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Shamanic Lucid Dreaming

Shamanic activity…makes use of the ordinary (that which is available to all) in extraordinary ways.

— ANGELA SUMEGI,

Dreamworlds of Shamanism and Tibetan Buddhism

I’m not very keen about the term lucid dreaming, because it has often been associated with the preposterous notion of “controlling” dreams. For the ego to set out to control the dreamworld is as silly as Canute trying to stop the waves of the sea. The ocean of dreaming is infinitely deeper and wiser than the daily trivial mind. Our enterprise should be to navigate its waters, not control them.

Then again, the term lucid dreaming is often associated with techniques for waking yourself up to the fact that you are dreaming while you are asleep. Such techniques range from using goggles with flashing lights to self-programming to check whether you are dreaming every time you look at your hands or in a mirror. But the easiest way to become a lucid, or conscious, dreamer is to start out lucid and stay that way: in other words, to enter conscious dreaming from a waking or semiwakeful state.

I must add that the Dutchman who coined the term lucid dreaming, Frederik van Eeden, was awash with bizarre notions about sexuality and demons; those who borrow from his famous paper on the subject would do well to study his strange, autobiographical novel, The Bride of Dreams, as well.⁹

But the discussion of lucid dreaming has matured in recent years, especially with the publication of Robert Waggoner’s excellent book Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self. And since I am often asked whether Active Dreaming is a mode of lucid dreaming, I am going to borrow a phrase employed by one of my friends in the lucid-dreaming fraternity, who refers to my “shamanic lucid dream adventures.” The word shamanic is also problematic, of course, since the word shaman is used in so many ways. I am using the adjective here to describe a method for shifting consciousness in order to enter nonordinary reality for purposes that include the care and recovery of soul. In this chapter, we’ll explore how Active Dreaming goes beyond most approaches to lucid dreaming. In the next, we’ll learn how the core techniques of Active Dreaming can be used to facilitate adventures in shared dreaming with one or more partners.

Taking Off in the Twilight Zone

Once more, with feeling: the easiest way to become a conscious dream traveler is to start out conscious and stay that way. How do you do that? Really, you only need three things: a clear intention, an image that can serve as a portal, and a means of focusing the mind and fueling the journey.

All these things can become available naturally and effortlessly in the twilight zone of consciousness that researchers call hypnagogia. In it, you are between sleep and waking. Images rise and fall in your mind, if you let them, and any one of those images can become the gateway for a conscious dream adventure. In this liminal state, we also make creative connections that escape the ordinary mind. In my Secret History of Dreaming, I call this the “solution state” because it has been the field for breakthrough discoveries in the history of science as well as many other fields.

When you develop the ability to enter and remain in a state of relaxed, free-flowing awareness, images will come. You can simply observe them as they rise and fall, or engage with one of these images or scenes and enter into what may be a full-fledged dream journey.

The term twilight zone evokes the brilliant old TV series by that name and (for me) the no less clever contemporary series of fantasy novels by the Russian author Sergei Lukyanenko. In Lukyanenko’s Night Watch