The Lucid Dreamer

Sign in to add to Watchlist

Charlie Morley taught himself to lucid dream at the age of 16. As an adult he began practicing Buddhism, then in 2008 he began teaching lucid dreaming. He has offered a number of lucid dreaming courses all around the world, including South Africa. He states that it was in this country that he realized that his lucid dreaming practice could be used to benefit others.

Dreams are powerful stories that unfold in our sleep reality. For centuries dreams have been seen as a source of inspiration and the subject of intrigue. Psychologically, dreams have been defined as reflections from the unconscious, but culturally they have been said to be messages from ancestors or even from God. Spiritually, dreams can also be described as predictions of future events.

Maintaining lucidity while dreaming provides us with a useful stepping-stone on the path to spiritual enlightenment. It’s a way of training the mind to recognize the dream as it unfolds. This strengthens our capacity for mindful awareness not only in the dream but also in the wakened state. This is one of the greatest gifts that you can give to yourself and to others because it is only when we are fully awake that our full human potential is realized.

A lucid dream is a dream in which you are aware that you’re dreaming the moment it’s happening. It’s different from having a very vivid dream that you remember in the morning and it’s not a dream in which you see future events that later come to pass. It’s also not about seeing yourself floating above a room.

If we were a little more lucid there would be less ego, less fear, and even less conflict because self- acceptance and kindness would arise spontaneously. Just a flash of lucidity would help us to regain control of our lives and stop operating on auto-pilot, because lucid dreaming increases our capacity for healing.

Tibetan monks have been practicing lucid dreaming or dream yoga as a means of attaining enlightenment for thousands of years. They have developed elaborate techniques for inducing lucidity. These practices, however, are not restricted to Buddhists even though they were the ones to make it into a science. There are records of lucid dreaming being present in many different belief systems.

The Buddhists believe that we are all already enlightened beings that have bought into the delusion of being something different and as a result we experience what we believe to be true. According to them we are all already in a dream and the actual reality is our enlightened nature. A lot of lucid dreaming practices are about not falling asleep, but rather floating into sleep.

For a person who has learned the art of lucid dreaming, even nightmares can be very useful because they are making powerful psychological statements. The lucid dreamer learns how to face his or her fears and turn nightmares into possibilities for transformation. Find out more now.