The Essence of Lucid Dreaming

I have just finished reading a book called "Lucid Dreaming" by Stephen LaBerge. Stephen starts with a comprehensice account covering the history of dreams, lucid dreams (dreams where the dreamer realises that they are dreaming) and scientific techniques of measuring them. He uses examples of lucid dreams and the motivations of previous oneinauts (dream explorers) such as Sigmund Freud and Celia Green. He then talks about his research at Stanford university and in particular the sleep and dream experiments that trigger, explore and stop lucidity.

Lucid dreams can be learned by contempolating a previous dream and then think about waking up within the next dream just before falling asleep. It can take a long time to become lucid in a dream and experience lucidity. The dreaming mind needs to be trained to recognise wakefulness whilst dreaming. This can be done by using triggers such as reality checks and attempts at flying or doing the impossible. Lucid dreams are often enjoyable and provide an insight into the nature of self expressed by the dreaming body and the deam environment.

LaBerge discusses several uses for lucid dreaming including healing, anxiety reduction, decision making, rehearsal and creative problem solving. He then discusses the meaning and functioning of dreaming and its relation to the subconscious, reality and illusion. This includes experiences and experiments covering out of body experiences (OBEs) and near death experiences (NDEs). There is some indication in the results that astral projection and OBEs are merely very vivid dreams where the dreamworld is very similar but not identical to reality. Also, he suggests that everyone has a dream body that can be of any form separate from the physical body. The experience provided by transpersonal dreams is synonymous with NDEs and we can have the equivalent of a near death experience without actually dying. Stephen even states that death and transcendece are the same from the point of view of lucid dreaming.

Stephen gives one of the most concise descriptions of death and what may happen after it. He asks "What will we be after death" and looks at the meaning of individuality (self or being). From his analysis of lucid dreaming he declares that individuality is a mental image of oneself. "Who you think you are?" is but a thought which passes like everything else in time and space. He then relates death and transcendence in a way very similar to that expressed in Buddhism:

"... your essential being transcends space and time: your transpersonal identity transcends your personal identity. Your transpersonal identity may in the end prove identical with the nature of ultimate reality - the shining sea possessed of all possessions, knower of the all-knowledge, creator of all creations - the one mind, reality itself. At death the dew drop slips back into the shining sea. Thus it may be when death comes, although you are annihilated as an individual and the dewdrop is lost in the sea, you at the same time return to the realization of what you have always essentially been: the drop recognizes itself to be not merely the drop it thought it was, but the sea. So to the question of what we will be after death the answer maybe given as everything and nothing."

This appears in my view to be true of the physical universe originating in the big bang apparantly from nothing and everything and this is perhaps what exists beyond our visual universe even now. In Buddhism we are reborn after death into Samsara (continuous suffering from beginningless time) unless we purify all negative karma and attain nirvana (the mind of the clear light of bliss). This could be the enlightenment of realising and experiencing everything and nothing.