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.

Success in lucid dreaming requires the ability to navigate a realm where gravity is not guaranteed.  And where comfortable chats in a café can be interrupted by sudden feelings of spinning, drifting, or falling down an infinite chasm. During the REM dreaming state, as well as during hypnagogia, these sensations ebb and flow thanks to activation in the inner ear as well as the supercharged visual processing of REM.

That’s why working out the inner ear is the key to mastering the weirder aspects of lucid dreaming.

Phasic REM and Vestibular Land Mines

Lucid dreaming tends to occur during the active form of REM sleep known as phasic REM, which includes greater brain activity as well as more eye movements than tonic REM. 

Lucid dreams remembered from phasic REM often include awareness of vestibular (inner ear) hallucinations and intense bodily sensations as well.

It’s a trip.

How do you develop confidence during these weird experiences? I have already discussed how playing video games influence lucid dreaming, which combines saturation of an activity with often confusing visual stimuli: perhaps the perfect workshop for developing proprioception.

But we can also take a hint by looking at professional athletes, who reportedly have spontaneous lucid dreams that can improve motor skills and focus. 

Furthermore, Hindu yogis and Sufi mystics develop lucid dreaming as a side effect of their bodily training.

These bodily practices all have this in common: the development of balance.

Pick up a Balancing Act

Incorporating a body practice that develops balance and focus is key. If you have lucid roadblocks involving confusion or getting overwhelmed by dizzying sensations, bodywork can help with developing proprioception and field independence.

You don’t have to become a master yogi though. Just find some activity that is attractive to you and in line with your interests. Some enjoy martial arts, especially the energetic art of Tai Chi.

There’s also rock climbing, bouldering and sailing. Fly-fishing is another example—this is lucid dreaming expert Scott Sparrow’s preferred body meditation.

And don’t forget the Wii.

Inexpensive habits include walking the rail of abandoned train tracks at your lunch hour or following along with a yoga video online.

Even a daily walking meditation develops bodily awareness. Simply take a walk and attend only to your breath and your body as you navigate the landscape. When thoughts come up, acknowledge them, and let them go.

Immerse yourself in the lucid landscape

Me in the Mojave Desert, 2002: showing off a rare Rosewood Springs point. I had so many lucid dreams during that archaeological survey in the high desert of CA, I had trouble finding time to write them down.

Personally, I am an avid hiker, stream-walker, and rock scrambler.

Recently, I took a hike in which I walked a fallen tree over a rushing stream. That night, I had a challenging dream that took place on a steel girder high above the ground.  I found myself balancing just as I had on the tree trunk in waking life. As I slipped and almost fell, I noticed I could die and that thought led to lucidity.

Rather than escaping the scene or trying to fly, I stuck with the situational physics of the dream and found a solution that led me to safety.  

I also enjoy walking terrain to find historic and prehistoric archaeological sites. The practice is intuitive, leading me to prehistoric hunter’s camps, mound sites, and rock clusters where women once pounded acorns and cornmeal while telling stories.

The practice is mirrored in my dreams, where I often discover beautiful ruins, golden treasures, and flint knives glowing in streambeds. The discoveries in the dreams inevitably lead to lucidity.

The beauty of developing a body practice for your lucid life is that you can simply redirect new energy to the things you already love to do. The practice also keeps you grounded and prevents the flighty spinning out that can sometimes accompany an intense new focus on dreaming.

So what’s your balancing act?

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This article is adapted from my new digital kit the Lucid Immersion Blueprint, a how-to-guide for really encouraging lucid dreaming.

This is not the same old tired stuff about WILDS and DILDS you’ve heard before. 

Rather, it’s the latest research in lucid dreaming combined with the ancient wisdom of lucid dreaming lore: the best of the old and the new.

Find out more about the Lucid Immersion Blueprint here.

It’s called the Lucid Immersion Blueprint. This is the distillation of contemporary dream research, ancient dream practices and my own personal experience into a step-by-step plan for going deeper into lucid dreaming.

In a nutshell, this is the home study course I wish I had twenty years ago when I got started with lucid dreaming. It would have saved me a lot of frustration, confusion, and nightmares too.

The Immersion method is about playing smart, not working hard. This is the dream induction method I use to regularly double my usual lucid dreaming rate.

Lucid Life Practice: the Big Picture

But more than that, it’s a holistic life practice that soaks into your bones, encouraging lucidity not just in your dreams, but also in your waking life.

As you probably know as a reader of DreamStudies, I believe lucid dreaming comes naturally as a fruit of lucid living. The Lucid Immersion Blueprint shows you the nuts and bolts of how to set up a more lucid life in a sustainable way.

Check out this short video about what I’ve created:

 To learn more about my new digital course, here’s the link to the information page.

By the way, I’m offering the Lucid Immersion Blueprint at special price through January 23, 2012. I figured this would ensure that you, one of my core readers and subscribers, will have a chance to get the goods at a discounted rate since it were your needs and requests that lead to its creation.

If you’d like to help me spread the word, check out my affiliate program here.

Here’s hoping that your final days of 2011 are relaxing!

As I look back what happened this year, I’m happy to report that 2011 has been a year of growth for me.

Highlights: I started off the year by lecturing at Stanford University on the topic of sleep paralysis, published my first peer-reviewed article in March, and am now wrapping up the year with a new book launch on lucid dreaming.

Other highlights include three sleep related articles of mine that went viral on Business Insider and an article about wolf dreams that was republished on Care2, one of the biggest healthy living sites on the web. 

2011 was a big year for radio work too. I was interviewed 5 times via blog radio: all are still available to listen online and can be found in my Whereabouts page.

As for DreamStudies.org, you may be interested to learn that:

The top trafficked articles written this year were:

1. Binaural beats for lucid dreaming – is it pseudoscience?
2. The Neuroscience of lucid dreaming
3. Is lucid dreaming dangerous?
4. 10 ways to prevent sleep paralysis
5. 3 techniques to turn SP into a lucid dream

And some personal favorite posts of 2011 that you may have missed:

1. Archaeodreaming: lucid dreaming as a tool for exploring sacred sites
2. Do dreams have meaning? (a tour of the dreaming brain)
3. 3 ways to find your ground (and make your home more sacred)
4. Lucid dreaming Alchemy: a guest post by Mary Ziemer

What’s ahead for 2012?

There’s a good chance that my new experiences with sleep deprivation as a dad will inspire more articles about the science and culture of modern sleep.

And you can definitely expect more in-depth work on lucid dreaming, as well as the transformative potential of sleep paralysis and other spontaneous vision states.

Finally, I hope to break new ground (for me) by blogging more often, and delving into other topics in consciousness studies such as shamanism, near death experiences and more sacred archaeology.

In short, I plan to keep on following the muse of dreams and consciousness studies, wherever it may take me, and I hope you will enjoy the trip as much as I do.

So if there’s something in particular you’d like to hear more about, leave a comment below and I’ll add it to the mix.

Happy New Year!

(First Image Credits: Candle by shutupyourface.)

In the coming weeks, I may change the title of this blog from dream studies to sleep deprivation studies.

Why? Because my wife just gave birth last week to our son Connor Dungan ! Here he is only a few hours after delivery.

Both Connor and Wendy are doing well, safely ensconced at home. We are feeling so blessed by a healthy baby (over 8lbs, y’all) and a relatively easy delivery. 

I’m also overcome with gratitude for the midwives of The Bryn Mawr Birth Center, and my friends and family who have helped us make this transition into parenthood with their gifts of dinner,  errand-running, and infant wisdom.

Our sleep patterns have indeed shifted dramically as we adapt to sleep deprivation.  Once we realized that time doesn’t matter anymore, and that the baby is calling the shots, we have watched with fascination as we become untethered from the diurnal world.

That’s my take away so far: sleep is opportunistic when you’re caring for a newborn.  There’s no choice but to adapt. But we are designed for this: it’s actually not that hard once my own rigid self-constraints of what “good sleep” means has fallen away.

My dreaming in particular has become filled with intensity, no doubt due to the pressure of REM deprivation, which results in instant REM rebound anytime I close my eyes. 

It’s really trippy.

That’s all I have time for today, but I hope to be adding new content to DreamStudies soon. 

And my new lucid dreaming program –the Lucid Immersion Blueprint — is still ready to birth Jan 2, 2012.  (Just had to birth a real baby first.)

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.

Mom was wrong: video games don’t rot your brain. 

Gaming can actually develop your focus, self-esteem, and mental balance; which are all useful skills for encouraging lucidity in dreams… and in waking life.

Lucid dream researcher-turned-technology psychologist Jayne Gackenbach has collected some solid evidence that playing video games may increase the chances of going lucid. In 2006, Gackenbach reported in the journal Dreaming that frequent gamers have more lucid dreams than those who don’t game at all.¹

Although this research is still in its infancy, it appears that playing video games can develop consciousness in similar ways as more traditional methods, such as meditation or chanting.

Gaming targets and augments several abilities simultaneously:

First, gamers develop concentration by engaging in a goal-oriented task amongst many distractions.

Secondly, gamers have a highly developed sense of proprioception, or knowing where their avatar is in relationship to the game matrix. Gaming appears to develop field independence, a psychological trait that has already been correlated with high lucidity levels.²

Finally, gamers have a “can-do” attitude and excellent self-esteem after playing, a trait that bleeds over into other aspects of your life. So if meditation is not for you, a regular gaming practice may actually develop your awareness.

I can't recommend lucidity training with violent games, unless you want to numb yourself down

Interestingly, gamers do not have more nightmares than non-gamers, even though they spend much of their waking awareness shooting zombies. On the contrary, playing violent video games may dampen your response to violence.³

So, when using violent first person shooters games to develop your awareness, ask yourself “what am I training for?”

You gain an appreciation for architecture after trying to recreate it. I keep accidentally building Norman castles.

Personally, I have been recently spending an inordinate amount of time playing the indie hit Minecraft. This game is styled after classic 16-bit first-person shooters, but it’s really a building game like SimCity with strong role-playing influences a la Final Fantasy.

There is no goal: you are free to build structures and terraform your world all while picking up resources and making tools. Currently, I spend my time building to-scale Neolithic megaliths on my private ice planet.

The game also encourages vigilance due to the zombies and monsters that come out at night, but it’s not a violent game unless you seek it out or hang out in dark caves.

Just like real life.

This article is drawn from my upcoming course The Lucid Immersion Blueprint, which with luck will be available for download in early December.

Sources

¹ Gackenbach, J. Video game play and lucid dreams. Dreaming, 2006, 16(2): 96-110.

² Gackenbach, J. (2010). Psychological considerations in pursuing lucid dreaming research. International Journal of Dream Research, 3 (1), 11-12.

³ Anderson, C. and Dill, K. (2000). Video games and aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the laboratory and in life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78,  772-790.

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

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

No it can’t be.

It is your face.

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

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

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

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

This stuff happens.

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

Nothing can be further from the truth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First image credits: Doppelganger by AbbyLadyBug

Over the centuries, spooky stories have warned us of the creatures of the night. But these tales don’t just come from dusty fairytales: they are panicked stories of real experience transmitted down through family lines and melded into myth.

The ghosts, goblins, and werewolves we celebrate during Halloween are still with us today, thanks to the ever-present condition known as sleep paralysis.

Ever felt held down when are waking up?  Like someone is sitting on your chest?  Or felt a cloud of evil lurking in the room while you hear the sound of footsteps shuffling towards you?

These are all symptoms of sleep paralysis, which is the harmless sensing of bodily paralysis that comes with REM sleep.

But it gets weirder when you start projecting your dream imagery into the bedroom, literally calling to order your worst nightmare.

To honor the spooks of sleep paralysis, I teamed up with Zeo to illustrate the history and complexity of these lucid nightmares throughout the centuries.

Click the image below to see the full sized infographic, and please share it and pass it along!

Emotions are often put aside when we are looking for ways to increase lucidity in dreams. This is definitely a missed opportunity, because by design dreaming is built upon emotional logic.

Navigating the lucid dream successfully, whatever your intention, demands the skill of dancing with the powerful emotional traces that construct and inform the dreamscape. This is a form of metacognition that involves being aware of your emotional state in the dream and making choices in light of this powerful force.

How emotions affect lucid dreams

Thanks to activation of the amygdala gland during REM sleep, our fight and flight responses are in overdrive during the dreamstate. Negative emotions far outweigh the positive: dreaming is not exactly the CandyLand depicted in popular media.

The most common emotions include fear, anxiety, anger, and confusion.

Dreamworker Jeremy Taylor has written eloquently about how facing fears and giving up unhealthy psychological projections in waking life can stir up dream lucidity. Emotional know-how can also help with dream navigation: so you can stay lucid in the dream for longer than a few seconds when it gets weird. (And it always does). 

The average dream: not exactly a stroll through Gumdrop Pass

As Robert Waggoner suggests in his excellent book, to maintain the lucid dreaming state, we must modulate our emotions. If we don’t learn this, we have a host of issues, from waking up too soon from excitement, to becoming enmeshed in the dream drama again.

Lucid nightmares, of course, are intense struggles against strong feelings that threaten to blow us out of the dream into a panicked awakening.

Remembering how to feel

Unfortunately, we are taught in our culture that emotions cannot be controlled and they are to be feared. Men especially are acculturated to always be strong and never cry. Meanwhile, women are taught that shopping, entertainment and distraction is the best way to calm down.

Essentially, we live in an emotionally undeveloped culture that rewards (and profits from) us not knowing how we are feeling. As a result, when we embark on a quest for more awareness and choice in our dreams, we can be blindsided by emotional surges that we never expected and don’t know how to handle.

Growing gratitude

With this in mind, working with your emotions takes some training.

Start with gratitude. It’s easy and… so refreshing.

Gratitude evaporates one of the greatest lucidity killers: negative expectation. Given the major role that expectation plays in lucid dreaming outcomes, gratitude as a practice protects the dreamer by grounding the lucid mind in a spirit of trust and confidence.

Gratitude in waking life spills into the dream when we need it the most: when we’re scared, facing dark truths and being challenged by terrifying dream figures.

(Don’t get me wrong: sometimes we need to face shadows. In fact, that’s another emotional skill set altogether.)

Interestingly, the effects of gratitude extend into sleep physiology. A 2009 study suggests that gratitude is correlated with good sleep quality above the effect of all the other personality traits.

It just feels good to pay respect. The world deserves a little more love. And so do you.

The practice of Ho’oponopono

Gratitude must be rooted in forgiveness. Especially self-forgiveness.

In Buddhism, this is known as maitri, or complete self acceptance. Pema Chödrön writes, “Only when we relate with ourselves without moralizing, without harshness, without deception, can we let go of harmful patterns.” (2002 p. 25).

Self-acceptance in the lucid dream is a powerful place to lean against; allowing flexibility and courage when the dreamworld shifts and moves with the visionary intensity of REM.

I recommend repeating a Hawaiian reconciliation affirmation, known as Ho’oponopono. (pronounce each o like “oh”:  Ho-o-pono-pono. In Hawaiian, it’s said very quickly.)

Traditionally, this ritual is used when someone is ailing, or during community conflicts, guided by a ritual authority.

I’m very careful to not culturally appropriate native ceremonies. But this practice has been offered to the world by Hawaiian elder and kahuna Morrnah Simeona, who modified the traditional chant and philosophically integrated it with both Eastern and Western cosmologies.

Recently, the practice of Ho’oponopono was clinically investigated as a relaxation method. The practice resulted in significant drops in both diastolic and systolic blood pressure, showing that the practice could be useful as a complementary therapy in many medical settings, including the treatment of hypertension.

Try the following affirmation in waking life. It’s particularly effective (and sometimes mindblowing) with your romantic partner. In the dream, the practice of Ho’oponopono can also be grounding, courage building and love infusing.

Repeat slowly, and mean it:

I love you
I’m sorry
Forgive me
I’m thankful.

Recently, I tried the affirmation while looking at myself in a mirror, in a lucid dream:

I watch my reflection morph and shimmer as I repeat the words. My visage changes from uncertainty to acceptance. Now I have a beard, as well, and look older than I am in my waking life. My heart opens as I forgive myself. As I say the words, the mirror becomes like a sheet of mercury. I tap it with my fingers and concentric rings dance across it. I slip inside it, dissolving into a dark and spacious space. Now I have no dream body, and I breathe fully, protected and safe in the dark void. (10/10/11)

What would happen if this affirmation was the way we started every day?

Or the standard greeting for meetings of the United Nations?

We would live in a more lucid world.

This essay is excerpted from my forthcoming project Lucid Immersion: a holistic blueprint for conscious dreaming. The blueprint should be available in the next month or so… stay tuned.

First Image: Forgiveness by Taston CC 2008