Lucidity as a Way of Being
Dreaming illustrates a vital drive and developmental need to have experiences as both a physical and formless being. Dreams are highly advanced negotiations with transpersonal, existential levels of being. They represent a path of knowledge through direct experience and personal insight that everyone has access to.
If we reduce dreaming, we distance the universe from ourselves. We won't remember our dreams well when we wake up. They won't feel as nourishing, and they won't show up when we need them most. Learning how to feed our dreams, which in turn feed our Soul, is an important rite of passage for us on our journey toward reality. Dreaming is a journey to live awake in more places, more times, more relationships, more dimensions of identity, more being.
Dreaming is also a discipline used to examine reality more directly. We are more real in dreams than when we are awake. Their fluid dynamics show us a more trustworthy and complete rendition of ourselves. When we are awake, our level of perception and identity is restrictive, selective, and highly distorted. Dreaming relies upon a network of local and nonlocal consciousnesses, a woven mesh of sentience and transpersonal reference points. While awake, these diverse streams are separated from each other, by both ideological conditioning and by matter, subjectivity, and the sensations of the physical body. While dreaming, these separated quasi-realities close in on each other and interact, exchange, recompose.
A theoretical lucid cosmology is an important precursor for talking about dreaming with power. This is because all dreams are lucid, and by some degree will express Primeval power, or Primeval perception. Dreams are far stranger than we give them credit for. Even mundane dreams are structures with comparable features to the very large spiritual forces that create and sustain the universe. They work according to a vision of reality that, from our ordinary perspective, is upside down and inside out. One of the reasons we don't lucid dream or astral travel more naturally and more powerfully is because we are reading reality backwards. If we can change our fundamental assumptions about consciousness and matter in authentic and meaningful ways, we will dream.
Dreams show us exactly what a simultaneous transsubjective, transobjective experience feels like, which ordinarily is a type of perception that is absolutely forbidden. Dreaming overcomes the rules of classical physics and the body's involuntary sense of individuality. Together, these two conditions decompose an absolute experience of being into bite-sized pieces of self, other, subject, object, inside, outside, matter, energy, awareness. Dreaming is a radical return to wholeness.
This is the provocation and premise of this thesis, and its assertion about the cosmological, social, and personal significance of lucidity. Reality is a gem with many facets—each face is true, yet all different. Dreaming is a realization that higher levels of reality are permitted in which this diversity is both preserved but also synthesized into higher dimensions of wholeness.
At night, we experience this realization through the Soul's circulatory system, which pumps interdimensional fluid through the body's conditioned sense of reality—loosening its grip, making its identity more fluid. Dreams temporarily move our center of gravity away from our body, inward toward our Soul and beyond, toward the astral planes the Threshold.
Dreaming and lucidity are relative to an ability to include, then enter greater levels of cumulative reality, through an emotionally coherent, transpersonal synthesis. Dreams are interdimensional passages that move. They move us, but they also move the cosmos. It is an archetypal movement that can be studied to hypothesize not only how the universe works, but also why it exists.
But let's take a few steps back, acknowledging some of our limitations in realizing this model, and also considering just how technologically advanced our dreams might be.
If we choose to examine reality, not in its entirety, but through theories which use compartmentalized modeling, it will always be at the expense of either subjective or objective knowledge. If we use a functionally objective model, we can learn a lot about the body of the universe, its flesh and blood, but we will not be able to enter it. We will be stuck outside of it like an excluded observer.
If we study the universe only through subjective participation, we will enter the universe but only as deeply as our conditioning and biological limits permit. Our personal fantasy, idiosyncrasy, narcissism, and ethnocentric biases will be a terminating factor in our research.
Through subjectivity, we can conquer a small slice of reality, only to be bound there in self-limitation. Through objectivity, we can conquer the "skin" of the universe, but will be bound instead by a decomposed and reduced version of things, forever an outsider in our own universe—and in our own body.
Dreaming offers a different path. It does not deny the importance of duality for evolutionary possibility, and for the cosmos to exist. However, it also suggests that everything can be entered and observed, critically evaluating reality from a state of being and awareness of what is being.
Perhaps our bodies and minds will resist the sheer plurality and super continuity of existence that lucid dreaming suggests? Perhaps our sensibility and sense of decency will balk at the idea that dreams are actually so coherent, they describe what reality is like better than our ordinary perception while awake?
Aren't dreams just messy, confusing psychological hiccups? Aren't dreams unpredictable and chaotic experiences? Wouldn't it be scary to exist like this all the time? Isn't a more concrete, empirical version of things—with a safe distance between cause, effect, self, and other—a more stable and dependable way to go about our business?
Dreams are not meant to be half-remembered, hazy hallucinations. Somehow, we have been lobotomized and divorced from this faculty. When we were born, we came from dreaming and remembered how and why dreaming mattered. When we die, we will need to dream. To dream again, we need to recompose reality through a new, transpersonal cosmology that teaches us to regenerate an Inner Sense that has been lost—or taken from us.
We are not meant to reach distorted conclusions or fragmented results through distorted and fragmented bodies. Today, through countless intersecting disciplines, humanity drives itself forward in order to define the universe and its place in it. Dreaming helps us understand that these disciplines are not just philosophies, ideologies, industries, or belief systems. In fact, they are versions of reality that we are then obliged to occupy—they will also accompany us through death as an afterlife of our own creation.
Cosmology is not just about astronomy and physics, but about a version of ourself that we deeply internalize, giving us access to new abilities and conditions while limiting others. For dreams, a cosmology is a concrete reality. To learn to dream again, we need to bridge many realities through complexity, without reduction. This project, in fact, of building a total, coherent vision of self as cosmos, speaks to what it means to be human.
We are a bridge species, and we were meant to dream. Our drive to make choices, to make meanings, to research and analysis, to evolve, transform, synthesize, doubt, and innovate all over again... This is what keeps humanity in harmony with the cosmos.
The body's instincts for physiological satiety and safety press upon us urgently. But equally pressing are our existential drives for self-expression, social construction, creative daring, and abstract anticipation. We are held back by our vital physical instincts, but also pushed forward by powerful transpersonal drives. There is nothing we can do about this condition beyond accepting it, learning to manage it wisely, and behaving with humility in the face of life's staggering scope of existence.
Dreaming is a drive and need as real as physiological hunger and satiety. It absolutely cannot be reduced by ordinary or banal conflations. Losing our ability to dream is tantamount to losing our place in the universe—losing our humanity. Dreams are breaths of air that give the days of our life purpose and continuity beyond death, beyond time, beyond every possible evil or indignity.
They are our connection to something whole, something real. They connect us to each other. They connect us directly to our planet and to the natural world. Each dream is a thread interconnecting body, mind, Soul, species and cosmos. We are literally woven in with reality through our dreams—and through lucidity we can also learn to weave back upon the tapestry of naturally occurring phenomena.
Those that account for the full measure of things will also see how practical dreaming is. It guides our choices, relationships, vocations, vital projects, longevity, and quality of life. It warns us and helps us avoid mistakes. If circumstances feel disenchanting or cruel, it warms us back to life. It is the foundation of authenticity and a true measurement of our fulfillment and integrity in life.
As researchers, we can also use dreams to test how far they can carry us beyond the limits of our conditioning and the knowledge of our time. Dreams fill us with the realization that, individually and as a species, we can learn to guide our own reincarnation, completing important projects that span centuries or millennia. However, to realize this greater vision of our capacity, we will need lots and lots of lucidity. We will need power.
Although this thesis will continue to elaborate on how to lucid dream powerfully and consistently, its fundamental claim is that the internalization of a lucid cosmology is the primary approach. The first and final step is simply to reflect upon why and how reality is the way it is, in relation to dreaming's capacity for coherent transdimensional inclusion. It is a reflection that also considers sentient beings as representatives of life's movement toward higher evolution by being able to dream at all.
With this in mind, we are finally ready to begin talking about lucidity in earnest: What it really is, how to awaken it, and how to transform ourselves through it. It is a personal path of evolution even if it is also predicated on knowledge that our physical universe—relative to the Primeval Laws—is upside-down, and that lucidity is permitted conditionally on our ability to somersault through this change in perspective.
Lucidity is not just becoming aware of a dream while dreaming, or being able to control one's dream by making choices. Lucidity is the universe becoming aware of itself through us becoming aware of the universe as ourselves. It is consciousness expressed through energy which culminates in mass and matter, and then reawakens through sentient life's expansion beyond countless transpersonal borderlands.
Lucidity is produced when things that are different or far away from each other find their way back together. It is a byproduct of transcendent states of consciousness, as an act of true love, as therapeutic Harmonization, or as strategic diplomacy which reveals what we have in common—not what sets us apart.
Lucidity is an ability to control one's existence by using free will in the present moment. Actually, the present moment is another way to define what is lucid. The present moment is a slice of reality we each possess, and the greater it expands beyond its provincial limitations, the more lucidity is harnessed. It is a process that corresponds to a rebirth of our core sense of identity, harmonizing this renewed identity with nature and the natural order of the cosmos.
Dreamers can use lucidity to take journey back to the Primeval state of things, beyond the physical universe. It is a journey into successive levels of purer and purer consciousness, which produces more and more lucidity. Eventually, the journey "ends" in total lucidity. The technology of dreaming has reached its maximum, and to go further requires something else.
Returning back to the physical world, it is possible to give pure consciousness safe passage into our ordinary reality. Normally, this is not possible. Pure consciousness and the Derivative functions of the laws, which splice the universe into its discrete pieces, are opposite ends of a spectrum between extreme sublucidity and total superlucidity. Our ordinary state of perception is characterized by a kind of sublucidity without which we couldn't exist.
Human beings do express a degree of pure consciousness within a world heavily defined by Derivative conditions. We are designed to produce, elaborate, and manipulate lucidity on behalf of the universe, directly from our unique point of view. Primeval consciousness cannot experience lucidity in the same way that we can. In its singularity, there are no relationships and there is no movement. The mechanics of lucidity, meanwhile, work exactly upon these two principles.
According to this theoretical cosmology, lucidity speaks to a possible purpose for the creation of our universe in the first place. A Primeval singularity has dreamed itself into plurality, into multiplicity, into a continuous but decomposite stream of transmigrations. This supreme maneuver gives us a model through which to better appreciate and research dreaming as a cosmologically significant, and powerful creative process. In our dreams, we can study how lucidity accumulates through individual growth and development, in relation to much larger processes that we give back to, returning to the Primeval.
It is from the Primeval that we have been gifted the lucidity of our incarnation. Through it, vital meanings are distilled from experiences in physicality and offered back—a coherent "Drop" derived from a lifetime of exploration, creativity, choice and emotion. This participation is a function fulfilling the cosmos' flow of power, perpetuating its existence.
It is an honor and a privilege to dream. It is an inheritance from our ancestors and a critical skill for our descendants to survive in increasingly complicated and interconnected world. Everyone is able to cultivate and increase their dream power. Everyone can learn to live with more lucidity: to feel more connected to the power of the cosmos, to the power of their body, and to the power of their humanity.
It is no exaggeration to say that we can learn to lucid dream every night, and to continue dreaming like this during the day. It is a great expression of personal freedom. And although it isn't an exhausting or overwhelming kind of freedom, the process of preparing to dream and live in this way can feel like a demanding project.
Regardless of what level our dreaming begins at, there is a definite path to power that leads to lucidity. Power is lucidity. It is consciousness that creates and directs physical energy, vibration, mass, and the flow of time. Power arrives through the Primeval and Derivative Laws, dictating the harmonic structures responsible for the evolution of life.
Power for the dreamer is a path toward lucidity defined by a series of movements, changes, and relationships we will explore more in the next chapter. But it is a path which begins with a series of important reflections:
• Where in the world do I witness subjectivity, distinct from objectivity, or objectivity, distinct from subjectivity?
• If I was dreaming right now, what would it feel like to experience objectivity and subjectivity at once?
• If I was dreaming right now, what would it feel like to dream as many people at once? What would it feel like to dream as many places at once?
• If I were to suddenly stop existing, but my awareness continued to move forward, where would it go? What would it do? What would define its path and momentum?
• If this awareness was required to return to physical existence, into a new incarnation, what kind of life would it choose?
• In this new life, what kinds of things would be challenging for this awareness? From its perspective, what kinds of things would be the most attractive? The most interesting?
These simple questions can teach us a lot about who we become when we dream. They are familiar reference points for our dreamer. Reflecting on questions like these help us remember our dreams with more regularity, and open us up to new kinds of transpersonal experiences. They generate insight, create energy, and produce lucidity. The answers we find show us more about who we are and how we got here, in our present incarnation.
Embarking on this journey, we also need to reflect on the concrete requirements of sustained lucidity. It needs to be stabilized, grounded, harmonized with all of our many pieces. Reality is right here, ready for us to enter, but it will take some effort to be ready for this new kind of relationship. We will need to enter reality with an equivalent level of power.
Our ordinary existence, fragmented and distorted, needs to be prepared and refined for a transfiguration into the present moment. It is a challenging type of dream maneuver that will ask us to hold more and more and more...
Lucidity asks us to adapt to a more fluid interpretation of our subjective emotions, desires, memories, choices, new experiences. At the same time, it makes our subjective experiences more profound, more visceral, more immediate.
This is reality presenting itself to us, and asking us if we are prepared to respond with an appropriate degree and quality of energy and respect. This kind of relationship also requires a very specific dream maneuver that, perhaps, you are already familiar with.
Each lucid journey and astral travel is a ritual death. Lucidity means dying into the unknown possibilities of dreaming's expansive, inclusive nature. It means passing through ourselves, beyond ourselves, to reawaken (temporarily or permanently) in another dimension. Lucidity requires freedom, and learning how to die is another way to talk about what it means to be free.
Lucidity is related to the idea that, in the present moment, dreaming stretches or dilates perception in order to encounter and relate to more of itself. The present moment is not simply resting spaciously in the known—it is resting in a dynamic, highly energized state of interconnectivity. There is an openness in the body and in the universe around it, which reflect back and forth upon each other. It is not a vague, abstract sensation.
Similarly, when the body does not have this connection, our sensation of transpersonal interconnectivity may be vague and abstract. Or, we may have a concrete sensation that there is no connection, no opening, no back-and-forth movement of dreaming. This is also a good definition of illness, loneliness, and fear.
To dream we need to cultivate more love. We need to learn how to expand our level of reality to include and become more of each other. Greater intimacy and exchange are vital ingredients for lucidity. We need to dream into the earth, its biomes, trees, plants, animals, stones and deep geological processes. We need to become the stars, not only studying them, but orienting them so that we can recognize them as ourselves. So that we can dream together.
Are we afraid of voyaging out into the cosmos naked, with only our integrity to protect us? Are we afraid of looking deeply into each other's eyes? Dreaming forces us to redefine our relationship with fear. It forces us to reconsider the present moment as a challenging concept, one that inevitably brings up fear.
Our working prototype of an infinite lucidity will never be perfect, but it can be trained to expand and expand, and never stop expanding. We need to understand who and what we are as dreamers: fearless voyagers that hunt for expansion, for I-we-energy, for new and more interesting kinds of interconnection. Lucidity is the synergistic colliding of worlds toward greater orders of complexity—and it is our job to let it happen.
Lucidity also, perhaps paradoxically, protects and nourishes the known, and our familiar sense of self. Even while transcending into the unknown, it deeply recognizes and resonates with individual expression. It enables a qualitatively greater expression of our unique strengths, weaknesses, talents, Personalities and dreams. Our dreamers have a profound sense of respect for us, our bodies, and our authentic livelihoods.
Lucidity is our teacher. It can heal, guide, serve justice, innovate, and lead the way. If people regained the power of lucidity, the world would change overnight. Those that were ill or unwell would find healing. Those that made choices against their nature or their humanity would hold themselves accountable. We could, and we would, weigh our own Souls and diagnose our own conditions. We would realize, bit by bit, a razor's edge between error and integrity—a way forward no matter what.
Lucidity can be trained to live upon the skin, like an invisible multisensual barrier. It can be projected in order to move through the physical world, modify conditions, or even saturate new events. When confronted by insurmountable conditions, lucidity finds the crack, the winning solution, the right idea and the right timing that make improbable events more favorable and even inevitable. It is the connective tissue of the Soul, uniting our own volition with unfathomable cosmic imperatives. It is powerful and it is fragile, requiring us to defend it against violence, prejudice, and stupidity.
If lucidity were truly understood, societies would choose the strongest dreamers among them to be their leaders. It would be understood as a gift, to be safeguarded in children. That which is antithetical to lucidity, and even to ordinary dreaming, would be understood as antithetical to life.
Intersubjectivity, interobjectivity, transPersonality, transcorporeality: We need to train muscle memory for a new body that self-organizes through lucidity, surpassing itself again and again through our strongest dreams. Lucidity retrains us not to define ourselves by what we believe or who we are, but by how we are, and how reality moves through us.
Lucidity is a science defined by integrated but contrasting juxtapositions, arising when diverse astral energies are proactively and responsively harmonized. Reality becomes more real when we learn to harmonize many types and levels of consciousness at once, initiating a process of either temporarily or permanently dream dilation of the present moment.
When blocked by our own lack of awareness, or blocked by lack of awareness of others, we reduce ourselves, relying on the autonomic processes of our body, which perceives for us. Instead, if our bodily sensations are gathered, focalized, and offered into a sense of lucid abandon, amazing types of dream maneuvers are possible. The fabric of the universe opens inside us, releasing tremendous energy, offering safe passage into other worlds, reconnecting us back into the Void.
Lucidity trains us to live other lives, more coherently, on the astral planes. Astral travel can become so strong that significant time dilations occur. Realms of energy can become so dense, so real, that it can be really hard to return to your body without help. One can retrieve information, collaborate with spirits, converse with deceased ancestors, and study with higher level forces. One can adventure out into different universes and timelines, defined by a different composition of the Primeval from our native, human one.
Lucidity transforms experiences into energy, and also projects energy into new experiences. It asks us to manage our energies wisely, investing diversely in rich and rewarding experiences. Ordinary dreaming survives at the edge of our desires which have been polarized by our conditioning. Superlucidity ignites itself upon the edge of passionate curiosity that garners the attention of higher forces.
It is the product of an innovative, communal and highly creative lifestyle. It is a passion that abandons our ordinary surety and superiority. Lucidity loves challenge. It fuels itself upon a broth of replenishing activities that nourish the Soul while also pushing it, always just a little bit further...
Lucidity is the steady hum of a constant illumination: It is the degree of free will possible within the present moment. Engaging this mechanism, we can push and pull our blocked perceptions apart, reconnecting us with the structure of the Soul, our Inner Personalities, and their Primeval journeys. Through our dreams we animate the Soul's living transpersonal memory and its deepest archetypal desires.
Our main reservoir of energy for dreaming, in fact, comes from the Soul's reservoirs of subtle energy, and from its metabolic activity. The Soul processes our vital, sexual energy and formless, transpersonal, spiritual energy—rendering them compatible. Our Soul is a transpersonal engine: an interdimensional ship designed for free range of motion across the cosmos.
When we are awake, when our physical bodies move, we do not ordinarily consider that we are dreaming, but this is only because we have moved our cosmological center of gravity into a different relationship with the laws. If we generate enough lucidity, we will perceive that the physical and astral worlds move together with us—depending on our perception of dreaming as a formula of energy. Even ordinary movements through the physical world are accompanied by complex and interesting kinds of dreaming.
In astral projection, we take only the movements we've mastered through lucidity with us. Our integrated, vital movements are our currency in this life and have currency in our afterlife. Without a body, we will only have these dream movements to give our existence a sense of continuity, evolution, and free will. Lucidity therefore is also a kind of measurement that tells us a lot about the death process, and about how prepared we are for what lies beyond.
If we do not heal our trauma before dying, our dreamer carries unstable or unusable energy in its wake. Trauma is an arrested dream movement that needs to be metabolized by the Soul, or else it will accompany us through lifetimes. From a mechanical perspective, it is just locked up vital-spiritual energy, stored through inaccessible musculature or dissociated transpersonal containers. It only needs a channel through which to discharge.
However, since trauma is created through dreaming, it also needs proper dream maneuvers to complete its journey—which actually might not be simple or straightforward at all. Trauma might need a complex process of Harmonization, neutralization, stages of decomposition and recomposition, or a combined process of many kinds of healing relationships and changes.
For traumas arriving from other timelines, other bodies, other transpersonal inheritances—one will need to be a strong dreamer in order to distill and fully recapitulate traumatic experiences that have no physical bases within one's own lifetime. Our lucidity can actually volunteer us to process trauma from the Soul's library of lives, inheriting great pain, violence, and learning.
We may also encounter opportunities to do this for our biological ancestors, for our spiritual community, even for strangers. These can be terrible lessons with steep learning curves. They can lead to enlightenment, even while they tear the Soul apart in confusion and misunderstanding.
Illness is a great teacher for learning how to move through transpersonal blocks. Whether within the body and Soul, or out in the universe, the same dynamics apply. Managing our healing and recovery process is an important part of cultivating dream power. Lucidity's great capacity for traversing territories and orienting natural law gives it a prodigious capacity to heal and transform. The pain of dozens or hundreds of incarnations can be held in one body, negotiated with directly, and potentially resolved (or greatly reduced) over the course of a lifetime of lucid dreaming.
The body's posture, emotions, gestures, and habits all reflect a fundamental balance between the objective laws of the cosmos and our degree of Derivative lucidity. Lucidity knows how to move between the Primeval and Derivative, effectively generating a formula of new energy, a new personal meaning, a new technique for healing. Lucidity opens doors to new worlds, and can send an entire incarnation flashing before one's eyes—preparing the Soul for rebirth.
It is an adventure of rediscovering oneself as a Primeval dreamer, occupying huge swathes of cosmic territory relative to one's tiny position in the universe. We have the honor and duty to observe a flow of lucidity in our lives which speaks to the architecture of distributed power across the cosmos.
Greater and greater levels of the universe's dreaming observe our attention to the requirements of the laws, deciding the flow of power to be sent individually, collectively, and through packets of time that define important moments for whole civilizations. Dreamers can use lucidity to poke through their own existence, exchanging with higher level forces. There are always new tests and new requirements to observe.
This is why dream power is also cultivated and sustained through knowledge of the cosmos as a Primeval/Derivative superstructure. This knowledge governs a near infinite variety of living creatures and their ecosystems. When our own movements harmonize with the movements of this superstructure, a wealth of knowledge and understanding lies at our fingertips (Vajne). If power is subtracted from those who do not follow the path indicated for humans, our dreams will seek to reduce the collective error and to guide us toward taking right action.
This is the continuous meditation on lucidity we must learn to have within ourselves, if we want to dream. In our body and in our life, it is a constant conversation, a narration on the use of pure power, on the transitory implications and the essential ones.
It is cumbersome at times but necessary, to enter the universe on its own terms and also to combat the dreamlessness of our social conditioning. With preparation, our dreams arrive through us, into us, eager to participate and engage on behalf of reality. They need our help, having to contend with and overcome the general dreamlessness of the modern world.
Now that some of the underpinnings of lucidity and its relationship with power has been outlined, we can move from theory to practice. But first, let's take a quick moment to review some of the bigger ideas we will continue to develop in this field of research.
• Lucidity operates as the connective mechanism between pure, singular consciousness and the fragmented multiplicity of physical existence.
• Lucidity involves harmonizing subjective and objective reality simultaneously, allowing experience of multiple perspectives, places, and dimensions of identity at once.
• Lucidity depends upon the Soul's metabolism, which processes vital energy and transpersonal information, creating an interdimensional vehicle for movement and change.
• Lucidity transforms physical experiences into Primeval energy and manifests new experiences through the Derivative Laws, allowing dreamers to create and influence their own existences.
• Lucidity operates according to our desire, or free will in the moment, allowing us to shift our perception and even our physical circumstances based on our correspondence with power.
Next, we will ground our conversation on lucidity by talking about the individual dream practice. Techniques, tools, and strategies for increasing astral travel and lucidity will be covered. However, we will see how it is principally our dream organ's improper alignment that must be corrected in order to liberate our perception.
This will bring us to the core application of this thesis: The cultivation of dream power achieved through Recapitulation, Harmonization, Energization, and Allyship. It is the core because it is a chance to reencounter life in terms of pure energy. It is the start of a path where personal beliefs are no longer required. Direct experience of the universe through dreaming is possible due to an appropriate use of energy through an appropriate orientation to lucidity.