Are you interested in lucid dreaming but frustrated about not having them often, or at all? I’ve got good news and bad news. Let’s start with the bad news: as the continuity hypothesis of dreaming predicts, our nighttime dreaming mirrors our daily scheming. We can’t expect fantastic self-aware adventures and peak experiences in our dreams if we are sleepwalking through life.
Due to several contributing factors, we are not as lucid in waking life as we would like to believe. For starters, culture has framed our minds. To a certain extent, we arrive in adulthood trained not for lucidity but for following directions and accepting a strict routine.
Much about our way of life—including the way we sleep—has been built around the efficiency of the factory model. Our schools and institutions train us to be cognitively domesticated. Clock in, clock out. Work during the day, check out in the evenings, and sleep at night.
Also, our ability to sustain focus may be getting shorter every year, if we are to believe Noam Chomsky and other social critics old enough to remember what life was like before the television rose to power. Even sound bites in the popular press are shrinking every year. I do not doubt that our culture promotes, and profits from, the complacency and distractibility of its citizens.
Our awareness levels also follow predictable biological patterns. Are you aways self-aware, emotionally conscious and accurately perceiving what is happening around you? I’m certainly not. The spectrum of self-awareness ebbs and flows throughout the day in response to circadian rhythms. This is healthy and normal, but the flow is often not recognized, so rather than taking a nap, we are more likely to drink a cup of coffee.
We are also frequently unaware of our decisions as they are occurring. Much of what appears to be logical is actually decided unconsciously by the emotional centers of the brain. In short, we are mysteries to ourselves. We are human: imaginative and creative, as well as habitual and fallible.
But we literally sculpt our minds anew with every breath, in every moment.
And as Daniel Quinn writes in Beyond Civilization, rather than bemoaning the old story of everything that keeps us down, let’s start living a new story.
So here’s the good news — this is where lucid living comes in.
As coined and described by lucid dreaming pioneer Beverly D’Urso, lucid living is a mindset for going about the day in a way that promotes self-awareness of our intentions, emotions and actions in order to transcend the illusion of “ordinary” life. D’Urso was one of Stephen LaBerge’s most frequent subjects in his early lucid dreaming experiments at Stanford. She also is the first person documented to have an orgasm in a lucid dream while in a sleep lab.
Anyhow D’Urso’s training in Buddhism led to this phrase lucid living, although one doesn’t need to subscribe to a particular style of mindfulness. Indeed, lucid living is not necessarily about being a monk, and certainly is not about withdrawing from life. Rather, it’s about participating more fully with your whole self. Everything is on-board: your passion, willpower, empathy, decisiveness, vision, and clarity.
We wake up to the possibilities all around us. We wake up to what lays behind our expectations. We wake up to the important truth that *I* am not center of the universe. We wake up to the beautiful and chaotic and the remarkable.
The best part: lucid dreaming is a natural byproduct of lucid living.
Many are frustrated about not being able to call lucid dreams when they want them. But when lucid dreaming is practiced in context, as a fruit of lucid living, our frustration vanishes and we are invited deeper into the perennial mysteries of the universe.
So let’s have compassion for ourselves. Commit to greater lucidity only in a light-hearted spirit of self-love. The more we play, the closer we get to our creative drives and can shake off those self- limiting behaviors due to cognitive domestication.
How do you define lucid living? And how to you go about, you know, living it? Comments are open (for a couple weeks, before the AI bots destroy my willpower and I close comments back down).
And if you want to start living more lucidity, make sure to take my free video course Preparing for Lucid Dreaming.