Stephen Gerringer
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Rings true to me. I do experience many “little” hero journeys within the arc of the overall journey that is a human life, but you have certainly captured / conveyed the essence, Jufa.
Again, not to worry, James – conversations take on a life of their own. I am curious – do you ever recall realizing, in the middle of a dream, that you must be dreaming? If so, do you remember if you felt wonder as a result, or maybe discomfort or confusion? Or do you wake up once you realize you’re having a dream? Or has this not happened to you before?
Thanks, James – though I can really only speak from my own experience. I, too, pay special attention when a word or phrase follows me across the divide between the dream zone and waking consciousness.
Your reference to readings on core complexes reminds me that dreams love visual puns. For example, many of my dreams unfold in public settings – hotels or resorts, elaborate restaurants, or on a campus, a planned community, or among a set of apartments – and I will find in my dream journal the next morning that I have referred to these as a “complex”: e.g., “the dream occurred in a public space in the complex,” or “I saw her in a crowded area of the complex,” or “we were on the bed in a guest room in the the complex,” etc. – with the rest of the dream supplying the clues as to what “complex” I seem to have located myself in . . .
But now we’re wandering a bit far afield of the topic of lucid dreams (granted, given their fluid nature and many-fold layers, it’s no easy task to confine a discussion of dreams to just one subject, so some leakage is to be expected).
But you’ll notice the account of my most recent lucid dream (which I shared in the hopes others might share some of their experiences with lucid dreaming) just naturally overlapped with the pre-cognitive aspect of that dream.
Maybe we need a couple new threads, one perhaps on elements or aspects of dreams (such as telepathic and precognitive experiences), and one on dreamwork, including active imagination, which would also cover your most recent post. (Just thinking out loud for a moment . . . )
My most recent lucid dream happened a few weeks ago, when I found myself on an unfamiliar balcony: aware I was dreaming, I carefully examined the setting of the dream, attempting to impress it on my memory, even running my hands over the adobe-colored stucco walls, touching the smooth brass railings – and then slipped back into full immersion, forgetting I was dreaming until the morning, when I scribbled the dream in my journal.
Exactly one week later, visiting a different city to see a production of Hamilton, had a wonderful moment in a hotel where I’d never stayed before when I recognized the balcony outside my room – right down to the feel of the texture of the adobe-colored stucco walls, the thick, round brass railings, and the view . . .
As mentioned in another thread, I’ve recorded over a thousand dreams in dedicated journals the past three decades. As a result, just about every configuration possible has appeared in my dream journals, including dreams within dreams (waking up from a dream only to find one is still dreaming), dreams where I am more than one character at a time (one where I was six people at the same moment, some in different rooms interacting with different people – very trippy experience that challenged my perception of individual consciousness), dreams where I am a different gender, and, of course, countless instances of being awake within a dream.
I don’t seek out those lucid dreaming experiences, and don’t do anything particular with them different from any other dream when they occur. But beyond anecdotal evidence, there is a growing body of research devoted to lucid dreaming. Frankly, I have had a less than favorable opinion of those who focused on being conscious while dreaming, assuming the idea is to control and direct the dream (the wonder of dreaming for me is bypassing waking ego; I shy away from the muscular ego – M.E. – in charge of my dreams, consider it doesn’t do that great a job managing my waking life).
I’m pleased to learn my understanding is mistaken, at least when it comes to serious dream research. My current dream practice works well for me, so I’ll likely continue to just enjoy lucid moments within dream when they occur, rather than attempt to induce and prolong lucid dreams – but I am beginning to understand the value of that approach, thanks to those like Andrew who have shared their experience.
James – no worries. I doubt Andrew even noticed you posted this in the Helpful Books thread (I’m just trying to keep conversational threads separate from those listing resources, to avoid sprawl).
To me, the difference between the practice of Jung’s concept of active imagination and the experience of lucid dreaming is analogous to the difference between imagining you are drinking a cup of coffee, and actually drinking a cup of coffee. Depending on how powerful one’s imagination is, it certainly is possible to recall the aroma, the flavor, how it feels in your belly, and the accompanying mental stimulation on more than just an abstract intellectual level when imagining that cup of coffee, but that still pales compared to the experience of actually drinking a cup of coffee.
A dream, like a psychedelic experience, is an altered state of consciousness – an immersive experience in an alternate reality, if you will, but reality nevertheless, at least to the “dream you.”.
Active imagination, on the other hand, is working with images, often from a dream one has already had, with the idea, in Jung’s terms, to “distinguish ourselves from the unconscious contents.” He originally referred to this as “the transcendent function,” and then “the picture method” – but also “active fantasy,” “trancing,” “visioning,” “exercises,” “dialectical method,” “technique of introversion,” “introspection,” and “techniques of the descent” – before using the term “active imagination” for the first time in public in his Tavistock Lectures in London in 1935.
There are many forms active imagination can take – working with and engaging the images in one’s own mind, for sure, often by selecting an image from a dream, vision or fantasy, or even focusing on a mood or psychosomatic symptom experience from waking life, which then activates the imagination (you can even do this with a painting or photo, concentrating on it until it comes alive, so to speak).
Other times this involves giving the imagination form through painting, drawing, sculpting, writing, dancing, and such. Jungian analyst Joan Chodorow, who compiled a collection of Jung’s passages on the subject, describes the process thus:
Sometimes the image appears first in the mind’s eye, but it may or may not want to come out. More often than not, images arise in a completely spontaneous way as we work with an expressive medium. Sooner or later the imagination is given physical form. Jung describes a wide variety of forms that include writing, drawing, painting, sculpting, weaving, music, dancing, as well as the creation of rituals and dramatic enactments. Marie-Louise von Franz reports that Jung once told her symbolic enactment with the body is more efficient than ‘ordinary active imagination’ but he could not say why.”
I’d venture to guess the reason for that is a symbolic enactment in the three-dimensional world gives the imagination body – the images put on flesh, so to speak, become real. “Play” is often an essential element: Jung’s return to an activity of his childhood, building houses and cities out of blocks, then graduating to stones and building the full-scale tower at Bollingen, was a form of active imagination – as were his inner dialogues with Philemon and Salome.
Despite some differences in minor details or terminology – whether Jung, von Franz, Robert Johnson, or other depth psychologists – the trajectory of active imagination is essentially the same: Let go of ego and open the mind to the unconscious (I believe Johnson phrases it “invite the unconscious”), then let an image arise, give the image some form of expression, let the ego react to it (applying waking world values by bringing in an ethical element), make it concrete with a physical ritual of some sort, and then live it.
There is intention to active imagination, which is something we do when awake. We do not think we are dreaming when doing it, nor do we think this is “real” (though for some individuals, it is possible to be overwhelmed by unconscious impulses if careless). Active imagination is not something that happens by chance – it is an intentional psychological process designed to achieve a result.
Lucid dreaming is very different. We know about lucid dreaming because it tends to arise spontaneously in the dream state. When dreaming, our experience feels just as real as when awake – but many many many people will at some point have an experience where they notice some sort of dissonance within the dream (e.g. sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool and suddenly realizing you haven’t been holding your breath, and yet are feeling no discomfort – or noticing your Aunt Martha left the room by walking through the wall instead of out the door, which just doesn’t feel “right”).
Most of the time when impossible things happen in a dream we don’t think of them as strange at all, because we experience them as consistent with the dream logic of that dream reality. Dissonance arises when there is a sense or suspicion that we witness, or directly experience, as at odds with reality – which is often the result of the intrusion of conscious awareness into the dream reality.
For example, I have often had dreams where I am sort of skipping or dancing over the ground – a joyous experience – and then I notice that I’m actually traveling or floating long distances between skips, maybe thirty or forty feet, far beyond what should be possible –and that sense that this is at odds with reality leads me to wonder if I am dreaming. Other times I will find myself in a situation where I can’t remember what came before it – how did I end up on the back of this unicorn, or in my childhood bedroom – which is at odds with waking world experience, where I remember what came before I started typing this post, for example, and know how I ended up here.
Sometimes that’s a momentary twinge of awareness, and then I’ll slip right back into full immersion – but there are times when I realize that I really am dreaming. Often, when that happens, consciousness takes the rudder and suddenly I am fully awake – but there are other times when I remain in the dream, marveling at the reality of what is clearly impossible when I’m awake: the intervals between feet touching the ground when running or skipping grow longer and longer, and suddenly I am floating or flying, swooping and soaring, knowing I must be dreaming.
One doesn’t have to read Carl Jung or Robert Johnson to experience a lucid dream; these tend to arise spontaneously. There is no conscious purpose or intention to it for most dreamers.
Often these experiences are quite joyous and playful: there is a certain exhilaration to knowing I am dreaming. For example, if I am being chased by a snarling, hungry tiger, I experience a rush of adrenaline and tremendous fear and anxiety. This is true whether dreaming or awake – in either case, the threat and fear is real.
But if, while this happens, I suddenly realize I am dreaming, that changes the experience. The tiger may catch me, but I know that ultimately, there is nothing to fear as it’s just a dream, so I am able to have some fun with the experience.
(On a bit of a tangent, it is intrigues me that “Buddha” can mean He Who Is Awake – or the Awakened One. Buddha realizes life is sorrow, but knows that all is a dream, and that he is awake within the dream; his solution to that suffering, then, is to stop the dream and simply cease to be – nirvana: blown out, like the extinguishing of a candle. Three centuries later the figure of the Bodhisattva emerges, one who is on the cusp of Buddhahood – knows all is a dream and is awake with that dream, and yet determines to stay in the dream, experiencing the sorrows of life until all beings in the dream wake up to that – which Campbell refers to as the Bodhisattva formula: “Joyful participation in the sorrows of life”)
Knowing that lucid dreaming exists, a small number of people today actively aim to foster the experience of being awake within a dream, often for fun – but all, often with the intention of changing the dream (e.g. turn that snarling, threatening beast into a butterfly). That, however, is easier said than done, for even though one may know one is experiencing a dream, the ego having that experience is not exactly identical with one’s waking ego – it may be possible to influence the dream somewhat (say, float off into the sky, or imagine one is going to meet one’s first lover around the next bend in the path), but it is still dream, with its own dream logic. Dream characters may not react the way you want – might turn that tiger into a butterfly, but then the butterfly bites off your arm.
So Andrewl points out that he leans more toward experiencing the dream while awake within it without trying to script or manipulate it, or make it conform to one’s will. Indeed, one can apply active imagination to the images one encounters in a lucid dream.
It does indeed seem possible to achieve some psychological benefits from lucid dreaming.
Research remains ongoing . . . .
I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve added these titles to the thread Helpful Books on Dream, along with a fairly expensive two-volume collection of interdisciplinary research on the subject.
This is an endlessly fascinating subject (interest certainly ratcheted up after the 2010 release of the film Inception). As I noted in our exchange in The Conversation with a Thousand Faces forum, I haven’t consciously attempted to incubate lucid dreams, not wanting to subject my dreams to control by my waking, muscular ego (which I want to abbreviate M.E. – or “me”), though anyone serious about chronicling their dream lives has likely experienced lucid dreaming (which might be defined as being awake within a dream, aware that the dream is a dream).
But as you pointed out in your response,
One of my own most important lessons, back when I was following a strict lucid dream induction practice, was allowing ‘the dream to unfold on its own,’ as you so aptly put it. I think for many people new to lucid dreaming, as I was at that time, the will comes to the forefront of the lucid dreaming experience, experiencing that power and control is exhilarating, especially at the beginning. But you’re right – dreams contain messages, usually in the forms of images, symbols and story, and when we impress the will too deeply upon the dream, we run the risk of losing that message.”
Nor, from the reading I have done, when aware one is dreaming, though it may be possible to influence the dream, “willing” things to happen doesn’t always work: dream characters don’t always react to what we do or say the way we want them to (indeed, many seem to have their own motivations, back history, and even their own inner life!), nor, given the fluidity of dream, do circumstances necessarily remain static once we “will” them. That jives with my experience.
And then, even if “awake” within a dream, remaining lucid isn’t necessarily all that simple, often taking waking intention, discipline, and practice to learn how to maintain awareness when dreaming. Indeed, in my own experience, often the awareness that I am dreaming is a prelude to waking up; other times, I may be lucid for a space within a dream, but then something shifts, awareness slips, and I am back fully immersed in the dream state.
But then there have been dreams when I am lucid for an extended period; I don’t attempt to influence the way the dream unfolds when that happen, but I do pay special attention to my surroundings, and the feelings and sensations and interactions I experience within the play of the dream.
In my retro-hippie period (which I’ve never exactly outgrown), I focused attention and discipline on ingesting and learning from teacher plants and the visionary state – particularly recording and reviewing my experiences in my journals once I surfaced and returned to consciousness. I find much resonance between the texture of the psychedelic state and the dream state – including an awesome, fascinating hyperreality when lucid in each.
I am curious, andrewl – are there specific techniques you apply before falling asleep to foster lucidity within a dream? And once you are awake in the dream, is there anything you do to maintain that awareness for the duration of the dream?
Books on Lucid Dreaming (the first two recommended by forum user andrewl)
Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge
“LaBerge gives interesting examples of how professionals in different fields have used lucid dreaming to benefit job performance, good examples being a programmer who used lucid dreaming to work out bugs in thier code, and a surgeon who used lucid dreaming to practice complex surgeries.” – from andrewl
Stephen LaBerge is no touchie-feelie type, but a serious dream research scientist: his 1980 Ph.D. dissertation at Stanford University is titled “”Lucid Dreaming: An Exploratory Study of Consciousness during Sleep,” and he is the co-author of a number of scientific studies on the various aspects of this subject.
Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self by Robert Waggoner
“Waggoner focuses more on the metaphysical and philosophical/spiritual implications of lucid dreaming, as well as the different elements at play in lucid dreams, including the general development of the skill over time, a roadmap of sorts of how the skill generally develops for most people, from beginning to expert. His discussions of what he calls the ‘conscious unconscious’ is also illuminating.” – andrewl
And I will add the following title:
Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep edited by Ryan Hurd, M.A. and Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D.
This fairly expensive two volume set is an in-depth, multidisciplinary exploration of lucid dreaming from the perspective of science, psychology, and education in one volume, and religious traditions, creativity, and culture in the other.
Feel free to “ramble on” to your heart’s content, Andrew. You may have noticed by now that conversation in these forums unfolds leisurely, rather than at the frenetic pace of Facebook and other meme-driven social media (where intriguing posts tend to scroll off one’s newsfeed and out of sight in a matter of hours, or days at best, and depth is rare).
Turnaround is much slower here. It’s not unusual for forum users to let ideas simmer and percolate a few days, even weeks, before replying to a thought-provoking post – and many posts are often “long form,” rather than social media sound bites. An additional advantage over FB is that this content lives on: there are more than a few conversations that appear to have petered out months ago, which are rediscovered and revived by a new arrival who adds their thoughts, generating further discussion.
So no worries about writing too much, especially on a fascinating subject like this (though thanks for starting the thread on lucid dreaming – it will make the subject easier to find for forum users).
Though this isn’t dance, my wife and I are excited to be enjoying the arts once again after the 18 month or so Covid lag. The last weekend of September we attended a production of Steve Martin’s “The Underpants” (a revision of a 1911 play) at a local playhouse where we purchase annual season tickets. What a thrill to be enjoying a show and laughing with other people in the flesh. And then ,on October 1, we traveled an hour-and-a-half to Sacramento to catch a performance of Hamilton (stellar performance – I haven’t the words to explain how wonderful it was – my wife purchased tickets back in May for my birthday).
And just two nights ago we drove a couple hours to San Jose (at the south end of San Francisco Bay) for a magnificent dinner and my birthday gift to my wife in August – catching Monty Python alum John Cleese on his “Why There is No Hope” tour.
Everyone at the performances we attended was vaxxed and masked (except for performers onstage), which wasn’t really much of an inconvenience. Here’s hoping conditions continue to improve as life in the arts gradually returns to normal . . .
Love pretty much anything Robert Mirabel does – thanks for sharing this, Sunbug!
I hope you don’t mind, but I used my admin super powers to remove the raw URL and arrange the link so that if someone clicks on it, it will open in a separate page (that way forum users don’t have to worry about being transported away from this page and having to navigate their way back to COHO).
To do that in the future, type out the title you want to use for your link, then highlight it and click on the slanted paperclip icon (next to the image icon) on the menu at the top of your posting form. Paste the URL into the field that opens, click on the gear-like icon and select the open on a different page” option, and then click submit.
Hello Andrew,
I took a quick look at your story outline. I’ll return to it later when I have time to peruse it at my leisure – but seems a sweet little tale.
As admin, I did take the liberty of changing your raw link so that it opens on a separate page (so forum participants can read it without having to worry about navigating back to the discussion).
Lucid dreaming is an intriguing subject. I’ve recorded over a thousand dreams in dedicated journals the past three decades, which include several instances of being awake within a dream. I don’t seek those experiences out (I prefer the dream unfolding on its own, rather than attempting to consciously guide it – though your story makes clear dreams still work their magic even if we are aware we’re dreaming). Usually, once I become aware I’m dreaming, the dream dissolves soon after and I awake – but I do appreciate those instances where the dream continues.
That happened most recently just a few nights ago, when I found myself on an unfamiliar balcony: aware I was dreaming, I carefully examined the setting of the dream, attempting to impress it on my memory, even running my hands over the adobe-colored stucco walls, touching the smooth brass railings – and then slipped back into full immersion, forgetting I was dreaming until the morning, when I scribbled the dream in my journal, including the lucid episode.
Exactly one week later, visiting a different city to see a production of Hamilton, had a wonderful moment in a hotel where I’d never stayed before when I recognized the balcony outside my room – right down to the adobe-colored stucco walls, brass railings, and the view . . .
Feel free to peruse our relatively new forum on dreamwork (Myths, Dreams, and Reflections); you can jump in to one of the existing discussions (don’t worry if no one has posted in a while – a new comment is bound to draw others), or open a conversation on the subject of lucid dreaming. In fact, I’d love it if you would add a title or two or more on lucid dreaming to our Helpful Books on Dream thread.
Brad,
A third take-away for me from your essay is this observation:
It’s true, isn’t it, that the mythic narratives themselves are not as important as the dialogues we have about myth and meaning? Isn’t that the great inheritance, the great gift of myth: that they immerse us in the existentially puzzling phenomena we’d rather not have to give too much thought to?”
I can attest to that.
Perhaps you remember the very first time we met, fourteen years ago this month (!) at “Fools Dancing on the Edge,” the second of the Fools Gatherings under the auspices of Leigh Melander’s Imaginal Institute. After the first full day of more formal sessions, several of us ended up that evening in Leigh’s room, where we enjoyed animated and heady conversation revolving around mythology, psychology, soul, and such over adult beverages.
There came a moment in the conversation – I don’t recall what exactly we were discussing that triggered it, but I know it wasn’t planned – when several of us slipped off to our own rooms, which were all close to Leigh’s. Moments later we were all back, each carrying her or his own favorite etymological reference work, so we could dive deep into the origins and imagery of the language behind the mythological concepts we were discussing.
Glancing around that room, seeing the heavy volumes we had prioritized when packing for the weekend, I knew I has found my tribe.
That’s what I think of when I read the passage shared above. We weren’t just telling stories; myth provided the opportunity to immerse ourselves in dialogues, trialogues, and every other configuration as we plumbed life’s imponderables – for me, a poignant and enriching experience.
I cherish that memory, and in many ways imagine the MythBlast series you facilitate as an extension of that evening long ago, the circle ever expanding to include so many thinkers, writers, mythologists, and more in the ongoing conversation – which includes our conversation here in this forum.
Such a joy to be part of that tribe . . .
Allow me to hitchhike on Sunbug’s kudos and add my own appreciation for this “delightful” statement, Brad:
Mythopoesis is a uniquely human endeavor and delighting in it allows one to, if not exactly remake the world, at least remake our own reality here and now. For there is no fear in delight, no pain, no thought; delight is pure experience, and is in itself, transcendent.”
This observation mirrors the delight Campbell displays in his approach to the subject – a perspective first enunciated in “The Dilettante Among Symbols” (etymologically, a dilettante is “one who takes delight”), the opening chapter of Heinrich Zimmer’s The King and the Corpse – one of four posthumous Zimmer works, edited by Joseph Campbell and compiled from boxes full of typewritten lecture notes, partial outlines, “scraps of paper, scribbled in German, English, Sanskrit, and French,” and even notes found in the margins of books – a task that ate twelve years of Campbell’s life.
I think of Zimmer’s four posthumous volumes as “proto-Campbell”; Joe’s playful voice certainly comes through (which is evident when one compares these books, published in English, with the English translation of Kunstform und Yoga im indischen Kultbild (“Artistic Form and Yoga in the Sacred Images of India”), the 1926 work that brought Zimmer to Jung’s attention.
Here is an excerpt of Zimmer arriving at the same conclusion re delight in myth:
Delight . . . sets free in us the creative intuition, permits it to be stirred to life by contact with the fascinating script of the old symbolic tales and figures. Undaunted then by the criticism of the methodologists (whose censure is largely inspired by what amounts to a chronic agoraphobia: morbid dread before the virtual infinity that is continually opening out from the cryptic traits of the expressive picture writing which it is their profession to regard) we may permit ourselves to give vent to whatever series of creative reactions happens to be suggested to our imaginative understanding. We can never exhaust the depths – of that we may be certain; but then, neither can anyone else. And a cupped handful of the fresh waters of life is sweeter than a whole reservoir of dogma, piped and guaranteed.” (The King and the Corpse 5)
No wonder Campbell declares that Zimmer “gave me the courage to interpret myths out of what I knew of their common symbols.” Zimmer encouraged Campbell to follow his instincts, give free rein to his imagination and actually engage the mythic archetypes, rather than analyze, categorize, and systematize them to death. This experiential mythology, with its emphasis on the numinous image and the power of myth, is guaranteed to make many an academic specialist uncomfortable.
And, on a related note, nearly four decades later, in conversation with Bill Moyers, Campbell underscores that same resonance between myth and poetry that you highlight:
I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in the poem is what the myth does for you. (Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth 55)
Apparently great minds really do think alike, Brad . . .
