We put ourselves in the Circle. Enter from the Eastern Door. Circle the fire once, always clockwise. When leaving, always circle once, clockwise, then leave by the Western Door.
The traditional or common definition of Lucid Dreaming is that the person dreaming is aware they are in a dream state and gains or attempts to gain some amount of conscious control of the dream. The purpose of gaining control is to change the outcome of the dream, to exert one’s will in a dream, to achieve some goal other than the one being played out in the dream itself.
It is possible to learn how to gain control of one’s dreams and, truth be told, I used to do this. Now I don’t for three reasons, the first leading to the second and third.
Reason One
First, I would occasionally wake with headaches. Nothing severe and definitely notable. Unlike other types of headaches, these left me foggy and groggy, as if I wasn’t quite ready to wake up when I did. Further, these headaches could be associated with restless sleeps. This combination of headaches and restless sleeps caused me to do some research.
The research led me to reason two which I’ll explain further down. The third reason was that, after learning reason two, I discovered (and this was reason three) which of my totem/guides guards my dreamworld and I have since asked that entity to take care of my dreams. My dreamlife now is different than most peoples (I’m guessing) as it’s quite often a series of lessons, learning and communications between myself and all those things around me.
Reason Two
Research indicates there’s a great deal of necessary psychological and physiological activity which takes place when someone dreams. When someone gains and continually exercises conscious control over their dreams, they’re shutting off the nonconscious part of their brain which needs to do that work.
Your body goes into a different physiological state when you dream.
When you are dreaming, your body goes into a different state of physiological organization than when you’re awake. One of the things which happens when you dream – in REM sleep – is that your brain is filing memories. As one part files the memories, actually remembering the days events and ordering them into some kind of cohesion, another part is putting all the stuff together in any kind of order. This is why the days events often get jumbled with past experiences or take place in bizarre areas, etc. The brain is storing information along some plan it understands and we do not. Thus, you may dream of a conversation you had with a friend earlier in the day and dream of the same conversation taking place with someone you met once ten years ago, and the conversation may take place in a locale you saw on TV. The brain is filing the events as memories and, much like going through a filing cabinet, it looks through old folders occasionally and comes up with totally unrelated material, skims through other folders and takes pieces and parts from them, scans the folder labels and sorts until it finds the one folder it wants to drop things in. Children have the most interesting dreams – often when they are awake – because they don’t have a body of experience in their filing cabinet to skim. This is also why brand new experiences, things you’ve never had before in any way, shape, or form in your life, cause lots of dream experiences. you’re either making new folders or building a whole new cabinet.
So your brain is actually in the process of taking memories and transferring them from one type of storage to another type of storage.
Lucid Dreaming shuts off that mechanism.
When you decide to perform lucid dreaming, you shut that mechanism off. The end result is that you’re causing yourself to forget something the mind – neither conscious nor nonconscious but the mind as a whole organism – has decided is relevant. When you decide to take control of your dreams you are stopping or inhibiting the ability to place memories for retrieval.
Thus, one of the things which you do in Lucid Dreaming is that you’re affecting memory. I don’t know if this is beneficial or detrimental. I only recognize that you’re affecting memory.
Reason Three – Control versus Trust
So Lucid Dreaming equates to you taking control of your neural activity and often we take control because we don’t trust whatever to do what we want, to do something properly, so on and so forth. In Shamanic Work, you don’t take control. The most control you have is “I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to go there, I want to go back.”
Part 2 in this arc addresses concerns some people have about journeying, trust and control, and more differences between shamanic work and lucid dreaming.
Thank you for sharing this Joseph. I experimented with lucid dreaming myself and noticed the headaches right away. The instruction I received required me to set and alarm to wake myself up, then going back to sleep to enter a more lucid dream. I spoke to someone who did this all the time, and didn’t experience the headaches. It makes me wonder if what they are experiencing is more of a reality than lucid dream, but I didn’t go into enough detail with this person. I am looking forward to part 2 to answer some of my questions about differences between shamanic reality and lucid dreams.
Howdy,
My guess (based on your comment) is that they never re-entered the dream state, or perhaps never entered it at all. Sometimes, when we know we’re going to have to wake up at a certain time, our internal clocks make their own alarm so that we don’t oversleep. The end result is that we never get into a deep sleep and only doze. This is not a full enough sleep for dreaming to occur.
Part 2 is coming soon. Thanks.