This is a special year, as several founding lucid dream researchers—including Stephen LaBerge—are kicking off the event with a one day pre-conference workshop “Lucid dreaming, Consciousness and Non-duality.” This workshop is really a once-in-a-lifetime reunion: it’s well worth the road trip.

Other notable lucid pioneers in attendance include:

• Gregory Scott Sparrow, author of the 1976 book Lucid dreaming: Dawning of the clear light and founder of Dream Star Institute
• Jayne Gackenbach, technology psychologist and co-author with Stephen LaBerge of the foundational academic text on lucidity, Conscious mind, sleeping brain.
• Fariba Bogzaran, co-author of Extraordinary Dreams and how to work with them and founder of the Dream Studies program at John F. Kennedy University.
• Patricia Garfield, author of the 1974 lucid dreaming classic Creative dreaming and co-founder of the International Association of the Study of Dreams.

Stephen LaBerge's keynote presentation is an overview of lucidity "from science to transcendence."

That’s just the half the line up! All the workshop participants are discussing the cutting edge of spirituality and lucidity: how the remarkable (and learnable) lucid dream state is a gateway to mystical experiences that have been the subject of poetry and sacred literature for eons.

Zooming out, this pre-conference workshop is a warm up the 2011 Science and NonDuality Conference (SAND), a dynamic meeting grounds for scientists, spiritual teachers and philosophers to share the fruits of 21^st century wisdom. The conference runs from October 20-24, 2011.

Keynotes for SAND include A. H. Almaas, Ken Wilber, Dean Radin, Michael Harner and Fred Allan Wolf.

When: October 19, 9am-6pm

Cost for the workshop: Full-day $130 or half day $65. (SAND conference attendance is separate)

Location: Embassy Suites Hotel – 101 McInnis Parkway, San Rafael, CA 94903

Here’s more information about the SANDS lucid dreaming workshop.

In two words: highly recommended.

At first glance, this husband and wife team are an unlikely duo for a lucid dreaming book. Paul’s expertise is cognitive archaeology and earth mysteries, and Charla is most widely known for her bestselling book the Aromatherapy Kit.

But these dynamic writers have crafted an easy-to-read introduction to lucid dreaming that combines their personal experiences, interesting historical context and some unique tales from the early days of lucid dreaming research.

In fact, the original research is what  impresses me the most.

How many times have you heard the story of how Stanford researcher Stephen LaBerge thought he was the first to verify lucid dreaming in the laboratory, only to discover Keith Hearne did it two years prior using the same method? 

The authors contacted Hearne and heard his side of the story, a fascinating account about his trials and tribulations. Hearne’s experience makes clear the resistance of the scientific establishment in the 1970s to acknowledging the reality of consciousness in the dream state.

Lucid dreaming in context

This readable volume also provides the best framework of lucid dreaming yet in print.

That’s a bold claim, I know.

This is exactly what Paul Devereux has accomplished in his other books as well, and it’s so refreshing to see his vision applied to the dreaming arts.

The first chapter is a fascinating tale that covers ancient lucid dreaming practices, the role of the Church on lucid dreaming suppression, the subsequent “rediscovery” of lucid dreaming my 19^th century psychologists, and modern sleep science. This grounding is essential to lucid dreaming, because we don’t just “wake up” in a vacuum.

Correcting misconceptions

Lucid dreaming also clears the air of some oft-repeated misinformation about lucid dreaming. Contrary to popular belief, Frederick van Eeden did not coin the phrase “lucid dream.”  Rather, he translated into English the same phrase from the French “rêve lucide.”

Other popular misconceptions discussed include the true nature of dream control (harmless fun but missing the point) and the value of dream dictionaries (limited). They quote dream researcher Tore Nielsen on this last point: “Dream dictionaries are dumb.”

The oldest Lucid Technique you haven’t heard of: Aromatherapy

The middle section of Lucid dreaming is dedicated to induction practices. Most are well-known by now. The usual induction masters are reviewed: LaBerge, Castaneda, and Paul Tholey. However, the Devereuxs do an excellent job leading beginners through the process of remembering more dreams and discovering what works best for you.

My personal mugwort patch

But then Charla lends her aromatherapy expertise to lucid dreaming induction, with expert suggestions that can electrify your intention and increase the odds of lucidity when asleep. She has sold over a million copies of her aromatherapy book, by the way, so her advice is solid when it comes to the effects of plant essences on consciousness.

Of course, dream pillows have been used for such purposes for hundred of years, but admittedly the empirical evidence for this claim is lacking.

Still, strands of evidence do exist.

Researchers have found that smells can increase the vividness of dreams, as well as enhance positive emotions in dreams. Also, other researchers have found that memory can be reliably improved when subjects go to sleep smelling botanical infusions. Taken together, aromatherapy may indeed improve recall of a lucid intention, as well as provide more vivid opportunities to go lucid in the dream.

This revitalized my desire to keep mugwort by my bed, a classic dream herb that happens to grow in my front yard.

The spectrum of lucidity

Finally, Lucid dreaming contains balanced discussions about related altered states of consciousness, including out-of-body experiences and sleep paralysis visions. Ever careful, the arguments are presented for and against the common perspective that OBEs are actually the soul in travel (this is called naïve realism, or the folk psychology view).

They also present a holistic theory linking lucid dreaming, OBEs and false awakening dreams as a continous set of related mental events. I am delighted to see their model, as it has neat parallels with other dream research theories, such as Alan Hobson’s AIM, Harry Hunt’s dream diamond and Ernest Hartmann’s continuity model.

Lucid dreaming: accessing your inner virtual realities is a great read. My least favorite part of it is the title, actually. The metaphor of virtual reality is dated, and does not really jive with the nuanced and historical view of lucidity that the Devereuxs present within.

The rest of the book, I’m happy to report, is filled with timeless wisdom. For lucid dreaming beginners, I recommend this book wholeheartedly, and it will captivate more experienced dreamers as well.

Here’s where to get your own copy.

If you haven’t read a book by Robert Moss yet, you’re in for a treat. His latest title, Active Dreaming: journeying beyond self-limitation to a life of wild freedom, is a welcome distillation of his approach to dreamwork. At once useful, playful and threaded with captivating storytelling, Active Dreaming is a guide for rediscovering your innate ability to live your dreams like they really mattered.

Because, as Moss might say, they may be the only thing that does.

The Stories of Our Lives

“You are going to learn an approach to life that I call Active Dreaming. This approach includes paying attention to night dreams, but it is not only, or even essentially, about what happens at night. It is a method for conscious living. When you become an active dreamer, you’ll notice that the world speaks to you in a different way.” (p. xii)

This different way, Moss suggests, begins with noticing that we live our lives as characters in a great cosmic story, but we often do not recognize the roles we play. By becoming an active dreamer, we become a chooser of our stories, rather than a victim of the limitations others have imposed on us.

“We learn to recognize that, whatever situation we are in, we always have a choice. We choose to stop running from the monster in our dreams—who may turn out to be our own power hunting us—when we brave up and turn around to confront it.” (p. xiii)

From Conscious to Lucid

Interestingly, for the first time in any of his books, Moss adopts the phrase lucid dreaming. For years, he rejected this phrase because of the pop-cultural associations of lucidity with controlling your dreams, a practice that Moss finds distasteful and unbalanced.

“It is utterly misguided to seek to put the control freak that is the ego in charge of something immeasurably wiser and deeper than itself.” (p.4)

Moss credits Robert Waggoner’s mature discussion of lucidity in Lucid Dreaming: gateway to the inner self as a cultural turning point away from the control model of lucid dreaming.

He also nods to my own influence, suggesting, “I am going to borrow a phrase employed by one of my friends in the lucid dreaming fraternity, who refers to my ‘shamanic lucid dreaming adventures.’” (p. 50)  (See my article here that Moss is referring to; as well as this blog post).

I am honored to be a small part of this cultural milieu that is ushering in a more holistic—and appropriate—recognition of self-awareness in dreaming as more than an enactment of a schema or a rational conquest of a primitive world, but rather an ability that comes with a wide range of cultural and transpersonal possibilities.

Parsing Shamanic dreaming

Bear shaman, by American painter George Catlin (1796-1872)

Moss defines shamanic carefully. As an ex-history professor, he knows the term has been used and abused.

“I am using the adjective here [shamanic] to describe a method for shifting consciousness in order to enter non-ordinary reality for purposes that include the care and recovery of the soul.” (p. 51)

Moss doesn’t ever claim he is a shaman per se, although he sometimes refers to himself as shamanic practitioner in interviews and the press.

He walks a tightrope, steering away from cultural appropriation while managing to not prematurely chop off our own (Western) access to shamanic waters either.

This is not a tightrope of postmodern political correctness, but one drawn through his own lifetime of experience in procuring natural and “altered” states of consciousness, including not only sleeping dreams, but also those visions that happen at the boundary between sleep and wakefulness, as well as those accessed through sonic driving with the drum.

Moss walks the walk, and his mission is to wake up the slumbering West to this aspect of reality, so we can start taking responsibility for our actions on this planet.

Stories Bearing Fruit

Admittedly, his stories sometimes have a fanciful air to them, and can strain credulity. I notice my inner skeptic constantly at war with my intuitive self when I read Moss.

This confusion of reason may be purposeful; it’s a function of good storytelling, allowing for deeper processes to emerge from the fractured Western ego.

After reading his book, I dreamed I was in a workshop with Moss:

Outside a house, I found a bearskin hanging on a rack. I presented it to Robert inside a long wooden house, and he told me it was mine. He motioned to put it down.  I laid the skin down on the ground and laid on top of it and began to dream a new dream…

The dream goes on, and is followed two days later by another powerful dream that awakened something old in me that has been slumbering a long time.

Soon afterwards, Moss wrote a blog post about shamanic dreaming, reminding us, “Built into the language of the Earth’s oldest people, is the understanding that the heart of the shaman’s power lies in his or her ability to dream. In our everyday modern lives, we stand at the edge of such power, when we dream and remember to do something with our dreams.”

The image used at the top of this blog post? A historic painting of a shaman wearing a bearskin.

I felt the shivers crawl up my back, recognizing the image from my dream.

This is the kind of thing that regular happens around Robert Moss; his influence is immediate, authentically reawakening our own innate dreaming abilities.

So if you’re the skeptical type who, like me, nonetheless finds yourself circling shamanic dreaming like a moth around a flame, I encourage you to look precisely where the discomfort arises.

Here, as Moss suggests, we may find our own forgotten abilities, and claims to our own untapped power.

Moss’s book goes farther and deeper than I have room to suggest here today. But I guarantee the book will delight, challenge and instruct you how to hone your dreaming abilities, awake and asleep, and in between worlds.

Find Active Dreaming on Amazon.

Cover image “Bear” by Daliborlev (CC).

Jared Loughner is also a lucid dreamer.

Already, several news sources have commented on Loughner’s passion for “conscience dreaming,” as he called it, the ability to control your dreams. Today, CNN followed up with a balanced piece, interviewing several dream researchers. Unfortunately, some local TV networks have not dug so deep, suggesting that conscious dreaming–the actual term for dreaming with self-awareness– is a gateway to mental illness.

Let’s be clear: becoming self-aware in your dreams has never been correlated with mental illness. Knowing when you are dreaming is not a slippery slope into self-delusion, nor a dangerous fantasy realm that leads to the inability to distinguish reality from dreams. Actually, lucid dreaming is a normal part of life for millions of healthy people.

However, I can’t blame those not familiar with lucid dreaming for making these associations. Remember that our Western model of mental illness has to do with confusing a shared reality with internal hallucinations, and behaving as if the two worlds are one.

Well, in popular lucid dreaming culture, you’re instructed to do “reality checks” during the day in order to “question whether or not you’re aware.” The purpose of this activity is to illicit a cognitive pattern that repeats in your dream, so that you ask the same question and then realize, “hey, this is a dream.”    Lucid dreamers are also fond of saying that a conscious dream feels as real as waking life, and cannot be distinguished from reality.

But these mental gymnastics do not suggest that lucid dreamers can’t distinguish waking life from the dream while they are awake. Rather, the shock of this “virtual reality” usually bring about joy and awe about the power of imagination. And what people do with the insights from lucid dreaming defines them.

For instance, Tibetan Buddhists practice dream yoga, which is a series of lucid dreaming meditations that allows the meditator to manipulate the content of the dream in ways that poke holes in the self-generated dream architecture. The practice shows that the dream world is an illusion. This insight is further used as metaphor in daily life, to bring about a clarity that the waking senses are similarly an illusion that prevents us from seeing clearly. This is the central philosophical heart of Buddhism, whose adherents are some of the most peaceful people on the planet.

Let’s talk about another troubled young dreamer. He was a sickly writer, holed up in cabin for the winter. He was obsessed about the nature of reality. One night he had a series of dreams which showed him, as objects appeared and disappeared, that his senses could not be trusted. The last dream was lucid, and he interpreted the dream as it occurred. When this man woke up, he felt a sense of awe about the universe, an emotional breakthrough that mirrored the logic in the treatise he had written the day before. The treatise was Discourse on Method, and the young man was Rene Descartes, the father of modern philosophy.

And here’s my point: dreams, lucid or not, tend to mirror our concerns, beliefs and problems we are grappling with. This is called the continuity theory of dreaming, and it’s largely accepted by cognitive psychology. That’s why Buddhists have meditative lucid dreams and Descartes had philosophical lucid dreams.

Perhaps when alleged shooter Loughner began having lucid dreams, the dreams reflected his waking delusions that nothing is real and therefore nothing matters.  It’s not my place to diagnose, but as dreamworker Robert Moss noted, it’s more than ironic that Loughner misspelled “conscious dreaming” as “conscience dreaming.” In the final analysis, nihilism does not need evidence, only a lack of compassion.

I’m deeply saddened and disturbed by the tragedy in Tucson.  I’m also saddened that  the media is grabbing for someone or something to blame, be it political rough-housing, lucid dreaming or mental illness. Let’s hold up the light of our own lucidity and compassion as the public spectacle of Loughner’s trial continues in the month to come.

You may also be interested in this statement about lucid dreaming from the International Association for the Study of Dreams.

Dark Intrusions by Louis Proud is a much needed investigation into the paranormal aspects of sleep paralysis visions. Proud digs deep and views SP within the philosophical and literary traditions of spiritualism, mediumship, ghost hauntings and channeling. Hands down, it’s pretty much the spookiest book I’ve read this year.

Proud is a sleep paralysis experiencer himself, so his narrative is grounded in his first-hand knowledge of what it feels like to be held down while you sleep by various unsavory entities. This is the classic sleep paralysis encounter, recounted by millions around the world in many cultures as the old hag, the incubus effect, and being ridden by the witch. Proud uses his experience as a touchstone as he reviews the connecting threads of SP with the fortean literature.

The Secret History of Sleep Paralysis

Strieber's visitors came to him after he was lying in bed, paralyzed.

Our Western culture, it has always seemed to me, is unique because there is no extant cultural expression of SP.  Most people who have the experience have no clue what’s happening to them, leading to a religious interpretation. Fewer know that sleep paralysis has biological correlates related to sleep hygiene and REM dreaming. On this point, sleep parlysis expert and medical anthropologist David Hufford commented in the documentary Your Worst Nightmare, “We have erased knowledge of these experiences from the cultural repertoire while these experiences are continuing to happen. That’s dramatic. That’s a level of social control that’s very impressive.”

Louis suggests that the SP narratives actually are highly represented in the literature of the West, but they have been marginalized from scientific inquiry. SP encounters can be seen spanning the centuries, from Swedenborg’s works, to 19th century spiritualist texts, to the voluminous writings of Chico Xavier, and most recently Whitley Streiber’s harrowing account of night visitors in Communion. Louis methodically reviews this literature, pointing out trends and similarities, as well as theorizing how sleep paralysis visions may be one of the authentic ways to contact spirits—or be terrorized by them.

Discarnate Entities, Psi and Quantum Psychics

Here is where I initially parted company from Proud, in his assistance that fearful SP encounters with demons, hags and aliens are proof positive of the existence of autonomous discarnate entities: spirits, in other words, who feed on the living and lead the way to madness. After all, I know from my own personal experience that entities can change form and become helpful when the sleep paralysis sufferer controls for his fear and sets strong boundaries or rules for contact. Expectation plays a major role in this phenomenon, just as it does with other altered states such as lucid dreaming and entheogenic reverie.

However, I began to see that Proud’s thesis is more complex, as he does not argue that all sleep paralysis encounters are the products of spirits. But a crucial and terrifying minority may be, he argues, especially those that yield information that could not have been known, information that is later verified from 3rd party sources.

Our current scientific paradigm ignores this sort of data, even though many studies using accepted controls have yielded statistical results. (For a great review of the status of the scientific enterprise of psi research, see Charles Tart’s The End of Materialism.)

Are poltergeists responsible for entity intrusions?

Yet I also think that there are other ways of receiving “uncanny” information through dreams and visions besides through the theorized action of malevolent spirits, including telepathy, remote viewing and other anomalies as theorized by the work of Carl Jung, Rupert Sheldrake and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. In these matters, it’s difficult to know where clairvoyance ends and telepathy begins, much less to distinguish between archetypal energies, the structure of the space/time continuum and the souls of the departed. Not that these perspectives are unknown to Proud — he cites specially the work of Stan Gooch — but he leans towards the spirit hypothesis at the end of the day.

In any case, I definitely agree with Proud in general that these sorts of encounters are more than the projected fears of a dreamer during REM intrusion, which is the “flatland” perspective espoused by mainstream materialism. My own work with sleep paralysis, informed by transpersonal psychology and anthropology, has focused on how dreamers can lessen their fears and transform negatively construed encounters with spirits, but this emphasis does not preclude the influence of other sources of influence during SP nightmares that may lay outside the personal psyche. Rather, accounting for our fears and biases allows us to view the “autonomous entity”—whatever its origin may be—more clearly.

The Shadow of Western Science

Dark Intrusions wades into some pretty weird and fascinating waters, including ghost rape, phantom voices, poltergeists and energy vampirism, but he always brings the material back to the experiences of sleep paralysis sufferers. There’s some particularly fascinating accounts of consensual spirit sex. Proud’s central thesis is that some sleep paralysis experiences are “attempts at possession by discarnate entities” that occur when one’s psychic guard is down. This is certainly a powerful meme that deserves review as its historical root are deep and influential, running parallel with western science as a kind of shadow culture for the last 200 years.

Science as an enterprise, we must remember, bracketed out first-person experiences long ago, so no amount of evidence from personal narratives will ever convince materialist skeptics of the veracity of these powerful internal visions and their hand in shaping the culture and folklore of spirits, ghosts and goblins.

Proud writes in his conclusion that the research of this haunting topic actually transformed his largely negative perception of sleep paralysis to a larger spectrum. “SP is a doorway to many possibilities,” he suggests, “some terrifying, some interesting and delightful, others simply weird and baffling. Over all I think the condition is a gift—a tool, which, when used properly, can be immensely rewarding.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Inception came out over the weekend and I was not disappointed. The movie felt like a dizzy sci-fi lucid dream and I stumbled out of the theater afterward like I has just crawled out of a hall of mirrors. Don’t worry, there’s no big spoilers in this review.

I have already covered the actual possibilities of mutual lucid dreaming as well as the clever use of real dream researchers to create the impression of government dream research in the film’s viral marketing campaign. In this article,  I am focusing on how the film portrayed dreaming well, and where it fell flat.

Dream Creation

The Architects are the folks in Inception who craft the infrastructure of the dream. In lucid dreaming, this sort of dream construction is very possible and the depiction of the mind-bending scenery changes is true to my experience.  I particularly liked how the dream characters would stare if the architect changed too much…. this also has a thread of dreaming reality. In my dreams, dream figures actively respond to changes of the dream and may try to prevent the changes from occurring. And they don’t always like being told they are figures on a dream, either. In one dream, I announced to a restaurant of people “This is only a dream!” and they crowd yelled back a cacophony of “no, no, no, it’s not true.”

I then did what most lucid dreamers eventually do: threw myself off a cliff to see what would happen.

Pain and Death in the Dream

The spinning top: now the world's most famous reality check

Which leads me to my next point. Pain is possible, and it can be excruciatingly real, so it makes for a lousy reality check. Dying in dreams is also possible. But neither pain nor death can stop the dreamer. Rather than waking up, it’s not uncommon for lucid dreamers to enter another dream. For me, I enter the lucid void for a while, and I then patiently wait for the dream to recreate itself around me. This is more exciting for me then manipulating the architecture of a dream scene.

Spontaneous Intrusion

Without going into too much detail, I found Cobb’s struggle with intruding dream material true to life. Even in the most “lucid” of dreams, when we are completely aware and confident in our movements, unexpected and sometimes terrifying dream material will interject into the dream. Inception does an excellent job portraying this psychological truth. The harder you push against this material, moreover, and try to shove it down and away, the harder it will hit you back the next time. Lucid dreaming is a tension between openness and resistance.  The resistance is nothing to be ashamed of… it’s part of the package. But we can become more aware of our resistances the more time we spend in lucid dreams, and become more adept at facing them when they spontaneously appear… rather than running away.

But where’s the bizarreness?

This was cool, but still pretty rational.

I’ve heard many complain about the lack of dream bizarreness in Inception. The truth is, dream bizarreness is over-reported. Most dreams are fairly mundane recreations of our everyday life, our jobs, homes and the relationships that make it all worthwhile. Big dreams don’t come often, but it is these dreams that steal the headlines with all  their half-human/half-animal creatures, abstract geometric imagery and intense colors that make us say WTF when we wake up.

Also, Inception was set in drug-induced stupors, not even in ordinary dreams. Who could even say what stage of sleep the dreamers were in?

Still, I would have enjoyed some more dream bizarreness. The movie was so heavy, all focused on the drama drama drama. Several times I wish everyone would just become a little more lucid and enter a non-dual state so all actors suddenly merged minds. Or flew into a gigantic kaleidoscope mandala. I would even have laughed at some old-school Freudian imagery, but nay, the closest the movie got to Freud was the fact that the characters had their weapons drawn the entire time. But I can’t complain about the weapons… it was primarily a heist film after-all.

Dream Time versus Real Time

Lastly, again without going into detail here, I loved the sci-fi imagining of how different layers of dreams have different senses of time. Some dreams really do seem to last hours, only to wake up and find 15 minutes has gone by. Often this is a narrative effect, in which a story is told through vignettes that create the span of time between scenes. But sometimes it is the feeling of time passing that is so vivid. I recently had a dream in which I worked with a mentor making rope from strings. In the dream, I realized I had been there a month. My entire personality had changed in the dream through this meditative work. I woke up so centered, aged, as if I had actually gotten dropped in an infinite time bucket. My wife tells me she once lived an entire life in a dream. These things happen, and they are sometimes more than a trick of the narrative.

Overall, I had a great time watching this movie. But once I account for my love of any movie that uses dreaming as a plot point, I’d say that Inception is a little confused. It is a heist or a psychological thriller? A sci-fi parable or a love story? Inception tries to be all, and ends up not doing any particularly well. True to most dreams, and to waking life, this film has some truth, some distractions, and some fun imagery, but at the end, it’s the journey, not the destination that really matters, because if you think about it too hard, the whole thing kinda unravels anyways.

I’m usually not so wrapped up in the release of summer blockbuster movies, but I have to admit I’m enthused for Inception, Chris Nolan’s latest film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. And I want to share my joy for being interviewed by Empire Magazine on the topic of how endangered we really are by dream-hacking super spies.

I can’t reprint the interview without breaking copyright laws, but I can tell you what I think about the dream philosophy stuff that Inception explores.

Director Chris Nolan’s own lucid dreams inspired the film. In his recent Wondercon appearance,  Nolan says his lucid dreams come after waking up and going back to bed (a wake-initiated lucid dream) and that his own attempts to manipulate the dream were “frustratingly elusive,” a hint that such things are possible on a grander scale. As Chris Nolan says at WonderCon, Inception is primarily a heist movie set in the dream world. Nolan says his desire to express what it feels like to be in a lucid dream even influenced decisions of which kinds of film to use. He shot 35mm some of the time, to get a gritty documentary feel in order to honor the truth that they “feel completely real while we’re experiencing dreams.”

The central premise of Inception is that Leonardo DiCaprio, as corporate sleuth Dom Cob, can hack into people’s dreams with the help of a mysterious dream machine and discover secrets held by the dreamer. Once in the dream, Dom may also have the ability to manipulate the dream world too, a la lucid dreaming, as he is also having the same dream. Then, things begin to unravel, as Dom’s own emotional ties and memories begin to complicate the heist.

Here's the cover for the June 2010 edition of Empire with my interview.

What of the technology to see into people’s dream? To be honest, I think there’s more a chance of hacking people’s dreams the old fashioned way (shamanism, telepathy,  entheogenic plant-assisted spirit voyages) than with some scientific equipment that projects dreams into your brain like a virtual reality game. Cognitive neuroscience techniques like fMRI now allows scientists to view three-dimensional brain activity scans as they occur, but brain activation is a long, long way from interpreting neuronal output as visual and tactile metaphors that can be re-constructed as sensual reality. Dreams are not a movie, and there’s no projector screen to view what is happening in a dream.  This is the classic homunculus fallacy.

Is dream sharing possible? I didn’t discuss this in the interview, but mutual dreaming is an oft-explored topic amongst experienced lucid dreamers, and you don’t need a fancy dream machine. Linda Magellon literally wrote the book about mutual dreaming in 1997, in which she explores synchronicities and successful dream incubations by two or more people who have statistically-improbable dreams on the same night. Also, Robert Waggoner co- editor of the Lucid Dream Exchange, was recently interviewed at the WOLD about Inception, where he discusses other cases of mutual lucid dreaming, and also lucid dreaming telepathy. More stories are discussed by Ed Kellogg, another veteran lucid dreamer.

Skeptical?  I was too… until my first mutual dream. My wife and I actually have mutual dreams on a fairly regular basis. They tend to occur in early morning for us. While they are never the same exact dream, they tend to show different perspectives about the same event or a similar dream environment, and are usually tied together with strong emotions. If there’s even more funding available for mutual dream research (like the supposed Project Somnacin that was leaked in this viral video), I’d recommend using people who care about each other or have a deep bond instead of random strangers, as this is how the phenomenon is expressed in the natural dream world, to help families illuminate issues that are central to the whole community and possibly the eco-system at large.

But I digress.

Will Big Brother Ever Record our Dreams?

The dream machine from Inception, apparently based on my dad's reel-to-reel player.

As a sci-fi, Inception brings intrigue to the idea that a device could tap our dreams like a Google van taps into our privacy. Even if we could devise such a contraption, would we be able to steal secrets?  I don’t think so.  We dream about things that are important, and may have locked inside us theorems and algorithms, but how would the dream hacker know what was the truth? Dreams regularly mix up actual events with deep emotional material, so any secret divined from a dream could not pass a veracity test.

For every scientific breakthrough and creative solution discovered in dreams, there’s a thousand more dreams full of information and metaphors that would not provide “data” for the waking world. That’s because dreams are more than reflections of waking life, but actual experiences that have their own internal truths. So mining the dream world can work well for novelists, but probably not dream sleuths after the magic code/formula/password/widget.

I still want a peek inside the dream machine tho.

I’ve been following the movie Inception, due out in theaters this summer. The movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, involves a pseudo-government dream research team who can access people’s dreams, and perhaps construct their reality too a la the Matrix. About two weeks ago,  a video showed up on youtube, showing a rough 6 minute cut of three interviews of dream researchers by the director Chris Nolan. The unfinished video looks like raw footage of interview material for a DVD bonus, but it’s actually a very clever viral marketing video, because the third dream researcher doesn’t really exist.

Who are the Dream Researchers Interviewed by Chris Nolan?

The first dream researcher in the clip is William Domhoff, a professor of psychology at University of California Santa Cruz. The video cuts away when he identifies his title, but gives viewers enough to search for and verify his credentials. Domhoff specializes in linguistic dream content analysis.

The second featured dream researcher in the video is Jayne Gackenbach. Her lucid dream research helped define the field in the early 1980s, and she served as editor of the now-defunct journal the Lucidity Letter. Gackenbach now focuses on video game research, but has released a few studies about the topic of lucid dreaming and video game interfaces, making her a natural interviewee for Nolan. I’m excited about Jayne’s influence on this movie!

This woman is not who she seems

Then we have the third interviewee: a woman who is not identified by name, and talks and looks like a professor. Her interview is fascinating, almost… scripted.  As she discusses the science of lucid dreaming, she says, “if one can actively participate in one’s own dream, what would happen if one could actively participate in someone else’s dream?”

Mystery professor continues, “The military calls this project Project Somnacin. And from what I’ve heard, 2 or 3 subjects are able to collectively participate in one dream.”

Government research into mutual lucid dreaming? That really is a nightmare. Luckily, this is the viral plot device in the movie, not based on reality. Thanks to Wendy Iraheta for her insight on the topic.

Blending Dreams and Reality

Dream Machine t-shirt with QR image, thanks to slashfilm.comH

Here’s how Inception fans sleuthed it out:

Slashfilm published a viral t-shirt image for Inception, including  a QR code image on the back of the shirt. Someone decoded the image, leading to the discovery of this website which has specs for the “dream machine,”  known as the PASIV device: Portable Automated Somnacin IntraVenous Device.

Therefore, Somnacin is a plot point, not a real government program, and the third dream researcher is an actress. This movie has already done a good job blending dreams and reality, and its generating interest in dream research all the while. Yah Chris Nolan!

This is great year for lucid dreamers in the media, first Avatar, and now Inception.

Here’s the full video interview:

Avatar is the movie James Cameron has been dreaming about for over 20 years.  It took that long for the technology to catch up with his vision.  Worth it?  Yeah, worth it.  I usually only see movies in the theater if something is guaranteed to blow up.  Avatar met this requirement, and if you wear the 3D glasses, exceeded it.  Beyond the explosions and mind-numbing CG goodness, Avatar is a film I recommend for dreamers everywhere.

As lucid dream writer Rebecca Turner suggested, the movie actually feels like a lucid dream.  Let’s see: a man goes to sleep, wakes up in a new body, and cavorts around in a magical world full of waterfalls and long-legged sexy smurfs.  Except for that last detail, this is the proto-typical lucid dream.

Cameron says the movie was inspired by his childhood romance with sci-fi fiction, and the Internet is awash with theories of his other cultural references such as the story of Pocahontas, Fern Gully, and the Thundercats.  But at its core, it is a movie about cultural clash, colonial exploitation, and the dangers/ecstasy of “going native.”  As such, it’s a CG remake of the film The Emerald Forest, which also features the destruction of the forest (read: the Amazon) by ginormous bulldozers.

Borrowing from Indonesian Shamanism

These culture clash themes are brought to the climax (won’t spoil, promise) during a communal ritual celebrating the web of life.  The participants are tapped into the world tree, and ancestral information flows both ways, to the past, and to the present.  According to David Price, a professor of anthropology at St Martin University, this ritual is loosely based on Papua New Guinean shamanism, as researched by University of Southern California anthropologist Nancy Lutkehaus who was consulted for the film.

Cameron’s scene designers actually listened to the cultural consultant.  This in itself makes the film worth watching. The indigenous peoples of Papua New Guinea, and indeed, many indigenous cultures in the Western Pacific, are strong dreaming cultures.  In an essay in Dream Travelers, Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern discuss how indigenous cultures of Papua New Guinea, the Hagen and the Duna peoples, use dreams to communicate with spirits and ancestors.  In this worldview, the dead and the living share a network of information, and influence each other.

Another culture in Papua New Guinea, the Kasua, are taught to shape-shift into animals in their dreams. As described in Roger Lohmann’s essay “Dreams and Ethnography” in The New Science of Dreaming,  dreamers make a sacred bond with their dream animal.  In waking life, this chosen “avatar” animal is taboo to kill.

This is reminiscent of the Navi’s relationship to the dragon-creatures they ride and “meld” with; their bond is one of friendship and cross-species communication, not hunter and prey.

Is Avatar political? Nah… it’s just anti-civilization

Closer to earth, David Price also illustrates how Avatar closely parallels current strategies by Western civilization to “get in the heads” of native populations who happen to sit on land and resources we have deemed important to national security.  Price suggested that Cameron was alluding to the controversial alliance between the US military and American anthropologists, known as the human terrain system (HTS), which still active despite increasing resistance by the American Anthropological Association.

Price makes the connection to Avatar plain: “Like the HTT counterparts, the Avatar teams openly talked about trying to win the “hearts, mind, and trust” of the local population (a population that the military derisively called “blue monkeys”) that the military was simply interested in moving or killing.”

But Cameron maintains his movie is not anti-American, and his anthropological consultant also denies that she discussed this topic with Cameron and his staff.

Well, if Avatar isn’t anti-American, then it’s anti-globalization.

Dreaming for the Earth

I love sci-fi fantasy for the way it approach political and cultural issues through dreams, visions, and other worlds.   But as a lucid dreamer, I know that it’s more than a metaphor.  Lucid dreaming can be used in service to the earth’s silenced voices and colonized landscapes.  We heal the internal landscape by tending to what shows up.

Turns out, there’s already people living in the vast wilderness of dreams.  They’ve been there all along.  This is how lucid dreamer Erin Langley approaches lucid dreaming: as a chance to interact with the earth dreaming.

As Erin says, from an indigenous science perspective, dreaming is the real world, and what we do (and who we are) in that realm matters.  I like to think Cameron would agree.

Avatar approaches these sticky issues of cultural critique without making the Western viewer feel like shit.  Instead, we are given a fresh chance to “go native,” buck the colonial agenda of the globalized uber-economy, and reconnect with the living spirit of creation of which we all participants.

It’s not really that intelligent of a movie, in an analytical way, despite that a linguist created the language of the Navi over a thirteen month period before training the actors.

Rather, it’s somatic.  It feels good.

The action/romance/plot falls flat sometimes, but it’s so beautiful, who cares?  We know the surprise ending won’t be surprising, and seeing Sigourney Weaver essentially make a caricature of her role as an older, gentler but still chain-smoking Ripley is comforting.

But the dreamy feel of the movie lingers for hours afterwards—I actually saw men discussing it in the bathroom, yeah, in the US—reminding us that we all have an ancestral connection to the planet, no matter how disconnected we may feel thanks to our neolocal lifestyles.

And yes, Avatar hints, we really are cutting down the Amazon, still, at an increasing rate actually, even though those statistics are totally boring to the reading public.

Avatar: it’s a wonderful ride with just a decent balance of action, romance, and deep thinking, although the technological aspects of the movie are by far the most impressive.  You’ll walk away feeling transported, and questioning: “Am I dreaming?”

Further Reading about dreams and shamanism:

Dream Travelers: sleep experiences and culture in the Western Pacific, edited by Roger Lohmann, 2003

Entering the Circle: Ancient Secrets of Siberian Wisdom Discovered by a Russian Psychiatrist, by Olga Kharitidi, 1997

Conscious Dreaming: a spiritual path for everyday life, by Robert Moss, 1996

Waking Life is an animated feature film released in 2002, directed by Richard Linklater, the guy who brought us Dazed and Confused and Slacker.  This movie is a must-see for anyone interested in dreams, consciousness and how our visionary states play out in modern life.

Like Linklater’s previous works, Waking Life is a film constructed of moments in time, depending more on the viewer’s fascination with the characters’ worldviews rather than a exciting plot sequence.   But Waking Life is radically different than his earlier projects, and not just because it’s animated. What makes this film so unusual is the deep philosophical waters it explores as the protagonist (Dazed and Confused‘s Wiley Wiggins), tries to figure out what has happened to him after being hit by a car in the first scene.

The movie can be summed up with this question: Are we sleep-walking through our waking state or wake-walking through our dreams?“

As Wiley goes about his day – which Slacker-style, seems to consist of bumping into strange and talkative people in an American suburban environment –- we are treated to a shifting display of “reality” as Wiley’s consciousness changes moment to moment.  Sometimes he’s clear and the animation becomes gritty, laying bare the filmed scene underneath.  And other times, the world is a bubbling cauldron of sense impressions that are more dream-like than anything else.

Which is precisely why you should check this movie out if you are into dream studies, and especially movies about dreams.  Although the philosophical themes in Waking Life range from “the telescopic nature of evolution” to the existential bummer of modern life (yes, this movie is very “talky” in the tradition of Woody Allen but without the New York anxiety), behind the talk is a meditation on the dream-like qualities of waking life.

One of the many - and I do mean many - philosophical discussions in Waking Life with the characters of the hit 1994 movie Before Sunrise.

How lucid are we anyways?

Because we’re really not as lucid in our waking life as we like to think we are.  We are often eclipsed by thought habits and emotional clouds that are almost as old as our bodies, and we co-create the world we are accustomed to being in.   As Paul Simon says in the Boxer, “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.  Lie-da-lie.”  But of course we are granted moments of lucidity – those sudden opportunities to break out of our everyday thought addictions – and it is precisely these “aha” moments that Linklater is stalking through his character Wiley.

The film also offers up a fairly base depiction of lucid dreaming as it is most often marketed as in the commercial media.  A portly trickster figure tells Wiley how, through “waking up” in his dreams, he can have “so much damn fun.”  He leans in and leers, “you can have all the sex you want.”  I laughed so hard the first time I saw this, as here is the cultural zeitgeist of lucid dreaming that I am trying my darnest to dispell.

But this character is balanced by other characters who show him how lucidity can be turned, like a mirror, towards deeper questions without losing the exuberance of living passionately.

It’s a beautiful film, in short, even though the dialogue can get tiresome at times.  Still, Waking Life is one of the best meditations I’ve seen yet on how our consciousness and our mortality are all tied up in a double helix.   I own it on VHS (remember those?) but the DVD includes a short film as well.   This movie is a must-have for the dream film collector.

Waking Life can be found at most video rental stores and the occasional switched-on public library.  To add it to your collection, it retails for less than $10 on amazon.