Lucid Dreaming with Gaia
I’m a lucid dreamer and have been for most of my life. I used to have terrible nightmares, as a child. Eventually, I learned how to wake myself up out of the nightmare and then I thought: if I could wake myself up from the dreaming state, what could I do in the dreaming state? That question kicked-off a process of experimentation and refinement that lasted for several decades. Now, I am interested in being in the dreaming state while awake, that is real lucidity. To imagine is to dream while awake.
I use the dreaming state to learn beyond what is possible for me in ordinary consciousness. The information I have retrieved has ranged from names of healing plants for specific conditions, innovative solutions to problems, insights into the operations of the natural world, to precognitive dreams of events that have subsequently occurred.
I’m not aiming to prove anything, or map reality, or define consciousness or any such intellectual pursuit in this post. I consider lucid dreaming to be a useful learning method that anyone can do, as everyone dreams, and it doesn’t need a group or any special equipment! Now is the time to dream ourselves and the world we want to live in, into existence.
What is a lucid dream?
My definition of a lucid dream has changed over the years. I used to accept the consensus definition, that a lucid dream is one in which the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming. Now, I find that definition to be incomplete. I define a lucid dream as a dream in which you know you are dreaming AND you have the capacity to act in the dream environment AND you are able to witness a corresponding change in external reality. This happens when you are aligned with the dreaming power of the Earth – real lucidity.
There are three functional components of a lucid dream as I define it:
1. Awareness of the source of the dream, the oneiric factor;
2. The self-awareness and character of the human dreamer;
3. The ability to recall the dream.
Lucidity is not a continuum. You either have it, or you don’t. No one is ever nearly lucid, or partially lucid. When you come into lucidity, whether in ordinary consciousness or dreaming it is sudden, switched on like a light-bulb and it can leave you, just as quickly. However, the self-awareness of the human being, the dreamer, who is the instrument of lucidity does vary and could be considered to exist on a continuum from not self-aware at all to fully self aware and self-directed. All animals dream and even the most ego-identified individual with a maladjusted personality dreams, but they do not have lucid dreams. Can a fake persona be lucid in ordinary consciousness? I don’t think so. If you can’t be lucid in waking life, it is extremely unlikely that you would be lucid in a dream and, conversely, if you had lucid dreams, you would also become lucid in everyday life.
I have been studying my lucid dreams since October 2003. The frequency, intensity and quality of the content received a considerable boost after we moved here in May 2013. I am now able to direct certain aspects of the dreams, including the subject matter I want to explore and I can go back to previous dreams for further investigation. Mostly, I don’t do this anymore, as it is more enjoyable to let show up, what shows up; to dance with Gaia in my dreams. Lucid dreams are one of the channels that the living planet uses to reach into the human mind and that they are also a channel for communicating with other human animals and back to Gaia.
The Lucid Dream of the Planetary Mind
Cultivating lucidity when you are awake makes it easier for you to be lucid in your dreams. You instantly recognize the tone, clarity and coherence of lucid expression, but do you ever stop to think about its origins? The root of the word ‘lucid’ is the latin ‘lucidus’, which means bright, or shine, which comes from the root ‘lux’ which means light.
Anyone serious about lucid dreaming needs to consider this proposition: the totality of experience on earth is oneiric, because everything is occurring within the dreaming power of the super-organism that is the planet.
“The onieric factor, lucid dreaming: The planetary entelechy awakens in a dream, not from a dream. The concept of dreaming parallels the Dreamtime of Aboriginal myth, as well as dreaming gods like Vishnu. “Dreaming” is an emanationist metaphor: it describes a world sustained by divine imagination immanently and concurrently in real time, not a world created once and for all like a pot thrown by a potter. In this case, the imaginative power to sustain the world-dream belongs to the Aeon or Divinity Gaia-Sophia-Vidya, who also inhabits the world she emanates.”
John Lash, The Future of Rapture II
The dream world is often dismissed as unreal, just your imagination, which is a mistake. The dreamworld is simply the unknown, the invisible world, the matrix of divine imagination, the dimension beyond time. It is not a land of anything goes, there are rules to be discovered and observed. In fact, you are already an expert in navigating the invisible world, you just don’t know it because you fool yourself into thinking that you know things that you don’t. Do you know how your brain works, or your digestive system? How your car works, or the operations of the device on which you are reading this? Probably not. But you follow a specific process in order to drive you car, you adhere to the highway code and you know that there are things you can and can’t eat etc. There are also rules in the dream world, which need to be followed if you want to make your dreaming fruitful.
Discerning the difference between an external threat causing an authentic physical fear response and the machinations of your own imagination is an essential survival skill these days. And also, if you are not dissolving your own fear you are transmitting fear to all the living creatures in your vicinity (see Healing the Waters), as well as mentally, via the archetypal characters you draw from (consciously or unconsciously).
When you are in the unknown, you need a guiding principle to manage your fears, because the human imagination has been programmed from birth to be hyper-sensitive to fear, both real and false. You can’t go wrong if you rely on the alchemical rule, whether in ordinary or non-ordinary consciousness:
“In all thine operations, let the Work be guided by nature, according to the slow progression of metals in the bowels of the Earth. And in thine efforts, be guided in all ways by the true and not the fantastic imagination.”
Theatrum Rosarium
How do you discern between the true and the fantastic imagination? If your imagination integrates with the imagination of the earth, it is true. if it does not, it is fantastic, or delusional.
Dreaming lucidly while you sleep is preparation for lucid dreaming while you are awake, another way of perceiving with your etheric senses.
If you want to undertake any worthwhile experiments in lucid dreaming you need first to recognize the oneiric nature of reality and secondly, whose dream is it that you are attempting to wake into? Hasn’t it ever struck you as glaringly odd, how people can talk about the consciousness of plants, animals, water, collective consciousness, collective unconsciousness, the universe etc., but they never mention the consciousness of the planet? Any forays into lucid dreaming without recognition of the source of lucidity are sterile fruitless non-starters, like looking for the meaning in chicken scratchings on a frozen pond.
Who are you?
Is it possible to locate yourself in the dream world if you do not know who you are?
Have you ever asked some one: who do you think you are? I’ve been asked that many times, often quite disdainfully and sometimes with the delightful addition: who on earth do you think you are? Maybe that mantra I heard so often as a child did me some good, prompting me to find an answer. It doesn’t matter who you think you are. Identities come and go, as life creates itself, through us creating ourselves. These two components describe the biological and imaginal aspects of my existence as succinctly as possible. Self-awareness is critical to lucid dreaming.
The faculty of the Imaginal Self enables you to use your imagination to direct the story-line of your own life, to build your character and define the role you want to play in the dream of the planetary mind, through experience, spontaneous self-expression and intention. The separation from Source that generated the ego-identity, is now breaking down – you see evidence of the breakdown in the mass psychosis of fear-based projection and identity politics erupting everywhere. For some of us this is a breakthrough. Modern society is an archontic construct and the ego is a false self, the fictional character created by society programmed to operate within that society to maintain it – it is not what you have created for yourself or who you are destined to be. Osho describes this well:
“The society creates an ego because the ego can be controlled and manipulated. The self can never be controlled or manipulated. Nobody has ever heard of the society controlling a self – not possible.”
Unfortunately, most eastern mysticism and its new age spin-offs have been corrupted and peddle the notion that the solution is in the dissolution of the ego, when it is only a partial solution unless you create something to replace the ego society created for you. There is no automatically conferred higher self; it is all potential, for you to work with. You cannot escape the narrative thread of your own personal experience and the story you tell yourself about your life, because this is a natural instinct. The whole fabric of the universe is made from the narrative threads of many lives, some like yours, others not so much. If the Earth likes the choices and actions you take to make your story great, she will share them with. It’s a participatory dream.
The false narratives of the Abrahamic religions and their psychological offshoots keep lucid dreamers stuck in a self-referential spin-cycle from which they cannot escape, because the parameters of the reality they believe in have been defined by the fantastic imagination operating with evil intent. There seem to be many training tools and courses available that claim to teach lucid dreaming and although I have nothing to say on their effectiveness, as I haven’t tried them, I think they could all be considerably improved if they took the oneiric factor into account and had a better definition of the human dreamer.
The notion of ‘recreational lucid dreaming’ looks like a good way of getting anyone who shows any interest or potential in this field stuck in the spin cycle. Here’s an example:
“A lucid dream creates a mind-blowing alternate reality where you can fly over breathtaking scenery, teleport to the edge of the universe, interact with other dream figures, and communicate with your subconscious inner self. The applications of lucid dreaming are limitless and I am going to help you explore that infinite potential. That is my promise.”
From the Art of Lucid Dreaming, by Rebecca Turner
Teleport to the edge of the universe? Or ‘teleporting’ to what you imagine the edge of the universe to be like?
A huge tranche of the material on lucid dreaming offers the possibility of self-discovery, which sounds good on the face of it, but the ‘self’ to be discovered is always the flawed notion of self as defined by society, religion and psychology – the latter of which came to its definitions of the self through the study of psychosis!
I found this interesting, from Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, by Robert Waggonner
Waggoner describes a lucid dream which goes right to my own definition:
“Years ago, my wife and I joined a seven-day float trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Within a day or two of being constantly in nature and totally out of touch with the world of work, meetings, phone calls, and national news, we felt ourselves readjust mentally and emotionally. Surrounded by nature, we be-came inwardly more natural, more alive, and more aware in each moment.
On the trip, I noticed that I had particularly interesting dreams and became lucid on two successive nights as I lay asleep outside on a tarp under the brilliant stars and moon. It felt good to be free of routine concerns and return to nature’s simple rhythms. On the fourth day in the Grand Canyon, the August sun blazed deep into the cliffs as our raft pulled to the rocky shore near Havasu Canyon—home of the famous, beautiful spring-fed waterfall and luscious, milky-blue creek waters. As we disembarked to explore, our guides told us to follow the trail across the rocks and up above the steep embankment alongside the creek for about a mile, and then the trail would drop down to the silky blue canyon water.
Watching our group scramble along the rock and wisp of a trail, I looked back to see my wife helping a woman, the oldest person in the group, negotiate the easiest route. There was no sense of hurry now. I hung back and helped my wife and the woman at various rocky points. Up ahead, the rest of the boat made quick progress along the trail. Eventually, and with some effort, we helped the woman down the steep embankment of loose gravel and dirt to a quiet place in the creek where she could soak. “Aaahhh,” I murmured as we started to cross the swift, cool waters of the creek; this silky water has some mineral in it, which made for its smooth feel and soft white stone formations underwater. Finding a spot, we eased ourselves into the delicious coolness. I relaxed and closed my eyes. This was heaven in the August sun; I literally soaked it all in.
A few minutes later, I took a quick glance around. Most everyone had gone farther upstream, to the waterfall, perhaps. My wife and a couple of others relaxed twenty feet away in a quiet pool. I closed my eyes again. Feeling at peace and playful, I mentally said, “So Canyon, what do you have to say to me?” Immediately, I mentally heard a voice clearly state, “Get out while you still can.”
Now that was completely unexpected! I sat up and looked to see if I was hurting something, sitting on a plant or breaking a rock. Everything seemed fine. Still, I couldn’t deny that I had clearly heard something suggest otherwise. I closed my eyes again, feeling assured that I was not hurting the canyon. More relaxed now, I decided to ask one more time, “So Canyon, what do you have to say to me?” This time it sounded even more urgent, “Get out while you still can!” Hearing those words a second time, I knew something was really wrong. I still didn’t know what, but the canyon knew. Pulling myself out of the water, I called to my wife, “We have to go.” Lazily, she asked why. “I don’t know,” I said, “but something’s wrong.”Moments later, I looked to the sky and there, beyond the west canyon wall, I could see the dark front edge of a massive thunderhead coming into view. “Look over there,” I pointed, “it’s a thunderstorm headed this way. There’s going to be a flash flood.” My wife’s first concern was the elderly woman. “We’ve got to get her out of here,” she said. We roused the others from their quiet relaxation in the stream and told them of the approaching storm. Together, we helped the elderly woman up the steep embankment and onto the trail above the creek bank. By then, the crew from the boat appeared, running up the trail, yelling, “Get out! Get back to the boat! A storm’s coming. Hurry! Everyone made it back to the boat just as the heavens opened up with a thunderous downpour. As we pushed off into the river looking for a ledge to moor beneath and escape the torrent of rain, I thanked the canyon for letting us get out “while we still could,”knowing that in moments a flash flood would be racing through Havasu Canyon.
As I lay in the cool waters of Havasu Creek and playfully asked the canyon a question, I did so because I had taken seriously the idea announced to me in a lucid dream—that everything is sacred, conscious, and alive. I had come to believe that we all exist within an aware universe. Each item and each space is conscious and alive.”
Proof of Lucidity
This is a lucid dream I had in 2014. I’m including it here as proof of the points I’m making and as a pointer towards dream interpretation within this framework.
I found myself in this dream standing on the side of a hill, overlooking a flat plain on which two armies were aligned ready for battle. The air crackled with tension and the rustling and shuffling of anticipation. There were banners held high and the army I was with was predominantly blue. Standing next to me on my right side was my husband and on my left my friend Dav, a Sikh who lives in England. We all had swords in both hands.
In the next scene we are down in the thick of it, fighting for our lives. Except there was something terribly wrong with the enemy we were fighting, as they were not fighting back. They were just sitting their docile, smiling with vacant eyes and continuously eating. As we slashed at them and an arm fell to the ground they, picked it up with the other hand and started eating it. Stretched miles back across the plain I could see them eating the ground, eating all the vegetation, mindlessly just stuffing everything in their mouths. It was horrible.
I knew I was dreaming and that I didn’t want to be killing the enemy in this dream, they did not seem to be an enemy, they felt like my brothers and sisters and they were sick, and I could feel myself falling back. Dean saw me fall back and shouted, “Don’t think about it, just keep fighting. You have to kill them. It is a mercy killing. They are infected.” But I didn’t want to do that. I thought: this is not what I’m here for. I could feel myself falling and hear Dean’s voice calling and I knew it was certain death to let go. Even though I knew I was in a dream I could feel the pull on the fibres connecting me to Dean, but because I knew it was a dream I could surrender to death.
There is a specific level of engagement necessary for a lucid dream. It is engaged and involved, focused enough to make decisions and take actions, but it is more detached than in the waking world. Emotional engagement lives in the physical body and so a lucid dream allows you to experiment with situations safely and to learn more quickly than is possible in the waking state, where the mass and processes of physical bodies dictate the pace and intensity of what you can stand. I’ve died many times in lucid dreams. In the early days, I would wake myself up at that moment, trembling in a state of fear and shock. Now, I surrender to it and either fall into a deeper sleep or something significant happens in the dream.
In this dream the ground suddenly split open in front of us and a wall of fire and ash exploded from the chasm, as if the side of a volcano had split open. The fire burned all the ‘enemy’ to ash. It burned us too. As we stood there, side by side, I held up my hands in front of me and watched the flesh burn off my bones and my bones blacken, then glow red and finally blow away as white ash in the wind. I turned and saw the same thing happen to Dean and Dav and yet we were all still there after our flesh and bones were gone and glowing in our pure luminosity. United, without words, we stepped into the fire and came through the other side where the world was calm and beautiful and peaceful, with no sign of the battle that had raged.
I knew this was what I call a significant dream. So the next day I phoned Dav to tell him about it. This has been my practice for the last 14 years. Whenever I have a dream with some one I know in it, I tell them about it, no matter what the content of the dream. This has become a rich source of intel over the years. Dave thanked me and said that was significant to him as there was something going on in his life that it pertained to, and we left it at that.
One week later, Dav phoned me from the hospital. The day before he and his sons had been attacked in their temple by men with swords. The issue that Dav had referenced when I had called him was regarding the refurbishment of the temple. Dav was the treasurer of the refurbishment committee and he had requested that the plan included a room for meditation. Other members of the committee had objected on the basis that meditation was Buddhist and that the temple was for the worship of God. Dav had asked them to explain where in the Sikh scripture God was ever mentioned and an argument broke out. The men who attacked him and his sons were known to him, his brothers as it were. They attacked and demanded that Dav handed over the refurbishment accounts to them. He told me that at the very moment he was about to draw his sword and fight back he remembered my dream and it came to him in a flash that the real battle was fundamentalism against the free mind. So instead of drawing his sword and he stood and faced up to his attackers and said: you will have to kill me then, because the account is not mine to give. They hit him and ran away and neither he nor his sons were seriously injured.
I’ve pondered on this dream for several years and it was the precognitive element that I found hardest to explain. Freedom is what I bring to humanity, and Dav too. We met in the dreamworld to ‘witness’ more freedom into our ordinary reality. This is in alignment with Nature and the dreaming mind of the Earth.
A precognitive dream is only seen as precognitive in retrospect, after the event it foretold occurred, but in the invisible world, the dream world, there is no time. (See: Killing Time with the Quantum Pixies). By focusing on the effect rather than the cause, it makes this kind of lucid dream seem more mysterious than it actually is and denies the factor of self-determination. The simple fact is that anyone can discover the themes that are important to the Great Mother if they pay attention. They see those themes popping up everywhere in everyday life and have the opportunity to act, or not. Lucidity happens because you are an open conduit for the planetary intelligence, which you then express uniquely according to your own life experience and character. One source of lucidity, many expressions of it. It doesn’t matter whether lucidity comes to you sleeping or waking, what matters is that you share it because her power comes through to the human domain even in the mere telling of it.
Cultivating Lucidity
Lucidity comes as an act of grace and, although you can prepare for it, you can never guarantee when or if it will come to you. You prepare in every moment of your waking life. When it comes down to how to prepare, it’s really just about spontaneous self-expression and action. Those thoughts that come to you and make you grimace, they need to be said. When the idea comes to go out for a walk, even though it’s raining, do it. Because you never know what the outcome might be and the more you hold back the more dense you become and the harder it will be to be lucid. You were born to be lucid, it’s not about having a lot of clever ideas, it’s about letting go and letting flow – and honing your character in the process.
I find if helpful to remind myself often throughout the day that every experience on this planet is happening within the lucid dream of the planetary mind as, especially when I get wrapped up in things that I really don’t want to be giving my attention to. The social domain is in chaos and that creates turbulence and problems to resolve. It’s not possible to be lucid when in a predominantly Beta brain wave state, either asleep or awake. Beta brainwaves correlate to alertness and focused concentration, when occurring naturally and with normal hormonal activity in relatively short bursts. Too much beta correlates to stress, anxiety and the fight-flight syndrome. Episodic stress is natural and useful when correctly managed, chronic stress is the enemy of lucidity. Every lucid dreamer has to find a way to manage their stresses and not get pulled off track by the fantastic imagination. Working in the garden works for me. A combination of well-balanced physical and mental activity is a good foundation for lucidity.
Certain types of meditation can be useful as a way of relaxing and showing you where you put your attention. Body scanning and structured breathing are good. Listening to the rain, or the sound of running water, or crickets are excellent. Do your best to feel good before you go to sleep, the hypnagogic state is the portal to the dream world.
My lucid dreaming became more frequent and easier to direct when we moved here, as we live in a fairly remote area, in a natural home, without neighbours or electrical interference. We haven’t had a TV for years and we switch off the internet at night. We have minimal electricity in the bedroom and no wiring near the bed. As our bedroom is above the store room in which we have a freezer, we have put shielding under the floor to stop the interference. This might sound excessive, but electrical and wifi signals entrain your brain to their frequencies and make it much more difficult to shift into the high frequency Gamma brain waves that correlate to the lucid dreaming state. I think that electrical, wifi and mobile interference is probably the main impediment to lucid dreaming for most people.
I used to have three dream spaces that I’ve created over the past few years. I recreate these spaces in my mind as I nod off to sleep. Sometimes I find myself lucid in these spaces, but not always. One of the spaces is a moonlit lake, a monochrome setting, and I just walk along the beach on a warm night and feel the sand between my toes, or swim in the cool water. I go to this place when I feel a bit stressed and I want to relax. The second place is a cave. This is also a night setting and the cave is on the side of a cliff, with a ledge outside and I have a fire on the ledge and I sit there and look at the sky and across the valley. This is when I have a specific subject I’m focused on. I will have focused on that subject intensely with the first attention and I need to stop thinking so I can get to sleep, but still retrieve the subject in the dream world. The cave is the place for that. An interesting development has occurred, as now I have a physical cave to dream in, where I work.
My third dream setting is the garden. I used to go there when I have several subjects on the go, that seem to want to come together, but I can’t figure out how. So I wander through the garden as I fall asleep and very often I meet some one in the garden, or find a path or doorway that leads me to something useful. Yes, you guessed it! I now have a garden in the visible world too. You see how this works? How you pull through from the invisible world of dreams into the visible world?
The purpose of these spaces is to train my mind through habit to go into the lucid state more easily. In the early days of my lucid dreaming, I read somewhere that imagining an empty white space was useful, but I didn’t find that to be the case.
I do not aim to control the dream. In a lucid dream the dreamer can control where he/she directs his attention and his actions. You can put a lot of effort into shaping the dreamscape if you like, but this is just an exercise for your mind. You will not learn anything from it. Remember whose dream you are in, who you are dreaming with.
I intend to dream on a subject that is important to me. This usually emerges at the beginning of the lunar shift and often it will be a continuation of previous themes and subjects that I’ve been working on. Sometimes something personal comes up in between, like a health issue or a problem and I’ll work on that. Your brain will prioritize anything that relates to your personal health and safety, so you need to work with those issues first. There are no rewards for finding solutions to any ‘important social issues’, it is all subjective, upfront and personal. I am hopeless at any of those exercises that ask you to see yourself walking to the end of the bed, or fly to the ceiling and watch yourself sleeping etc; I can’t do anything in any state of consciousness that I find completely pointless and I demand useful evidence all the time.
I rarely have lucid dreams on the full moon, as I don’t usually sleep well or deeply on full moon nights. Lunar apogees tend to be more fruitful than perigees.
Recalling your lucid dreams
I don’t keep a dream diary and never have done, but it does help to tell your lucid dream to some one. This also helps to keep you on track with directing your lucid dreams to a useful purpose, as no one wants to hear anyone babbling on about angels in the sky or dream characters that don’t have anything to say – come back with something interesting and useful and then people want to know more.
The one practice that I find enormously useful in dream recall is to not move any part of my body in bed until I have recounted the dream to myself in my head as though I were telling it to some one else. I think that any movement, no matter how small, engages the proprioceptive senses and brings you back into your body and if you don’t ‘fix’ the dream in your short-term memory before then, it’s gone.
The ability to remember your lucid dreams improves naturally over time. Lucidity itself enhances all of your cognitive functions.
When you become lucid, it is because you are snapped out of the trauma induced en-trancement that passes for ordinary consciousness into the lucid dream of the planetary mind. And where is the proof for that statement, you might ask? The proof does not come from anything I, or anyone else can say to you. The proof you want and need comes after you decide to engage with the mind of the planet (that is your mind too) and set up your own experiments to test the hypothesis – your experience is unique, subjective and irreplaceable.
