Lucid Dream: Powerful Tool or Distraction?

by David Rivinus

A lucid dream is one in which the dreamer becomes aware that he is dreaming. This awareness is often triggered by a startling event in the dream. The following hypothetical example represents a classic scenario in which the dreamer begins to notice something unusual and starts to analyze his own situation. He thinks to himself, “Oh look! There’s a hippopotamus in ballet slippers. Wait a minute! Hippos don’t wear ballet slippers. This has to be a dream, so I guess I’m dreaming.”

Another type of trigger is the one I experienced when I first began to dream lucidly. Like the dreamer above, I vaguely became aware of watching a scene unfold in my consciousness. The more I looked, the more I knew that I had witnessed all of these events before. My sense of déjà vu caused me to be perplexed and to pull back, viewing the unfolding events from an even greater distance. At that point, I thought to myself, “Oh yeah. I know what’s going on; this is a dream.”

Once one becomes aware of being in the middle of a dream, one tries to stay aware while taking charge of the dream events that occur. This can take lots of practice. For example, in the dream about the hippo, a common outcome in a lucid dream is to be so startled by realizing that one is watching one’s own dream that one wakes up from sleep. Over time and with considerable honing of skills, one can learn not to be startled: “Oh. There’s a hippo in ballet slippers. I must be in a dream. Well, what should I do now? I think I’ll go over and make friends with the animal; I’ll tickle the hippo under its chin.” Then, the trick is to stay focused and concentrated enough that the goal – in this case tickling – actually gets accomplished. For many dreamers, fulfilling such a task is difficult.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, researchers, like Stanford University’s Stephen LaBerge, began devoting their careers to understanding these lucid dream events, writing books that described this type of dream and offering techniques to increase the dreamer’s efficiency. LaBerge even went so far as to invent and then refine a machine designed to help induce the lucid dream state.

In recent years, dozens of lucid dreaming clubs and online lucid dreaming chat groups have sprung up across the U.S. and Europe. I belong to two of them, and what I have noticed is that the discussions are almost exclusively about technique. Here are some typical questions asked by club members: “When you see something interesting that you want to examine in your dream and you try to get close but can’t, how do you move yourself forward?” “If you’re flying and you find yourself drifting down to the ground, how do you stay aloft?” “When you see a scary guy in your dream, how do you get rid of him?”

When dreamers become fixated on technique, they can sometimes miss the spiritual message delivered through the lucid dream’s metaphor. That can be a problem because it puts the dream in the category of a diversion rather than a medium for significant spiritual dialogue. Take another look at the three questions in the paragraph above. Distance yourself from the literal scenes they are describing and examine each scenario as a metaphor or a dream symbol. It becomes immediately apparent that there is a symbolic message being delivered that needs the dreamer’s attention.

In the past, when I have expressed this kind of observation during meetings of the local lucid dream club I am a member of, I have been told that I have missed the point: You’re talking about symbolic dreams, they tell me. This is different. We’re discussing a lucid dream. You can view it from another perspective and can avoid all that symbolism stuff.

It is true that lucid dreams have their own important characteristics. The most profound demonstration of this comes from Tibetan Buddhist monks who have been practicing lucid dreaming for centuries. These monks learn to use lucid dreams to move their spirit bodies from one state of consciousness to another. They have a specific goal in mind: If they can successfully maneuver their spirit bodies in dreams, these Buddhists believe that they can also influence the movement of their souls when their human forms die. If they can guide their souls in the right way at death, then they can avoid returning in another incarnation, and can finally separate themselves from the lower worlds of karma.

A more prosaic, but nevertheless important Western goal of lucid dreaming is therapy. Advanced lucid dreamer and author Robert Waggoner discusses successfully confronting one’s own personal demons in the lucid dream state. In his book, Lucid Dreaming Plain and Simple, he says that such lucid dream therapy has even resulted in the cure of post-traumatic stress disorder. These special characteristics do set lucid dreams apart from more typical dreams in certain important ways.

Yet in his book, Waggoner, a skilled lucid dreamer, makes the remark that, whenever he encounters another dream character in a lucid dream, he has trained himself to ask that figure what it represents in Waggoner’s life. Even after going through the adventure and exhilaration of being aware and then controlling his own lucid dream, Waggoner brings the experience right back to the realm of symbol and metaphor. To him, understanding the dream metaphor is one of the most important aspects of the experience.

In fact, Waggoner devotes an entire chapter of his book to learning how to work with dream metaphors. He agrees that without taking note of the spiritual message delivered symbolically, the dream experience is diminished in value. He is emphatic that dreams, even lucid ones, are not primarily about the scenes they depict; rather, they are metaphoric communications.

All of life is a metaphor, both waking life and sleeping life. We live in a paradox. We are expected to deal literally with the issues that come into our lives. It is when we go beyond these literal understandings that life’s real esoteric knowledge is presented to us. While God can certainly communicate in English, Swahili or Mandarin, God never stops conversing in the universal language of metaphor. It is a language that is being spoken to us constantly, twenty-four hours a day. The trouble is that we are often so seduced by the drama, or in a lucid dream, the adventure of the experience, that we overlook the most important part.

Do you have good dream recall? Do you have none? Do you dream lucidly, have visions, or travel on the astral plane? Are you a couch potato mostly interested in Monday night sports on TV? No matter what your personal inclinations and skill levels, you are constantly being offered helpful messages from an intelligent, guiding source that can see well beyond your own individual perception. This is true of any experience you have while you are aware even during lucid dreaming. Your single most important job is simply to pay attention to the metaphor.

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About the Author

David Rivinus has been a dream analyst since the late 1960s. His subsequent discovery that one can analyze startling daytime events as dreams revolutionized his approach, and he has lectured and facilitated dream workshops internationally ever since. Recently, he documented his findings and methods in the book, Always Dreaming. For more information, please visit www.teacherofdreams.com