A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming Read Online Free PDF Page A

egyptians
    The first recorded evidence of a dreaming society can be found
    among the ancient Egyptians. These guys believed dreams to be
    a direct connection to the spirit world. The Egyptians appear to
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    have practiced a form of lucid dreaming and likely mastered dream
    skills such as shape-shifting and time travel. How do we know they
    were conscious dreamers? One clear indicator comes from their
    belief in the Ba (or soul), which they thought could travel con-
    sciously outside of the body while the body slept. Even their word
    for dreams, rswt (pronounced “resut”), translates as “awakening” or
    “to come awake” and was depicted in hieroglyphs as an open eye.
    Scholars say that the open eye might also signify an awakening to
    truths, advice, or insights commonly missed in daily waking life.
    Egyptians were so into dreams that they constructed temples
    specifically for the practice of dream incubation, a method of
    receiving divine healing and revelatory messages through sleep.
    They believed that the dream world was a deeper reality, a place
    where true transformation could happen. The dream interpret-
    ers of their day were called the “Masters of the Secret Things.”
    Imagine that on a business card.
    ancient greeks
    Ancient Greeks saw dreams as a spiritual practice as well, a con-
    nection to the divine. At first, only Zeus was thought to send
    divine dreams, but as time went on, other gods were allowed to
    send dreams too. There were two gods who specifically ruled in
    the arena of dreaming— Hypnos presided over sleep, and his son,
    Morpheus, ruled dreams. Scattered across the Mediterranean, the
    Greeks built more than three hundred shrines to serve as dream
    temples. These temples were heavily involved with dream healing,
    where the sick came to heal physically, emotionally, and spiritually
    with the help of nightly dreams.
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    Well over two thousand years before Freud, Plato theorized
    that dreams are the expression of our repressed desires. In his vol-
    ume The Republic, Plato wrote “in all of us, even the most highly respectable, there is a lawless wild beast nature, which peers out in
    sleep.” Aristotle, on the other hand, while fascinated by the fact
    that we can perceive colors, lights, and images with our eyes closed
    during sleep, concluded that dreams had no purpose. They foretell
    the future, you say? Mere coincidence.
    In the second century, Artemidorus wrote his five-volume
    work, Oneirocritica. “The crocodile signifies a pirate, murderer or a man who is no less wicked,” he wrote. “The way in which the
    crocodile treats the dreamer determines the way in which he will
    be treated by the person who is represented by the crocodile. The
    cat signifies an adulterer. For it is a bird-thief. And birds resemble
    women.” Instead of creating just a generic interpretation system of
    dreams, Artemidorus was the first to take the individual’s personal
    background into account.
    Romans
    Like many aspects of their culture, the Romans piggybacked their
    dream beliefs off the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. They had
    everything from dream incubation to dream temples, they even
    read the Oneirocritica. Pythagoreanism, a Greek philosophy dating back as far as 500 BCE, was also revived by the Romans.
    This metaphysical system of belief was based on mathematics
    but had nothing to do with high school-level geometry. It stated
    that “conscious soul travel” was possible and that spiritual gurus
    born centuries apart could communicate through these mystical
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    avenues. As more and more Romans were converted to Christianity,
    dream interpretation was refocused through the lens of the Bible,
    and the dream temple culture was all but wiped out.
    hindus
    According to Hindu mythology, everything around us in the
    physical world is a dream happening in Vishnu’s mind. Even we
    ourselves are only manifestations, dream characters if you will. It
    is thought that our world will end when