Lucid Dreaming: The Poor (or Rich) Person's Virtual Reality
By Colin Black

Completely safe, commitment-free sex with friends and strangers. The ability to flap your arms and soar all over town. Intimate chats with Jesus, Mahatma Ghandi, Abraham Lincoln or even another you. Teleport to distant worlds with no chance of being labeled an imperialist terrorist and gunned down. Get out of sticky situations with the blink of an eye.

This could be a future commercial script for a Sony virtual reality home entertainment system. The fact is that all of you, right now, have the potential to do all of these things and much, much, more.

What I’m talking about is the practice of lucid dreaming. And you could consider me somewhat of an expert, as I do it a couple times a week and have been practicing it since high school. I won’t go in to all the socio-political, philosophical and psychological ramifications of this ability, but suffice to say it’s pretty fucked up that we can do it at all, basically interact as our “real” selves in our own visual thought processes. What I want to convey is that it is not as hard as it sounds, and it is extremely fun, and, as a dream character in Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” informs the protagonist, “as everyone knows, fun rules.”

What exactly does it entail? Quite simply, while dreaming, you are or become aware of this fact, but rather than waking yourself up, you explore the dream environment and maintain a great potential for control over what you are capable of and what surrounds you, as the basic rules of the waking world need not apply.

How do you do it? Lucid dreams have most commonly been reported to occur during periods of high central nervous system (CNS) arousal and rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, although it is possible to have non-REM lucid dreams. Surprisingly enough, the more you do it, the more control you obtain over the many dream parameters, and the longer it lasts. As with most anything, practice and experimentation significantly increase your ability.

First, it is important to maintain a high level of conscious activity almost immediately before falling asleep. I first was able to lucid dream when taking a daytime nap, and a little later when going back to sleep after waking up pretty well rested. Now I exclusively do it right as I start to go to sleep, but this method takes some practice to work right. Telling people your dreams or writing them down helps you remember them better, which in turn connects your conscious mind more and more to your dreams and helps prevent immediate shut-off of your aware mind when falling asleep.

Another method involves determining that you are asleep while in a dream. There are many questions you could ask yourself to deduce that you’re dreaming. Can you remember what you did yesterday, or even an hour earlier? Do you ever need to blink your eyes? If you do try to blink your eyes for a second or two, is everything around you exactly the same as it was? Can you read a book well or use electrical appliances? Temporal and spatial inconsistencies abound in dreams. As is noted in “Waking Life,” people tend not to question their dream environment because they never question their waking environment.

Things don’t always make logical sense in dreams, and often it is just this illogicality that can lead to your “awareness.” For example, people tend to have “false awakenings” fairly often, in which they will tell dream characters about how fucked up their dream just was. Sometimes, fucked up elements from the previous dream will seep back into the false awakening and it doesn’t make sense. This was how I first became lucid.

Once you are aware, you need to fairly quickly decide what you want to do. Just as you “believe” or visualize that your arm will go out “simultaneously” while you’re doing it, the same applies for something like walking around or flying. If you have the slightest imagination about what it would look like to take off into the air from wherever you’re standing you should be able to do it. The important thing here is that merely thinking “I want to fly” doesn’t cut it. First you need to declare to yourself that, for example, gravity doesn’t apply, or that you CAN fly, by flapping your arms for example. Once you’re airborne you might have to re-decide that gravity still doesn’t apply or you could fall (it wouldn’t hurt anyway, as long as you decide so), but you can pretty much move in any direction you choose for a long time. I recommend trying this activity first and extensively. It really is quite liberating.

Changing physical attributes, for example colors, sizes or people’s faces or body parts, normally requires merely a visual thought of what attribute should be substituted or altered. The effect is amazing, as the new attribute seems to “wash,” or materialize over the old almost instantaneously.

Walking through walls, dropping through floors, or flying through the ceiling are more complex than they seem. Not only do you initially have to “believe” or decide that the wall, floor, or ceiling is intangible, but unless you have an idea of what should be on the other side, you will find yourself “stuck” in the imaginary “void” outside the space of the room. This too takes practice.

Teleporting is quite difficult, as you must close your dream eyes or walk through a door or wall and imagine a whole world which you want to materialize. Creating objects and people out of thin air also proves difficult, and the best method I know is to “know” that they are out of sight, then turn around still expecting them to be there.

The last example I want to share is something I recently have been experimenting with, that of turning on a self-manufactured dream TV and allowing it to play a movie of my creation. This is quite difficult, but when it works it is amazing. A fully edited, cast, lit, set, and scored movie appears on screen and somehow I am not consciously directing it. Although the movies are never long, it simply baffles me how this is possible.

The possibilities of lucid dreaming are not endless, but there sure are a lot of them, and I have only begun to do what I would like to do in world with no set rules. I leave the exploration of your own overt desires and subconscious texts up to you.