 LUCIDITY |
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Transformation
Through Dreams Dr. Stephen H. Whiteman, DCH, practices hypnotherapy in Atlanta and teaches workshops on self-hypnosis, developing deep rapport, and lucid dreaming. He studied with Tibetan Buddhist lamas, and through meditation and Tibetan Buddhist dream yoga practices, he learned that lucid dreaming is a perfect metaphor and vehicle for spiritual awakening. Jenee: First of all, describe what lucid dreaming is. Steve: Basically, it's when the more or less ordinary 'you' that experiences waking life consciously realizes that you are in a night dream. For example, here I am talking to you and your pen starts to float off the table. Since these anomalies don't usually happen in waking life, you would suddenly realize that we had this conversation three days ago, so you must be at home in bed dreaming about it. Jenee: I've had that experience before. I remember thinking to myself while dreaming, 'This is really a dream.' Steve: The question is, did your dreaming ego think that, or did your ordinary waking self think that? If it was your dream ego, we call that a 'pre-lucid state.' That's when your dream ego recognizes that you're in a night dream, but you're still caught up in the dream. If your ordinary waking mind recognizes that you are dreaming, that's true lucidity. Rather than slipping back into ordinary dreaming, any useful, emotionally healing experiences come back with me, just as if I had experienced them in waking life. Most of your waking experience is influenced by your dreams at night, so having conscious access to those dreams is going to have an enormous influence over how flexible, creative, and resourceful you are in dealing with your everyday world. Almost everyone is profoundly affected by their dreaming experiences, but they don't realize it. What I'm offering people in my workshops is a program to bring their waking consciousness to their dreams and their dreaming consciousness to their waking experience. Jenee: What do you mean? Steve: One of the regular practices of Tibetan dream yoga is to recognize the dream-like quality of waking experience, which really is another level of dreaming. So my workshops have two goals. On one level, the workshops teach people how to have lucid dreams at night through various techniques practiced while awake. Simultaneously, the workshops help people begin to experience waking reality as if it were a dream, with the same flexibility and aliveness and creativity present in the lucid state. In class, they will experience that they have just woken up in a night dream and everything around them is part of that - dream class room, dream chairs, dream people. The fun and aliveness that you can experience in a lucid dream will become apparent to them and become a part of their experience in the room. I call this 'lucid waking.' Jenee: How did you learn to do that? Steve: Ten years ago I experienced a profound spiritual awakening and started waking up inside my night dreams. Over the months and years that followed, I began to experience my ordinary reality as a dream, literally. My dream characters showed up in public and were witnessed by other people. For a while, anytime I closed my eyes, I would immediately be in a lucid dream somewhere else. While I was jogging, the landscape around me would change, becoming vibrant and surreal, and I would have to check to see if I was dreaming. Over time, I've continued this merging or overlapping of dreaming and waking experiences. Now, I don't have to fall asleep to wake up inside the dream. I've learned how to cross over from ordinary experience into that lucid space where I experience my life right now like an incredible lucid dream. And, through meditation and Tibetan Buddhist dream yoga practices, I've learned to stabilize this lucid waking state, which as far as I can tell is really a state of spiritual awakening. Lucid dreaming is a perfect metaphor and vehicle for spiritual awakening. Jenee: What makes lucid dreaming so exciting? Steve: Because you experience phenomenal freedom. When you become lucid, you're no longer caught up in the dream and incredible opportunities for learning and experience are opened up. On one level, you can do fun things like fly, walk through walls, make objects float, travel to distant places, or control some aspects of your dream. You can have experiences that you can bring back with you to help in your ordinary life, such as receiving life-changing messages from important dream characters or talking to and resolving issues with a deceased parent. These experiences can all be very valuable in your growth. People will learn specific practices they can do during the day to train themselves to lucid dream and to maintain the lucid state. For those who are having difficult dreaming experiences, they will learn how to complete these dreams and move on. And, for those who have not experienced a lucid dream, they will get to experience what that state is like. There will also be a follow-up weekly dream group to help people master lucid dreaming. For
more information on Dr. Stephen Whiteman's March 10 course, |