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What Is Lucid Dreaming?
Lucid dreaming is a state in which the sleeper becomes alert and conscious that he or she is dreaming. The imagery seen while in this state tends to be much more vivid than in non-lucid states, and many people find it difficult to distinguish between the dream and reality. During Lucid Dreaming, the dreamer is able to control what is dreamed.
Lucid dreaming has formed the central core of virtually every shamanic and mystical practice throughout history. It allows the shaman to visit the spirit realms to gain healing power and insight. In the East, lucid dreaming has long been seen as a signpost on the way to enlightenment.
The Goldi shamans of Siberia guide dying or dead subjects through the realms of the otherworld through lucid dreams. Native Americans rely upon conscious dreaming for their vision quests, and consider dreams to be central to life itself, and the foundation of all spiritual matters.
The Australian Aborigines are the oldest lucid dreamers, but the Tibetan shamans have carried the process of lucid dreaming more exactly into the realm of mysticism. In 12th century Tibet there was a famous school of Dream Masters who uses lucid dreaming as a powerful method of meditation, which was reported to speed up the process of enlightenment. The Tibetan shaman was always "chosen" through a lucid dream, which transformed the dreamer into a new being.
Many Western subjects entering lucid dreaming for the first time report experiencing nothing comparable in the whole of their waking lives, feeling as if they had been radically changed by the event and mysteriously transformed. The essential purpose of lucid dream work is ultimately to wake up. Lucid dreaming helps us understand that we are just as asleep when we think we are awake, as we are in dreams.
Lucid dreams have been scientifically proven to exist. Stephen LaBerge of The Lucidity Institute used a special machine to track eye movements during a dream (these are linked to your eye movements within the dream). He asked lucid dreamers to point their eyes left and right in quick succession once they became "conscious" in their dreams, and this movement was recorded on the machine. For more information on this and other experiments, read Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (ISBN in Further Reading).
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