Telling a dream inside a dream

In the Babylonian Talmud it is stated that “Three types of dreams are destined to be fulfilled. These are: a dream one sees in the morning, just before he wakes up; a dream that his friend dreamt about him; and a dream that is interpreted within a dream. And some say: a dream that was repeated is likewise destined to be fulfilled.” (Berakhot 55b)

I can't endorse all of this. I don't agree with the last statement. A dream that is repeated may be a warning that is being issued again and again. However we also confuse "repeated" dreams with serial dreams in which the action is evolving and changing from one installment to the next.

"A dream one sees in the morning" may indeed be psychic, showing things at a distance in place and time. I often catch glimpses of what is going to happen in the near future when I linger in the hypnopompic state after sleep. When we dream of others, our perceptions may have an objectivity that is harder to attain when we are entangled with our own hopes and fears; however we may not understand what we are seeing.

What I want to explore here is the phenomenon of telling a dream inside a dream. I do this quite often. It is rarely a case of old-fashioned dream interpretation; I find that far too limited. It is often a case of sharing the energy, as well as the content of a dream while inside another dream - and of taking some action to apply what is being shared. Here are some examples from my journals.

On the Beach in Brazil

August 11, 2013

I love the wild beach. Water, wind and light stream together. This calls for Turner's brush. I run in and out of the water with two lovely younger women who have trained with me.

I feel myself being gently pulled out of the dream, but I want to stay with it, enjoying its energy and trying to hold every detail: the island across the waves, the buildings on the rise above the sand dunes, the palms swaying in the wind. Is this the beach in Brazil where I'll be leading a workshop later this month? It is very like it.

I let the scene go and proceed to describe it to the women who were with me in the dream. One of them needs some counsel for a friend who is going through a painful life passage. The other wants to explore some marketing ideas we began to discuss in the beach dream.

I stretch, and open my eyes, and sit up in bed. I am now in a spacious, pleasant room where more than a dozen happy people are gathered around the walls. They seem to have been waiting for me to wake up. They are all students of mine, and all but two are women. I joke that it is my good fortune in life to go everywhere surrounded by beautiful women. We are in the midst of a retreat I am leading. Our laughter is interrupted by a matronly figure, the manager of the place, who comes through a door to my right I had not noticed before to remind us that checkout time is 12 noon.

Oh, very well. I go out through the door she used to get my stuff together. I go outside the house, and now seem to be in a different country. I overhear part of the conversation of friends in that country and get a picture of a certain situation that may be useful. I leave them to it and go back inside the house. Funny, I can't seem to return to my room the way that I left it. The layout of this house is rather unusual. When I stepped outside, I was in another country. When I go back in, I am not where I was before.

I rose from this dream this morning, in my regular bed, in excellent spirits. I amused myself by counting the number of dream scenes that opened from each other here. There was (1) the scene on the wild beach (2) the scene where I am discussing this with the two women who were with me on the beach; (3) the bedroom with the party crowd; and (4) the outside scene where I listen to the conversation of people from yet another country, apparently in that country.

I smiled at a very familiar motif. Remembering a dream inside a dream is a common experience for me. So is telling a dream inside another dream. This sometimes triggers dream lucidity in the narrow sense of becoming aware that you are dreaming inside a dream. Sometimes it brings the ability to navigate and draw knowledge from multiple realities in whatever state of reality and consciousness we happen to be in.

Called by Sea Eagle

Back in 1994, I dreamed that a sea eagle was wrestling with me on a beach for possession of the Australian hat I used to wear in those days. The struggle felt altogether physical. I reported the dream to a large audience in an auditorium at a conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams (ASD)*. Then I woke up in my bed, several months before that conference took place. The tussle with the sea eagle helped to prepare me for a very important life transition that was going to require my return to Australia. The scene where I told the dream, within a second dream, had more than entertainment value (though I never underrate that).

When I recorded the dream, I noted that I was speaking in an auditorium with chairs bolted to the floor in tilted rows under sterile lightning. This was quite the wrong environment for the workshop I had agreed to lead at the ASD conference, in which I planned to have people choose partners and journey together with the aid shamanic drumming. I called one of the ASD organizers and learned than the scheduled location for my workshop was identical to the auditorium in my dream. It was now time to tell the dream in which I was telling a dream to someone in the dream of waking life. By doing that, I was able to have my workshop venue changed to a dreamier space.

In a Sea Plane with the Professor

November 17, 1995

Here's another example of telling a dream inside a dream:

I am being piloted by an elderly professor in a small seaplane over a mountain range. As we dip low, over the reddish peaks, I remark that this reminds me of a dream in which I was flying in a similar plane over a cordillera, and how this kind of plane has always appealed to my sense of romance and adventure. We swoop low over a body of water. The sensations of flight and movement are wonderfully vivid.

 “This is like a dream!” I exclaim in delight.

It's like a dream because it is a dream. Like life.

 

Driving with My Father

I have dreamed of the departed for as long as I can remember. Our interaction usually feels perfectly normal, though information is shared that is beyond what is accessible to me in ordinary reality. I become aware that I am in another reality, where those who died on Earth are very much alive. I become lucid in that sense but rarely say to myself "I must be dreaming". One of the occasions when I did is noted in this journal report in which I proceeded to tell a dream within another dream. 

May 1, 1994 

My father takes me for a drive. The steering wheel is on the right. We are having a wonderful time. His moral support and counsel are immensely encouraging and steadying, at a time when my emotions and thoughts have been confused by various encounters with other people, including a couple of pushy tabloid reporters who want to write articles on my psychic abilities.

I realize I must be dreaming, because I remember that my father died in 1987.

I don’t want to lose the wonderful experience of the dream. I resolve to stay with it and explore its conditions more carefully. I start to open the car door, intending to make a small alteration in the dream scene, to confirm that I am dreaming and able to transform elements in the dream. When I open the door just a crack, I find the car is surrounded by pulsing white light, without form or dimension.

Now I wake up and describe my dream to others, possibly including the tabloid reporters.

When I wake up back in my body in bed, I realize that the dream lucidity I thought I had achieved was lucidity in a dream-within-a-dream. It strikes me that this is a metaphor for life.

[*] Now the International Association for the Study of Dreams

Photos: Praia Morro das Pedras Negras, Santa Catarina Island by Robert Moss

On Leaving a Dream

When I leave a dream, I often feel that I step from one room into another. It's a "just so" feeling. I was there, and now I am here. When I exit a dream, I avoid saying "I woke up." That is such a boring way to end a dream narrative. And it's entirely possible that when I open my eyes in one reality, I have fallen asleep in another world that is no less real. When I finish recounting a dream adventure, I may say. "then I left that scene" or, “then I came back to my bedroom”. Sometimes, of course, the exit is less gentle. I return to the dormant body in the bed with a thump, feeling that I just fell to Earth or was dragged out of my dream life in chains. Sometimes the dream stays with me, and I am in both locations - the bedroom and that other room - in a state of dual consciousness after I come back to my body. I am often aware that, when I step out of a dream, the dream and its players may go on without me, leading autonomous life. I have the impression I am not wholly absent from these scenes. A second self has assumed my role - or reclaimed the role I took on for the time of the dream.

Photo: Jean-Robert Ipoustéguy, "Man Passing through Door" in Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.

Through the Skylight: Adepts who take on bodies

The light comes on at the top of my head. It is bright, white and steady and I know there is no cause for alarm. It is like the opening of a skylight. I sense that a circle of benign tutelary presences has been formed, and is beaming a communication to me. The theme is the deliberate incarnation of a succession of adepts who teach and inspire humanity. I am able to record the following:

     “This is truth: there is a line of spiritual masters, known to each other across the ages, who watch over humans and are alert to the stirrings of spiritual understanding and intellectual achievement. From time to time they take on bodies voluntarily. Their descent into the body is both mourned and honored.
     “Born remembering, they are nonetheless exposed to the phenomenon of memory loss. Unless closely supported and protected, they are feared and resented, as unnatural, as “demons”, as illegitimate bastards. Hence the stories of efforts to put them to death: of Moses in the rushes, of Asklepios exposed on the mountain. Alternatively, in some traditions they are welcomed and even worshiped, but may become pawns for greedy and ambitious theocracies.”

Origin: This journal entry, from New Year's morning, 1999, surfaced during one of my bouts of bibliomancy (divination by book) in my old journals. It describes an experience unfolding in the hypnopompic zone, the place between sleep and awake - prime real estate for adventurers in consciousness. 

Skylight photo by RM

Blue dreams

Before dawn on my first morning back in Prague, I have a thrilling experience in the liminal space between sleep and awake. Behind closed eyelids, I see an opening like the outline of an eye. Through it, I look into a marvelous blue deep, the deep blue of ocean. I flow through the blue portal. The seascape is vividly alive, yet neither literal nor artificial. I feel I am in a living painting, where imagination can shapeshift and generate forms. I can see to the other side of the ocean, which now seems to shrink to the size of a lake. I am now in a city. It seems normal enough, and pleasant. I do not know the name of this city. It may be in another reality. I am ready to explore, but want to check that I can get back to the body I left in the bed in my Prague hotel. I open my eyes. Yep, I'm still in the body I left here a little while ago. What's with that blue depth, and that portal? I have been thinking about the term "blue dream" which in Spanish (sueño azul) also means "daydream". I've been looking to freshen the vocabulary we use to describe various types of dreaming, including dreaming wide awake, eyes open, when you are IN your physical body but things around you are unfolding with oneiric logic, in the way of a dream.

I have a lunch date at the Cafe Imperial, an art deco palace where it isn't hard to recognize that you may be dreaming with your eyes open, with a wonderful Czech artist, psychologist and dream teacher, Kamila Ženatá. I am curious to see whether my blue vision will resonate with her. The story gets better. She has a fabulous gift for me, a painting of a blue seascape she had made for me. The male figure out there in the water is me. Her title: "Robert IN the shoreline".

In the place between sleep and awake

Prague

How I love to lie, after sleep, in a state of horizontal meditation. Sometimes my thoughts and images stream from a dream I remember or that now slips through the curtain between the worlds. Often I am simply attending, in a relaxes way, to the forms and pictures that surface, fresh and unexpected, from a creative matrix that now becomes available.

     On my first morning back in Prague, I was startled, but not altogether surprised, to observe a large number of people advancing towards me from bank of the Vltava River. They were well dressed in middle-class winter clothes, dark topcoats and hats, male and female, mostly adults. I indicated that they should choose one to speak.
     The man who came forward had a German name I will not make public here.  He told me that had been try to cross Nový Most, but there was a problem. I walked with him to the bridge, try to understand. He demonstrated by stepping out onto the bridge. He got only so far - perhaps to the middle - when he was bounced back, as if he had run into an invisible rubber wall. I understood now that he and the others were dead but had not yet been able to make their crossing. They seemed like decent people, but I wondered about the history here. For example, what had this German been doing in World War II?

     I stirred from this scene, not feeling an obligation to stay with this group.

     Later, a scene opened like the cover of a children's book with a scene of a bright starry sky above rooftops, framed by a colored border that made the whole thing look like a stage. Big words floated in the sky: FRUTA DE DESCANSO. I knew this menat "Fruit of Rest" and thought it might be a delightful invitation. I entered into the spirit. I was drawn into enjoyable sideshows and spectacles. The whole thing had the quality of a mild and gentle version of Carnaval.

     After a bathroom break and some time online, I lay down again and heard an inner voice. The in-between space between sleep and awake is a good place to entertain inner and transpersonal guides, but when the contact seems new, you want to check its reliability. This voice told me encouraging things about myself and my possible accomplishments as teacher and healer, but I felt the need to follow it into its home realm.

    I willed myself to rise above the body and seek face-to-face contact. I did not lose contact with my physical body; some pains resulting from recent wear and tear helped to ensure that. I succeeded in finding a place that reminded me of a school of advanced studies on the other side. The entrance was quite different, though. It became something like the portal of huge, immensely elongated rocket ship. I was given to understand that beings here do not need to retain human form and that knowledge here can be stored in forms other than my beloved books.

    I asked for a name for the guiding intelligence that was with me. He said I could think of him as the Rememberer, or the Memorialist, within my larger Self. To demonstrate what he remembers, he surprised me by putting me on a bus full of radiant beings. They all looked like children between ten and twelve years old. Around them, I saw luminous "shadows" - shapes in their energy fields - that provided hints of who and what they are, as adults, even very old ones, in other places and times.
    Why did we all appear as children? It was indicated that this was because I had been brought to a place of despatch, from which all us - related personalities with related missions - were sent out across time 

There was much, much more. I let many of the images and openings come and go without involvement or attachment. This part is no doubt familiar to meditators. More familiar to active dreamers is the choice to follow a certain encounter or portal that is offered into a lucid dream adventure - as with the group of the dead trying to cross the New Bridge, or the invitation to enjoy the Fruits of Rest in a latino funfair environment.

    I drifted into sleep dream before ending the adventures. I thought I was at home, engaged in a fascinating online conference with vibrant African music in the background. The layout of my house was inverted. My study was at the top instead of the bottom. I did not notice this anomaly in the dream. I was interrupted by the early arrival of the mailman downstairs. I padded down to collect the mail. It was voluminous, filling twice the normal space. I gathered it up, but woke before I had the chance to go through it. Opening my dream mail is clearly an assignment for another period between sleep and awake.

Note: Sleep researchers call the state of consciousness I describe here the hypnopompic zone. I like the phrase used by Tinker Bell in the movie Peter Pan, when she tells Peter, "Look for me in the place between sleep and awake. There you will always find me."
    

At the door to the dream vault

People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

- Rumi

It happened again this morning. Noises in the house ripped me out of sleep in the early morning, and my dreams fled from me as I tried to grab them, groggy and disoriented, hurled too quickly from their world into the bedroom.
    I padded to the bathroom, grumpy. I went back to bed and made it my game to place myself at the door to the dreamworld. I sensed the presence of a favorite gatekeeper, the black dog. Then a portal appeared, vivid on my inner screen. It was a large round opening, big enough for me to step through without stooping. Its shape and the impression of locking mechanisms made it look like an open hatch in a spacecraft. Or the open door of a bank vault.
    I went through, without setting any firm intention about where I wanted to go. I found myself, immediately, in a tunnel. There was the sense of a benign wind in the tunnel, pushing me forward at increasing speed. I came out on a road beside water. I saw a pleasant village ahead of me, fishing boats and pleasure boats tied up at the docks. As I entered the scene more deeply, I found I was in Canada. It was a pleasant visit, just-so, eh.
    This little experience of entering lucid dreaming from the hypnopompic state (the liminal state after waking) leads me to offer a few more reflections about what to do when our dreams seem to be locked away on the other side of a sealed door.
     You've been into a deep place, full of valuable things you'd like to bring back with you. But as you leave the treasure house, a door swings shut behind you. Maybe you try to catch the door before it closes, but it's so heavy and its movement so strong that you frequently find you can't manage that.
    When the door is sealed tight behind you, you may look for a way to reopen it. But the combination is tricky, and there may be a time release, as with the doors to some vaults. that won't open until a certain hour or date unless you can find a supervisor or an override mechanism.
     Many people just shrug and go about the business of the day, leaving the door between the worlds shut. Some people dedicate themselves to keeping it shut, because they don't make room in their lives for dreams or because something once happened on the other side that scared them. But even the most passionate and dedicated dreamers go through periods when the vault door slams shut, morning after morning, leaving the strange feeling that we are missing out on something really important.
     I have recorded many thousands of my own dreams over the years, sometimes a dozen from one night. Because I know just how much goes on in the dream worlds, I get edgy when I find I have lost my night dreams. Yes, I make a practice of living as if everything around me is a set of dream symbols. And I have developed many techniques for entering states of conscious dreaming, including the use of shamanic drumming. But I treasure the gifts of spontaneous night dreams, especially the ones we don't ask for and may or may not want, because they hold up a magic mirror to our lives and show us things with an objectivity we can rarely achieve in ego-centered consciousness. They may also be adventures across time and in other dimensions of reality. 
    Dreaming is social as well as individual. We get out and about and meet others: other dreamers, the deceased, beings other-than-human. Sometimes I feel that behind the door of the bank vault is a lively, well-appointed restaurant, as in the photos from a converted bank in Butte, Montana.
     Let's assume you know all about setting an intention for the night. (My favorite one is "Show me what I need to see.") And that you have trained yourself to be ready to catch and record dreams at whatever hour you stir from them. But now you are finding that, despite your best efforts, that heavy metal door keeps swinging shut behind you, keeping the treasure (and the beauty or terror or both) down in the vault. What to do?
     See if there is a wisp that followed you as the door was closing, or slipped through the tiniest crack before it was sealed airtight. In ancient Mesopotamia, dreams were called "zephyrs" because, like little breezes, they can slip through a chink in the ordinary world. Stand under the shower, or sit with a cup of tea, and see whether the wisp will reveal itself in the rush of the water or the rising steam. If you can grab that wisp, it can take you back behind the sealed door, in its own special way.
      If you can't catch even a wisp, be alert for how the logic of the dreams you missed may now be playing out in the world around you. Find signs and symbols as the day unfolds, and read them as if they were dreams.
     As general practice, we want to learn how to slow down the closing of that tremendous door, by schooling ourselves to linger in the twilight zone between sleep and waking. Instead of jumping out of bed when you wake, however you wake, see if you can stay for a time between the worlds, in the twilight state that researchers call the hypnopompic or hypnagogic zone. A great place to develop the practice of conscious or lucid dreaming.
    You might try this, when you wake up and find your dreams are missing. Picture yourself standing in the doorway between the worlds. It is open, like the door of the bank vault in the photographs. One one side is your dormant body in the bed. On the other is an adjacent world, a world from which your traveling self is returning. You can look both ways. If you are crafty, you may be able to tiptoe back into the vault and grab something you can bring back to the daylight side. It could be pure gold. Or the deed to a magic kingdom.
     

Yeats' secret working mind and the importance of Edmund Dulac

I dreamed again into the secret working mind of W.B.Yeats, my favorite dead poet. Of a story he wrote, unpublished in his lifetime, from encounters with the ghost of an eight-year-old boy. Of a fierce poetic vision of a man who kept a severed head that rose up in the night with blazing eyes.
     When I sought to reenter the dream, it seemed the boy’s name began with H and may have been “Henry”.
     An inner voice spoke of the importance of Edmund Dulac.

I was thrilled. I knew there was a treasure map in this dream, and I wanted to use it immediately. I ran to my books. Dreams give us research assignments and sometimes these feel urgent. 
     I remembered that Edmund Dulac was a famous book illustrator and painter to the Faerie courts, and a friend of Yeats. I confirmed that Dulac painted the portrait of the poet's wife

Georgie that is on the cover of Becoming George, the vast (and vastly excellent) biography by Ann Saddlemyer that is in my Yeats collection.
     Dulac created images for the 1925 version of Yeats' extraordinary mystical book A Vision.These include the portrait of the fictional Giraldus – with something of Yeats’s hawk-like features – used as the frontispiece. My inner communication in the hypnompic state left me with the impression that Dulac may have been more involved in Yeats’s magic and encounters with the spirits than I had known.

Life called, and I left my research at this point, nearly four years ago, on the morning of January 9, 2012. Now that I have a little leisure to open old journals and follow their leads, I returned to the possible importance of Edmund Dulac.

    I discovered that the artist and the poet saw a great deal of each other in the dark time of the Great War. They attended a seance together in 1917 in which they tried to summon the Wise Men of the East, with the Orientalist Edward Dennison Ross on hand in case translation from Persian, Arabic or Turkish was required. [1]
    In a lecture on Art and Magic, Dulac declared in 1924 that “the greatest desire of man in all ages has been the establishment of a means of communication with the rest of the universe.” He joined Yeats in experiments in spirit communication, magical evocation and mutual visioning.
    They were both lovers of fairies and fairy story. Yeats painted the realms of Faerie with his words, Dulac with his brush.
    They worked together to bring Japanese-inspired Noh plays and mythic dramas, including "At the Hawk's Well" (which In saw in Toronto a few years ago) to stage and salon.
     Both sought a new mythology for their century that would make room for the return of Immortals from other times and dimensions. Both turned, again and again, to the legend of the Magi as a key to the confluence of spiritual traditions and the transformation of the Christian story. Yeats wrote an eerie, haunting, dream-infused story, "The Adoration of the Magi"(1897) and later a poem, "The Magi" (1914) 

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,   

In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones   

Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky   

With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,   

And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,   

And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,   

Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,   

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

Three years later, Dulac painted an extraordinary picture of "The Three Wise Men" in the style of a Persian or Mughal miniature. The costumes and the stance of the Magi evoke different traditions, Persian, African, Chinese. The placement of the Virgin's hands around the infant Jesus gives him the look of a miniature Shiva Nataraj.
    I discovered this painting only today. In storage at the Williams College Museum of Art, it appears to have been overlooked by scholars and art historians until a remarkable researcher, Jaimee K. Comstock-Skipp, brought it to light in a wonderful article for Relegere. [2] I am grateful that round two of my dream-inspired research brought me to this.
    I still need to track the ghost story of H and the tale of the severed head. I may of course be required to write them, if my Yeats is willing. [3] Dreams set many kinds of assignments.

References

1. Christopher Blake (ed) “Ghosts in the Machine: Yeats and the Metallic Homunculus,
with Transcripts of Reports by W.B. Yeats and Edmund Dulac,” Yeats Annual 15 (2002).

2. Jaimee K. Comstock-Skipp “’ To be an Infidel or an Unbeliever…’ Five Wise Men: Edmund Dulac, W.B.Yeats, and The Magi” in Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception 3, no.2 (2013)

3. For my dreams and visions of Yeats over many years, please see my books The Dreamer's Book of the Dead (Rochester VT: Destiny Books, 2004) chapter 8, and The Boy Who Died and Came Back (Novato CA: New World Library) chapter 37.

Pictures: (1) Edmund Dulac, "The Garden of Paradise: Fairy of the Garden"; (2) Edmund Dulac, "Mrs W.B. Yeats"; (3) Michio Ito as guardian in "At the Hawk's Well" (1916)

Breath Slippers are So Wild

It can be delicious to loiter with intent in that liminal zone that Tinker Bell recommended to Peter Pan: the place between sleep and awake.
   I love to do this in the morning when I don't have to rush off into the world right away, and and my dog allows me (when I am home) to delay his first walk for a bit. If I have the memory of a dream that intrigues me, I will stay with it, and let more of the adventure unfold.
   Sometimes I simply lay open to the rise and fall of images. When I make it my practice to remain an observer as the images come and go, I joke that I am doing horizontal meditation. But I am often poised to be more than an observer, by entering a scene that interests me and becoming a lucid traveler within its territory, and often beyond that.
   This morning, I woke early with the clear light of a chill autumn morning, dappled by the trees outside my house, slipping through the blinds. I remembered that I had been in London in my last dream, and decided to stay in bed, close to the dream scene, and see whether I could simply move back into it.
    Immediately the scene became vividly alive. All my senses were engaged as I walked towards an elegant restaurant under a colonnade, on my way to lunch. The area seemed very quiet. I wondered whether the restaurant was open. However, when I stepped inside with my companion, I saw that many of the tables were already occupied. I was slightly irritated when we were ushered to a table that was pushed right up against a smaller table where another couple were seated. It seemed quite impossible to have a private conversation under these circumstances.
     But my feelings changed as we started talking to the other couple. They were quite charming. The man was French, the woman English, and our conversation proceeded in alternate bursts of both languages. Another couple, at a table on the other side, joined in, in the same fashion. I was pleased to discover that my French was better, under these impromptu circumstances, than I usually give myself credit for. We talked about Montpellier, and the adventures I lead at a center near Montpellier,
    This was all entirely realistic. I can taste the butter served at the table, and feel the fizz of the sparkling water on my tongue. Soon I was traveling to various locations in London and Paris at the invitation of the new friends met at the table. I felt the joy of new friendship and of the meeting of minds as we discussed topics ranging from the Existentialists to how leaves change color in the fall.
    As I sped from one site to another, I noted that I was not using any obvious form of transportation other than my own two feet. I seemed to have developed the abilities of a human hovercraft. If I took a step, I would glide forward as far as it pleased me, across the English Channel, or from the Gare du Nord to Montparnasse. I had the impression - always at least vaguely aware that I had a body in the bed - that my giant steps were powered by my breath.
    I am wearing breath slippers! I laughed inwardly. This seemed all the more funny to me given the fact that I never wear ordinary slippers. I thought of Mercury with his winged sandals.
 

  
At no point did I try to control my experiences over the couple of hours I spent in this state. I did make it my intention - successfully - to look in on a special friend, and to walk again through the colonnade of lime (or linden) trees in the garden of the Palais Royal in Paris. However, for the most part I simply followed the flow of the encounters and opportunities that were presented to me, exercising choice without trying to control events by imposing any agenda - other than to relax and have fun.
    

I wrote here recently about a simple method for lucid dream induction that I call SO WILD. You go to Sleep, remaining Open to whatever may come. You Wake and then, when you are ready, you set an Intention to embark on Lucid Dreaming. We will be experimenting with this new technique in my next course for The Shift Network, "Active Dreaming: The Essential Training." Classes start on December 10.

Drawing by RM
Photo of trees at the Palais Royal by RM