Can lucid dreaming quicken physical healing? Can you use your dreams to scan for illness in the body? And what are the best ways to apply the skill of self-awareness in dreams for facing your fears and revitalizing your spirit?

These are the questions we’ll be addressing next Wednesday, March 16, during a free teleseminar with guest Robert Waggoner, author of Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the inner self.  I’ll be joining dreamworker Amy Brucker to co-host the discussion, as part of a special event for The Dream Tribe.

My own lucid healings

The topic of healing in lucid dreams has a powerful pull for me. My own lucid dreams began as nightmares where I learned to literally stand my ground and find my voice. Later, as an adult, I went through another period of intense lucid dreams that resulted in recovering lost vitality after I faced some ancient sorrows. Lucid dreaming has also allowed me to say goodbye to loved ones and find real closure.

Physical healing through lucid energy

But psychological healing or healing “spirit loss” is only aspect of the conversation. Robert Waggoner has amassed a fabulous array of accounts from people who have applied their lucid dreams to assist in physical healing. We’ll also discuss the possibility of lucid dreaming as a foundation for seeking out unknown illness. Some of these stories can be found in his book Lucid Dreaming, but others are never-before-told accounts that will soon be published in the Spring edition of the Lucid Dream Exchange, which Waggoner co-edits with Lucy Gillis.

Beyond the Placebo Effect

These topics are cutting edge applications for lucid dreaming, especially as we come to grips with the realization that self-healing is so much more than a “placebo effect” but may actually be the secret behind shamanic healing and the miraculous remissions of cancer and other “intractable” diseases, as documented by Larry Dossey, MD.

Indeed, lucid dreaming embodies the role of focused will, spontaneous mental imagery, and the application of spirituality and prayer in healing — all of which are currently hot topics in medical, psychiatric, nursing and hospice communities.

So how to we harness our own lucid healing? What are the best approaches and possible pitfalls? We’ll discuss this too.

I hope you can join me for this fun and revitalizing conversation next Wednesday at 8pm EDT (that’s Midnight GMT). If the timing is all wrong, don’t worry, we’re recording the call and you can listen to it at your convenience.

Click here for the link to sign up for the teleseminar on Wednesday, March 16th.

Recent polls conducted by dream researchers indicate that more people are having lucid dreams than ever before. The increase may be “between 10 and 40 per cent since the 1980s,” reports Mark Blagrove, a psychologist and dream researcher at the University of Swansea.

If lucid dreaming has become a household word in the last ten years, we must thank the lifetime work of researchers like Stephen LaBerge and Jayne Gackenbach and the tireless work of lucid dreaming forum moderators like PasQuale of LD4All.com. Further, we owe the dreamers, psychologists and visionaries who have been exploring this natural vision state for the last thirty years, such as as Scott Sparrow, Fariba Bogzaran, Robert Moss and Robert Waggoner.

However, lucid dreaming has much deeper roots than the last 30 years. While the history of lucid dreaming is often framed within the discipline of psychology, the slow movement of “waking up in our dreams” has had a much more powerful influence by indigenous peoples around the globe, for whom lucid dreaming is one part of a vast and complex spiritual practice known today as shamanism.

How we’ve come to be influenced by these First Peoples is not always a pretty story, but their message is still coming through,reminding us what we have forgotten: that our dreams are an ancient portal to discovering truths about ourselves, our communities and our ecologies.

Here’s a quick recap of how lucid dreaming has taken root.

The Great Forgetting

Westerners forgot about dreaming when the Church began to increasingly demonize dreaming and those who practice the dreaming arts. Dreams were the playgrounds of witches and demons. Theologians stepped away from the dream, arguing that it could not be told if the message was from below or above.

Then, adding insult to injury, the Enlightenment segregated all subjective forms of knowing from the practice of science. Descartes used his lucid dreams as evidence that the senses were illusions and could not be trusted. (Don’t get me started on the paradox here). This is the double-bind of dream studies: even today, listening to a dream’s counsel is considered both devilish and irrational.

Rediscovering the Source

Carlos Casteneda still casts a long shadow

Then — in brief — there was industrialization, the rise of nation states, modern warfare, and a tremendous expansion of colonialism. One product of 20th century military colonization was a renewed interest in indigenous peoples and traditional societies due to the power and provocation of photography.  With this flood of anthropological studies came bizarre stories and images of trance states, sorcery and zombies.

In particular, the work of Carlos Casteneda galvanized a generation about new possibilities in consciousness and spirituality. In lucid dreaming circles, Casteneda is given props for the reality check “look at your hand and realize you’re dreaming,” but his influence was much broader. He basically broke down the wall between fact and fiction, inside/outside, scientist/native through his imaginative—and best-selling—books. Anthropologists and academics all held raucous debates about whether or not Castaneda was telling the “truth,” while the availability of psychedelic drugs borrowed from indigenous societies proliferated through the respectable middle-class and its institutions.

In the United States and Europe, this underground academic movement culminated in the Psychedelic Sixties. Humanist and Transpersonal Psychologies were also established in this era, focusing on positive psychology, human potential, and altered states of consciousness.  Eastern philosophies – Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, and yoga (the spiritual practice, not the fat-burning work-out video)—also added to this rich, cross-cultural mix.

The Seeds of 20th century Lucid Dreaming

In this expansive cultural climate, two books were published that set the stage for 20th century lucid dreaming. Celia Greene’s phenomenological study of lucid dreams was published in 1968: Lucid Dreaming: The Paradox of Consciousness During Sleep. A year later, transpersonal psychologist Charles Tart compounded the popular interest in lucid dreaming by publishing his highly influential Altered States of Consciousness, which reprints a 19th century essay by Frederick van Eeden, the Dutch psychologist who, in 1911, coined the phrase “lucid dreaming.” Also, Tart reprinted a 1951 essay from anthropologist Kilton Stewart, which describes how the Senoi, a subgroup of the Malaysian culture group Orang Asli, practiced lucid dreaming.

Like Castaneda, Stewart was a charismatic figure who influenced a generation of anthropologists and psychologists, even though his work is now considered to be somewhat fictional, or at a least highly imaginative account of his fieldwork experiences. Regardless, along with Castaneda, he casts a long shadow in modern lucid dreaming studies. Both these writers awakened an interest in the ancient practice of lucid dreaming, and in the 1970s lucid dreaming was re-framed as an altered state of consciousness, a path to spiritual ecstasy and a way to get high without using drugs.

Cross-Cultural Influence Continues

Since then, more anthropologists have reported indigenous dreaming societies that hone their dream skills in order to satisfy the basic goals of shamanism: for healing themselves and others, and for seeking power or information. Popular books on shamanism have celebrated many of these societies, such as the Aborigines and the Guatamalan Mayan, while others are less known, such as the Batek and Jahai peoples of Penisular Malaysia.

These Malaysian dream societies, in fact, related to the culture groups studied by Kilton Stewart in the 1930s. While Stewart may have been loose with the details, contemporary anthropologists, such as Diana Riboli, Lecturer at Panteion University, actually confirm that lucid dreaming shamanism is alive and well in Malaysia.

Without these still intact dreaming cultures, which are very much endangered by the continuous cultural whitewashing of globalism, we would still be hissing and crossing ourselves when someone mentions the weird dream they had last night.

May the light continue to shine…

Top Image: Orang Asli children, by Colin Nicolas, founder of the Centre for Orang Asli Concerns, a non-government organization (NGO) that serves as a resource centre to facilitate Orang Asli initiatives at self-development and in the protection of their rights.

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

Narby is an ethnobotanist, and he makes the key observation that, while Western scientists have freely picked from the fruits of indigenous plant knowledge, these same scientists do not believe the indigenous claim about how they received their staggering encyclopedic understanding of the most diverse ecosystem in the world.

The plants told us, they say. In particular, the plants communicate directly through images, feelings, and language during ayahuasca, datura, and tobacco-based ritual sessions.

Two Biases in Western Science that Narby Addresses

Narby ascertains that there are two biases in Western science that prevent the acceptance of this claim (which is nonetheless resulting in molecularly verifiable information that our civilization has profited mightily from).

First: we posit that hallucinations and visions are internal creations, and to think otherwise is the definition of psychosis, a break from reality.

Secondly: Plants cannot communicate with humans on an imaginal level, using language, symbols, or images. To think so leads back to the first point: la-la land.

Narby goes on to posit a theory about drug-induced hallucinations being the interior experience of an actual communicatory event with other non-human entities, through the language of DNA. Hmmm… I need more convincing about this explanation, but I like the spirit of the inquiry.

The Relevance for Lucid Dreaming & Other Visionary Experiences

But what really caught my eye is how the subjective reports of communication (as well as verifiable information that results from these uncanny experiences) are similar to that of advanced lucid dreaming and other non-drug-induced visionary experience.

Narby writes that for the Ashaninca peoples, “There was no fundamental contradiction between the practical reality of their life in the rainforest and the invisible and irrational world of ayahuasqueros. On the contrary, it was by going back and forth between these two levels that one could bring back useful and verifiable information that was otherwise unobtainable” (p. 47).

The shamanic perspective of lucid dreaming is similar. In the Native Americas, as well as Australia, Micronesia, and Asia, many cultures practice lucid dreaming as a communicatory event with the spirits of the land. Consciousness in the dream is a way of bridging the two realities, empowering the dreamer in the moment while allowing uncanny insight to be revealed and brought back to consensual, everyday reality.

Because lucid dreaming as it is advertised in the West is so infantile in design, it is refreshing to see parallels with other shamanic vision states that are still practiced today.

Author Hillary Webb gave a spell-binding talk about her participatory research into Andean cosmology. When she asked a respected Andean shaman about the worldview of complementary dualism that is at the heart of his culture, he replied, “It’s best to download it from the cosmos.” So she did, by grace of a San Pedro ceremony high on a mesa top.

Such participatory research can be helpful in breaking down constructs in order to perceive reality as it is experienced through other cultural mazeways. Guided by ritual experts, Webb described a new level of intuitive being-in-the-world that opened her up into “the place between will and surrender.”

There is also a psychogeographical element to these rituals which are often held in the middle of the mesa, between two ritually barren grounds. Note that these councils, as I understand them, are hybrid ceremonies meant to introduce Westerners to Andean ways of being. By participating in shamanic tourism, Webb became not only a participant in a cross-cultural ritual but also an observer to her own ways of thinking.

Another great talk about shamanism was presented by Anthropologist Diana Riboli. She discussed her fieldwork in peninsular Malaysia, with a group of indigenous cultures known as the Orang Asli. Here, shamans transform into animals in order to gain power, protect individuals and villages, and communicate with the forests.

Malaysian shamans often perform their shamanic journeys from dreams as well as light trance-state. However, there is no distinction between sleeping dreams and trances; both are considered the portal to the spirit world.

Riboli’s work is important for dream ethnography because she is correcting for earlier work done in the 1930s by the infamous Kilton Stewart , whose fabulous reports helped inspire the modern American dream movement as well as rekindle interest in lucid dreaming. Unfortunately, Stewart’s reports about the Senoi, also an Ornag Asli culture, are not considered trustworthy by many dream researchers and anthropologists, who lump him in the same category as the charismatic Carlos Casteneda: truthful, yes; honest, no.

Like many places in the world, shamanic knowledge is dying out as elders are not able to pass on their skills in a culture that is increasingly fractured by changing economic conditions brought on by globalization. However, Riboli mentioned that some young people are training as shaman, and have promised that they will perform an important ritual for their communities in a few years time.

The symposium is titled Ecopsychology, Cross Cultural Big Dreams, and Shamanic Lucid Dreams, also with Mark Schroll, Jorge Conesa-Sevilla, Curt Hoffman, with discussants Stanley Krippner and Judy Gardiner.

My complete abstract below:

Lucid Dreaming: Participating in our Inner Wilderness

In my eco-psychological critique of lucid dreaming, awareness and control are often conflated with one another due, in part, to a deep historical bias in which nature is viewed as a wilderness that is separate from, and at war with, humankind. I will present a phenomenological methodology for lucid dreaming that has helped me bridge this conflict within myself, centered on receptivity and connectivity.

This talk is based on my MA thesis on lucid dreaming, which should be available in May 2008.

After all, when you do a google search on dreams you are likely to find a number of cheap ad-sense optimized webpages with bad dream interpretations that have nothing to do with contemporary research. I find this intolerable and I”m here to help separate the wheat from the chaff.

My first book review is Archaeologies of Consciousness by Gyrus. This is a slim, independently published collection of essays at the intersections of prehistory, altered states of consciousness, and participatory research.

If you are interested in shamanism’s potential role in the creation of the ancient megalithic sites and prehistoric rock art of the British Isles, you may find Gyrus’s approach refreshing and exciting. Dreams are but one of his inspirations for this original research.

Check out my review of Archaeologies of Consciousness.

Just found an interesting article by Dr. Ron Masa about his practice of shamanic dreamwork. He tells a story about a women who discovered through her dreams a generations-old trauma that has been passed down through her father’s lineage.

Many psychologists have suggested that deep family-of-origin issues can be seen to manifest in our dreams, but this pattern of dream interpretation is usually overlooked. Masa suggests that dream interpretation is multi-layered, and never a simple equation. However, our heritage is certainly part of the story. He writes:

One thread in the tapestry of dreams tracks our heritage and family history. We each contain the best gifts and worst faults of our “biological team” as part of our unconscious starting point in life. Scientists pass along their best discoveries, failed experiments and unresolved dilemmas in technical journals. Families bequeath this same information through biology instead of books.

Masa describes dreaming as “shamanic archeology of the mind.” Given that soul flight is one of the primary calling cards of shamanism, I agree with him that dreaming can be considered one of the shamanic tools of ecstasy, alongside trance, drumming, and the ritual use of psychedelic substances. I also love the metaphor of dreamwork as archaeology, and not just because I used to dig ditches for science. After all, both uncover what was previously hidden. And both involve abandoned treasures in a murky substrate.

However, I prefer the phrase ancestral dreaming for this rich topic, because it sidesteps the current anthropological grump-fest about the origins of the word shamanism, and the term’s misuse by New Agers to mean that anyone who shakes a drum and pops a tab of acid is a shaman.

Nonetheless, we all dream, and we all have ancestors who have passed us what I can only call, with all due respect, a mixed bag of nuts. It’s up to us to make the connections.

Further reading:

Crockett, Tom (2003). Excerpt from Stone Age Wisdom

Kehoe, Alice (2000). Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking

Hayden, Brian (2003). Shamans, Sorcerers, and Saints

There’s always a danger of projecting our ideas about dreams into the past, especially the deep past, but as archaeologist David Lewis-Williams has reminded, humans cannot refrain from dreaming. I take this a step further and suggest that our ancient ancestors were quite capable of incubating visionary states within their dreams.

Click here to read: The Prehistory of Lucid Dreaming.