Table Of ContentA Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming
Mastering the Art of Oneironautics
Dylan Tuccillo, Jared Zeizel, and Thomas Peisel with illustrations by Mahendra
Singh
WORKMAN PUBLISHING • NEW YORK
1. Starting the Journey
2. Packing Your Bags
3. Arrival
4. Exploring a New World
5. Mastering the Terrain
6. The Next Frontier
CONTENTS
Foreword
Part One
1 A New Discovery
2 What Are Dreams?
3 A History of Dreaming
Part Two
4 The REM Stage
5 The Power of Intention
6 Remembering Your Dreams
7 Keeping a Dream Journal
8 The Reality Check
Part Three
9 Becoming Lucid
10 Staying Lucid
Part Four
11 Transportation
12 Creation
13 The Natives
14 Superpowers
Part Five
15 Defusing Nightmares
16 Healing and Wholeness
17 Dream Incubation
18 WILD
Part Six
19 Know Thyself
20 Waking vs. Dreaming
21 A Future Vision
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
FOREWORD
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to
arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. Eliot, poet, playwright, aka “Old Possum”
For as long as there have been blank spots on the map, there have been pioneers
—those unafraid of the fringe, who relish the untamed, the unknown, and the
undiscovered. These individuals are inspired by the adventurous impulse to
survey new ground, to chart new territory, or to discover new ideas. They are the
innovators, creators, visionaries, and explorers.
Today we find ourselves on the brink of yet another frontier. You, holding this
book, are about to enter this unknown world. Where are you going? What’s left
that hasn’t already been mapped out? The only blank spots left are in the depths
of the sea and in the vastness of outer space, but you won’t be going to either of
these places. This journey is a tad different. You won’t find this place on any
map.
You’re not a stranger to this land. In fact you’ve traveled there every night of
your life, whether you realize it or not. You leave your familiar world and
experience this place, which has its own rules, customs, laws, and native
population. You can traverse this frontier just like you’d walk through a forest.
Here, you can learn, discover, heal, and awaken to different realities.
If you’ve read the cover of this book, you know what we’re getting at:
dreams! The goal of this book is to help you explore your dreams using the art of
lucid dreaming. We will explain what lucid dreaming is and how you too can use
it to survey the ground floor of your own subconscious. We will teach you how
to become an oneironaut, a word derived from Greek that means “dream
navigator.”
Lucid dreaming is the ability to know you’re dreaming while you’re
dreaming. A lucid dreamer is able to go to sleep at night and wake up within his
or her dream. With this unique awareness, you can generally behave like
someone who is awake, exercising the free will, imagination, and memory of
waking life. Once lucid, you can explore and even change elements of the
dream.
If you were to travel down the Amazon River, you’d need a field guide to tell
you which plants to eat, how to navigate the terrain, and what to do when
dealing with the natives. Consider this book your field guide to the dream world,
a map to navigate through your subconscious. If you’re a newcomer to lucid
dreaming, the idea of exploring your subconscious may seem crazy or daunting.
Don’t you worry, we searched for the best techniques out there, made some
improvements, and then boiled them down to their simplest forms. For those of
you who have already experienced lucid dreaming, this guide will help you
master this ability while traveling beyond what you thought was possible.
We’ll teach you:
1. How to reconnect with your dreams
2. How to have a lucid dream
3. What to do once you’re lucid
This book is filled with step-by-step advice, stories from the dream world, and
wonderfully maddening ideas. It’s based on our own experiences with a decade
of lucid dreaming as well as the real-life experiences of many other lucid
dreamers, writers, and scientists. Our goal was to report back from the dream
world and write about the things that we actually observed and experienced.
Unlike other field guides, this book is designed to be read from start to finish,
just as if you were to travel down a jungle trail. Information from the first
chapter will be used in the second chapter; tips from the second chapter will pop
up in the third chapter, and so on. So try and hold off the urge to jump around.
Here’s an important note to remember before embarking on this inner journey:
While dreaming is a skill that can improve with practice and focus, it’s not
something foreign to you. You dream. You do so every single night, whether
you remember it or not.
Ready to start? Here’s your first lesson. The icon of a compass, seen above,
will appear many times throughout this book. TRY THIS: Every time you see a
compass, ask yourself the question “Am I dreaming at this very moment?” Look
around you and really try to answer this question.
It may sound ridiculous to doubt your reality (of course you’re awake, after
all, you’re reading this book). But for reasons you will soon learn, this reality
check is the first step in waking up in your dreams. If you’re able to master this
technique, you’ll have no problem with lucid dreaming.
So take a moment now and ask yourself this seemingly bizarre question:
“Am I dreaming?”
PART ONE
Starting the Journey
1
A New Discovery
It’s April 12, 1975, in the Department of Psychology at the University of Hull in
England. Researcher Keith Hearne is trying desperately to stay awake. He sits
alone, monitoring a man named Alan Worsley as he sleeps, watching the
monotonous up-and-down charting of ink on his polysomnograph machine.
Worsley looks the same as any sleeper does—eyes closed, chest rising and
falling. It’s almost 8:00 a.m., and so far there is nothing out of the ordinary about
this quiet Saturday morning. But in just a few minutes something incredible will
occur.
At this very moment, these two scientists are attempting to make a discovery
that will change history. They are trying to prove scientifically an esoteric ability
that humans have known about for centuries: We can be consciously awake
inside our dreams.
An obvious obstacle stands in the way of this would-be breakthrough: How
can such a strange and ridiculous claim be proven? Worsley has experienced
plenty of lucid dreams before. It won’t be hard for him to become conscious
inside of his own dream. But how does he prove that he’s lucid? It’s not as if
Worsley can bring a camera into the dream world and bring back some
Polaroids. To prove such an ability, our researchers will need a way to
communicate from the dream world back to the waking world. They need some
sort of phone line, a way for Worsley to “call” Hearne and tell him he’s
dreaming.
Since this feat has never been pulled off by modern science, these two men
cannot rely on past experiments to figure out how to do it.
They are all alone, navigating the uncharted fringes of science. Luckily,
Hearne and Worsley have an idea.
In the dream I entered my house at night. I flipped the switch to turn on the kitchen lights. The
lights did not come on (a common problem in my dreams). It caused me to ask whether I was
dreaming or not, which I knew the answer to immediately. I proceeded into the house now fully
aware that I was dreaming. I saw my brother. I remembered that my objective tonight was to
interact more with dream characters. —Richard V. W.
A few basic scientific facts helped develop their clever theory. You see, while
our minds are active during a dream, our physical bodies are turned off. The
body is essentially paralyzed when we venture off to the Land of Nod; the motor
neurons in our brains are not stimulated, and the body’s muscles are dormant.
This is a normal state known as sleep atonia. Fortunately there are two parts of
the body that remain unaffected by the paralysis: the diaphragm, so we can keep
breathing, and the eyes. Our hotshot scientists came into the lab that day with a
hypothesis: If Worsley moved his eyes back and forth inside the dream world,
the physical eyes of his sleeping body would echo the same pattern of eye
movement. The eyes would be the phone line, a way to communicate between
these two worlds.
At 8:07 a.m., Worsley finds himself in a dream, aware that he is dreaming and
that his physical body is lying unconscious in the waking world. He then carries
out specific, agreed-upon eye patterns—left to right eight times—in order to
signal to the lab that he is in fact dreaming and doing so consciously. “The
signals were coming from another world—the world of dreams,” wrote Hearne,
“and they were as exciting as if they were coming from another solar system in
space.” The EEG readout confirmed it, charting Worsley’s brain activity: He
was physically asleep, yet he was aware enough to signal back to the laboratory.
He was lucid dreaming.
Three years later, a man named Stephen LaBerge would conduct a similar test
at Stanford University. Without any knowledge of Hearne’s experiments,
LaBerge completed his doctoral dissertation, trying to prove the same thing:
Conscious dreaming was not hogwash, but an actual, provable experience. Using
the same eye-signaling technique, he too was successful. More tests were done
to confirm the findings, and the news spread. There was now scientific proof of
what the ancients had been telling us for centuries.
We can be awake in our dreams.
I’m in a high-rise apartment building with glass windows. A villain taunts me outside. He’s
flying on some sort of skateboard device. Realizing the absurdity of the situation I realize that
I’m dreaming. “I’m dreaming!” I think to myself and I jump out of the building wearing
nothing but swimming shorts. I fly toward him, trying to catch up. He is much faster than I am,
but I’m able to mirror his movements and keep up with him. We chase each other, weaving
around and in between buildings. I can read his subtle movements like we’re two birds chasing
after each other. I put my head down and fly in a straight line no longer following his lead. I
grab ahold of him! Holding the back of his flying device I fling him high into the air. Not sure
what happens to him after that. I wake up. —Miguel H.
Getting out of bed and standing on my feet, I performed a reality check by looking at my digital
watch, looking away, and looking back at it again. As the digital numbers did change, I still
wasn’t entirely convinced that it was a dream because everything was so vivid and real. —Ben
S.
Becoming Aware
Before we talk about the fine subtleties of dream adventures, let’s take a step
back and ask the obvious question: What exactly is a lucid dream? A lucid
dream is one in which you become aware that you’re dreaming. Not to be
confused with a very vivid dream, a lucid dream is the present-moment
realization that you’re dreaming, a sudden self-reflective epiphany of, “Wait a
second . . . I’m dreaming!” You may notice that you’re in a location that would
normally be impossible (Wait, how did I get to Hawaii?) or perhaps you stumble
upon something absolutely absurd (Is that an ostrich driving a car?). Maybe your
trigger has more to do with your past (Wait a second, I’m not in college
anymore! This has to be a dream!). Typically, lucid dreams are triggered by
some sort of inconsistency, something that suddenly causes the dreamer to stop
and question his or her reality.
O-NEIR-O-NAUT-ICS
Oneironaut is derived from two Greek words, oneira meaning “dreams” and nautis meaning
“sailor.” An oneironaut is someone who has learned to travel consciously in the dream world,
exploring its terrain with a high degree of clarity and awareness.
Once you become lucid, you’ll have complete memory of your waking life,
and will be able to think logically, make decisions, and explore the dream’s
landscape in the same way you’d traverse the physical world. You’ll have direct
influence over the entire dream and its content. Whereas in a regular dream, you
would react blindly, unable to reflect on your current situation, you now hold the
reins—your mind is awake enough to call the shots. Have a conversation with a
dream character, fly across a mountain range, breathe underwater, pass
effortlessly through walls—these are just a few examples. No longer confined to
a physical body, you have the freedom to travel over large distances, move at
incredible speeds, or even transcend time as you know it.
When you realize that you are not separate from the inner world of your
dreams, you can move, shape, even create objects out of thin air. Everything in
the environment around you takes on a very intimate relationship; you might
even say that the world around you is you! If it seems like we’re exaggerating,
we’re not: The sensations of touch, smell, sight, taste, and sound will seem just
as vivid as they do in waking life. If you’ve ever seen the sci-fi film The Matrix,
you already have a good idea what this world is like: a place that seems real but
is just a projection of the mind. As the character Morpheus describes The
Matrix, “If real is what you can feel, smell, taste, and see, then ‘real’ is simply
electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” But unlike The Matrix, lucid
dreaming is not science fiction.
Imagine being free of your physical body, leaving behind silly things like
