Usually lucid dreaming is discussed as dream control, but this is not the only approach. In a lucid dream of surrender, the dreamer intentionally stills the logical mind at the moment of lucidity, taking a receptive position.

This is not a new idea. In fact, the roots of this process can be seen in the ancient art of alchemy.

Many view alchemy as the origins of modern chemistry via the search for the elixir — the secret catalyst that would turn dross matter into gold. However, alchemy actually began in ancient Egypt as a means of communicating the mysteries of the inner world. The practice of alchemy was known as the “Great Art” or the “Sacred Art.”

Fast forward to the 20th century.

Alchemical emblems: tracking the transformative process

Alchemically, this image from the 16th century Splendor of Solis of the peacock in the alchemical flask is viewed as demarking the end of nigredo and the movement into stages wherein the personality is more fully realized. This phase is known as “the peacock’s tail." The peacock’s tail, full of symmetrical patterns and vibrant colors, symbolizes the expansion of the personality. At the same time, this image can also be understood as depicting the lucid dreamer’s encounter with forms of light and color and the expansion of consciousness that results.

Psychologist Carl Jung recognised that —across cultures— alchemical stages and imagery reveal the process of what he called Individuation: the process whereby a person’s inner nature becomes realised in the outer world. From this point of view, the true alchemy is the Art of Personality.

Psychological health in this sense is aligned with the idea of wholeness: physically, psychologically, and psycho-spiritually through a relationship to the unconscious in dreams. Jung saw the transformation of the psyche mirrored in alchemical emblems and viewed dream imagery as depicting both personal and Transpersonal archetypes and qualities.

From a Jungian perspective, then, dreams are mini alchemical emblems that reflect a person’s psycho-spiritual condition and suggest what is needed for transformation. On one level, alchemical emblems track the inner transformation of the dross matter of lives into the true gold of personality. On yet another level, alchemical emblems provide a pictorial guide to healing lucid dream experiences. In the outer world, this analogy parallels that of the relationship between classical Newtonian physics and Quantum Mechanics.

Surrender in Lucid dreaming

In the unusual brain state of the lucid dream, the mind activates a balance between both sleeping and waking mental processes.[1] The subjective experience of this state is translated into images that take on an objective reality for the dreamer — an experience of the intuitive mind that is often difficult to articulate in language. This healing lucid dream imagery has an internal symmetry that serves to collect the dispersed elements of the psyche and establish internal balance in the dreamer.

At the moment of lucidity, the dreamscape disappears as the dreamer takes a receptive pose. Here’s a recent example that emerged after having come through a challenging time at work.

The Crystal Tubes

Am by the sea in a dream and pass by a large granite stone with a streak of bright green moss running along the centre from top to bottom. I stop to admire the green. When I touch the moss, an intense joy runs through me as the thought comes: “The green is the Holy Spirit.” With this awareness, lucidity comes.

This time, as I bow my head, my being is pulled backwards onto the black winds very fast and hard. Sing a holy hymn. It is impossible to think or wonder. But then the speed slows and my being is in a space filled with cubes and other geometric forms of light. Two thoughts come: the first is “Here are the cubes.” The second, “Now I am in Plato’s realm of ideal forms” because these forms have appeared in other lucid dreams. However, at this point, the edges of the cubes angle out and surprise me by turning into crystalline shapes.

Then it feels my being is taken through a beautiful, immense, mine tunnel of light crystals. At the end of the “tunnel” there are forms of tubular light packed tight like crystal organ pipes. They rain their light down as music on me. When the light touches the crown of my “head,” all sense of separation disappears. The light fills me, purifies, cleanses, and renews me. But it is not just me somehow that is filled, it is Life itself. The feeling is of complete delight, wonder, and humility.

After some time, I sense a subtle shift in my awareness and feel my being lifted up as if from the bottom of a deep sea into waking consciousness and back into a dream with my dream teacher by the sea.

My intent is to add to the conversation on lucid dreams and to present a timeless perspective in contemporary terms.  I look forward to your participation in this conversation.

About the Author:

Mary Ziemer is a psychotherapist in private practice as well as Service Director of HELP Counselling Centre in London. On the website www.LucidDreamAlchemy.com you will find more lucid dreams of surrender as well as free downloads about alchemy and lucid dreaming, including A Guide to Lucid Dreams of Surrender.

Images: Fall back, by vishwaant (CC); The Peacock’s Tail © Adam McClean.

Notes:

Except for Dr Freud, no one has influenced modern dream studies more than Carl Jung.

A psychoanalyst based in Geneva, Switzerland, Jung (1875  -1961) was a friend and follower of Freud but soon developed his own ideas about how dreams are formed.  While depth psychology has fallen out of favor in neuroscience, Jung’s ideas are still thriving in contemporary psychoanalytic circles.  Popular applications directly based on Jung’s research include the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator, the polygraph (lie detector) test, and 12-step addiction recovery programs.

The basic idea behind Jungian dream theory is that dreams reveal more than they conceal. They are a natural expression of our imagination and use the most straightforward language at our disposal: mythic narratives.  Because Jung rejected Freud’s theory of dream interpretation that dreams are designed to be secretive, he also did not believe dream formation is a product of  discharging our tabooed sexual impulses.

And surprisingly enough, Jung did not believe that dreams need to be interpreted for them to perform their function.  Instead, he suggested that dreams are doing the work of integrating our conscious and unconscious lives; he called this the process of individuation.  It’s easiest to think of individuation as the mind’s quest for wholeness, or that quality of applied wisdom that separates elders from grumpy old men.   While not required, working with dreams and amplifying the mythic components can hasten along the process.

Archetypal Images Bring Balance

Jung drew heavily from Medieval texts and described his psychology as alchemy

This mythic world of Jung’s is the realm of the archetypes, which are the universal energies of every human who is not only in conflict with society but also with him or her self.  Jung suggested that the archetypal images that come through dreams may be derived from different organs and thought centers in the body, and as such represent evolutionary drives.

Despite all the conflict, order is where it’s all headed from Jung’s perspective.  The quicker we can balance all these ancient needs, the more productively we can live.  The psychotherapist’s role is to provide hope for this order by helping the client make sense of their night visions and how they relate to waking life.

In Jung’s reckoning, the psychotherapist is like a modern shaman or priest who helps the individual create a personal mythology that works by throwing out maladaptive patterns and establishing healthy ones in their place.

The Collective Unconscious is not a Psychic Soup

The components of our mythic lives all have a similar structure throughout the lifespan.  This is Jung’s collective unconscious, an idea that is usually misrepresented in popular culture today as some kind of psychic reservoir of knowledge.  Jung was pointing more towards the psychological constants in all societies, such as rites-of-passage into womanhood, or the growing fascination with death after middle age.

The confusion over the collective unconscious  might have to do with the fact that Jung believed in telepathy. Ever the empirical scientist, Jung wrote “I would not assert the law behind them [telepathy] is “supernatural”, but merely something which we cannot get at yet with our present knowledge” (1974, p. 48).

If you are interested in how dreams can reflect the Big Moments in our lives, as well as our natural aptitude for mysticism, then start with Jung’s Dreams, Myths and Reflections, his autobiography.  It is rich and provocative.

Jung’s dream journal has also just been published for the first time, in limited numbers.  Known as the Red Book, this is the journal that Jung kept during his “encounter with the unconscious” during WWI, in which he holed up in his studio and purposefully went crazy for a while.  He claimed later that all the seeds for his major ideas are represented in the Red Book, which is full of ornate drawings and calligraphy.  This book may prove to rewrite everything we thought we knew about Carl Jung.

Next, we’ll look at the work of Calvin Hall, creator of the first cognitive theory of dreams.

Further Reading:

Memories, Dreams and Reflections by Carl Jung

Dreams by Carl Jung

However, the “dreams we remember for the rest of our life” are not the Big Dreams that contemporary dream researchers have demarked, but rather a watered down “catch-all” category that is based on the dreaming public’s perceived importance of particular dreams, rather than a set of features and characteristics unique to the experiences themselves.

Some researchers claim that Big Dreams come from different kinds of cognition than the typical REM dream. These typical dreams are the bread and butter of our dream life: chaotic stories, funny pairings of people from the past with situations of the present, anxiety dreams, etc. These “little” dreams are largely drawn from our personal past and tend to be loosely put together. We use narrative and story to help structure these experiences so we can talk about them.

Features of Archetypal Dreams

Big Dreams, also known as archetypal dreams, seem to be cut from a different cloth. Most importantly, they feel more real than real life, and a strong “felt meaning” is experienced in the moment. I think some visitation dreams definitely fit this description. But the other categories really set Big Dreams apart from ordinary dreams.

The most common elements are:

• abstract geometric patterns and kaleidoscopic mandalas,
• the experience of flying, floating or falling,
• encounters with mythological creatures and strange, intelligent animals
• feeling awe, fascination, fear and terror, and a sense of “Other”

Unlike ordinary dreams, these dreams are not easily picked at with standard dream interpretation procedures like psychoanalysis because very little personal history is encoded in these larger-than-life experiences. Archetypal dreams also have a consistency unmatched by ordinary dreams; in other words, their structure is cleanly focused, and the delivery to consciousness resembles waking visions of shamans and saints more than other nocturnal dreams.

Carl Jung and Big Dreams

The term “Big Dreams” came from Carl Jung, who seemed to dream in an archetypal way much of the time. But he made the distinction after visiting an East African tribe in Kenya, the Elgoni, in 1925. According to Jung, the Elgoni have a strong dreaming culture (80 years ago anyways – they have been successful at staying out of the eye of Sauron for many years since). They explained to Jung that there are little dreams and big dreams. For the Elgoni, big dreams were seen as collective dreams. The dreamer was dreaming for the community, for the landscape, and perhaps for all of the world.

This shamanic style of dreaming matched well with Jung’s own experience, and it gave him further insight into his theories of the collective unconscious (as a side note, later in life, Jung revised his earlier essays about the collective unconscious and moved away from theories dealing with “racial memory”, instead framing these shared experiences in a way that is more parsimonious with today’s evolutionary psychology: as bodily expressions transformed metaphorically into cognitive symbols that all humans share due to our common biological heritage.)

Archetypal Dreams and Mysticism

Consciousness researcher Harry Hunt has studied archetypal dream for 20 years, and has done more than anyone in helping re-frame these experiences in light of cognitive psychology as well as the world’s mystical traditions.

He notes in the Multiplicity of Dreams:

“The archetypal dreams of long-term meditators and other highly intuitive subjects, with their geometric (mandala) designs and forms of luminosity, convey an ineffable portent that when articulated sounds metaphysical and spiritual. These are more abstract levels of imagistic self-reference, based on structurally complex visual-kinesthetic synesthesias, with visual structures predominating. It is exceedingly difficult to see how such dreams could be based on the Freud/Foulkes model of translation from verbal-propositional thinking (p. 132).”

That’s a mouthful, and quoting Hunt is always dangerous because it makes me responsible for translating!  Hunt is suggesting that archetypal dreams may have a different process than little dreams; his main point being that these expressions and experiences are not linguistically based and may not be formed from personal memory sources either.

The Origin of Big Dreams

So where do big dreams come from” And could archetypal dreams ultimately originate from the same cognitive soup as little dreams” John Antrobus, a retired professor of psychology and sleep research from City College of New York, thinks this is the case. His research into big dreams focuses on the emotional intensity of REM dreams that occur in the last part of the night, or early morning. From a recent New York Times article:

Core body temperature rises gradually from its nadir in the middle of the night during slow-wave sleep, the least active brain state. As morning nears, subcortical brain activity tied to the circadian cycle increases. When these cycles coincide in the last and longest REM phase, the study found, the mind produces its most dramatic dreams. Dreams during this active period are more likely to be highly memorable, vivid, and experiential, what Dr. Antrobus calls “superdreams.”

“The brain is waking up,” Dr. Antrobus said in an interview. “It starts waking up long before you are fully awake.”

Keep in mind that, for Antrobus, big dreams mean “memorable dreams,” and are not necessarily full of the archetypal elements that Jung and Hunt have described. Here, the emotional intensity of Antrobus’s “super-dreams” is the connecting thread. Perhaps the uncanny emotional level is one component that merges with the other, more complex, visual metaphors that comprise the unique characteristics of archetypal dreams.

This intense emotional element is also studied in the sociology of religion, in particular Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum, which he described as the basic of mystical thought.

Archetypal Dreams & Ecopsychology

Returning to the shamanic Big Dreams of the Elgoni, perhaps these intense experiences with “Other” reveal communication with the larger-than-human community through our personal mythic and metaphoric artifacts of dreaming. Those half-human/half-animal dream figures seem to have their own agendas – as such they could be seen as expressions of our connectivity to our present ecological community.

It’s no wonder Westerners describe horrific dream visions as well as benign, given our disconnect from the natural world and our techno-industrial assault on the living fabric of life itself.

Even without assigning “inter-species communication” or “Gaia consciousness” it seems plain that we are resistant to ecological information (and other collective levels of suffering) that comes through our dreams.

That’s definitely one of my strong biases – that ecopsychology (the study of our minds in relation to our environment) has the most inclusive way of looking at our behaviors, our emotions, and our visionary states. From here, we can frame Big Dreams as evidence for a “collective unconscious” that is not rooted in the distant past (or phlyogenic memory) but instead that bubbles up from the present moment, from our present relationship to the Others in our lives.

Ultimately, I wonder: does the world dream through us” And even if this is only a metaphor for our personal and communal journeys through life, how can we learn to listen?