Lucid Dreaming Part 10

Such a piece of technology might do the same thing for would-be lucid dreamers that biofeedback machines do for novice meditators. In both cases, the technological aid might make it easier for the beginner to get started, perhaps saving him or her years of frustrating, misdirected effort. But a time will likely come when reliance on external a.s.sistance will hinder the learner's further development. Crutches may help us walk when we are weak, but until we set them aside we will never dance.

7.

The Practical Dreamer: Applications of Lucid Dreaming

Concerning electricity, a "scientific curiosity" of the eighteenth century, a woman is said to have asked Benjamin Franklin, "But what use is it?" His reply is famous: "What use, madame, is a newborn baby?" If at this stage the same question were asked in regard to lucid dreaming, a "scientific curiosity" of the twentieth century, the same answer could be given. Though for the moment we can only speculate, our work at Stanford and the accounts of other lucid dreamers suggest that, like electricity, lucid dreaming could also be harnessed to aid us in performing a variety of tasks with far greater ease. As they appear to me today, applications of lucid dreaming generally fall into four broad areas: scientific exploration; health and inner growth; creative problem solving, rehearsal, and decision making; wish fulfillment and recreation. Since the use and advantages of lucid dreaming in scientific exploration of the dream state have already been presented, we will only concern ourselves with the latter three categories.

All of the applications of lucid dreaming we will be examining are examples of creativity. Since the most general advantages offered by lucid consciousness-to both dream and waking-is the capacity for flexible and creative action, it should come as no surprise that the various applications of lucid dreaming are all, in a sense, examples of creativity. As biofeedback researchers Elmer and Alyce Green have observed,

It seems increasingly certain that healing and creativity are different pieces of a single picture. Both Swami Rama and Jack Schwarz, a Western Sufi whom we recently had a chance to work with, maintain that self-healing can be performed in a state of deep reverie ... But this "manner" of manipulation of images is also the same as that in which we find ideas being handled creatively ... for the solution of intellectual problems.

What an interesting finding!1

The Greens go on to describe what creativity means on each of three different levels: physiological, psychological, and social. In physiological terms, creativity means physical healing and regeneration; in emotional terms, it means creating att.i.tude changes that favor the establishment of inner harmony; in the mental sphere, it involves the synthesis of new ideas.

The Greens continue:

The entrance, or key, to all these inner processes, [is] a particular state of consciousness in which the gap between conscious and unconscious processes is voluntarily narrowed, and temporarily eliminated when useful. When that self-regulated reverie is established, the body can apparently be programmed at will, and the instructions given will be carried out, emotional states can be dispa.s.sionately examined, accepted or rejected, or totally supplanted by others deemed more useful, and problems insoluble in the normal state of consciousness can be elegantly resolved.2

The state of consciousness the Greens refer to is not lucid dreaming but the hypnagogic or reverie state. Nevertheless, their conclusions would seem to apply even more practically to the lucid dreaming state, in which the conscious mind confronts the unconscious face to face.

The Healing Dream

Testifying to the emotional healing power of dreams, Goethe wrote, "There have been times when I have fallen asleep in tears; but in my dreams the most charming forms have come to cheer me, and I have risen fresh and joyful."3

The use of dreams for healing was widespread in the ancient world. The sick would sleep in temples of healing, seeking dreams that would cure or at least diagnose their illness and suggest a remedy. I have mentioned this as a reminder that healing through lucid dreaming is a partly new and partly old idea. But before continuing, we need first to clarify exactly what the terms "health" and "healing" mean.

According to popular conception, a major function served by sleep and dreams is rest and recuperation. As it happens, there is scientific evidence supporting Macbeth's conception of sleep as "chief nourisher in life's feast." For example, there is a positive correlation, across many species, between the amount of sleep and the need for restoration as measured by metabolic rate. Accordingly, for humans, physical exercise leads to more sleep, especially delta sleep, which in turn releases more growth hormone. On the other hand, mental exercise or emotional stress appears to result in increases in REM sleep and in consequence, dreaming. Sleep, as a time of relative isolation from environmental challenges, allows the person to recover optimal health or the ability to respond adaptively. The healing processes of sleep are holistic, taking place on all levels of the human system. On higher psychological levels, these healing functions are probably normally accomplished during the dreams of REM sleep. I say "normally" because due to maladaptive mental att.i.tudes and habits, dreams do not always accomplish their functions, as can be seen in the case of nightmares, which we will discuss later in the chapter.

Human beings are extremely complex, multilevel living systems. It is useful, although an oversimplification, to distinguish three main levels of organization that make up what we are: biological, psychological, and social (as was mentioned earlier in relation to the Greens' research). These reflect our partial ident.i.ties as bodies, minds, and members of society. Each of these levels affects every other level, to a greater or lesser extent. For example, your blood sugar level (biology) affects how good that plate of cookies looks to you (psychology), and perhaps even whether you are hungry enough to steal (sociology). On the other hand, the degree to which you have accepted society's rules and norms affects how guilty you feel if you do steal. So how the cookies appear (psychology) depends on how hungry you are (biology) as well as on who else is around (sociology). Because of this triple-level organization, we can view humans as "biopsychosocial systems." Now, since environmental challenges (such as the one mentioned above) occur on all levels of the individual's biopsychosocial organization, from cellular to social, and since we are speaking of the whole individual's responses, the concepts of health and of healing we have developed here are holistic.

Health has been defined as "a state of optimal functioning with freedom from disease and abnormality." The domain over which this functioning ranges is life in all its complexities. In the most general terms, health can be conceived as a condition of adaptive responsiveness to the challenges of life. For responses to be "adaptive" requires at minimum that they resolve a situation in a way that is favorable and that does not disrupt the integrity, or wholeness, of the individual. Adaptive responses in some way also improve the individual's relationship to his or her environment. There are degrees of adaptiveness; the optimum is what we have defined as health.

By this definition, being healthy involves more than simply maintaining the status quo. On the contrary, when our familiar behaviors are inadequate to cope with a situation, a healthy response will include learning new, more adaptive behaviors. And when we learn new behaviors, we grow; having done so, we find ourselves better equipped than before to deal with the challenges of life.

Lucid dreaming bears a family resemblance to daydreaming, hypnagogic reverie, psychedelic drug states, hypnotic hallucinations, and other types of mental imagery. Since many members of this family have found gainful employ in therapeutic circles, it would seem reasonable to expect that lucid dreaming might also prove effective here.

According to doctors Dennis Jaffe and David Bresler, "Mental imagery mobilizes the latent, inner powers of the person, which have immense potential to aid in the healing process and in the promotion of health."4 However it works, imagery is used in a great variety of psychotherapeutic approaches, ranging from psychoa.n.a.lysis to behavior modification.

The efficacy of imagery is to a certain extent dependent upon its believability as reality, so it seems likely that healing imagery occurring in the lucid dream state could be particularly effective. This is because lucid dreams are not merely experienced as being very realistic and very vivid; without exaggeration we can say that lucid dreaming is the most vivid form of imagery likely to be experienced by normal individuals. Thus what happens in lucid dreams has an understandably powerful impact on the dreamer, both experientially and physically.

Hypnosis is a therapeutic imagery technique that could possibly be relevant to lucid dreaming. People experiencing hypnotic dreams while in deep trance relate experiences that have much in common with lucid dreams. Hypnotic dreamers are almost always at least partly lucid in their dreams, and in the deeper states they, like lucid dreamers, experience imagery as real, or almost as real, as real can be. Deeply hypnotized subjects are able to exert remarkable control over many of their physiological functions: inhibiting allergic reactions, stopping bleeding, and inducing anesthesia at will. Unfortunately, these dramatic responses are limited to the five or ten percent of the population capable of entering hypnosis very deeply, and this capability does not seem to be trainable. Lucid dreaming is, on the other hand, a learnable skill, and lucid dreams could hold the same potential for self-regulation as deep-trance hypnosis, yet be applicable to a much greater proportion of the population.

One of the most intriguing therapeutic applications of mental imagery is Carl Simonton's work with cancer patients. Dr. Simonton and his colleagues report that patients with advanced cancer who supplemented standard radiation and chemotherapy treatment with healing imagery survived, on the average, twice as long as expected by national averages. While caution seems appropriate in interpreting these results, they still suggest some very exciting possibilities. Given the direct connection between mind and body that we have demonstrated in our lucid dream experiments, it seems justifiable to hope that healing imagery during lucid dreaming might be even more effective.

The fact that our laboratory studies have revealed a high correlation between dream behavior and physiological responses presents a rare opportunity for developing an unusual degree of self-control of physiology that might prove useful for self-healing. You could conceivably carry out actions in your lucid dreams specifically designed to have whatever precise physiological consequences you may wish.

A frequently described part of the techniques commonly used by so-called "paranormal healers" consists in imagining the patient to be in a state of perfect health. Since while dreaming we generate body images in the form of our dream bodies, why shouldn't we be able to initiate self-healing processes during lucid dreams by consciously envisioning our dream bodies as perfectly healthy? Further, if our dream bodies do not appear in a state of perfect health, we can heal them symbolically in the same manner. We know from our investigations at Stanford that such things can be done. Here is a question for future lucid dream research to answer: if we heal the dream body, to what extent will we also heal the physical body?

The possibility of voluntary self-control of physiology during lucid dreaming is attractive for another reason. In general, an individual can only learn to control a physiological parameter (heart rate, brain waves, blood pressure, and so on) within the normal range of variation for a given state of consciousness. For instance, while awake, you can only deliberately alter the frequency and intensity of your brain waves within the normal limits of waking brain activity. You can increase or decrease the amount of alpha waves you produce, since they are a.s.sociated with waking, but you cannot get your brain to produce delta waves as it does when you are deeply asleep.

Now, of all the normal states of consciousness an individual pa.s.ses through every day and night, the state with the widest range of physiological variability is REM sleep. Lucid dreaming, which occurs in REM sleep, thus affords those interested in voluntary self-control the widest possible parameters in which to operate. A person with high blood pressure could probably lower his or her blood pressure with greater ease, and to a greater extent, in lucid REM sleep than in the waking state. How practical this will prove to be, and what long-term effects it might have, are open questions. But it is possible that lowered blood pressure during lucid dreaming could result in lowered blood pressure during subsequent wakefulness.

The other side of the hypothesis that positive dream imagery can foster health is that negative dream imagery can contribute to illness. Harold Levitan of McGill University has studied the dreams of psychosomatic patients. Their dreams typically involved injury to the body, and Dr. Levitan suggested that "the repet.i.tive experience of consummated trauma contributes to the malfunctioning of the physiological systems, and therefore, to the production of illness."5 This seems plausible enough. If we are willing to accept the possibility that dreams can cure, it seems we must also accept the possibility that they may harm.

Since health means increased wholeness, psychological growth often requires the reintegration of neglected or rejected aspects of the personality, and this can be consciously and deliberately achieved through the symbolic encounters of lucid dreaming. The content of a healing dream often takes the form of an integration or union of images. The self-image (or ego) is often unified with elements of what Jung called the "shadow." For simplicity, let us divide our personalities into two categories. On one side, we put all the characteristics we find agreeable and "good." These qualities are the aggregate of our self-representation or "ego." On the other side, we put all those traits and qualities we consider "bad" or dislike in ourselves, and consciously or unconsciously wish to deny. We disown them by projecting them on the mental image of an "other"-the "shadow." Note that the self-representation is incomplete, not whole: it leaves out the shadow. According to Jung, when the ego intentionally accepts aspects of the shadow, it moves toward wholeness and healthy psychological functioning.

The ability to act voluntarily according to ideals, rather than habits, allows the lucid dreamer consciously to accept, and thereby integrate, previously repressed aspects of the personality. It is the stones rejected by the builder of the ego that form the foundation of the new Self.

The importance of taking responsibility for even the "shadow" elements in one's own dreams is ill.u.s.trated by the difficulties that plagued Frederik van Eeden's dream life. "In a perfect instance of the lucid dream," wrote van Eeden, "I float through immensely wide landscapes, with a clear blue, sunny sky, and a feeling of deep bliss and grat.i.tude, which I feel impelled to express by eloquent words of thankfulness and piety."6 But for some reason, van Eeden found that these pious lucid dreams were very frequently followed by what he called "demon-dreams," in which he was typically mocked, hara.s.sed, and attacked by what he supposed to be "intelligent beings of a very low moral order."7

Jung would have probably considered van Eeden's demon-dreams as examples of compensation, striving to correct the mental imbalance produced by his ego's sense of self-righteousness and inflated piety. Nietzsche would probably have responded more aphoristically: "If a tree grows up to heaven, its roots reach down to h.e.l.l." In any case, for van Eeden, the apparent existence of these demonic holdovers from the Middle Ages was a source of considerable embarra.s.sment-was it not, after all, the twentieth century? Nevertheless, as a dedicated explorer of inner s.p.a.ce, he felt compelled to account for their presence in his dreams. It was awkward, but demons they were, without question. However, van Eeden could not bring himself to believe his mind was responsible for "all the horrors and errors of dream-life." Since it was impossible for no one to be responsible, it must be someone else-and thus van Eeden was forced to embrace the demon hypothesis. Because of this belief, he was never able to free himself from his demon-dreams, and his efforts to rid himself of them met resistance throughout his life.

Van Eeden is not the only lucid dreamer to have had problems with dream demons. Saint-Denys also met his share of "abominable monsters" in his dream explorations; how he regarded them provides an instructive contrast to van Eeden's att.i.tude. At one time, the Marquis found himself plagued by a "dreadful" recurrent nightmare:

I was not aware that I was dreaming, and imagined I was being pursued by abominable monsters. I was fleeing through an endless series of rooms. I had difficulty in opening the doors that divided them, and no sooner had I closed each door behind me than I heard it opened again by the hideous procession of monsters. They were uttering horrible cries as they tried to catch me, I felt they were gaining on me. I awoke with a start, panting and bathed in sweat.

The same nightmare, "with all its attendant terrors," recurred four times in the course of six weeks. But, "on the fourth occurrence of the nightmare," Saint-Denys wrote,

Just as the monsters were about to start pursuing me again, I suddenly became aware of my true situation. My desire to rid myself of these illusory terrors gave me the strength to overcome my fear. I did not flee, but instead, making a great effort of will, I put my back up against the wall, and determined to look the phantom monsters full in the face. This time I would make a deliberate study of them, and not just glance at them, as I had on previous occasions.

In spite of his lucidity, he "experienced a fairly violent emotional shock at first," explaining that "the appearance in dreams of something one has been dreading to see can still have a considerable effect on one's mind, even when one is forewarned against it." Nevertheless, the intrepid lucid dreamer continued,

I stared at my princ.i.p.al a.s.sailant. He bore some resemblance to one of those bristling and grimacing demons which are sculptured on cathedral porches. Academic curiosity soon overcame all my other emotions. I saw the fantastic monster halt a few paces from me, hissing and leaping about. Once I had mastered my fear his actions appeared merely burlesque. I noticed the claws on one of his hands, or paws, I should say. There were seven in all, each very precisely delineated. The monster's features were all precise and realistic: hair and eyebrows, what looked like a wound on his shoulder, and many other details. In fact, I would cla.s.s this as one of the clearest images I had had in dreams. Perhaps this image was based on a memory of some Gothic bas-relief. Whether this was so or not, my imagination was certainly responsible for the movement and colour in the image. The result of concentrating my attention on this figure was that all his acolytes vanished, as if by magic. Soon the leading monster also began to slow down, lose precision, and take on a downy appearance. He finally changed into a sort of floating hide, which resembled the faded costumes used as street-signs by fancy-dress shops at carnival-time. Some unremarkable scenes followed, and finally I woke up.8

And that was the end of Saint-Denys' nightmares.

The nearest thing I have had to a "demon-dream" was the "riot in the cla.s.sroom" lucid dream (quoted in Chapter 1) in which I successfully accepted and integrated one of my demons-the repulsive ogre. It seems clear on several levels that this was a healing dream. In the first place, the initial conflict-an unhealthy condition of stress-was resolved positively. Also, the dream ego was able to accept the barbarian as a part of itself, and thus move toward wholeness. Finally, there is more direct evidence-the feeling of increased wholeness and well-being that I experienced upon awakening.

There are alternatives to this technique of intentional acceptance and a.s.similation. Another of my dreams provides an example of a healing lucid dream that made use of symbolic transformation. I had just returned from a journey and was carrying a bundle of bedding and clothes down the street, when a taxi pulled up, blocking my way. Two men in the taxi and one outside it threatened me with robbery and violence. Somehow I realized I was dreaming, and immediately attacked the three muggers, heaping them into a formless pile and setting fire to them. Out of their ashes I arranged for flowers to grow, and I awoke feeling filled with vibrant energy.

In contrast to the receptive strategy I followed in the cla.s.sroom riot dream, I took an active approach in this dream, using the purifying symbol of fire to transform the negative image of the muggers into the positive image of the flowers. The main justification I have for considering this a healing dream was how good I felt after I awoke. And the muggers? I somehow felt they were happier being flowers!

The two lucid dreams I have just discussed ill.u.s.trate an important psychotherapeutic principle: it may not be necessary to interpret the dream in order to resolve personality conflicts. In many cases, these conflicts can be resolved symbolically in the dream itself. While the barbarian and the muggers might well have symbolically represented some hidden att.i.tude, quality, or aspect of myself that I had been attempting to reject and deny admission to my "ego" or self-image, I was able to resolve them without even having to know what they represented. So, my acceptance or transformation of the dream characters represented a symbolic acceptance or transformation of whatever unidentified emotion, behavior, or role they stood for. Interpretation may cast an interesting sidelight on the matter, but it would seem to me, in these cases, to be an entirely optional one.

The same two dreams provide ill.u.s.trations of another important guiding principle in the psychotherapeutic use of lucid dreaming. In both cases, I attributed healing qualities to the lucid dreams on the basis of how I felt upon awakening. I have found from experience that the feelings I am left with after a lucid dream reliably indicate my intuitive evaluation of my behavior in that dream. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that "if it feels good, it is good." What I am saying is that "if it feels good afterward, it was good." This is the compa.s.s by which I have charted my personal explorations through the lucid-dream world. If I do something in a lucid dream that I feel good about later, I do it in future lucid dreams. If I feel bad about what I have done, I avoid that action in later lucid dreams. Following this policy, of course, leads to increasingly good feelings in my lucid dreams. And rather than recommending to my students any more particular course of action in their lucid dreams, I advise them to follow the same general path: "It's your dream. Try it and see how you feel afterward. If you listen to your own conscience, you need no other rule."

Nightmares and Anxiety Reduction

Nightmares, according to Freud, are the result of m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic wish-fulfillment. The basis of this curious notion was Freud's unshakable conviction that every dream represented the fulfillment of a wish. "I do not know why the dream should not be as varied as thought during the waking state," wrote Freud, tongue in cheek. "... In one case it would be a fulfilled wish, in another a realized fear, or again a reflection persisting into sleep, an intention, or a piece of creative thought."9 For his own part, Freud wrote, "I should have nothing against it. ... There is only a trifling obstacle in the way of this more convenient conception of the dream; it does not happen to reflect reality."10 If, for Freud, every dream was nothing but the fulfillment of a wish, the same must be true for nightmares: the victims of nightmares must secretly wish to be humiliated, tortured, or persecuted.

Since the mirror in which I see reality reflected is different from Freud's, I do not necessarily see every dream as the expression of a wish; nor do I view nightmares as m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic wish-fulfillment, but rather as the unhappy result of unhealthy reactions. The anxiety experienced in nightmares can be seen as an indication of the failure of the dream process to function effectively. Anxiety arises when we encounter a fear-provoking situation against which our habitual patterns of behavior are useless. If a person experiences a recurring anxiety dream, what he or she obviously needs is a new approach for coping with the situation represented by the dream. This may not be easy to find, since the dream undoubtedly results from unresolved conflicts that the dreamer does not want to face in waking life. It may be difficult to fix the nightmare without fixing the personality that gave rise to it. But this qualification applies mainly to chronically maladjusted personalities. If you are a relatively normal person who has nightmares only occasionally, the prognosis is much more favorable. That is, provided you meet a certain requirement-being willing to take responsibility for your experience and, in particular, for your dreams. If you fulfill this condition, then an exceedingly powerful tool for coping with anxiety dreams is available to you: lucid dreaming.

To find out how lucidity aids the dreamer in working through anxiety-provoking situations, consider the following a.n.a.logy. Let us compare the non-lucid dreamer to a small child terrified of the dark. The child really believes there are monsters there. The lucid dreamer would perhaps be an older child, still afraid of the dark yet no longer believing that there are really monsters out there. This older child might be afraid, but would know there was nothing to be afraid of, and could master the fear. Thus it is with the lucid dreamer. Biologically speaking, anxiety serves a special function. It results from the simultaneous occurrence of two conditions: one is fear in regard to some situation we find threatening; the other is an a.s.sessment that an unfavorable outcome is unavoidable. In other words, we experience anxiety when we are afraid of something, and have nothing in our repertoire of learned or habitual behaviors that will help us overcome or evade what we fear. Anxiety functions to prompt us to scan our situations more carefully and reevaluate possible courses of action in search of an overlooked solution-in short, to become more conscious. This is likely to be adaptive just because the conclusion that no habitual behavior will help calls for nonhabitual, intentional, or novel behavior.

So when we experience anxiety in our dreams, the most adaptive response would be to become lucid and face the situation in a creative manner. In fact, anxiety does seem to result fairly frequently in spontaneous lucidity, even in children. It may even be the case that our anxiety dreams would always become lucid, if we were taught about this response.

Regarding the treatment of childhood dream anxiety, Mary Arnold-Forster mentioned having helped children overcome nightmares with a touch of lucidity, and I can relate a similar experience myself. Once, when I was making long-distance small talk with my niece, I brought out my favorite hobby-horse and inquired, "How are your dreams lately?" Madeleina, then seven years old, burst out with the description of a fearful nightmare. She had dreamed that she had gone swimming, as she often did, in the local reservoir. But this time, she had been threatened and terrified by a little-girl-eating shark! I sympathized with her fear and added, matter of factly, "But of course you know there aren't really any sharks in Colorado." She replied, "Of course not!" So I continued, "Well, since you know there aren't really any sharks where you swim, if you ever see one there again, it would be because you were dreaming. And, of course, a dream shark can't really do you any harm. It's only frightening if you don't know that it's a dream. But once you do know that you're dreaming, you can do whatever you like-you could even make friends with the dream shark, if you wanted to! Why not give it a try?" Madeleina seemed intrigued and soon proved that she had bitten the bait. A week later, she telephoned to announce proudly, "Do you know what I did? I rode on the back of the shark!" Whether this approach to children's nightmares always produces such impressive results I have no way of knowing, but it is certainly worth exploring.