Lucid dreaming

“ Strange dim memories, which will not abide identification, often, through misty windows of the past, look out upon me in the broad daylight, but I never dream now. It may be, notwithstanding, that, when most awake, I am only dreaming the more! But when I wake at last into that life which, as a mother her child, carries this life in its bosom, I shall know that I wake, and shall doubt no more.
I wait; asleep or awake, I wait. ”

“ The machinery for dreaming planted in the human brain was not planted for nothing. That faculty, in alliance with the mystery of darkness, is the one great tube through which man communicates with the shadowy. And the dreaming organ, in connexion with the heart, the eye, and the ear, compose the magnificent apparatus which forces the infinite into the chambers of a human brain, and throws dark reflections from eternities below all life upon the mirrors of the sleeping mind. ”

“ But when we reflect on the small number of these in proportion to the myriads which are experienced nightly, the wonder is rather that so few of them have anything like a fulfilment. That mysterious part of our being which communicates activity to the brain never sleeps, and gives rise to incessant dreaming; so that no man passes a night without awaking to a consciousness that his brain has been busy with events which he can seldom recall in his waking hours. ”

“ The principal, indeed in general the exclusive, impulse to our dreaming thoughts, is our past experience and existing character, from and in obedience to which, imagination moulds our dreams.
Not that sensation is suspended in sleep. On the contrary, it appears to have its usual acuteness; and impressions made upon our senses—the feelings produced by an uneasy posture, for instance, or the introduction of sudden light into the room, or a loud and unusual noise, or even whisperings in the ear—will give a new and corresponding direction to the dreaming thoughts. ”

“ Sleeping is as natural as waking; dreams are nearly as frequent as every-day sensations, thoughts, and emotions. But dreams, being familiar, are credible; it is admitted that people do dream; we reach the less credible as we advance to the less familiar. For, if we think for a moment, the alleged events of ghostdom—apparitions of all sorts—are precisely identical with the every-night phenomena of dreaming, except for the avowed element of sleep in dreams. ”

“ Strictly speaking, the source of the dream as a dream can only be central, and a truly presentative dream is impossible. If our senses receive an impression, external or internal, and we recognise and accept that impression for what we should recognise and accept it when awake, then we cannot be said to be dreaming. The internal and external stimuli which act upon sleeping consciousness are not a part of that consciousness, nor in any real sense its source or its cause. ”

“ When dreaming we have, as we have seen, a mental experience which closely approximates in intensity and reality to that of waking perception. Consequently, dreams may leave behind them, for a time, vivid images which simulate the appearance of real images of memory. Most of us, perhaps, have felt this after-effect of dreaming on our waking thoughts. It is sometimes very hard to shake off the impression left by a vivid dream, as, for example, that a dead friend has returned to life. ”

“ And what you seem to waken to is but another form of this same world you see in dreams. All your time is spent in dreaming. Your sleeping and your waking dreams have different forms, and that is all. Their content is the same. They are your protest against reality, and your fixed and insane idea that you can change it. In your waking dreams, the special relationship is your determination to keep your hold on unreality, and to prevent yourself from waking. And while you see more value in sleeping than in waking, you will not let go of it. ”

“ Yet, while there is thus a real sense in which dreams produce their effect by the retraction of the field of consciousness and the limitation of the psychic activities which mark ordinary life, it remains true that if [280] we take into account the complete psychic life of dreaming, subconscious as well as conscious, it is waking, not sleeping, life which may be said to be limited. ”

“ In dream, your mind does it all without a conscious effort. Nor is it, as some have suggested, merely a fancy that the mind is so acting and not a positive action of the mind. If wakened while so dreaming, the argument, the speech, the song, will recur to the waking consciousness and become a positive memory capable of being subsequently recalled. Sometimes the dream vanishes after an interval and cannot be recollected by any effort of the Will, although it may recur in dream long years afterwards. ”

“ Now, with respect to this so-called dreaming in profound sleep, it is a thing no one can well doubt who thoroughly believes that his body is a temple built for the dwelling of an immortal spirit; for we can not conceive of spirit sleeping, or needing that restoration which we know to be the condition of earthly organisms. If, therefore, the spirit wakes, may we not suppose that the more it is disentangled from the obstructions of the body the more clear will be its perceptions; and that, therefore, in the profound natural sleep of the sensuous organs we may be in a state of clear-seeing. ”

“ I can reasonably take either of two possibilities, one being that the dream was self-created fantasy only, and the other that it was the mirroring in the brain of an experience of soul in a real sphere of being.
But whether we assume one or other we postulate an unsleeping consciousness within ourselves while the brain is asleep: and that unsleeping creature was either the creator of the dream or the actor in a real event.
Who is that unsleeping creature?
Is it the same being who daily inhabits the brain?
Does it rise up when the body sinks on the couch? ”

“ But I cannot forget that, at other times I have been deceived in sleep by similar illusions; and, attentively considering those cases, I perceive so clearly that there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep, that I feel greatly astonished; and in amazement I almost persuade myself that I am now dreaming. ”

“ When we apply these general statements to dreaming, we may see that the whole phenomenon of dreaming is really the same process of image formation, based on resemblance and contiguity. Every dream is the outcome of this strenuous, wide-ranging instinct to reason. The supposed 'imaginative faculty,' regarded as so highly active during sleep, is the inevitable play of this automatic logic. ”

“ While asleep we are impressed by the importance and logical consistency of the dream incident, which assumes, possibly, the proportions of a revelation, but which dissolves into ridiculous triviality and nonsense as soon as we awake. The reason is that there is a complete hiatus between the visionary and the waking state of consciousness, and even the laws of thought appear to undergo a change as the centre of consciousness slides down from the inner to the outer world of thought and feeling. ”

“ III. Light in the Dream You who have spent your life in bringing truth to illusion, reality to fantasy, have walked the way of dreams. For you have gone from waking to sleeping, and on and on to a yet deeper sleep. Each dream has led to other dreams, and every fantasy that seemed to bring a light into the darkness but made the darkness deeper. Your goal was darkness, in which no ray of light could enter. And you sought a blackness so complete that you could hide from truth forever, in complete insanity. ”

“ A dream may, therefore, be defined as the occupation of the field of consciousness during sleep by a succession of ideas more or less completely withdrawn from the guidance of the senses and from the control of the will. A great variety of dreams may thus be admitted, ranging all the way from those products of mere absence of mind which constitute revery, down to the faintest and feeblest stirrings of consciousness which have been always observed during the act of waking from the profoundest sleep. ”

“ Again she composed herself to sleep, lying now with her face turned to the window and the door. She was still sure that she had been the victim of a hallucination which, emerging from her sleep, had invaded the borders of wakefulness, and then had reproduced itself in a waking illusion—an imitation of its original existence. ”

“ What other solution is there than this—and it is sufficiently marvellous—that my mind, free to act without the incumbering trammels of the sleeping body and exercising its unfettered faculties far beyond their capacity in waking life, had made me a musician, a dramatist, an actor, a painter—for all these that mind was in the invention and performance of that dream? If that mind or Soul be nothing more than the material form, or a function of that form, how comes it that it is more active and that its faculties are more exalted when the body, of which it is said to be a part, is asleep? ”

“ I had but slight experience of that loftier life in dream which to others I know was truer life than waking. But none can speak truly of the dreams or imaginations of others, but only of what themselves have known. In intensest meditation I think we encroach on that state which to the waking brain is veiled by sleep and is normally a blank, for in the highest dreams of which I retained memory I was on a plane of being identical with that reached in the apex of meditation and had perceptions of a similar order of things. ”

“ But dreams which occupy the mind when sleep is light and partial are excited by cerebral movements which are closely associated with external impressions that originate either at the moment of awaking or immediately after that event; consequently, the bond of union between the ideas of the dream and our waking ideas is nearly if not quite as perfect as the bonds which serve to connect the thoughts that occupy any portion of our conscious life. Hence such dreams are more easily reproduced from memory by any disposition that arouses a retrograde association of ideas. ”

“ Here, however, we have to remember the tendency to magnification in dream imagery, a tendency which rests on the emotionality of dreams. Emotion is normally heightened in dreams. Every impression reaches sleeping consciousness through this emotional atmosphere, in an [161] enlarged form, vaguer it may be, but more massive. The sleeping brain is thus not dealing with actual impressions—if we are justified in speaking of the impressions of waking life as 'actual'—even when actual impressions are being made upon it, but with transformed impressions. ”

“ Here we arrive at the most perplexing of the problems presented by the phenomena of dream.
We accept without hesitation, or questioning, or even a suspicion of its unreality, that which in waking life would have been banished instantly as the baseless fabric of a vision. We believe implicitly [63] in objects and actions which, when awake, we should have pronounced to be impossible. Moreover we contemplate the wildest conceptions of the fancy without the slightest consciousness of their incongruity or folly. ”

“ While many of our dreams may be traced to subconscious memory or telepathy and happenings of material affairs of our daily lives, others are undoubtedly the astral happenings of the ego while functioning in the etheric regions. There we meet not only the misnamed dead but also many of those who are still in the physical body, and let me state here that many of our difficult problems of physical life are worked out in sleep. ”

“ Chaotic as these are, they are full of wonder and miracle, for in the space of a second, almost before a voice has reached the ear of the sleeper or a hand has touched him, some magical engineer has flung a bridge of wild incident over which the spirit races from deep own-being unto outward being.
Never when awake could we pack into a second of vivid imagination the myriad incidents that the artificer of dream can create to bring us from the being we remember not back to the dream of life. ”

“ Yet, when one reflects on the vast number of dreams which night after night pass through our brains, the number of coincidences between the vision and the event are perhaps fewer and less remarkable than a fair calculation of chances would warrant us to expect. Nor is it surprising, considering the variety of thoughts in sleep, and that they all bear some analogy to the affairs of life, that a dream should sometimes coincide with a contemporaneous, or even with a future, event. ”

“ Thus it is that, when we are awake, the senses correct the action of the mind and our capacity to distinguish the real from the ideal is due to the information given by the senses.
It is plain now why in dream we believe the ideal to be real. The senses being severed from the Mind by sleep, the Mind has lost the instrument by which it learns, when awake, what is shadow and what substance. As the necessary consequence, all ideas appear to it to be real because they are all alike. ”

“ Yet a further explanation will be found in the exaltation of the mental faculties in dream, which enables us often to perceive, more clearly than in our waking state, ideas and chains of ideas and to think about them more correctly than is practicable in waking life, when the influx of external impressions represses to some extent the independent action of the mental faculties.
There is a popular belief that in sleep the Soul sometimes quits the body and personally visits the scenes and persons of the dream which, in truth, is not all a dream. ”