Lucid Dreaming as a method for living otherwise (original) (raw)
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Lucid Sleeping: A meditation on nightmares, bubbles and incantation
Performance Research, 2016
In the preface to his 1830 book The Philosophy of Sleep, Robert Macnish claims that on the subject of sleep ‘there is scarcely a single fact on which any two authors agree … the medical writers are, in every respect, as much divided in their views as the metaphysicians, and the most contradictory statements meet us at almost every step’ (2009: vii). Nearly 200 years later, not that much has changed – sleep researchers, neuropsychologists, lucid dreamers and psychoanalysts still have their own ideas about what sleep means. Yet we all sleep, even if we do it each on our own, some nights better than others, with differing degrees of immersion and depth. In a sense, even if sleep seems at first to be a purely private phenomenon, one might also argue that it is exactly the opposite – shared in form if not always in content and as such an exemplary performative platform if we can only learn how to put sleep in conversation with waking,thoughtful, experience. However, to do so involves meditating on this paradox, attempting to articulate some of the ways in which sleep can be made accessible as a shared contextual arena for speculation and performative engagement.
Lucid Dreaming: Participating in our Inner Wilderness
Annual Proceedings of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, 2008
In my eco-psychological critique of the culture of lucid dreaming, awareness and control are often conflated with one another due, in part, to a deep historical bias in which nature is viewed as a wilderness that is separate from, and at war with, humankind. I will present a phenomenological methodology for lucid dreaming that has helped me bridge this conflict within myself, centered on receptivity and connectivity.
Lucid Dreams, 2024
We sleep. Images appear in our mind’s eye. Scenes and sensations are seen, heard, felt: dreams, a creation of sleep. The unconscious speaks in symbols – as does art. Dreams and art open up transcendent spaces of healing. Lucid Dreams engages with this universal theme, crossing boundaries of time and geography to investigate dreams in art, material culture, and new media from a multicultural perspective. It presents ancient headrests, illuminated Jewish, Islamic, and Christian manuscripts, Chinese dream stones and Japanese Zen prints together with works in a range of mediums by artists from the last three centuries, from Goya’s powerful Sleep of Reason through Surrealist visions to contemporary international and Israeli creations. All of these express humanity’s shared, never-ending desire to touch the dream and interpret it. Celebrating the centenary of André Breton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism and inspired by his Dream Object, the exhibition leads you through a long corridor to multiple “compartments” of the unconscious. These rooms echo the complexity of the human mind and the multifaceted nature of thoughts, emotions, and memories. We invite you to shift consciousness and immerse yourself in the transformative power of art.
Dreaming with Awareness: Exploring Lucid Dreaming as a Bridge Between Reality and Meditation
Smaratungga: Journal of Education and Buddhist Studies, 2023
The article examines the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, which means a dream where a dreamer is aware of being in a dream state and can often influence the course of the dream to some extent. While some researchers of lucid dreaming compare the lucid dreaming state to a waking state and claim it combines cognitive elements of waking consciousness with the hallucinatory quality of dreaming, most recent researches suggest that some types of lucid dreams might be seen as a spontaneous meditative state. The research question for this article is if modern practice of lucid dreaming is a separate phenomenon that shares some characteristics of meditative experience. In order to answer the research question, both quantitative and qualitative research methods were used. Data collection was done with the help of online surveys. The author chose random sampling to sample a group of lucid dreamers. One hundred sixteen surveys were completed. Based on the research done,the author comes to the conclusion that lucid dreamers share the experiences typical of meditation practice. The author points out that lucid dreaming is not identical to being mindful in the dream state as well. Such commonly experienced sensations during a lucid dream as desire to control, desire to fly, and euphoria differ it from the state that ‘dream yoga’ or similar states in other religious traditions try to achieve.
Lucid Nightmares: the Dark Side of Self-Awareness in Dreams
Annual Conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. Presented June 27, 2009 Chicago, IL, 2009
Nightmares are often addressed today only in terms of how to prevent them, repress them, or transform them into positive experiences. In this paper, I will illustrate how some nightmares offer a unique opportunity to dreamers not because they can be transformed but because they transform us. These are lucid nightmares, which I am loosely defining as terrifying dreams in which the dreamer is self-aware, and is awakened immediately after the dream runs its course. So by reporting my own dreams and some of others I have collected through my website, I hope to open the channels of discussion of this intriguing, and perhaps misunderstood, set of experiences.
2012
Lucid dreaming and the Surreal: Accessing the unconscious to produce creative visual outcomes. The unconscious has long been considered a major source of creativity and dreams have been seen as a means of tapping into this reservoir of all that is strange, unreal and sometimes disturbing. The interpretation of dreams formed an important part of psychoanalysis right from the outset. More recently, consciousness science has distanced itself from the psychoanalytical approach, likening it to 'the Dark Ages' of dream research [Revonsuo 2010]. The enduring power of dreams as generators of creative imagery and bizarre ideas is, however, not to be dismissed. For the Surrealists dreams were considered a revolutionary force and central to their work, and the originality of much of their output may be attributed to dream imagery. This paper describes how it is possible to explore the realm of the unconscious through induced lucid dreaming. This has been done over a period of several y...