Lucid Dreaming

Hypnos and Thanatos, Sleep and His Half-Brother Death
by John William Waterhouse

I've been on holidays for one week now and that's about how long it takes to really start to slow down and relax. I've managed a daily meditation or two and have begun to re-read Osho's "The Book of Wisdom". In doing so, I was reminded of a reference he made to dreaming. He says:

The ego is a by-product, a by-product of the illusion that whatsoever you are seeing is true. If you think that objects are true, then the ego can exist; it is a by-product. If you think that objects are dreams, the ego disappears. And if you think continuously that all is a dream, then one day, in a dream in the night, you will be surprised: suddenly in the dream you will remember that this is a dream too! And immediately, as the remembrance happens, the dream will disappear. And for the first time you will experience yourself deep asleep, yet awake -- a very paradoxical experience, but of great benefit. Once you have seen your dream disappearing because you have become aware of the dream, your quality of consciousness will have a new flavor to it. The next morning you will wake up with a totally different quality you had never known before. You will wake up for the first time. Now you will know that all those other mornings were false; you were not really awake. The dreams continued -- the only difference was that in the night you were dreaming with eyes closed, in the day you were dreaming with eyes open. But if the dream has disappeared because awareness happened, suddenly you became aware in the dream.... And remember, awareness and dreaming cannot exist together. Here, awareness arises, and there, the dream disappears. When you become awake in your sleep, the next morning is going to be something so important that it is incomparable. Nothing like it has ever happened. Your eyes will be so clear, so transparent, and everything will look so psychedelic, so colorful, so alive. Even rocks will be felt to be breathing, pulsating; even rocks will have a heartbeat. When you are awake, the whole existence changes its quality. We are living in a dream. We are asleep, even when we think we are awake.

Osho is referring here to lucid dreaming about which much has been written and I was prompted to review the literature on the subject on the Internet. One technique recommended for the inducement of lucid dreaming is to carefully count the digits of your hand before going to sleep followed by a reminder to look at your hands in the dream and try counting the digits again. Apparently, this proves very difficult in a dream or you miscount the number. In either case, you are then alerted to the fact that you are dreaming. There are other techniques to maintain the state of lucid dreaming. I have an e-book titled "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" by Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. & Howard Rheingold that I think I'll make an effort to read. I notice the final chapter of the book is called "Life is a Dream: Intimations of a Wider World".

I'd like to attempt some lucid dreaming during these holidays and Osho's words have given me the stimulus. The dreaming also connects with Jung, whose writings I've recently reconnected with, and so it should be an interesting experiment. I'll need to start with the digit counting on a regular basis during the day so that it becomes so habitual that the practice will spontaneously occur to me in my dreams as well, maybe. Let's give it a try.

I am NOT THAT

I'm still making my way through Osho's "Book of Wisdom" and what he says about meditation is relevant to my last post about keeping physically fit. He describes meditation as anything that brings body, mind and spirit into harmony. To that end, jogging could be a form of meditation. So could swimming. He says it is important to choose a form of meditation that suits you. Sitting quietly observing the rhythm of your breathing may suit some but not others. You have to find techniques that work for you. He says that whenever a person is creative, absorbed in creativity, he or she is meditating.

As Brian Eno says, "If you study the heuristics and logistics of the mystics, you will find that their minds rarely move in a line". He goes on to say, "So it's

much more realistic to abandon such statistics and resign to be trapped like a leaf on the vine". It's easy to be trapped of course. We are trapped by identification. According to Osho (so this may be apocryphal), George Gurdieff said, "If I could summarise my teachings into one word, it would be 'disidentification'". I like that. Don't get trapped. Don't identify.

You can start by not accepting labels. I used to proclaim, with my ego nodding agreeably, that "I am a vegetarian". Oops, label. Of course once you allow yourself to be categorised, there are sub-categories to consider. People would ask "Do you eat eggs?" I would smilingly say "I'm an ovo-lacto vegetarian, which means I eat eggs (non-fertilised of course) and milk products". Inevitably someone asks, "Do you eat fish?" and I would be compelled to say, somewhat sternly, that I don't eat fish because if I did then I wouldn't qualify as a vegetarian. Categorisation feeds the ego. It's far simpler to say that I don't eat meat. If someone asks whether I eat fish, I can calmly say that I don't. It throws the onus back on the questioner to decide on a categorisation for my eating habits if he or she feels that it's needed.

The same goes for nationality. If someone were to ask me now, "Are you an Australian?", I'd have to say that I have an Australian passport. If the person then wants to classify me as an Australian then that's their decision. It's easy to get cute about this and use this "via negativa" as an ego trip but it's also important to free oneself of categories and this is a step in the right direction. If I say I am a vegetarian, then that implies there are non-vegetarians and immediately a divide is created. If I say on the other hand that I don't eat meat, it's rather different. It's more like saying I don't eat chocolate (not quite the same, but similar).

It's very common to describe oneself in terms of one's profession. I might say "I'm a teacher" but what I really mean is that "I'm qualified to work as a teacher in a Secondary school". It's not quite the same thing. I guess it come down to trying to remember that "I am NOT THAT". You can only find yourself by forgetting what you're not and reinforcing your false sense of identity through "I am THIS" is sensibly to be avoided.