Lucid Dreaming Makes Your Dreams Come True, Literally
Everyone dreams, even if they don’t remember; however, not everyone is aware of the dream while they are dreaming. Lucid dreaming is the ability to be conscious in the dream state and make willful changes. Tibetan Buddhists call this consciousness practice Dream Yoga, and it has the support of modern neuroscience. In an interview with Lilou Macé, Charlie Morley, a self-described Lucid Dreaming Teacher, explains the many benefits of lucid dreaming and offers simple techniques to begin this practice.
Charlie Morley, author of Dreams of Awakening: Lucid Dreaming and Mindfulness of Dream & Sleep, is a teacher of the holistic approach to lucid dreaming, within the context of mindfulness meditation and Tibetan Buddhism. In 2008, he became one of the first Westerners officially authorized to teach how to lucid dream within the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. This allows him the rare ability to synthesize both Western and Eastern perspectives on lucidity.
He shares his initial experiences of lucid dreaming when he was sixteen years old, and as you can imagine, boys that age often have only one thing on their mind. It wasn’t until some years later that he discovered the power of lucid dreaming to embrace the suppressed unconscious aspects of himself.
“You want a real psychedelic experience? Walk around in your unconscious!” -Charlie Morley
I love the way he calls it dream choreography, like dancing with your unconscious. If you saw the movie Inception, then you may recall the characters’ lucid dreaming experiences and how inception points were created and altered. Lucid dreaming, as Charlie describes it, is Self-Inception, very much like a virtual reality simulator.
When he asked one of his teachers one day about the most important secret of dream yoga, he was surprised by the teacher’s response, “You have to really want to do it. You have to be really fired up.”
Does it sound familiar?
It takes the desire to perform it, and then the willingness and discipline to practice on your way to mastery.
This is not airy-fairy woo-woo stuff. This requires training your mind to recognize the illusion and to be the interface in this reality experience. That means being willing to see all the rejected and disowned parts of yourself and recognizing the projections. That in turn ends the blame game, as it is all you.
So why would you lucid dream? It amplifies your intentions and visualizations a thousandfold.
Just imagine the power that might add to your manifesting! Imagine going into a lucid dream with the intention to rejuvenate your physical body. If you are in physical pain or are experiencing extreme discomfort, it can be quite a challenge to focus your attention elsewhere, but in lucid dreaming state, those distractions aren’t present. You can give your body the experience of being whole again. The body responds to this as if it were real and hence it is reflected in the awake state.
You can imagine the infinite potential and possibilities of what you might create in this state of awareness, and the kind of world we’d co-create when we recognize we are living this dream together.
About the Author
Researchers Find Way to Interact With People in Lucid Dreams
The mysterious world of dreams has thus far only been fully accessible to one person—the dreamer... until now. With a recent groundbreaking study, a new age of dream research has just begun.
The lucid dream is a state of awareness that you’re dreaming while possibly having some control over what happens within it. It’s estimated that some 50 percent of people have had a lucid dream, especially in childhood.
Scientists have been studying this phenomenon for decades but haven’t been able to adequately explain it because a person’s ability to recount their dreams upon waking is often unreliable. But recently, scientists have made a breakthrough by showing that people can both comprehend questions and provide answers to them, all while dreaming.
A team of international researchers studied 36 people with the goal of finding a way to communicate with them while they were dreaming. The results were groundbreaking.
Charlie Morley is a dream researcher who teaches people how to lucid dream.
“Up to this point, there’s been no way to directly communicate to the lucid dreamer while they’re in the lucid dream,” Morley said. “You can give them instructions before, you can speak to them afterwards, but while they’re in that internal virtual reality simulation of their own mind, there’s a blackout in comms. The brilliant thing about this new study is that blackout was broken through, they could actually communicate to the lucid dreamer while they were inside the lucid dream.”
“What they discovered was, while you’re in a lucid dream you can actually direct your physical eyes at will. So, using a form of literal morse code flicking the eyes left, right, up, down to indicate certain responses, they were able to communicate with the dreamer while they were still asleep. How did it enter the dream? Three main different ways, one person said it came through a car radio in the dream, suddenly the radio station changed and they could hear the voice of the scientist. Another person said it was like the voice of god, it just came down from the sky. And another person said it was like a narrator in a film, they would then reply ‘yes, I can hear you,’ by doing two eye flicks to the left or whatever code they had predecided to indicate ‘yes.'”
Out of 158 trials, participants were able to give correct answers about 18% of the time—a statistically significant result. The validity of the results was strengthened by the fact that there were four separate teams of researchers in four different countries, all using slightly different techniques and getting very similar results.
