Posted on by Matt Thomas

Levels of Lucidity in Dreams: A Close Reading

Illustrations presented with thanks by Riko Kusahara

Note: This piece was written for the Psiber Dreaming Conference offered by IASD in September 2018, under a strict word limit that forced a level of compression I don’t always allow myself. It draws on a series of lucid dreaming experiences to explore how we determine whether we are dreaming or awake, and why those determinations so often fail under pressure. Looking back, I’m less interested in the specific techniques of lucidity than in the broader question the paper circles: what happens when our usual markers of reality—stability, plausibility, even self-awareness—prove unreliable? The result is less a theory of dreaming than a compact record of trying to think clearly inside a system that continually revises its own ground.

Epigraph I:

The difference between most people and myself is that for me the “dividing walls” are transparent.  That is my peculiarity.

—Carl Jung

Epigraph II:

The conventional scientific sentiment has become that—while we don’t totally understand why dreaming happens—the dreams themselves are meaningless. They’re images and sounds we unconsciously collect, almost at random {…} Which seems like a potentially massive misjudgement.

—Chuck Klosterman

Dream I: I awake in a warehouse.  The bed is against one wall–on the other is a thirty-foot mountain of cantaloupes.  I realize I am dreaming.  I get up and run my hands over the cantaloupes.  They feel absolutely real—as tangible as in life.  I remember that tangibility is not a viable reality test—I’ve made that mistake before.  Now fully lucid, I decide to levitate.  The room dissolves, and I float suspended somewhere in dense, colourless space.  Eventually, I feel the need to come back to earth but cannot locate it.  I feel something beneath me.  This is my bed, and I awake back in the warehouse, relieved yet exhilarated.  The cantaloupes are still there, however I don’t question them.  I just happen to live in a room full of fruit.  Moments later I awake again, this time in diurnal “reality.”

The most common dream experience is of waking from a dream we take to be real, only to understand that it was “just a dream.”  However, a subset of dreamers, probably more than we generally imagine, have experienced lucid dreams, dreams in which, to some degree, they are aware they are dreaming.  Lucid dreamers may also experience “false awakenings”[1]— the sensation of waking progressively through dream “levels.”  False awakenings can be disorienting (Robert Waggoner writes that after seven successive false awakenings he “would accept {…} any reality {…} as long as it stayed put”[2]), or sought after (Daniel Love and Keith Hearne have independently developed techniques to induce false awakenings[3]).  Regardless of the desirability of the experience, the existence of dream levels, far from a simple oddity, provides a potential window into massive metaphysical questions.   

First, we need to understand how dreamers use evidence to establish whether they are dreaming or awake.  

II: I am in a dreaming contest with another dreamer.  The contest begins and slimy amphibians begin to appear.  Some resemble frogs; others are in shapes that don’t exist in nature.  Their size varies from that of a pinky to that of a fist and they are very colourful.  I am not trying to dream them, rather they are spilling everywhere around my feet.  I sense this is a dream and check on the other dreamer.  He is standing to my right in empty space.  He looks just like me and hasn’t begun his dream. 

This dream is non-lucid at first and becomes lucid because of the bright color and absurd number of the amphibians.  An awareness beyond the dream senses a non-natural situation.  

III: I am picking out fruit at a fruit stand.  There are some huge avocados, almost too good looking.  I wonder if I am in a dream, and touch an avocado to check.  The one I choose is ripe and soft—I squeeze it a little.  There is no doubt that I am having a tactile experience, and I conclude I am not dreaming.  Of course, I am. 

Two dreams, two types of evidence.  In Dream II, I correctly identify the amphibians as anomalous, and become lucid.  In Dream III, my attempt to test the lifelikeness of the avocado as an indicator fails.  Simply put, realistic sensation is not sufficiently indicative of reality.  Love agrees: “we are not looking for a qualitative difference in how realistic the experience feels {…} we are {…} on the lookout for issues with stability and plausibility.”[4]  In Dream I, at first the huge pile of melons in my bedroom appears implausible and triggers lucidity; after moving up a dream level, my mind overrides the implausibility by “justifying”[5] the anomaly.  

Because we awake from sleep and dreams every morning, we are very familiar with the experience of awakening.  It is therefore unsurprising that when we wake inside a dream we accept the new reality as the waking world, even if it contains anomalous elements.  

IV: I am in a huge house where a large group of families on motorcycles arrive.  The families are making noise all night.  I realize I am dreaming and levitate over to the families.  Later I decide to wake up.  I ease myself out of bed, bumping my nose into an ironing board.  The room looks and feels exactly like my room.  I don’t recall the ironing board being there, but whatever.  Moments later I awake again—the situation is identical, only, the ironing board is gone.  I feel a pit in my stomach, wondering what is ultimately real.

Dream IV is a good example of how dream levels can become increasingly realistic as we move through them.  An ironing board in front of the bed is (for me) more plausible than a house full of bikers.  Dreams such as this beg the question of how we can ever be sure we are awake.  I have dreamt of getting up, walking to the front door, opening it, and emerging into the sunshine in my neighbourhood.  At every point, this dream felt entirely realistic with no anomalies.  After experiences like this, is it wholly unrealistic that we could dream an entire morning?  An entire day?

There are different ways to approach this kind of question.  The first is to use rigorous reality tests.[6]  Using reality tests after each fresh awakening can help us filter anomalies in what may be an increasingly realistic dream state. The second is to open ourselves to a wider set of questions.  Although space limitations make full exploration of these questions impossible, modern dreamers would do well to recall that throughout recorded history people have speculated on the meaning of the dream state and what it can tell us about space, time, life after death, and the nature of reality. 

As dreamers, we know that dreamtime behaves very differently than waking time.  Robert Moss distinguishes between Chronos (“linear time”) and Kairos (the “spacious now.”)  He writes that when Kairos operates in waking life, “ordinary time is {…} suspended or elastic,” and that the world can “quiver or shimmer.”[7]  Moss’ Kairos time sounds a great deal like dreamtime.  Jung in his memoir writes “our concepts of space and time have only approximate validity,”[8]  and “there are indications that at least a part of the psyche is not subject to the laws of space and time.”[9]  Jung makes multiple connections between dreams and life after death, suggesting that our waking world,

in which we are “conscious,” may in fact be a projection of a more “real” and permanent, even timeless, unconscious.[10] 

In the Tibetan tradition of dream yoga, the yogi prepares for death through dreams and meditation, entering death consciously by releasing the bodily energy in such a way that the body partially or entirely dissolves into pure light.  This “rainbow body” is well-documented in Tibet and China, and cases of this phenomenon have been reported across multiple religious traditions.[11]  Finally, Moss connects dreams with the much discussed Many Worlds theory, as does, in popular culture, Richard Linklater. [12]

V:  I am among a large group of people on the top floor of a building.  We lie down on our backs and form bundles.  The molecular structure of these bundles begins to dissolve, we become lighter, then totally empty.  This process is dictated by a power outside of us which doesn’t speak.  Once empty, we have the choice to become anything we want.  I choose to become white light.  Suddenly I am transported through space in a burst of pure white light, my old body left entirely behind.  This is the most peaceful and thrilling feeling in the world.  Then, I am back into a new bundle, trying again to become empty.  I make progress, but it is hard and I am over-concentrating.  Progress ceases; I wake up. 

Although I have thought at length about dreams, I am a normal person with a normal job, dreaming anonymously night after night.  I don’t belong to a spiritual tradition, am not a yogi or a meditating hermit.  As a lucid dreamer, like many of us, I am self-taught.  While we anonymous dreamers are wise to suspend judgement about the particularities of a theory as mind-boggling as dreams as an interface to infinite parallel universes, it is perhaps not by chance that my dreams of ascending to a state of pure white light bear close resemblance to innumerable near-death experiences or the reported manifestations of a lifetime of dream yoga.  Although admittedly outside of our normal rational mode of apprehension, the experience of journeying through multiple dream levels, and the energy and amazement which often accompany these experiences, may point the way toward worlds far above, below, or beyond our own.  

Who are we in our trek through life?  Are we the maker, or the made?  The writer, or the page?  The actor, or the stage?  The happening, or the happened to?  Perhaps, our ability to exercise agency in the vastness of forever depends in part on learning to navigate levels of “reality,” however we encounter them.  Or, perhaps, journeying to the far side of the dream can bring us face to face with that which is actually dreaming us.

Bibliography

Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Vintage Books, 1989.

Linklater, Richard, director. Slacker. Orion Classics, 1990.

Love, Daniel. Are you Dreaming? Enchanted Loom Publishing, 2013.

Moss, Robert. Sidewalk Oracles. New World Library, 2015.

Rinpoche, Gyalwai Nyugu.  “About Rainbow Body.” http://www.gyalwai-nyugu.com/about-rainbow-body/.  Accessed 24 July 2018.

Rinpoche, Tenzin Wangyal. The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. Snow Lion Publications, 1998.

Thomas, Matthew.  “On Coming Through”: A New Meditation on Intention. https://craftfollowsconcept.com/2013/05/13/on-coming-through-statement-of-intent-on-the-approach-of-my-39th-birthday/#more-11. Accessed 24 July 2018.

Waggoner, Robert. Lucid Dreaming. Moment Point Press, 2009.

[1] Waggoner, 61

[2] ibid., 63

[3] Love, 131

[4] Love, 71

[5] Love cites “poor reasoning skills” as one common reason for failing to recognize dream signs and achieve lucidity.  Love, 73.

[6] Love, 78-79; Waggoner, 259.  (Wagonner uses the term “reality check” instead of “reality test.”)

[7] Moss, 49

[8] Jung, 300

[9] ibid., 304

[10] ibid., 324

[11] Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, 314; Gyalwai Nyugu Rinpoche

[12] Moss, 74-74; Linklater

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Carl Jung’s Collected Works: I

Volume I of Jung’s Collected Works is titled Psychiatric Studies, and begins with his dissertation, “On the Psychology and Pathology of the So-Called Occult Phenomena.” The editor’s preface to Volume I characterizes the dissertation as reflecting “simple descriptive research,” while acknowledging that many of Jung’s later concerns are foreshadowed herein (vi). In our posts on Volume I we shall attempt to draw out some of these foreshadowings, while also taking seriously this most “scientific” of the phases of Jung’s career and work.

It is of course highly significant that occult phenomena signify in Jung’s first major published work, as Jung’s reputation, for better or worse, is to this day closely linked with the occult, mysticism, astrology, post-material synchronicity, and the unconscious archetype. That Jung refers to “the so-called occult phenomena” here is suggestive, on its face, of at least some measure of empirical leaning in the young Jung.

As we shall see in later posts, Jung waged a decades-long internal battle to preserve his belief in himself as a man of science, rather than an artist, and the question of whether he was primarily a scientist or an artist would play a significant role in his mid-life crisis which set in during the decade of the 1910s. It is interesting to note here that Freud also held fast to the label of “scientist,” even as critics such as Roger Brown have suggested that he surrendered all claims to the title as early as 1896 (Storr, 24).

It is well known that Jung’s early years were suffused with religion and spiritualism, with several members on both sides of his extended family being parsons (MDR 42). From his earliest writings, however much he clung to the idea of himself as an empiricist (understood in its more typically narrow sense), Jung’s interest in the faint intimations of the “other world,” in the liminal zone between normal experience and those experiences or states which stray over the borderline of normal consciousness and everyday apprehension and into the dark underbelly of the unconscious, betrays the awestruck and bemused metaphysical wanderer who at seven would sit on a stone and wonder, “Am I the one who is sitting on the stone, or am I the stone on which he is sitting?” (MDR, 20).

“Liminality” is defined nicely by Wikipedia as “a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the ‘threshold’ of or between two different existential planes” (Wikipedia, “Liminality,”) and from the first paragraph of “On the Psychology and Pathology of the So-Called Occult Phenomena,” we can see Jung’s interest in liminality at play:

In that wide domain of psychopathic inferiority from which science has marked off the clinical pictures of epilepsy, hysteria, and neurasthenia, we find scattered observations on certain rare states of consciousness as to whose meaning the authors are not yet agreed. These observations crop us sporadically in the literature on narcolepsy, lethargy, automatisme ambulatoire, periodic amnesia, double consciousness, somnambulism, pathological dreaminess, pathological lying, etc. (Collected Works Vol. I, 3).

The author makes no claims to being a psychologist or to having any detailed empirical knowledge of the difference between automatisme and somnambulism, but briefly, for the sake of clarity, epilepsy refers to an overly active electrical circuit in the brain which causes seizures; neurasthenia is an outdated term that referred to deep exhaustion; what Jung and Freud referred to as hysteria we would more probably call neurosis; narcolepsy is a threshold state between sleep and waking which may include hallucinations; automatisme ambulatoire and somnambulism, as far as I can make out, both refer to sleepwalking or other actions taken while one is technically asleep.

Pathological dreaminess appears to be a coinage of Jung’s own, and pathological lying is best understood to be a state where one lies repeatedly with no motive force, no hope for, or anticipation of, gain.

What all these mental states have in common is a significant lack of control which those so afflicted have over their symptoms. Indeed, in all of the above cases it can fruitfully be asked, “who or what is in control of our psychological processes?” This is precisely the question that certain childhood experiences forced Jung to ask himself.

As recounted in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, at a very early age Jung had experienced the force of unbidden subterranean psychic contents which pushed their way to the surface of his consciousness. At the age of three, Jung dreamed of an “ithyphallically enthroned” ritual phallus entombed underground behind a thick green curtain. The ritual phallus “was made of skin and naked flesh, and on top there was something like a rounded head with no face and no hair. On the very top of the head was a single eye, gazing motionlessly upward” (MDR, 11–12).

The young Jung equated this ritual phallus with “a subterranean God ‘not to be named'” as well as with the Jesuits, whom at that point he believed feasted on human flesh (MDR, 12). Looking back from late middle age, Jung writes that the symbolically freighted symbolism of such a dream is far beyond what any child’s psyche would be able to produce without some kind of blueprint. His conclusion was that someone or something was already speaking with or through his mind:

It {became} clear to me how exceedingly unchildlike, how sophisticated, and oversophisticated was the thought that had begun to break through into consciousness {…} Who was it speaking in me? Whose mind had devised them? What kind of superior intelligence was at work? {…} Who talked of problems far beyond my knowledge? Who brought the Above and Below together and laid the foundation for everything that was to fill the second half of my life with stormiest passion? Who but that great alien guest who came both from above and from below? (MDR, 14–15).

Although these ruminations are retrospective, it is fairly clear that the inner autobiographical events that Jung highlights in MDR lay the groundwork for the young scientist’s interest in psychic liminality in all its manifestations. While the early studies mostly center upon the symptomatology of young, hysterical women, Jung’s early efforts to exteriorize his investigations would eventually give way to a deeper probing of his own levels of consciousness.

Indeed, the bulk of Jung’s mature, original work draws directly from his own borderline experiences, half-induced and half-received, during and after the outbreak of the First World War.

Therefore, while the early writings of Jung may with some justice be described as “simple descriptive research,” his choice of subjects and range of interests immediately plunge us into deep metaphysical waters, as Jung wrestles with questions such as where conscious control over the psyche ends, what exists or pertains beyond this control, and who or what is exerting itself when the formerly and apparently autonomous psyche cracks and the great unknown — the serpent in the garden, the siren on the farther shore, the vast propulsive other, or the slime of the deep — makes manifest its eternal will to power.