Sleep and Consciousness
Lucid Dreaming Is Only the Beginning
Why would you want to have a lucid dream? Some of the possibilities include, developing greater self awareness, getting rid of nightmares, solving work problems, even practicing your tennis stroke. If you're a tennis player and you want to practice a new angle with your wrist in order to get that shot exactly right, you can practice in your imagination and that can be helpful. But the dream is the strongest imagistic realm to which we have access. To practice there "feels" real. Sports psychologist, Paul Tholey from Germany has done a lot of work with athletes, training them in lucid dreams. In any case, it's fun, it's enjoyable, it has some psychological as well as some very pragmatic potentials, but lucidity is only the beginning.
I'm going to briefly summarize why I believe that dream lucidity is only the beginning. In my research program and in my books about lucid dreaming I have conceptualized it as the bargain basement of consciousness in sleep. Witnessing dreams and sleep are indicates of higher forms of the development of consciousness. My colleague Charles Alexander has conceptualized these "higher" states of consciousness as post-representational. Let me explain, the way we think is representational. When I think it is always about "something". There is a representation of something. Thus when I think about my children, I have feelings that represent them, I have an idea or cognition's about them, I have a mental picture about them, I have felt sense of how it is to touch them. But always they are represented. Even when I think about myself there is still representation, me the teacher, me the mother, me the middle aged-woman, me the expert, and so forth! There is always "something" that is represented in my consciousness.
In post-representational levels of consciousness our thought, feelings, sense of body, etc. is without content. It is self-referral and is sometimes called pure or transcendental consciousness. The idea that consciousness can have its own integrity, can know itself without an object, without a thing to be conscious of has been around for many thousands of years in some philosophical systems from east Asia. For those of us in the west it can feel like one of those peanut butter kind of concepts. You know what it is but its like trying to talk with peanut butter in your mouth when trying to explain it. Here's a quote from Alfred Lord Tennyson that somewhat describes this idea: "It's a kind of waking trance, I frequently had from boyhood, when I had been all alone, once as it were out of the intensity of consciousness of individuality . The individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being. And this, not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest. .utterly beyond words".
Some traditions argue that the most unambiguous marker of the development of these states of being is consciousness in sleep. These states have been called spiritual or mystical states. One of the early steps towards this consciousness in sleep is a lucid dream. But in a lucid dream although you know you're dreaming while you're dreaming you're still caught up in it. It's exciting, it's fun, you're not detached from it, which is what happens as you move into the higher forms of consciousness in sleep.
I was fortunate enough to have access to an elite group of meditators. These people are on a program of their practice all but two hours a day. They constitute extremely sophisticated observers of these states of consciousness. Lucid dreaming was described to them as a dream in which they are actively thinking of the fact that they're dreaming. One of them wrote about his lucid dreams, "I'll become aware of the dream as separate then aware that I am dreaming. Then I begin to manipulate the story and the characters to create whatever situation I desire. [At] times in unpleasant situations, I'll think as the dreamer, 'I don't have to put up with this.' And I change the dream, or at least I back out of the involvement."
Witnessing a dream was described to them as, "a dream in which you experience a quiet, peaceful inner awareness or wakefulness, completely separate from the dream". Another elite meditator wrote about this experience, "sometimes, whatever the content of the dream is, I feel an inner tranquillity of awareness that is removed from the dream. Sometimes, I may even be caught up in the dream, but the inner awareness and peace remains. It is deembedded."
One of the classic characteristics of the development of thought, the development of consciousness is a continued de-embeddedness. We think of this as wisdom, somehow things don't shake us up so much when we get older and hopefully wiser. As we move through life we become de-embedded or the term more classically used, "detached". Detachment does not mean that we don't care. Rather we've been through it and we have learned how to let those things wash over us.
Witnessing in deep sleep or relatively dreamless sleep was described to these meditators as, "a dreamless sleep in which you experience a quiet, peaceful inner state of awareness and wakefulness." One informant wrote, "It's a feeling of infinite expansion and bliss and nothing else. Then I become aware that I exist, but there is no individual personality. Gradually I become aware that I'm an individual, but there are no details who..where..what..when..etc. eventually these details fill in and I might awaken."
This state of consciousness has also been called the "void". Because there is no content or object of awareness, the only referrals are when leaving it. Thus what happens is you begin to construct not only self but also world, and finally self in world. You realize it's only a construction, a fabrication. The notion that self and the world are constructions is consistent with current information processing views of the way the brain processes information from sensory channels. What's amazing is how wrong this construction can be as in the case of eye witnesses testimony or our susceptibility to illusions. But what's more amazing is how right it can be. If you think it's just a construction it's really quite amazing that we're not killing each other more on the highways.