My solely purpose in inducing lucid dreams is the possibility for interaction with my own imagination. It is a journey into the unknown recesses of a fantastic world with which I can actively interact and “communicate” from the waking state – a bit like reading a book and suddenly becoming one of the characters. I also treat LDs as a fantastic source of inspiration which can help me develop an interesting perspective on life by extension/cultivation of my childhood imagination. I find some relief in the fact that when we explore the possibilities of dreaming consciously we confirm that by growing up we do not necessarily need to say farewell to the mysteries that surround us. I’ve always held much more interest for the ‘unreal’ than the ‘real’ and simply see no point in rationalizing and explaining the lucid dream phenomenon. I love to perceive imagination as something boundless, something that tackles the most unpredictable/unexplainable aspects of our reality. Trying to prove that dream-world is a parallel universe which we explore after having left our bodies… in which we can speak to our ancestors and so on is simply as cliché and as unoriginal as yet another flick made in Hollywood. I do believe that lucid dreaming is an absolutely incredible experience and goes far beyond the mundane but subjecting it to the long-time existing parapsychological theories is equal to limiting its creative potential. Of course, it is stimulating to read an article that teases your imagination and tries to explain lucid dreaming through this branch of science but when you see the whole bunch of authors who are trying to tell you in unison that lucid dreaming must be connected to UFO, telepathy, afterlife etc etc then this hackneyed interpretation becomes very disappointing. In my case the more random, incomprehensible and illimitable the experience is the more of my attention it will receive. Another thing that worries is that many books on lucid dreaming are self-help books, which would imply that the reader must have some kind of problems or at least must want to overcome his life dilemmas with the help of lucid dreaming in the first place. The more I read such books, the more I feel like someone who really needs some help. To tell the truth, I like reading all books about lucid dreaming, because they all increase the “lucidity frequency”, but I think that several aspects of the way lucid dreaming is presented, mentioned in this paragraph, might dissuade many people from trying to delve into this subject. Just an opinion. Ok, enough with this critique. Let’s get back to what lucid dreaming means for me. :) I’ve been keener to analyze the influence of dreams on our every-day life from the fiction-invading-our-world perspective. Training ourselves to have LDs we simply obliterate “the oblivion threshold” that usually makes us forget the dream content or that urges us to dismiss it as something totally unimportant. We open the gates of the unknown allowing the residue of randomness and unreality spill into the blinding ocean of ubiquitous boring rationality. Take as an example the process of recording your own dreams. Regardless of how hard you try to tell yourself that the result is a work of fiction, the dreams you’ve recorded have managed take root and will grow on you and your life anyway- no matter whether they have materialized as a scribble on a page or a recording on a tape or have been firmly memorized in your heard, no matter if you do not pay any attention to any of their symbology and meaning or do not look for any hidden messages in your dream state. Dreams simply have already influenced the course of your life and have become part of what you consider to be real! This is precisely what interests me the most: a pure parthenogenesis of thoughts and ideas - when fiction becomes flesh! This is why I admire all artists who seek inspiration in dreams – those who manage to transfer the dream’s abstract messages/thoughts/ideas/feelings and turn them into something one can contemplate. Labels: Film, literature, lucid dreaming |
