Shamanic Lucid Dreaming

 

I have reservations about the term "lucid dreaming" because it has been associated with notions of "controlling" or "manipulating" dreams. Through dreaming, we have access to a source that is infinitely wiser and deeper than the everyday ego, and we want to be available to that source. I am in favor of learning to choose where we go and what we do in dreams, as in waking life, but that requires discernment, not the fantasy of control. 

Another problem I have with the term "lucid dreaming" is that it is most often associated with techniques for waking yourself up to the fact that you are dreaming while you are asleep. This is a valuable skill, especialy when it enables you to choose how a story is gong to devleop and the role you will play, exercise your cretaive imagination, dialogue with dream characters and gather and retain detailed information you can bring back. However, the easiest way to become a lucid or conscious dreamer is to start out lucid and stay that way: in other words, to enter conscious dreaming from a waking or semi-wakeful state.  

I titled my first book on all of this Conscious Dreaming. My preferred name for what I teach and practice is Active Dreaming. As the phrase suggests, we can be active in embarking on conscious adventures in dreaming, and we want to be active in bringing the energy and insight of our dreams into waking life.  

Since I am often asked whether Active Dreaming is a mode of lucid dreaming, I am going to borrow a phrase employed by one of my friends in the lucid dreaming fraternity who refers to my "shamanic lucid dream adventures." I am using the adjective "shamanic" here to describe a method for shifting consciousness to enter nonordinary reality for purposes that include the care and recovery of soul.  

How do you become a shamanic lucid dreamer? You start out conscious and you stay that way. To accomplish this, you only need three things: a clear intention, an image that can serve as a portal, and a means of focusing the mind and fueling the journey. All these things can become available naturally, in the twilight zone of consciousness that researchers call hypnagogia. You are between sleep and waking. Images rise and fall in your mindnd any one of those images can become the gateway for a conscious dream adventure.  

I somertimes find that I am able to maintain continuity of consciones through all the phases that evolve from this liminal stage. I will add that I find the twilight state between sleep and awake in the morning tat sleep reserachers call the hypno[pompic zone particularly propitious for conscious edream adventures and lucid enciunters with inner guides and transpetrsonal visitors. 

An equally simple and natural way to become a shamanic lucid dreamer is to use a remembered dream as the portal for a journey. In your night dream, you went to a place, which may resemble a site in ordinary reality or may be a locale in a separate reality where the physics are utterly different. Either way, because you were in a certain place, you may be able to find your way back there, just as you could return to a house you once visited in regular life. 

 Why would you want to do this? Maybe you've been running away from something in your dream world that scares you - from the Bear, or the Tiger, or an unknown intruder or pursuer. If you can find the courage to go back inside one of those nightmares and face what frightened you on its own ground, you may find power and healing waiting for you on the other side of the terror.  

You may want to go back inside a dream because you were with your dream lover in a tropical paradise but were interrupted by the alarm clock. You may want to talk to someone who appeared to you in a dream. You may need to clarify whether that auto accident could take place in the future, as either a literal and symbolic event, and what you need to do with that information (once you have it clear) in order to avoid an unwanted development. You may simply want to know more about a dream. The best way to understand a dream is to recover more of the experience of the dream. A dream experience, fully remembered, is its own interpretation. 

 Through the technique of dream reentry, you can pursue any of these agendas, or simply enjoy the fun and adventure of using a personal dream image as a portal to the multiverse.  

The best time to attempt dream reentry may be when the dream is fresh and you are still closely connected to it, lingering in bed after waking. But if the dream has energy for you, you can go back inside any time, even decades after the original dream.  

Shamanic drumming - a steady beat on a simple frame drum, typically in the range of three to four beats per second, but sometimes faster - will help you to shift consciousness and travel into the dreamspace. The steady beat helps to override mental clutter and focus energy and intention on the journey. The rhythms of the drum correspond to brain wave frequencies in the theta band, associated with the hypnagogic zone and its dreamlike imagery. If you want a physiological explanation of why shamanic drumming is such a powerful tool for shifting awareness, you could say that the "sonic driving" of the drum herds our brain waves into the theta band, opening us to its characteristic flow of imagery. I have made my own recording of shamanivc drumming specifivcally for shamanic lucid dreamers.  

The drumming will also help you to synchronize and focus shared adventures in dream travel. You can invite one of more partners to journey with you through the portal you have chosen and act as companions and trackers who can support you and bring you extra information. In my workshops, we frequently have 30 or more active dreamers traveling together on group adventures of this kind. Often we keep group logs, and you can read samplings from these in my book Dreamgates and in the epilogue to Dreamways of the Iroquois, where I describe how I led a group of frequent flyers on a group journey to meet the shaman-priests of the Kogi, on their sacred mountain, at the invitation of a Kogi elder. Through such experiments, we assemble truly scientific data on the reality of the dreamworlds, and what is possible within them.  

Shamanic lucid dreaming is an adventure in navigating the deeper reality that we can share with a partner, with a group, or a whole community. A caution: the side-effects may include transformation.

Journal drawing by Robert Moss: "How It Will Begin"

Seven Gates to Lucid Dreaming

 

I suggested in a recent article that it is less important to be aware that you are dreaming than to be capable of exercising choice, pursuing goals and considering consequences, whatever state of reality and consciousness you may be in. However, the awareness that you are dreaming can give you the power to use the dreamscape as an adventure theme park, a place of training or higher education, or a field in which you can vanquish nightmare terrors and recognize and integrate different aspects of yourself.

I am going to offer seven ways to enter a state of lucid dreaming. I will use that term here for convenience, since it has become so widely recognized since Dutch psychologist and novelist Frederik van Eeden introduced it to a learned audience at the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1913. 

How do you become a lucid dreamer? Through one or more of these seven gates.

 

1. Wake up spontaneously to the fact that you are dreaming

 

This may happen because you notice an anomaly inside the dream. In ordinary reality, you don’t stand up naked in front of a crowd, you are not still in elementary school and you do not keep dragons in your basement. You look in a mirror and see a different face. 
     When dream elements of this kind make you aware that you are dreaming, the trick is to stay with the dream instead of letting yourself be startled out of it. This requires practice and a fine melding of excitement and familiarity. Your excitement over what is going on will make you want to stay with the dream. Increasing familiarity with the phenomenon will help you maintain the poise and balance to go on with it.
     It is interesting that it is often scary experiences in early life, especially adolescence, that first bring spontaneous dream lucidity. For example, the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, in which you begin to stir from sleep and find that you cannot operate major muscle groups, can be the prelude to lucid dreaming – when you are able to relax into the situation and let something else develop.

 

2. Recognize your dream signs

 

You want to follow the practice of journaling all your dream experiences. This is going to be your personal encyclopedia of symbols and will give you first-hand data on the reality of precognition, parallel universes and so much more. In relation to developing your abilities as a lucid dreamer, your journal is the place where you can study your dream signs – the elements in your dreams that could make you aware that you are dreaming.
     For example, the dead are alive in your dreams. Or a dream element is repeated, exactly, in the way the black cat runs across the room the same way twice in the movie The Matrix. There is a sudden transit from one scene to another and you don’t know how you got to the new place. You are making love with a movie star. You find that when you try to read a text, it blurs (not for me, but for many).
     You can then select one or more dream signs and tell yourself that when you observe the same element, you will become aware that you are dreaming. You can borrow suggestions from frequent flyers. A very popular one is Carlos Castaneda’s suggestion (in Journey to Ixtlan) that whenever you see your hands, you should ask, “Am I dreaming”? I do that when I look at my phone. Inside a dream, my phone sometimes operates very differently from its regular functioning.

 

3. Set an intention for lucid dreaming

 

Before going to bed, you set an intention to be aware you are dreaming and repeat that intention until it is firmly implanted in your mind. Give the intention some juice. “I am going to have fun in my dreams and I will be aware that I am dreaming” is perfectly acceptable. So is “Tonight I will go on a road of healing and I will know I am dreaming.”

 

4. Start in the Twilight Zone

 

The twilight zone between sleep and waking is a great launch pad for adventures in lucid dreaming. Sleep researchers distinguish the hypnagogic state, when you are on your way to sleep, from the hypnopompic state, when you are leaving sleep. In both states, if you are able to relax and entertain the images that form on your mental screen, you may find you are being offered a rich menu of portals and scenarios for dreaming. Choose to go with one of those images or developing stories, and you may start out lucid and stay that way. 
    However, when the adventure begins in the first period of the night, you may fall asleep and lose dream awareness (and often memory of the dream) because your body craves rest. In most people’s daily cycle, the first hours in bed are a time for “industrial sleep” to restore and replenish the body. Dream recall and lucid awareness may be less important in this period, in relation to daily maintenance, than the need for nourishing sleep and downtime.
    The best times to experiment in the twilight zone are when you wake in the middle of the night, and when you wake from your final sleep cycle to start the day. I love what becomes available in the middle of the night (especially between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m.) when I can simply lie back in a drifty state and let images come. After your final sleep cycle, you may find you remember dreams that have juice and energy and vivid detail. If you can arrange your life so you don’t have to jump out of bed right away, you can stay with one of these dreams and let it unfold into a fully lucid dream excursion.

 

5. Reenter a dream

 

Dream reentry is the royal road to lucid dreaming. This is one of the core techniques of Active Dreaming. The central idea is this: a dream scene is a place you have been, wherever in the worlds that may be. Because you have been there, you can go there again.
     Why would you want to do this?
      Maybe you were having a great adventure or romance, but were interrupted by the alarm clock and would like to go on with it. Maybe you were fleeing from a nightmare bogey and you realize it is time to face up to that challenge and resolve it on its own ground – which, by the way, is the smartest way to end a series of scary dreams. Maybe you want to talk to someone who appeared in the dream. 
     Maybe you simply want to develop entry points for lucid dreaming, personal dream gates through which you can access realms of adventure, guidance and healing.
      How do you practice dream reentry? You need three things: a strong image, a clear intention, and the ability to fuel and focus the lucid dream journey that is going to unfold. You hold the dream that is calling you in your mind and let it become vivid and alive. It might be the dream from which you just awakened or a dream from years ago, maybe a dream that frightened you in childhood and was never resolved. Next, you set your intention. I am going to see what’s behind that door. I am going to confront my pursuer. I am going to dance with the bear. I am going to meet my dream lover again on that tropical island and I don’t have to pay for the plane ticket.
     If you have a tendency to drift off to sleep, you may add the intention: I will remain alert and aware that I am dreaming.
     If you find that you need extra fuel to accomplish liftoff, and/or that your focus is easily distracted, try using shamanic drumming as you embark on the journey. In my workshops, we use shamanic drumming very frequently to power conscious dream journeys. I have recorded a CD of shamanic drumming specifically for conscious dream travelers, Wings for the Journey.

 

6. Look at the world around you as a waking dream

 

As is well understood by teachers of dream yoga, lucid living is fundamental to growing the practice of lucid dreaming. Practice mindfulness in everyday circumstances. Ask yourself from time to time, What am I doing now? What is playing on my inner soundtrack? Take some quiet, unscheduled time, inside or out and about, and receive impressions – both the contents of your mind and the incidents of external reality – without judgment.
     Look for signs and symbols in the world around you. I suggest many games in this cause in my book Sidewalk Oracles. You’ll become aware that the world is speaking to you in many voices, and you’ll start to glimpse the patterns of a deeper order of reality, behind the veils of ordinary perception.
     You’ll find you can carry this heightened awareness into the dream state, and that your deeper dreams will expand your consciousness, in turn, on the roads of everyday life.

 7. Become So Wild

This is the big sister of #3. 

Often when we first fall into bed, our most immediate need is to rest and restore the body. We may be overburdening ourselves and failing to satisfy that need when we set dream intentions or try to embark on lucid dreaming right away in the first period of bed time. It is actually fine to let the first cycle be "industrial sleep", allowing ourselves simply to restore and regenerate the body.
    Of course, spontaneous dreams will come during this phase, and may trigger lucidity as well as lively dream recall. So we want to be open to dream gifts during the first cycle of sleep. But we do not want turn the pursuit of dreams, or the quest for lucidity, into a job of work during this part of the night. We never want to turn the dream adventure into another of our chores, or stress ourselves by setting objectives that are unrealistic given the body's need for rest and restoration.
    The prime time for pursuing dream intentions and embarking on lucid dream odysseys is right after the first cycle of sleep. People's sleep patterns vary, but chances are you will awaken - and know you are awake - three or four hours after going to sleep. Maybe you need to go to the bathroom or have a glass of water. Fine, do it. Maybe you have dreams, or at any rate elements of dreams, from the first sleep cycle. Jot them down. Titles or key words may be enough.
    Maybe you want to putter around for an hour or two before going back to bed. That's fine, too, as long as you leave yourself time for more nocturnal adventures before you need to go out on the business of the day.
    Now: settle back in bed. Lie on your back, or on your right or left side, whichever position is most comfortable but do not lie on your stomach (unless you want to be seriously grounded). This is the time to set, or reaffirm, an intention for your dreams.
    If you have a dream with some juice from your first sleep cycle, you can make it your intention to reenter that dream, explore the dream space, and carry on with the adventure you were having before.
    You may find you are in a space where communication with an inner guide is possible. The most important spiritual dialogues of my life have unfolded here, in contact with wiser intelligences I have learned to trust.
    You may find that an inner light comes on, as bright as the sun would be. Once you resist the tendency to open your eyes and check whether someone turned on the lights, you may find that this rising of the inner light can carry into a state of greatly expanded awareness and creativity, where you can find solutions to previously intractable problems, and much more.
    Or you can simply lay yourself open to the images that will rise and fall on your inner screen in this liminal state between sleep and awake. Chances are that one of these will catch your attention and grow into a living scene that you can enter. This will be your portal for a lucid dream excursion if you set the intention to remain conscious you are dreaming as the action develops. The chances that you will fall into sleep without memories are reduced because you have already received your essential rest.

    I dreamed up an acronym for this simple approach:

      S=sleep
    O=open to experience
    W=wake
     I=intend
     L=lucid
     D=dreaming

SO-WILD, and it works!

 

God makes the dreamer fruitful with his own courage

It is the most extraordinary statement in the most remarkable book about dreams written before our own times: "God makes the dreamer fruitful with his own courage."
    The author is Synesius of Cyrene, a Greek philosopher, nobleman and student of Hypatia who was made bishop of Ptolemais in North Africa around 400. The source is his little treatise On Dreams. The translation is by Augustine Fitzgerald and was published in 1930. We owe a great debt to Fitzgerald because his translation is still (as far as I know) the only one in the English language. It can sound a little old and patriarchal in contemporary ears. We could say, "Spirit" or "the divine source" or "the Creator" or "the gods" in place of the masculine "God", but we don't want to dilute the power of that astonishing affirmation with a paraphrase. Let me stay with Fitzgerald's version for now.
    Here it is, in its context:

It is written, "Others even in their dreams He made fruitful with his courage." Do you see? One man learns while awake, another while asleep. But in the waking state man is the teacher, while it is God who makes the dreamer fruitful with His own courage, so that learning and attaining are one and the same. Now to make fruitful is even more than to teach. 

    This passage was on my mind this morning after I rose from a dream that left me filled with courage, confidence and a deep sense of blessing. The setting and action in the dream were very like my ordinary life. I was opening a workshop, preparing the group to make a journey, powered by shamanic drumming, to the Tree Gate, a portal I often use for excursions to the three tiers of the shaman's cosmos, the Upper, Middle and Lower worlds. There were a few distractions and minor issues of the kind that come up when new people are finding their place and their way in a circle.
    Then I started drumming, and the power of the drumming carried everyone, immediately, beyond the distractions into a powerful journey. I saw them meeting and reconnecting with the animal spirits and with benign energies of Earth, even with the Earth Mother. I felt the beating of great wings as the bird tribes and higher powers came to support us. I noticed, as I circled the group, that I was no longer playing my frame drum the usual way. I was whirling it in mid-air, like a bullroarer. This made the sound of rushing winds, and drove the journey deeper and higher.
    I returned to my place in the circle. As our dreamers came back from their excursions, stretched and moved their bodies, their faces were glowing and bright. We agreed to make an impromptu fire ceremony to do some releasing that people now understood to be required, and this was very effective. I was able to assist in some personal healing.
    Through most of this, I was in two places at once, fully aware of my body lying in the bed, and of morning light filtering through the blinds, while super-engaged in whirling the drum and tending the fire and assisting in healing. I suspect that bilocation of this kind is quite common for lucid dreamers as well as for shamanic voyagers.  I have experienced it for as long as I can remember.
     Fully lucid, still in the dream scene, I arranged with some of the people in the circle to do follow-up work and made a mental note of who, where, when and how on the assumption that elements of the dream may manifest in a future workshop in the physical world. However, the enduring gift of the dream, quite simply, was that, as my traveling consciousness rejoined my body as it rose from the bed, I felt "fruitful with courage" for the day, even blessed.



Quotations from Synesius of Cyrene,  “On Dreams,” in The Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene, trans. Augustine Fitzgerald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930). For more on Synesius of Cyrene, please see Robert Moss, The Secret History of Dreaming  (Novato CA: New world Library, 2008) 67-70. 

Image: Lion of Cyrene

Can't stop the dreamers drumming

Sivananda Ashram, Bahamas

Those in authority have decided to ban shamanic drumming for groups, in the way we practice this in Active Dreaming circles. They have concluded that the combination of drumming with personal dreams and imagery, used as portals for shamanic journeys, is just too powerful, opening direct access to the sacred and to self-healing.
    However, the practice has become so popular that it cannot be stopped. Efforts to interfere result in groups everywhere taking up the practice and it spreads like benign wildfire, cracking open the carapace of hand-me-down doctrines and entrenched skepticism. The mood is soon celebratory. Dream droughts are breaking everywhere.

I wake feeling very cheerful, even triumphant, from this dream today. I have the sense of a great wave whose ripples are being felt in many communities. My mind goes to the Singing Revolution in the Baltic. When I first visited Tallinn (where I am teaching again next month) I visited the Museum of the Occupations (note the plural noun) which preserves the memory of the suffering of Estonians under the heel of two totalitarian dictatorships, those of Hitler and Stalin. I will never forger listening to a recording of the chief of the Soviet KGB in Tallinn as people gathered in their hundreds of thousands to sing folk songs together, defying an official ban. As the singing crowd mounted, the Soviet secret police boss reported to Moscow, "We have lost". The collapse of Communism followed.
   I know the power of the combination of dreamwork and shamanic journeying that I have called Active Dreaming. There is an immense gift available in any image that comes to us spontaneously, especially in dreams we have not asked for and may or may not want. Any image that is authentic and personal can be worked with in the direction of healing and guidance.
   If you have been running away from something that scares you in dreams, you want to learn to go back and confront that fear on its own ground. You may find that what is waiting for you, beyond the fear, is your own power. You may find that by clarifying what is going on in the dream, you are able to avoid a crisis in waking life - an illness, an accident, the rupture of a relationship - that the dream has been trying to prepare you for.
    You may have met someone in a dream with whom you want to have an extended conversation, a departed loved one, a spiritual guide, an enigmatic figure you would like to identify.
    When you learn to journey through the portals of your own dreams, you will soon discover that a dream can be your gateway into the multiverse. You can use a dream door to travel to past or future or to a parallel self on a parallel life path. You can even find your way, through the space of a dream, to connect with a younger and brighter aspect or yourself that may have gone missing through pain or trauma or disappointment and bring her vital energy to reside in your heart and your life.
   This is the royal road to becoming a lucid dreamer any time of day or night.
   Steady drumming on a simple frame drum, of the kind that humans have been using for many thousands of years (first in Mongolia and Siberia) provides excellent rule and focus for this kind of journey. I have recorded my own shamanic drumming CD specifically for dream travelers
    They truly can't stop the dreamers drumming.

Photos: (1) drumming with a people of the Singing Revolution on the Bay of Riga in 2011
(2) scene on the beach in the Bahamas near the ashram where I am teaching today.