By Mallory Braun
The massive white tiger was inches away and staring directly at him. Its chest was adorned with gold plating and its fur was frozen flames. But Travis wasn’t scared. The tiger had just lunged out of nowhere and chased off the two lynxes that were about to devour him. His savior’s shoulders flexed as it began to pad away. “Wait! Are you my spirit animal?” Travis asked. The tiger nodded and vanished into the forest.
It has been about six months and Travis has not dreamed of the tiger since.
Lucid dreams like this one are less common for University of Massachusetts, Amherst junior Travis Connolly these days. After his psychotic break, he would have them often – “at least one significant one per month.” The dreams would vary, but overwhelmingly helped him feel spiritually balanced.
Like the meanings of our subconscious adventures, the definition of a lucid dream is ambiguous; a dreamer can have varying degrees of lucidity while asleep. He can be aware he is asleep but unable to control the dream OR he can be aware he is asleep and able to control the dream. But for the purposes of this article, we will refer to both definitions as “lucid dreams.”
Dr. Ursula Voss, who has a PhD in experimental psychology and who has recently conducted studies on lucid dreams, calls them “in-between states” where the sleeper can access secondary consciousness. He is neither awake nor in the deepest form of sleep, REM (Rapid Eye Movement). He is, however, aware he is asleep, self-reflective, able to think abstractly and sometimes, to exercise free will. If he has control over his dreams he can decide to fly to the moon or experience a supernova as Connolly has done.
A lucid dreamer can even confront his childhood fears. Witches used to haunt the dreams of Dr. Beverly D’Urso, who has her Master’s degree in cognitive psychology, is a prolific lucid dreamer and has been the subject of multiple experiments on the subject.
Almost every time D’Urso closed her eyes, “gruesome witches” would chase her through her nightmares. “One sticky summer night” when she was seven she dreamed of them for the last time. As she lay sprawled on her back, after having attempted to flee, she begged them to kidnap her in the next night’s dream. As she pleaded, she realized that this was only a dream and that she was safe. Thus began a life of lucid dreaming.
Becoming lucid in a dream takes practice. Lucidity can be brought on by trauma-induced comprehension – like in D’Urso’s case – but usually a few steps are necessary. You, hopeful dreamer, must keep a journal to teach yourself to remember your dreams. There is no point in lucid dreaming if you cannot remember them. Each morning, lie still with eyes closed and try to recall your adventures from the previous night. When you have recalled the dream(s), immediately record them in as great detail as possible.
You must also develop some practice for differentiating dreams and reality. Do this often throughout each day so that it becomes habitual, making it more likely that you will do it in your dreams. Looking at your hands works well; if a finger falls off it is safe to assume you are asleep – unless you have Leprosy that is. This seems absurd and the skeptical reader wonders – really, you want me to stare at my hands and ask myself if I’m awake? But, yes, think about how Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Inception has a unique object or “totem” of which only he knows the exact weight and dimensions – he knows it like the back of his hands. His “totem” is a spinning top which spins perpetually while he is dreaming. Since only he can predict its form and actions, it cannot be replicated by anyone else and thus he knows whether or not he is the one controlling his dreams. In life – I hesitate to say “reality” when the subject is dreams – we don’t have to worry about someone hijacking our subconscious, but the “totem” principle remains the same.
Like most things, there is an easier way: supplements. Melatonin will make you fall asleep; your dreams will last longer; be more vivid and realistic, helping you to remember them. Vitamin B6 will help you recall the details of your dreams. Choline Bitartrate will also help to make your dreams more intense and improve your memory of them as well. All of these effects will bring you one step closer to a lucid dream. However these drugs are not foolproof methods and you could become unhealthily reliant on them. The practice method is a better option.
Once you have made it into a lucid dream, you can change the scene by spinning around. With practice, you can even insert yourself into a lucid dream directly from the waking state. When D’Urso was a child and she wanted to go from wakefulness to lucid dream, she would lie down and imagine her dream-self somersaulting backwards out of her waking self and through a wall. Keep in mind that D’Urso has incredible control over her conscious and subconscious and most lucid dreamers use a different method. They lie completely still for about twenty minutes, allowing their physical bodies to fall asleep. This is called sleep paralysis. Don’t give in to any idle scratches or restless muscles but keep your mind awake. Concentrate on a puzzle or your plans for the next day – anything that will allow your brain to stay alert. As your limbs fall asleep and your brain doesn’t, you will fall into a lucid dream. As D’Urso said at the end of our interview, “Sweet dreams!”
D’Urso believes that “we dream dramas to remove emotional issues.” When she struggled with starting her doctoral dissertation she lucid dreamed that the chair in front of her desk was “the pit to hell.” Determined, she sat down “ready to be sucked into the pit.” Instead, she awoke and soon finished her dissertation. She has found that if you experience waking life as if there are “unlimited possibilities,” success, recovery and oneness is much easier to grasp. She calls this philosophy and actual spiritual state, “lucid living.”
Connolly also used lucid dreaming as spiritual self-treatment. After a bad trip on psilocybin, better known as shrooms, he was hospitalized. It was not a full-blown psychotic break but he needed to spend a few weeks recovering at home. Awake, he “was a vegetable,” but at night he would have his first lucid dreams. Sleep was his favorite time; he could be with his friends even though they were far away geographically. He knew he was sleeping and that the reunions didn’t take place in reality, but that didn’t matter. After his convalescence he went back to school and thought he’d “found heaven on earth,” but it was not to be.
One Sunday morning Connolly climbed Mount Royal in Montreal. He looked at the sky and saw “a skull and crossbones smiling down at” him. He lowered his gaze and saw a Chinese man who was dressed like he had just come from the Himalayas. The man said, “Good morning Buddha,” bowed and vanished. Connolly said that this strange juxtaposition “made me realize that life and death are pointless and this is paradise nonetheless.” These visions were not dreams, Connolly was awake.
But for the next few weeks, Connolly can only remember feeling like he was “spiritually being torn apart by some demon.” He had experienced a psychotic break, was hospitalized and diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He had to withdraw from school. For the next two years, during which he began his career at UMass, he believes his lucid dreams were imperative to his recovery.
Connolly thinks his lucid dreams were a manifestation of the spiritual balance he needed. Near the end of his treatment for bipolar disorder, he dreamed that he was standing at the top of a cliff with doubt in his mind. He wanted to fly but didn’t know if he could. Steeling himself, he leapt off the mountain and flew. He considers this to be a symbol of overcoming bipolar disorder because shortly afterward, his doctors deemed him healthy enough to be taken off his medication. Today, he is off the medication, feeling cured and has less lucid dreams than before.
D’Urso is thrilled at the climb of interest in lucid dreaming. This increase could be attributed to the popularity of Inception, or perhaps to humanity’s need to feel a spiritual connection in a world that has become more artificially connected by technology. Shortened thoughts typed on keyboards do not express anything important. Dreams however, tenuously grasp at some larger meaning. This surge in interest could even be explained by simple human curiosity – after all, dreams are some of the few remaining unexplored territories.
Mallory Braun can be reached at [email protected]
