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

Martin Luther spread the word that the devil
    was responsible for dreams and that divine messages could only
    be received through the church. St. John Chrysostom stated that
    dreams were insubstantial. Come on guys, really?
    Modern Times
    After the Dark Ages dreaming was basically swept under the rug.
    Anthropologist Raymond L. M. Lee notes that even after the
    Renaissance “dreams were treated as unremarkable by-products of
    psychological disturbances or bad digestion that possessed no real
    value.” It wasn’t until the turn of the twentieth century that dreams
    were brought out of the darkness by our friend Dr. Sigmund Freud.
    He started an entire branch of psychology devoted to unlocking
    his patients’ “unconscious” minds through the interpretation of
    dreams.
    Not only had the dust been brushed off the topic, but dreams
    were now also seen in an entirely new light—they were secular.
    Some of Freud’s ideas were soon challenged by his own student,
    a radically thinking upstart named Carl Jung. Dr. Jung believed
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    that dreams were not only about the past, but about the present
    too. He felt that dreams show us what we are striving to achieve as
    well as what stands in our way.
    Jung didn’t completely abandon his teacher’s thoughts. He
    accepted Freud’s basic structure and his theories on the language
    of dreaming, along with the idea of interpreting dreams through
    associations. And Jung wasn’t just observing patients; he was an
    ardent dreamer. Take a look at his academic essays and you’ll find
    some surprising topics: psychic powers, collective dreaming, and
    telepathy. He believed we dreamed in the collective unconscious
    (a shared space), and he coined the terms archetype and synchro-
    nicity. Thanks to Jung, a lot of modern-day dream explorers were
    inspired to think out of the box, exhuming ideas that had been
    buried since the ancients.
    PENNY FOR YOUR THOUgHTS
    What do you think? are dreams private, separate experiences happening only in each of our minds? Or is it possible that dreams take place in a shared and collective place? as we have seen, many cultures believed the latter to be true.
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    Who Has It Right?
    Our ancestors had a totally different relationship to dreaming
    than we do today. Dreams were an extension of the waking
    world, a reality just as important as “real life.” Most of us have
    been conditioned since childhood to look at these inner world
    visions as “just dreams.” You don’t have to believe any of the ideas
    that you just read, but we suggest considering them as possibilities,
    no matter how alien they may seem.
    Before writing this book, before we did some investigation
    into the matter, we thought we knew what dreams were. Now,
    some of the ancients’ ideas don’t sound so crazy to us.
    So let’s do ourselves a favor and start from scratch. Imagine a
    giant chalkboard filled with everything you know or think about
    dreams, covered with words and diagrams, crammed and overlap-
    ping with ideas. Now take a sponge, dip it in water, and run it
    across the blackboard. Erase everything. Good. To relearn how to
    dream all you’ll need is an open mind.
    As our mothers taught us, believe nothing that you hear and
    only half of what you see. Do not take our word, the words of
    our ancestors, or even the words of modern psychology as gos-
    pel. Instead, discover for yourself through experience what dreams
    really are.
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    The following chapters will give you the practical guidance
    you need to become lucid. We’ll start with some basics, recon-
    necting you with your nighttime journeys. No more wispy, cloudy
    dreams for you. As you progress, you’ll begin to notice that
    your dreams take on a potent and vivid quality; the memories will
    be more complete.
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    P a r t t w o
    Packing
    Your Bags

    When we first took the journey to the dream world
    and learned how to become lucid, the process wasn’t
    very simple. We found numerous books and