Literature - Essays

The Worlds Worst Tourist and Astral Travel
January, 2010

Travel takes on many forms, each providing unique experience and knowledge you could not know or describe before; even after you experience it, describing it can be difficult. I consider such knowledge to be the true value of traveling. Recognizing and valuing such experience as an asset is the first step in gaining the full benefit. The pleasure in each new adventure is enhanced by this data base, and experiences that can be boring to those with a small data base can be delightful to a knowledgeable traveler.

The vehicle we travel in often becomes a defining element, selected from a hierarchy beginning with walking, then riding a bike, and on to rickshaws, canoes, boats, cars, range rovers, buses, snowmobiles, trams, cable cars, ski lifts, trains, planes and a variety of carnival machines like roller coasters and simulators. As different as these vehicles may be, they are not beyond the imagination of the typical tourist. One can describe the experience of a Disneyland simulator as seeming so real that it can be terrifying. That leads me to a travel vehicle that is most likely beyond the imagination of many of the most seasoned travelers. I am speaking of travel where the vehicle is an unusual state of consciousness.

My vehicle for extraordinary travel within the consciousness is lucid dreaming. The fundamentals suggest that lucid dreaming, astral travel, and out of body experiences, OBE’s, are related, if not the same experience, by those who are more familiar with vehicles other than lucid dreaming. Since these are all evolving fields, I remain open minded. I first discovered lucid dreaming on my own in my late 20’s while conducting some experiments in meditation, but only after discovering the works of Stephen LaBerge and Patricia Garfield (Garfield is a San Francisco psychologist.) did I find a great freedom and encouragement to explore and enjoy what had been extremely scary before.

Recent exposure to the studies of Tom Campbell’s “My Big TOE (Theory Of Everything) rekindled my interests in lucid dreaming, this time as a travel vehicle, and once again I began practicing the necessary disciplines.

What are lucid dreams?

Lucid dreams are dreams in which the dreamer becomes aware that he is dreaming and takes control of the dream, to some degree. Typically, a lucid dream is brighter, more clear, and seems more real even than reality itself, so I could describe it as seeming more real than the Disneyland simulator, even more real than real life. The experience is surreal because what the dreamer “sees” and “feels” is limited not by the sensory organs but only by what the brain is able to create. Therefore, in a lucid dream, vision and hearing can be perfect or even better than 20/20 since one is not limited by the eyes and ears.

The major difference in the experience of lucid dreaming and real life is that lucid dream logic, like ordinary dream logic, is different from real life logic. What would be completely illogical in real life seems perfectly normal in a dream. For example, I can look at my hands in a lucid dream and sometimes see six or more fingers and that is perfectly acceptable. Everyone in a lucid dream can be naked and that does not seem abnormal. One can walk through walls in a lucid dream, and it seems perfectly natural.

The greatest advances in the understanding and application of lucid dreaming came about through the groundbreaking work of Stephen LaBerge in his research at Stanford University, which ultimately led to the creation of the Lucidity Institute[1], which has provided thousands of people the skills required to explore lucid dreaming[2]. Those who develop and use the skills are known as oneironauts. LaBerge’s interpretations are that the entire experience is confined to the individual brain. The OBE and astral travel interpretations are that the experience exists outside of the individual brain in some universal consciousnes.) [3] I am an oneironaut with an open mind.

Acquiring skills in lucid dreaming opens many doors to experiences otherwise inaccessable in the real world (I use the terms “real world” and “dream world” to distinguish the two states of consciousness.) An experience in the dream can seem just as real as that in the “real” world and sometimes even more real. When your lucid dreaming skills hit a certain level, you can choose to beat up a grizzly bear or have sex with the high school home coming queen (or even the grizzly bear); the possibilities are almost unlimited. Many oneironauts consider flying to be the most thrilling experience. While most oneironauts enjoy this kind of activity for a while, most move on to explore more interesting and useful depths of this state consciousness.

One common thing to do in a lucid dream is to ask for a guide to take you to some meaningful experience. For example you can ask your guide to take you to see something beautiful or maybe to see your deceased parents or Rembrandt or even God. My experiences with this approach range from incredible to meaningless.

Some Examples of Lucid Dreams

16 October-The Beautiful Planets-

I am walking in a cave like structure and make some attempt at climbing one of the walls. I find myself frustrated and unable to get anywhere. Recognizing such emotion as a possible dream sign, I look at my watch, and instead of seeing numbers, I see flowers dancing around on its face. I have trained myself to conclude from this that I am dreaming and I immediately become lucid. I sail through the roof with ease and soar upwards. I ask for a guide to take me to a beautiful place. Asking for the guide is extremely successful this time, because just as I finish the request a bright light instantly lights up everything. Something takes me by the hand and together we soar into space. I can feel and hear the wind rushing by my face. I can see the earth getting smaller below. We fly past a satellite and far into space.

Having arrived at some distant location we stop and look back upon a series of extremely colorful and beautiful planets lined up in a circular orbit. I gasp and scream out that it is beautiful. I ask the guide how I could have such a beautiful experience in spite of never having seen anything even close to this before. The response I hear is that these planets have not yet been discovered.

We light on a manmade space station and rest in a place like the rafters of a building. I hear an announcer exclaiming that of all the mysterious things to study in space the crew is in search of a mouse that is loose on the space station. At that point I see the mouse nearby and ultimately he approaches and sits on my shoulder. The dream ends and I wake up.

A few days after having this dream a group of British astronomers announced the discovery of 36 new earthlike planets, a rather unnerving, though perhaps meaningless coincidence.

18 October-The lighted desert

I am walking around in a very large house where I reside but not one that resembles any place I have ever lived. It is an old house with many rooms, levels, and corridors. A doorway is fitted with a very thick curved door that only half fills the opening. I begin to look for a place where I can set up a studio to paint. I see some stairs going down into a large area and decide to explore. It leads to an industrial facility like an assembly area that is outside the area of ownership of my house, but I imagine that the people here may allow me to set up a studio anyway. There is a large area with seats and one person seated. I enter and then realize that it is a wide train car as it begins to leave the area and head into a city. I panic for a moment wondering how I will ever get back to my house.

At that point I realize that it must be a dream. (Maybe because it is a frustrating situation that does not make any sense.) I immediately become lucid and take off flying through the roof of the train. I ask to be taken to a beautiful place that I can paint. I sense that I am waking up, but stay long enough to fly in a near horizontal path and begin to see very strange flowers like I have not seen before. Then I enter a desert scene where cacti are wild colors, a Huntington Garden desert on steroids. They are all lit up, and I begin to think of ways to paint them when the dream fades fast and I wake up.

Learning to Dream Lucidly

Dreams seem real when we are in them, but most people forget most dreams, and many people believe they do not dream. Everyone dreams. Oneironauts train themselves to have lucid dreams. Reliable and useful lucid dreaming is a learnable skill. A few techniques and bits of knowledge are requisites. The oneironaut learns that it is possible to take knowledge from the real world into dreams and make use of it. So he trains himself in the real world with disciplines he can practice in the dream world. He also learns to recall dreams, learn from them, and recognize when he is dreaming. Anyone can learn these techniques, but it takes work and discipline.

Remembering Dreams

To identify dream signs and to help recognize when we are dreaming, we need to remember dreams, characterize them, and look for dream signs. The only way to do this is to wake up and write down the dream before the natural forgetting process takes over.

Developing the ability and discipline for remembering dreams may be one of the hardest. Writing down dreams and later examining them carefully for dream signs teaches you to recognize dreams. The necessary practice includes:

Waking up after a dream and writing it down. Ideally this should be done several times each night. This takes a huge amount of discipline. How many times have you convinced yourself that you can remember the dream without writing it down? That simply doesn’t work. The forces to cause one to forget dreams may, according to Stephen La Berg, have an evolutionary basis. Tom Campbell, on the other hand, suggests that “someone or some thing out there” may be deliberately holding you back.
Practicing and training yourself to conduct dream tests when certain dream signs appear. This requires repetition of rehearsals in real life until they become almost habitual.
Setting ones intentions and rehearsing the rules each night before going to sleep.
Overcoming the rationalizing processes and other forces that moves one away from the disciplines and successful lucid dreaming. There are many.
Training oneself to take knowledge from the real world into the dream world and use it there.
Learning how to keep the lucid dream going.

Dream Signs

Almost every dream is laden with dream signs, situations that would either rarely or never appear in real life. In a dream, seeing one’s mother, who has not been alive for many years, is accepted as normal and is not questioned. Since all of ones life is recorded in the brain, time has a different meaning in dreams, and one may be old in part of the dream and young a minute later. The same goes for the other characters in the dream. In the real world we know that this is not normal, and the trick is to rehearse and train oneself with this otherwise taken-for-granted knowledge to have available in dreams. Learning that such knowledge can be taken to a dream is one of the keys to becoming an oneironaut. For me it occurs automatically as soon as I begin remembering, writing down dreams, and looking at dream signs.

The next discipline to be developed is to run dream tests when dream signs occur. There are many ways to run dream tests. A common method is to examine a digital watch to see if it has numbers and is stable. Other methods include testing the environment to see if it is stable in time. See what is in front, then see what lies behind, then return to the front view. Has it changed? In a dream, we find ourselves in locations derived from stored conscious information from another time different from the present. We can learn to recognize that this is unusual.

Lucid Dreaming Objectives

It is important to have objectives in advance to take into the lucid dream. Typical objectives can be, for example;

Simply having a thrilling experience.
Learn something new.
Seeing beautiful scenery.
Solve a problem
Rehearse a difficult situation.

What Now?

Stay tuned. I am just in the beginning stages of retraining and developing the discipline. The WWT will report some travel in a unique vehicle this year.

(1) www.lucidity.com

(2) Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming”, Stephen LaBerge.

(3) See for example, Tom Campbell’s “My Big TOE” or go to www.mybigtoe.com