Balance September 2017 - 41
N AV I G AT I O N S L U G
LIVING THE DREAM
For more than a millennium, Tibetan Buddhists and others
have been using their dreams to stir an inner wakefulness which
enhances their self-worth. You can too...
words by C H A R L I E M O R L EY
WORDS: XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX6.5PT/8PT APERCU
H
ave you ever suddenly
realised you are dreaming?
You're sound asleep yet
fully conscious in the
dream, totally aware you're
inside a 3D projection
of your own mind. That's called a lucid dream:
a dream in which you are actively aware you are
dreaming while the dream is happening. Once you
realise you're dreaming, you can, with practice,
learn to direct the dream at will, reprogramming
your mental habits and unlocking the wellspring of
potential that resides in your unconscious mind, all
while you're sound asleep.
Once lucid, you have the ability to interact with
the dream and co-create the narrative. We can all
choreograph our dream experiences, calling out
for what we would like to happen and intentionally
healing parts of our minds from within. It's not
that you control the dream; but simply orchestrate
it: 'No sailor controls the sea. Similarly, no lucid
dreamer controls the dream.' Just as it would
be an arrogant sailor who believed they were
commanding the awesome power of the sea, so it
is with dreams. Let's not be arrogant sailors.
You can't control the power of the unconscious
mind, but you can make friends with it and start
to release its latest powers every night of your life.
And this isn't some new fad. For more than 1,000
September 2017 BA LA N CE
years, lucid dreaming has been used in Buddhist,
Sufi and other esoteric cultures as a form of
mind training in which you learn consciously to
recognise your dreams, as a way to use the dream
time for spiritual practice. As with all forms of
mind training within these traditions, the aim is
to be more aware and more awake in all phases of
waking and dreaming, to switch off the autopilot
and to wake up to life.
People often sleepwalk through relationships,
too tired to activate their potential. They make
crucial life choices with sleep in their eyes. But
to dream lucidly is to live lucidly, so with every
lucid dream we become increasing more awoke.
THE SCIENCE BIT
Lucid dreaming has been a scientifically verified
phenomenon for more than 40 years. More recently,
in a 2009 study, neurologists at Frankfurt University
classified it as 'a hybrid state of consciousness'
in which areas of the prefrontal cortex (where
rational thought and self-awareness arise) become
activated while we're dreaming, which leads to
self-awareness within the REM [rapid eye
movement] dream state.
And researchers from the Max Planck Institute
of Psychiatry in Germany concluded that
'lucid dreaming constitutes a hybrid state of
consciousness with definable and measurable
differences from the waking state and from the
REM dream state'. This means the apparent
paradox of being both aware and asleep, which
had previously caused a lot of resistance and
scepticism from the scientific establishment, has
now been laid to rest: lucid dreaming is for real.
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