neco k synchronicitam (mimo jine) z emailovy konference o lucidnich snech (
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/iasd-lucidity/?v=1&t=directory&ch=web&pub=groups&sec=dir&slk=14 )
Hi Robert,
This is a great conversation: thanks for starting it!
I’ve spent some time around another Robert, Robert Moss, who advises that we ought to take dreams more literally and waking life more symbolically, and I’ve taken that advice to heart in many ways. He calls meaningful coincidences, “secret handshakes from the universe.” Sometimes I think of them as winks or, as Arnold Mindell might call them, flirts. As an example, in my most recent lucid dream the lucidity trigger came from an object. In the dream I was shopping at a clothing store and picked up a yellow sweater with a label that read “Lucid Dream Wear.” Wow, I thought in the dream, what are the odds of me, of all people, finding a sweater with this label—that’s it, I’ll have to buy it. And then it dawned on me that the odds were indeed too steep, and I was lucid, and went on to a second phase of dreaming with full lucidity. Now, believe it or not the next day, in waking reality, I went shopping, randomly picked up a sweater—the first thing I picked up—and the tag read, “Lucidity.” I chose not to reality test, but just smiled to myself and thought that the dream yogis are right: all of it is dream.
So I guess with the “lucid living” idea, the idea of being “awake” in all states or levels of existence for me has lessened my desire to have lucid dreams for their own sake, and made me more interested in being conscious (in the depth psychological sense) and/or mindful (in the Buddhist sense) as much as possible in my life, whatever is happening and whatever I’m feeling about it. To distinguish the two somewhat, I would say what I'm calling consciousness tends to be more analytical in terms of the interpreting of events as symbols with meaning connections to past and future, while mindfulness is more experiential, grounding me in my sensory experience here and now: both seem to involve, for me, a capacity for “witnessing,” standing apart from myself with a second awareness of what’s going on. In lucid dreams I tend more towards a mindful, yet often still exuberant, experience of the senses—most recently a smorgasbord of cake and pastries! But I’ve also had, at least in one lucid dream, a curious instantaneous interpretation of a dream character as a part of myself (blocked creativity). This interpretation was a lot different from waking interpretation of night dreams though, as there was no puzzling out, maze-of-associations process to an “I think it means this” interpretation; rather it was just a simple, instant knowing—“Oh, you are this element in me.” The most curious thing was that I had a simultaneous and equally strong understanding that this character had an existence all her own, independent of me. There seemed to be no conflict of understanding in this paradox in the dream.
A lot of my daytime “secret handshakes,” too, feel more like reflections of what is happening in my inner world. E.g. I was recently thinking about non-lucid dreams in which I’m venting anger, and pondering my waking behavior in light of this, and then it happened as I was stopped on a bridge while driving, in a sort of blank or mindful state of mind, I noticed that my gaze had fallen on a ship called the U.S. Naval “Assertive.”
The difference, I guess, with this waking dream symbol is that it pertained to something I was consciously, actively thinking about, whereas the lucid dream figure was alerting me to something more "buried," a state of affairs I wasn't dealing with consciously. But in both cases the interpretation was more like instant translation versus laborious deciphering, so it seems to me that there is a state of mind, in both waking and dreaming life, that is conducive to this symbol fluency, if you will. As you may have guessed, these experiences make me less patient with traditional interpretation methods for dreams, although I still find value in these too when I lose my fluency.
I will say that in general the more I stay alert to and acknowledge these sorts of nods and winks, and the more I pay attention to how waking and dreaming life intertwine, literally and symbolically, the more my perception of reality is altered.
The question then becomes not “am I dreaming right now?” It’s a given that I am. If it’s important to me at the time, I may ask myself which dream is it, the one where I’m bound by gravity, or the one where I’m not. (I still love flying!) If the former, I may still ask myself what the psychic equivalents of gravity are (fear-based-patterns) that bind me which wouldn’t if I were awake in a general sense; and I may still regard the people in my life as fully separate entities and yet also projected aspects of my own being.
Yours,
Lisa Coté