of self-awareness in dreams can be complete.

His approach is pragmatic, and draws heavily from evolutionary biology. Avoiding the morass of defining consciousness as a linguistic construct, Laughlin still points out that dream sharing is as much a result of language as it is the ability to remember our interior experiences in the first place (thank you higher brain). They probably came together, reinforcing the value of the dreaming mind due to its apparent knack for predicting the future, problem-solving, and exposing social tensions.

This biological grounding is why people have similar dreams throughout history and across cultures too. Laughlin says,

Visits with deceased ancestors, flying and OBEs, mandala-like geometric forms, shape-shifting beings, journeys to spiritual places, violent struggles, snakes and other totemic animals, witches, ghosts, spirits that cause and heal sickness, encounters with teachers or gurus, anima and animus figures, marriage, death, and so forth inhabit the dreaming of peoples all over the planet. Yet in every case, the motif will tend to be colored by cultural conditioning. Who is marrying whom…the place to which one is flying…what nastiness the witch is bent on doing… all these things vary depending upon the conditioning and information available in the culture.” (p. 461).

The development of lucid dreaming

This should come with no surprise if you read my blog regularly, but what I love about Laughlin’s book is his inclusion of the full spectrum of dreaming, including the relatively rare ability to lucid dream, or dream with self-awareness.

He really puts it perspective: some cultures invest in the ability to lucid dream, and some don’t. Those that do have a system of beliefs that allows them to train their minds to think clearly and with intentionality in the dreamspace. The mind training is about learning rituals that involve the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in dreams.

In those that don’t (such as most of Western culture), dreams tend to be viewed as random, meaningless events that happen to us.

Laughlin takes our culture to task here: “In a sense, the ‘normal’ dreaming we Westerners take for granted is actually quite primitive compared to lucid dreaming. I mean this literally—dreaming bereft of PFC mediation is a kind of throwback to the dreaming of hominins prior to the evolution of language.” (p. 461).

The application of lucid dreaming across cultures, of course, is largely shamanistic. Dream shaman are those who can direct their awareness in the dream state, fly to destinations to retrieve information, direct healing as well as sorcery, and transform the dreambody into animal and plant forms.

That doesn’t mean every lucid dreamer is a shaman, of course, a point I’ve made before.

But this historic and cross-cultural lens reveals that lucid dreamers are often swimming in shamanic waters without a clue of the power of the dreaming mind.

In conclusion

Communing with the gods is pretty dense, so it’s probably not the most appropriate text for dream beginners or those unfamiliar with some academic language. But if you are interested in the anthropology of dreaming, this belongs on your book shelf.  Laughlin has done a great service to the field of dream studies. In my mind, it’s an instant classic, the distillation of decades of careful scholarship and intensely personal experiences.

It sounds sensational, but Lucy Liu’s account is actually very much in line with the experience of millions of contemporary dreamers.

Lucy Liu’s amorous ghost is probably a subset of the incubus encounter, a nocturnal meeting with an otherworldly creature that sits on your chest or otherwise gets all up in your business while you lay in bed.

The entity can take the shape of known mythological figures, ghosts, demons, or weird human-animal hybrids.

Often, the encounter is fearful, and is described as supernatural assault.

But for others, it’s pleasurable, resulting in orgasm and bliss.

We live in a time that tries to ignore the visionary moments of life, yet the experiences keep happening anyways.

Oh Pan, you shouldn't have...

Science of the Incubus

Usually, the dreamer feels awake and aware, and may even have their eyes open when the encounter begins.

Known formally as REM intrusion into stage 1 sleep, the realistic vision is often called hypnagogic imagery or a hallucination.

Many people who feel these encounters also get the more unpleasant side of this mish-mash of consciousness: sleep paralysis, in which the paralyzing effect of REM intrusion into wakefulness results in terrifying waking nightmares.

The realistic encounter with non-human –or supernatural– entities has been recorded as early as Babylonian times. Some sexual imp traditions include the Sumerian sex demon Lilith, and the ancient Greek god Pan.

Although fearful, these encounters were sometimes interpreted as demonic possession. But not always.

For example, the Greek dream interpreter Artemidorus wrote that sexual Pan encounters “foretells a great profit,” especially if he “does not weigh a person down,” referring to the more common paralysis sensations.¹

The Eros of REM sleep

In modern populations, a significant minority have erotically charged hypnagogic experiences despite the lack of cultural prompting.

Those who are feel safe enough to “go with the flow” and not fight the ecstasy are sometimes rewarded with bliss.

Physiologically, this shouldn’t be too surprising, as REM sleep is a sexually active brain state. It’s quite common for both men and women to have multiple periods of genital engorgement during the night – usually these are not remembered.

So how does the positive incubus encounter take place, even when the dreamer does not have a previous understanding that these things are even possible?

Taboo is a big part of visionary consciousness, but  “cultural loading” is not the only, or possibly the stronger, influence. In my mind, the cross-cultural nature of sexual incubi points towards a neurobiological constant, an ancestral legacy.

It’s simply a natural part of being human.

Medical folklorist and anthropologist David Hufford suggests that not only are these extraordinary events “normal,” but “better knowledge of each [event] strengthens that belief rather than weakening it (e.g., learning that others have had virtually the same experience; information regarding possible physiological triggers is irrelevant to the assessment of the reality of the experience).²

Here is Lucy Liu’s full quotation from US Magazine:

“I was sleeping on my futon on the floor, and some sort of spirit came down from God knows where and made love to me. It was sheer bliss. I felt everything. I climaxed. And then he floated away. It was almost like what might have happened to Mary. That’s how it felt. Something came down and touched me, and now it watches over me.”

I find it fascinating that the line in bold above is edited out of most mentions of Lucy Liu’s account.

Her comparison to the experience of the Mary draws me back to the many women Christian mystics from centuries past, such as St Teresa of Avila.

Liu may be citing the Virgin Birth of Christ — wow there’s some taboo for you — or possibly the ecstasy of Mary Magdalene, which has also been captured with a decidedly sensual overtone by Peter Paul Rubens and other artists in the 17th century.

Long Term Effects of Visionary Experience

After her encounter, Lucy Liu reports that she feels she is being watched over. The encounter brings her a sense of trust in the unseen that she did not previously have.

This sort of long-lasting effect places positive incubus encounters in the same grouping as otherworldly visions such as near-death-experiences and angel visitations.

Interestingly enough, all three of these vision states may be correlated with REM intrusion states. When REM sleep blends with heightened frontal lobe activity, the imaginal richness of the dreamworld is enhanced with self-awareness and powerful drives for emotional significance.

In my mind, this neurobiological explanation does not in any way disprove or “debunk” the power of these visions for the individual. I’m a pragmatist and I feel there’s room enough for both science and spirit in this bed.

More importantly, David Hufford reminds us that NDEs, ancestral visitations and sleep paralysis can all result in positive emotional growth in the long run.

In clinical circles, disturbing events that result in long-term positive change are known as visionary spiritual experiences. Psychiatrist David Lukoff argues that these cases are not disordered mental breakdowns, but rather collapses that result in improved wellbeing and life-change.³  

As William James stated over a hundred years ago in his Varieties of religious experiences, “Know them by their fruits, not their roots.” In other words, no matter the material correlates, these visionary experiences can result in long lasting life-change, renewed trust in the world, and a happier life in general.

So have you ever had a pleasurable incubus or succubus encounter? 

Continue the discussion below. Intolerant comments will not be approved. If you prefer anonymity, I am also collecting accounts for my ongoing research. Contact me here.

Additional references

¹ Adler, S. (2011). Sleep paralysis: night-mares, nocebos, and the mind-body connection. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. (p. 43)

² Hufford, D. (2010). Visionary spiritual experiences in an enchanted world, Anthropology and Humanism, 35(2): p. 155 (142-158)

³ Lukoff, D. (2007). Visionary spiritual experiences. Southern Medical Journal, 100(6), 635-641.

The good news is that your rate of success skyrockets when you know how to focus your motivation towards the tendancies and habits that frequent lucid dreamers do everyday.

Some of these come naturally —the way you sleep, or the way you are wired emotionally. Others are lifestyle habits that appear to push the buttons of the embodied mind for going lucid in a dream.

Below is the collective avatar—the personality traits and habits—of frequent lucid dreamers. I’m not saying all lucid dreamers have all these traits. (That would be kind of intense…)

But if you find yourself in just one or two of these traits below, you actually stand a really good chance for going lucid if you haven’t already. With further training, you could begin lucid dreaming with higher frequency too.

Without further adieu, 

you know you’re predestined to be a lucid dreamer if you:

Are a light sleeper.

Self-awareness is a delicate state associated with heightened cortical arousal during REM sleep. Light sleepers are especially wired for this. All hope is not lost if you are a heavy sleeper who usually collapses without any remembered awakenings, or if you rarely wake up from disturbances. Instead, you may want to consider biphasic sleeping and other sleep disturbance tactics.¹

Have time to sleep in.

Lucid dreams are more likely in the lengthy REM periods of the morning. If you are sleep deprived, and never have a chance to sleep in, it may be difficult to achieve the lucid zone. However, stealing away for an afternoon nap when your circadian rhythms naturally dip may be the second best time for lucidity.

Have good dream recall.

One of the advantages of being a light sleeper is that multiple awakenings lead to more remembered dreams. Regardless of how you sleep, without the skill of remembering dreams, there is no room for lucidity. Luckily, dream recall can also be improved—quickly too.² 

Have an ongoing mindfulness practice.

Developing lucidity in the dream world is impossible if you are not very “lucid” in waking life. That’s probably why meditators are also frequent lucid dreamers compared to the general population.³ Concentrative meditation strengthens the mind’s ability to stay focused for long periods of time and improves emotional intelligence. But if you are not into meditation, there are plenty of other hobbies you probably already enjoy that can focus the mind in similar ways.  

Have good spatial skills.

Strange, isn’t it? One crucial but often overlooked factor of self-awareness is maintaining centeredness during periods of dream flux: those times when your senses are confused and you don’t know up from down.  Lucid dreamers tend to have good balance and may be more field independent than non- lucid dreamers.⁴ This trait involves the degree to which you are influenced by inner or environmental cues in orienting yourself.  Having or starting an ongoing body practice—yoga or gymnastics for example—may increase your odds, and so may playing certain types of video games. 

Excel at multi-tasking.

Lucidity is a balance of knowing you are in a dream and being involved in the drama. Not surprisingly, frequent lucid dreamers perform well on cognitive tests like the Stroop Task, a psychological test that measures attention during interference of multiple tasks at the same time.⁵

Are creative and/or artistic.

Many lucid dreamers are creative people who tend to see outside the box. They are imaginative and prone to fantasy.⁶

Are sensitive.

There is also a correlation with spontaneous lucid dreamers and having thin boundaries, which is a psychological term for having high levels of social alertness, and sometimes, social anxiety.⁷ Self-awareness is a double-edged sword, as some frequent lucid dreamers are also prone to nightmares. If you have been told before, “You are too sensitive,” you may have the markings of a powerful lucid dreamer.

Are willing to take risks.

A 2011 study found that students who had more lucid dreams than their peers also performed better on the Iowa Gambling Task, a test that measures emotional-based decision making in unknown situations.⁸  This is an important clue about the importance of regulating emotions—and integrating them with other forms of cognition—for mastering lucid dreaming.  

Have a strong desire to stick with it.

Patience, in other words. We live in a culture of “instant success guaranteed!” But the truth is that most successful lucid dreamers have a strong, internal desire to become aware during their dreams. They don’t give up easily. They set intentions and keep trying.

Take mental breaks.

It’s also important to take a break now and again or you’ll just get frustrated, not lucid. Cognitive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Finding Flow, has much to say about the importance of idle time for all creative projects. Taking time off from a serious pursuit—be it an invention, a puzzle, or a quest to go lucid—allows “simple rules of association” to form.⁹ You got to know when to let your training seep in, and let the work go underground.

So do you find yourself somewhere in this collection of traits and habits? Chances are, you stand a pretty good chance of going lucid. Recent demographics suggest 1 in 2 people have had a lucid dream.¹⁰

It’s not actually that difficult to get started, provided you set strong intentions and follow through with effective practices for developing the embodied mind.

This essay is adapted from my ebook Lucid Immersion Guidebook, the central piece of the Lucid Immersion Blueprint.

First image: CC Dancing Statues by dixie_law

References

¹ LaBerge, S., Phillips, L, Levitan, L. (1994). An hour of wakefulness before morning naps makes lucidity more likely. NightLight, 6(3).

² Kahan, T. and LaBerge, S. (2011). Dreaming and waking: Similarities and differences revisited. Conscious and Cognition, 20, 494-514.

³ Gackenbach, J. (2010). Psychological considerations in pursuing lucid dreaming research. International Journal of Dream Research, 3 (1), 11-12.

⁴ Gruber, R.E., Steffen, J.J., & Vonderhaar, S.P. (1995). Lucid dreaming, waking personality, and cognitive development. Dreaming, 5 (1), 1-12.

⁵  Blagrove, M, Bell, E., Wilkerson, A. (2010). Association of lucid dreaming frequency with Stroop task performance. Dreaming, 20 (4), 280-287.

⁶ Schredl, M. and Erlacher, D. (2004). Lucid dreaming frequency and personality.  Personality and Individual Differences, 37, 1463-1473.

⁷ Galvin, F. (1990). The boundary characteristics of lucid dreamers. Psychiatric Journal of the University of Ottawa, 15, 73–78.

⁸ Neider, M., Pace-Scott, E., Forselius, E., Pittman, B., and Morgan, P. (2011). Lucid dreaming and ventromedial versus dorsolateral prefrontal task performance. Consciousness and Cognition, 20, 234–244.

⁹ Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity : Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: Harper Perennial.

¹⁰ Schredl M, and Erlacher D. (2011). Frequency of lucid dreaming in a representative German sample. Perceptual and Motor Skills. 112(1):104-8.

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.

Interested? Watch my short video about Lucid Immersion. 

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.
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“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