Lucid Dreaming Part 11

Is there any evidence that lucid dreaming in this manner leads to any lasting benefits? I believe there is, and my own earlier experiences fit this pattern. Anxiety appeared to lead to lucidity in thirty-six percent of my first year's lucid dreams (sixty percent during the first six months.) In contrast, by the second year, anxiety was present when I recognized that I was dreaming in only about nineteen percent of my lucid dreams. During the third year, anxiety appeared in only five percent, and in one percent or less in the following four years. I attribute the decrease in the number and proportion of anxiety dreams to my practice of resolving conflicts during lucid dreams. This reduction seems especially impressive in light of the fact that my life has become much more stressful and demanding in the latter years. If something weren't resolving the stress of my daily life, I would be experiencing waking anxiety with concomitant increases in dream anxiety. It may therefore be the case that lasting benefit comes from "responsible" lucid dreaming of the sort I have been practicing-facing and dealing directly with dream conflict and anxiety in lucid dreams can result in more adaptive behaviors while asleep and perhaps while awake. In regard to my lucid dreams, I believe there is a convincing argument that this is so. First, suppose it were not. Suppose, on the contrary, that facing my fears and loving my dream enemies was an ineffective-or worse, unhealthy-activity. If this were the case, I should have found that I was continuing to have as many or even more anxiety dreams than before. Even if my methods of so-called "self-integration" were merely harmless palliatives-putting, as it were, a bandage on the dream-still there would be no reason to expect improvement. Yet the fact is that my lucid dreams became significantly more anxiety-free from one year to the next. Obviously, I was doing something right.

Yet someone could reasonably object that I have merely learned not to become lucid during anxiety dreams. This is by no means a far-fetched objection; however, it fails to account for all the relevant facts. First of all, the dreamer is always supposed to awaken from the cla.s.sical anxiety dream. According to Freud, the function of anxiety in a dream is to wake the dreamer whenever the going gets too rough. Thus we would not expect a dreamer to sleep through the worst of his nightmares. But in my case, as I explained earlier, I have learned to utilize anxiety itself as an infallible lucidity cue. In the past six years, I have not been awakened once from a dream by anxiety, as should have happened if I were having non-lucid nightmares. During this period, sufficient anxiety has always led to my awakening in my dream rather than from it, thereby affording me the opportunity to face my fears and resolve my conflicts.

This is a very important potential of lucid dreaming, since when we "escape" from a nightmare by awakening, we have not dealt with the problem of our fear or our frightening dream, but merely relieved the fear temporarily and repressed the fearful dream. Thus we are left with an unresolved conflict as well as negative and unhealthy feelings. On the other hand, staying with the nightmare and accepting its challenge, as lucidity makes possible, allows us to resolve the dream problem in a fashion that leaves us more healthy than before. So if, as I have suggested, healing was the original intent of the dream that became a nightmare, lucidity can aid the redemption of the dream gone wrong.

The flexibility and self-confidence that lucidity brings in its wake greatly enhances the dreamer's ability to master situations presented by dreams. I believe the habit of flexibility to be well worth developing in lucid dreams. In addition to being highly effective in the dream world, it is also generally applicable in the waking world. Indeed, it may at times be the only course of action open to you. In most situations, it would be unrealistic to expect other people to change in the ways you may want them to. You cannot always, or even often, get others to do what you want; you may not even be able to prevent them from doing exactly what you don't want. Nonetheless, at every moment, whether dreaming or waking, you have the power to reframe the way you see the circ.u.mstances you find yourself in. You define your own experience. Who and how you want to be, how much and which part of yourselves you choose to bring to the situation you are confronted with: the choice is yours. Finally, if in spite of what I have said, you still think that it is external events that determine your outlook on life, reflect on the following couplet:

Two men looked out prison bars; One saw mud, the other stars.

It is often not so obvious which outlook or course of action is best. Life often presents us with difficult decisions, and as it happens, lucidity may help us to choose wisely.

Decision Making

Of course, decision making is only a problem when there is uncertainty about the information involved. Otherwise, the optimal choice is clear-cut. So how might lucid dreams help you to make effective ("correct") decisions under conditions of uncertainty?

In order to answer this question, we must make a short digression and discuss two distinct varieties of knowledge. To take the lesser first, there is knowledge you know that you know, and can spell out explicitly, such as how to add a pair of numbers or what your name is. This is called explicit knowledge. The second kind of knowledge, sometimes called "tacit" knowledge, refers both to what you know how to do but can't spell out (how to walk or talk), and to what you know, but don't know that you know (say, the color of your first-grade teacher's eyes). This latter form of knowing has been demonstrated by recognition tests in which the individual thinks he or she is only guessing, but in fact does better than chance would allow. Of the two kinds of knowledge, the "tacit" variety is incontestably the more extensive: we know much more than we realize we know. As an aside, an argument can be made that in nonlinguistic animals, such as a cat or dog, all knowledge is tacit. There was also a time when, as a newborn infant, you couldn't put anything you knew into words. It is easy to see that linguistic, "explicit" knowledge develops within a context of tacit knowledge and is ultimately dependent upon it.

A similar distinction may apply to "thinking" and "intuition." But the important point for us to realize in relation to problem solving is that under conditions of uncertainty, the intuitive process-drawing as it does on the broader information bases of tacit knowledge-is likely to have a certain advantage over directed, conscious thinking. Here is where the connection with dreams comes in. Everyone has had the experience of dreaming about a person they've met only once, yet in a dream produced an amazing likeness of that person, much better than anything they could have done while awake, with pencil and paper or with words. The explanation for this phenomenon is tacit knowledge. In our dreams we can draw upon the entire store of our knowledge; we are no longer limited to the tiny portion that we have conscious access to. What I am proposing is that we take advantage of our broadest data base in lucid dreams to a.s.sist us in making optimal decisions.

Creative Problem Solving

As we saw in Chapter 1, there have been many instances of creative dreams in art and science. We will examine here two examples in sufficient detail to ill.u.s.trate the role played by dreams in the creative process.

First, let us consider the case of the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, who had been working for years to discover a way of cla.s.sifying the elements according to their atomic weights. One night in 1869, he fell into bed exhausted after devoting many long hours to the problem. Later that night, Mendeleev "saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required." Upon awakening, he immediately wrote down the table just as he remembered it. Amazingly, Mendeleev reported that "only in one place did a correction later seem necessary."11 Thus was the periodic table of the elements, a fundamental discovery of modern physics, first brought forth.

Let us take another example of creative dreaming. Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing machine, had worked on his idea for years before attaining success.

... Howe had been making the needles of his early failures with a hole in the middle of the shank. His brain was busy with the invention day and night and even when he slept. One night he dreamed, so the story goes, that he was captured by a tribe of savages who took him a prisoner before their king.

"Elias Howe," roared the monarch, "I command you on pain of death to finish this machine at once."

Cold sweat poured down his brow, his hands shook with fear, his knees quaked. Try as he would, the inventor could not get the missing figure in the problem over which he had worked so long. All this was so real to him that he cried aloud. In the vision he saw himself surrounded by dark-skinned and painted warriors, who formed a hollow square about him and led him to the place of execution. Suddenly he noticed that near the heads of the spears which his guards carried, there were eye-shaped holes! He had solved the secret! What he needed was a needle with an eye near the point! He awoke from his dream, sprang out of bed, and at once made a whittled model of the eye-pointed needle, with which he brought his experiments to a successful close.12

The experiences of Mendeleev and Howe provide excellent and dramatic ill.u.s.trations of how creative problem solving works. The process is commonly divided into four stages. The first is preparation, a phase of intense activity in which information is gathered, various unsuccessful approaches tried, and preliminary attempts made to solve the problem. Mendeleev and Howe had already been through this stage during the years they devoted to their respective problems. The next phase, incubation, begins when the person gives up actively trying to solve the problem. For Howe and Mendeleev, this phase was clearly in effect when they fell asleep and forgot their obsessions. If would-be problem solvers have "done their homework"-prepared themselves correctly-they may be rewarded by the illumination phase, in which the solution suddenly arrives unbidden. For Mendeleev and Howe, this literally meant their dreams had come true. Finally comes the verification phase, in which the viability of the solution is tested. For the Russian, this merely meant readjusting the position of a single element; for the American, the modification of the needle design on his machine. As we have seen in these examples, the dream seems most suited to play a role in the illumination phase of the creative process.

Illumination is also the part of the creative process over which we have the least amount of control. Preparation is a matter of working, and "incubation" of not working; verification is a fairly straightforward process. The difficult question seems to be how to get through the third stage. Lucid dreaming may provide an answer, and thus facilitate creative problem solving. Since we have access in our dreams to much more knowledge than we know that we know, perhaps we gain access to this knowledge when we become lucid. In the past, we had no way to ensure when, or even if, a creative dream might occur. It is possible that through lucid dreaming the extraordinary but heretofore unreliable creativity of the dream state could at last be brought under our conscious control. There is a little evidence available supporting this intriguing possibility. I myself have used lucid dreams for creative purposes in two areas: once I was able to effectively edit and alter the final form of my Ph.D. dissertation; and on other occasions, I successfully used lucid dreams to generate images for etchings and other graphic artwork.

It doesn't seem to matter what the specific nature of the problem at hand is. Sometimes it is even a physical one, involving the improvement of motor skills. Jack Nicklaus saw the solution to a problematic golf swing in a dream. After winning a number of championships, he had found himself in an embarra.s.sing slump, but when he regained his championship form seemingly overnight, a reporter asked him how he had done it. Nicklaus replied:

I've been trying everything to find out what has been wrong. It was getting to the place where I figured a 76 was a pretty good round. But last Wednesday night I had a dream and it was about my golf swing. I was. .h.i.tting them pretty good in the dream and all at once I realized I wasn't holding the club the way I've actually been holding it lately. I've been having trouble collapsing my right arm taking the club head away from the ball, but I was doing it perfectly in my sleep. So when I came to the course yesterday morning, I tried it the way I did in my dream and it worked. I shot a 68 yesterday and a 65 today and believe me it's a lot more fun this way. I feel kind of foolish admitting it, but it really happened in a dream. All I had to do was change my grip just a little.13

Nicklaus's confession that he felt foolish admitting it really happened in a dream suggests that there may be others with similar experiences who have never mentioned the source of their inspiration. In fact, it is a little surprising to read about a case reported by Ann Faraday in which a gynecologist "discovered how to tie a surgical knot deep in the pelvis with his left hand-while dreaming!"14

Among the many letters I have received from lucid dreamers, there are similar anecdotes of motor skills perfected in dreams. One lucid dreamer claims to have improved her hockey skating in a lucid dream. Tanya writes that she was a fair skater, but something inside told her she was holding back-that there was much more to skating than the way she was doing it. And then one night, in a lucid dream, she experienced "complete skating."

In the dream I was in a rink with a number of other people. We were playing hockey and I was skating in the manner I always had, competent yet hesitant. At that moment I realized I was dreaming so I told myself to allow my higher knowledge to take over my consciousness. I surrendered to the quality of complete skating. Instantly there was no more fear, no more holding back and I was skating like a pro, feeling as free as a bird.

The next time I went skating I decided to experiment and try this surrender technique. I brought back the quality of that dream experience into my wakened state. I remembered how I was feeling during the dream and so in the manner of an actor in a role, I "became" the complete skater once again. So I hit the ice ... and my feet followed my heart. I was free on the ice. That occurred about two and one-half years ago. I've skated with that freedom ever since and this phenomenon has manifested itself in my rollerskating and skiing as well.

Closely related to these mental "practice" dreams are those that serve a rehearsal function.

Rehearsal

Most readers have probably experienced instances of the rehearsal function of dreams. By dreaming about a significant event in advance, we can try out various approaches, att.i.tudes, and behaviors, perhaps arriving at a more effective course of action than we otherwise would have. We may also be forewarned, by the dream, of certain aspects in a future situation that we might otherwise not be conscious of.

One of my own lucid dreams offers a clear ill.u.s.tration of the utility of previewing "coming attractions." A month before the 1981 meeting of the APSS, I dreamed I was at the dream symposium in Hyannisport. I was scheduled to give my lecture after the next speaker, who was just being announced. My heart skipped a beat when I was introduced as the next speaker, because even at this late stage I was unprepared. I was given a brief reprieve when the sequencing mistake was corrected, and I hastily looked for my notes. My anxiety increased when I couldn't find them. But in a real emergency, I knew I could always talk from my slides. As I looked through them to organize what I was going to say, I found I had brought the wrong slides. These were my art slides, not my science ones! I was panic-stricken-but only for a moment, because almost at once I realized I was dreaming. My anxiety vanished instantly, and I literally leapt for joy, spinning above the audience and announcing, "This is a lucid dream!" When I awoke, I was very glad I had a lot more than ten minutes to prepare my lecture! Up until then, I had been planning to wait a few weeks before working on it, but my lucid dream motivated me to begin at once, and it turned out that the month I spent was just enough.

In 1975 Dr. William Dement confessed that his "wildest speculation [was] that REM sleep and dreaming might have evolved to be utilized in the future." He prophesied that "the eventual function of dreaming will be to allow man to experience the many alternatives of the future in the quasi-reality of the dream, and so make a more 'informed' choice." One of Dement's own dreams provides a striking ill.u.s.tration of how effective this can be:

Some years ago I was a heavy cigarette smoker-up to two packs a day. Then one night I had an exceptionally vivid and realistic dream in which I had inoperable cancer of the lung. I remember as though it were yesterday looking at the ominous shadow in my chest X-ray and realizing that the entire right lung was infiltrated. The subsequent physical examination in which a colleague detected widespread metastases in my axillary and inguinal lymph nodes was equally vivid. Finally, I experienced the incredible anguish of knowing my life was soon to end, that I would never see my children grow up, and that none of this would have happened if I had quit cigarettes when I first learned of their carcinogenic potential. I will never forget the surprise, joy, and exquisite relief of waking up. I felt I was reborn. Needless to say, the experience was sufficient to induce an immediate cessation of my cigarette habit. This dream had both antic.i.p.ated the problem, and solved it in a way that may be a dream's unique privilege.

Only the dream can allow us to experience a future alternative as if it were real, and thereby to provide a supremely enlightened motivation to act upon this knowledge.15

It would be the rare smoker who would continue smoking after such a dream! One wonders how many victims of lung cancer could have been saved by a dream preview of that likely outcome of their nicotine habit. Yet one also wonders how many smokers would choose to have such a dream if it became possible for them to do so. How many of us have the courage to face the possibilities of the future?

The recent movie Dreamscape presents a striking variation of Dement's life-changing dream. In the film, the president of the United States is plagued by gruesomely vivid nightmares on the theme of nuclear war. His dreams portray the postwar horrors so realistically that he is personally motivated to go to Geneva to negotiate a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union.

Today, humanity seems poised between the ostrich and the eagle. Regardless of whether we choose to face the fact or not, the ecological and political situation of this planet will force enormous changes upon humanity within the next century. Among the future alternatives are such extremes as have been termed "utopia or oblivion." Certainly the planetary situation is one of unprecedented complexity. And just as certainly, what is needed is unprecedented vision: both to avoid the abysmal catastrophe of nuclear war, and to find the path to true humanity. With the future to gain, and nothing to lose, we shouldn't fear to take our heads out of the sand and into the dream, for dreams may have much to contribute here (for example, novel and creative solutions not thought of during waking life). But before this dream comes true, we will certainly need to increase our understanding of dream control greatly.

Since lucidity seems to provide the key to dream control, it seems reasonable to expect that attaining the goal of intentional dreaming will require considerable advances in the art and science of lucid dreaming. It may even seem unlikely that such an advanced degree of proficiency in dream control is possible. We know of no Western lucid dreamer more experienced than Saint-Denys, and he wrote that he had "never managed to follow and master all the phases of a dream," adding that he had "never even attempted it." However, some things "impossible" to the West are-like the rising of the sun-natural to the East. And indeed, when seeking the source of light, we should look eastward.

According to William Blake, "The philosophy of the east taught the first principles of human perception ..." Regarding dream control, the existence of a 1200-year-old Tibetan "inner guidebook," The Yoga of the Dream State, testifies to the accuracy of Blake's a.s.sertion. One of the practices it describes is referred to as "trans.m.u.ting the dream content." With this technique, the yogi is able to visit any realm of creation he desires to see. Not that the yogis attached particular significance to this activity, but it does serve as a test of proficiency through which the aspirant must pa.s.s before continuing to the next stage on the path toward enlightenment. I shall say more about this in Chapter 10, but the relevance here is simply to support the possibility of highly developed dream control. This would also make feasible the fulfillment of another potential of lucid dreaming, to which we now turn.

Wish Fulfillment

"Pleasant dreams!" Thus we bid each other goodnight. According to various surveys, however, most dreams are unpleasant. That is, of course, non-lucid dreams. As for lucid dreams, the opposite is probably true. Many lucid dreamers have remarked on the emotionally rewarding nature of the experience, since the lucid dreamer is free to act out impulses that might be impossible in the waking state. For example, we might fly, meet anyone we like from all of history, or indulge in any s.e.xual adventures.

Patricia Garfield, as we have seen, has gone so far as to propose that lucid dreams are intrinsically o.r.g.a.s.mic. She further speculated that during lucid dreaming, the reward or "ecstatic" centers of the brain are stimulated. This speculation may actually have some basis in fact, since neurophysiologists16 have found evidence linking the neural circuits of REM sleep with the brain's "reward" system. It may be that in certain circ.u.mstances, lucid dreaming facilitates activity in this latter system. Whatever the neurophysiological case, lucid dreams are pleasurable experiences.

The lucid dream state might one day prove to be an ideal vacation site-a sort of poor man's Tahiti, a real "Fantasy Island." Lucid dreams could provide matchless recreation for those of us needing to get away from it all.

At the same time, lucid dreaming could provide the handicapped and other disadvantaged people with the nearest thing to fulfilling their impossible dreams. Paralytics could walk again in their dreams, to say nothing of dancing and flying, and even experience emotionally fulfilling erotic fantasies. Thus sings the contralto in Handel's Messiah:

Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped.

Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing!

It is the possibility of dream control more than any other potential application of lucid dreaming that seems to have captured the fancy and imagination of many people. By way of ill.u.s.tration, a recent article on dream control concluded with these terms of unrestrained enthusiasm:

The keys to unimaginable power are within the reach of the entire terrestrial population. I am certain that the next leap for our species will not be launched from the factories of physical technology, but from the night flights of creative dreamers. Think about the possibilities. An erotic encounter of unprecedented intensity with the most desirable woman you can imagine. A visit to an island paradise where intelligent natives sing solutions to your everyday problems. In one night, you could philosophize with Aristotle, joke with W. C. Fields, talk investments with J. P. Morgan and work out on the horizontal bar with Nadia Comaneci ... Even if only remotely possible, the idea of controlling our dreams seems well worth pursuing. Sensual pleasure, inner wisdom, emotional tranquillity, extrasensory perception or even a hot tip for the seventh at Belmont-whatever the quest, the answer may be waiting for you just beyond the borders of sleep.17

8.

Dreaming: Function and Meaning

Why do we have dreams, and what do they mean? For centuries these questions have been the subject of a debate that has recently become a heated controversy. In one camp we have a number of prominent scientists who argue that we dream for physiological reasons alone, and that dreams are essentially mental nonsense devoid of psychological meaning: "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The idea that dreams are nothing more than "meaningless biology" sounds absurd and rather blasphemous to the opposing camp, a coalition of Freudians and other dream workers committed to the view that we dream for psychological reasons, and that dreams always contain important information about the self that can be extracted by various methods of interpretation. This camp takes its credo from the Talmudic aphorism: "An uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter." A third camp occupies the middle ground, believing that both sides' extreme positions on the function and meaning of dreams are partly right and partly wrong. Proponents of the middle way argue that dreams may have both physiological and psychological determinants, and therefore can be either meaningful or meaningless, varying greatly in terms of psychological significance.

This middle position is where I find myself most comfortable. I agree with Sir Richard Burton that

Truth is the shattered mirror strewn in myriad bits; while each believes his little bit the whole to own.

Perhaps, however, we may be able to put together enough of the pieces to reflect the reality of dreams reasonably well. Although people have argued for centuries over whether dreams represent the addled children of an idle brain, the heaven-sent embodiment of wisdom, or something in between, we will confine our discussion to "scientific" theories of dreaming at least as modern as the twentieth century. So, then, let us start with Dr. Sigmund Freud.