Not only am I dreaming up a grand positive future fiction story in The Vision (see Preface or Chapter 1 – Departure), but I also record most of my normal dreams, night after night. Then last year my friend lent me the book Exploring the world of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge. It is a guide on how to become aware in your dreams that you are dreaming.
Sounds lame? Maybe in theory, but achieving this conscious dream state is actually an utterly exhilarating experience. In essence a lucid dream offers ultimate freedom, because in this private world of your own imagination you can do anything you like, even the impossible! That’s cool, right?
But taking control of your dreams can also help you to take control of your waking life; reports range from musicians getting over their stage fright, students using extra studying-time for exams, sports people practising their moves and people getting over recurring nightmares.
Lucid dreaming sure is an interesting tool for psychological self-exploration yet the science behind it is only in its infancy. It is a fickle subject to study and LaBerge’s Lucidity Institute keeps doing a lot of pioneering work and there are of course many more great resources on the web.
Now to tie all this back to The Vision…exploring impossibilities in dreams may just help keep my mind supple to explore different future scenarios, especially those unlikely positive ones that I hear so little about!
I admit that lucid dreaming is also a means of escape for me and being bumped out of one is always connected to the somewhat sorry feeling of, ‘I don’t wanna go back to normality…’ 🙁 But at least there is no hangover.
The experience is not unlike being immersed in writing The Vision actually, diving into this world of infinite possibilities where I can choose my next moves without the normal attachment to waking life…
Lucid dreaming is definitely one of my favourite subjects of interest. The work you put in pays off and it always feels awesome to be able to say, ‘Honey, I am going to go to sleep to do some research!’
