The headline "Biblical Angels Were Just 'Lucid Dreams'" intrigued me. The Internet article cited a recent study by the Los Angeles based Out-of-Body Experience Research Center that instructed its participants to try to visualize angels during states of lucid dreaming. In some cases, they succeeded in having experiences which seemed to parallel the encounters of Elijah and other Old Testament prophets with angelic messengers which are recorded in the Bible.
Still, I was put off by the dismissiveness of the phrase "just lucid dreams" in the headline, and also by the suggestion that the visions of mystics and prophets reported in the Bible and elsewhere are merely imaginary events that can be reproduced at will.
In my own experience, lucid dreams, while clearly owing a lot to the imagination, often contain a spiritual element which is not merely "imaginary." In other words, the imagination in this instance is not just a faculty for creating fictions and illusion, but equally a portal into another realm of experience, a realm of heightened awareness and intense spiritual aliveness which challenges our very notions of what is real and what it means to be awake.
The music that we hear during lucid dreams is rapturous and drenched in feeling; the colors are more subtle and vibrant than the ones we see in the "real world"; the aromas and tastes are more real than real, and may linger even after awakening; sex is explosive and ecstatic; and the insights we receive in lucid dreams are profound, if frequently difficult to put into words. A lucid dream, in other words, can be an intoxicating glimpse of what life might be like if we lived, as the Zen masters recommend, fully in the now -- alert, fiercely present and with wide open hearts.
In 1902, the British writer and occultist, Hugh Calloway, wrote of his first lucid dream: "Instantly the vividness of life increased a hundred fold. Never had the sea and the sky and trees shone with such glamorous beauty; even the commonplace houses seem alive and mystically beautiful. Never had I felt so absolutely well, so clear-brained, and so inexpressibly free!"
The intensity of experience in lucid dreams is one reason so many people today are pursuing them. Books have been written and workshops are offered on how to cultivate these visionary experiences. Lucid dreams, which typically occur just after the onset of sleep, or during the process of awakening, are episodes in which we remain aware that we are dreaming and can exercise a certain degree of control over the imagery and action of the dream.
While they are relative newcomers to the world of science, which only started studying lucid dreams in recent decades, references to them can be found as early as the writings of the fifth century Catholic saint, Augustine of Hippo. The12th-century Sufi philosopher and mystic, Ibn El-Arabi, instructed his students to take control of the imagery in their dreams. They also figure in a Tibetan tradition called Dzogchen, in which meditators practice mastery of lucid dreaming as a training for navigating the Bardo, the after death state that Buddhist believe helps to determine ones future incarnation.
The indigenous Senoi people, who live in the mountain jungles of central Malaysia, believe that by confronting and overcoming dangers -- like fire, flood and tigers -- in lucid dreams, and by consciously guiding those dreams to good endings, we can master our fears and have a positive impact on the events in waking life. More recently, Australian psychologist Milan Colic developed a method which employs lucid dreaming to help control nightmares and treat depression.
Working with dreams to gain psychological insight is a cornerstone of psychoanalysis, whose founder Sigmund Freud believed that dreams reveal in the symbolic language of the subconscious aspects of the personality of the dreamer and offer keys to understanding their emotional complexes. He argued in his pioneering work "The Interpretation of Dreams" that most dreams are a form of wish fulfillment in which the psyche attempts to resolve suppressed conflicts often originating in childhood or early adolescence and frequently of a sexual nature.
Freud's protege Carl Jung broke with his mentor in asserting that dreams were not just the byproducts of inner conflicts and psychopathology, but offered guidance for achieving psychic wholeness. Jung wrote that a dream is like "a small hidden door to the most deep hidden and secret corners of the psyche ... In our dreams we take the form of a more universal, true and eternal man..." One of the function of dreams, according to Jung, is to provide an entree to what he called "the collective unconscious," a repository of the wisdom of the human race which is often cloaked behind the more superficial layers of the mind.
Both Jung and Freud were aware of the existence of lucid dreams. Freud wrote in the second edition of "The Interpretation of Dreams," "There are people who are quite clearly aware during the night that they are asleep and dreaming and who thus seem to possess the faculty of consciously directing their dreams." The founder of psychoanalysis was reportedly disturbed by the sexual content of one of his own lucid dreams. Traditional Jungians, on the other hand, sometimes object to the conscious element in guiding lucid dreams. In their view, dreams belongs exclusively to the subconscious mind and should not be meddled with.
Yet I suspect that Jung himself was not as upset as some of his orthodox followers appear to be at the unconventional nature of lucid dreams. The great analyst had experienced lucid visionary states, both in sleep and in waking, and he understood that, while one can indeed remain conscious during visions, they are not merely products of the conscious mind. On the contrary, such experiences, for Jung, involve contact with an awareness which is more than merely personal. He reportedly had premonitions and received messages during these states.
Lucid visionary states have been sought by a wide variety of cultures, not just for the sense of euphoria, freedom and radiant aliveness which they convey, but because they were believed capable of transforming and uplifting the individual to a divine level. Native Americans went on spirit quests in remote places to seek visions which would result in positive new directions in life both for the individual and the tribe. In ancient Greece, sick people journeyed to temples dedicated to Aesculapius, the God of medicine, to engage in incubation, a ritual designed to produce lucid dreams, which they hoped would provide healing, or the answer to a troubling question.
This ancient practice of incubation was the topic of a recent study conducted by Dr. Deirdre Barrett at Harvard Medical School in which the participating students were instructed to focus on a problem of a personal, or academic nature just prior to falling asleep. Of those who remembered their dreams when they woke up, more than half reported that they contained solutions to the problem.
This research dramatically confirms the validity of the oft-repeated recommendation to "sleep on it." It also supports the age-old intuition that dreams are sometimes not just dreams, as we may dismiss them, but keys that unlock a deeper wisdom within ourselves. Lucid dreams, in particular, offer a rare bridge between the state of waking and sleep, which may provide clues to the nature of consciousness itself. Science is just now beginning to demonstrate that they are also invaluable tools for cultivating creativity, self understanding and personal growth.
So perhaps we should amend that reductive and condescending headline explaining away biblical prophecy -- "Biblical Angels Were Just 'Lucid Dreams'" -- to the far richer and more intriguing statement, "The Potential For Lucid Dreaming Makes All of Us Prophets!"
An earlier version of this article appeared in Religious Dispatches.
Angels, for instance. People in monotheist culture tend to see almost everything as either an 'angel,' one of their 'devils,' or some kind of ghost-presumed-to-be-a-dead-person. :) I'm Pagan, (though that came *after* learning this shamanic stuff in some really key ways.)
So I don't bias toward thinking everything not-scary is an Angel to begin with. :) Part of the problem with even discussing 'just the reports,' never mind techniques, is in fact that a lot of people are kind of taught to leap to assume any such sighting 'has to be' about a certain *religious complex* speaking with some kind of authority. 'Is it real, is it orthodox,' 'What does it 'prove,' ...Entirely skipping the question, 'What did you actually see?'
But I found some pretty interesting corroboration for some of those guys having appeared so for a very long time: longer than certain monotheism was ever around, to be sure, and they don't seem all that fussed about particular religious beliefs, indeed. (Though some might tell you different on that count, then argue as if the 'stakes' defined the 'argument' when the *information* is usually *ignored* to begin with. :) )
If from the get-go you're setting out to fight over 'Is This Real' in order to assert *authority* of something else, you're not *evaluating* either the process or content. Never mind the old books. :)
Dreams whether lucid or not have their place and usefulness. But the last thing we need are more prophets running around.
Never mind the content. :)
You shouldn't give any additional weight to anything from a dream. Doing so is indulging in superstition, plain and simple.
Most people who take up lucid dreaming practice don't actually even get *past* what's in their own heads, or what they bring with them, especially given some of the methods out there. And the general noise of our civilization. And the average adult, especially. (It helps to start relatively young, I think. Pure chance, in a way, that I found something that worked and helped make sense of it.
We're a very dreaming-illiterate society, some of what people think they know just ain't so about it, and part of that has very much to do with psychological theory and pop-psychological theory, etc. But anyone who'd hang around me long enough (especially when I was more on top of my game,) would almost invariably have occasion to see there's something to it, even just on the information part.
As for mystical/religious stuff, that's probably even *more* involved to try to explain to any given materialist. :)
For what it's worth to you, trust me, ...past a pretty early point, running around trying to 'prove' something to people goes *way* down the bottom of the priority list.
I'm a pretty scientifically-minded person, myself... Actually I always found that to be an asset in actual practice of it. You don't throw reason out the window, nor obsess on 'proving' something all the time, just cause there's someone calling you 'superstitious' and asking the wrong darn questions. :)
All humans are susceptible to confirmation bias or seeing patterns where they don't actually exist. There are plenty of con men who love to exploit these tendencies. Scientists spend a lot of time to compensate for these very human tendencies in their procedures. Much of scientific progress in the last 400 years is built on only accepting evidence backed claims and conclusions.
Incidentally, James Randi, a famous magician, wants to give a million dollars to anyone who can prove anything along these lines.
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html
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The music that we hear during lucid dreams is rapturous and drenched in feeling; the colors are more subtle and vibrant than the ones we see in the "real world"; the aromas and tastes are more real than real, and may linger even after awakening; sex is explosive and ecstatic; and the insights we receive in lucid dreams are profound, if frequently difficult to put into words. A lucid dream, in other words, can be an intoxicating glimpse of what life might be like if we lived, as the Zen masters recommend, fully in the now -- alert, fiercely present and with wide open hearts.
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Maybe it's because it's Monday morning and I'm only on my second cup of coffee but what does your first statement mean? That these guys were seeing 'real' things in their dreams?
And your second statement? I've never heard music in any dreams I've ever had but maybe that's because I don't do hallucinogenic drugs! :-)
So, saying 'Just Lucid Dreams' implies that there can't possibly be more *to* it. :)
(The 'You must be on drugs' claim is a whole other kind of dismissal, ...Maybe that's why you don't hear music. Or 'Big Music,' :) Actually, most 'hallucinogens' you find have the opposite effect of lucidity, (Though lucid dreaming skills can help one *navigate* altered states, it's not really a useful tool that way. Certain traditional entheogens I've never actually tried are reputedly quite different that way, but they're also quite different from the 'Getting messed up and hallucinating' more familiar to modern culture. :) )
Frankly, if you can't tell the difference, the stories you tell about it may not be about the important parts. Especially once a few millenia of dogmatarians get hold of it. :)