Fringe-ology (30 page)

Neuroplasticity, in a nutshell.

But as LaBerge also teaches, and as I found, just
training
to have a lucid dream is enough to start the process of changing a life, from the inside out.

I
HIGHLY RECOMMEND
L
A
B
ERGE'S
book,
Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming
, for detailed methods of how to become lucid. The book is a direct product of LaBerge's scientific research: for the average lucid dreamer, just having a lucid dream or two a week is a worthy goal. But the need to have lucid dreams on command, in order to be studied in a laboratory setting, shaped LaBerge into a kind of lucid dreaming superhero. Avid lucid dreamers speak in reverent tones about his ability to have a lucid dream “any time he wants one.”

As LaBerge himself noted to us, repeatedly, his research indicates that lucid dreaming is like any other skill. Some people may have greater natural aptitude than others. But the more the beginner practices, the easier it becomes. I share a couple of his methods here that directly invoke the meditative process—a factor LaBerge himself addressed succinctly. “I understand that for many people meditation might have some religious connotations,” he said. “Some of you might be fine with that. Others, not so much. But my advice is, Get over it.”

To LaBerge, rejecting meditation or lucid dreaming because of its spiritual connotations is, well, scientifically counterproductive—holding us back from the knowledge and experience that might be ours.

According to LaBerge, lucid dreaming involves attaining a heightened state of awareness in waking life, which naturally bleeds over into dreamtime. And the awareness arises from asking yourself a simple question:
Am I awake, or am I dreaming?

This question may seem easy to answer, and often it is—but ask yourself,
How do I know when I'm awake? How do I know when I'm dreaming?

Well, for one thing, more
unusual
things happen in dreams. And these events—like flying without the aid of an aircraft—are called dream signs. But the key to lucid dreaming is to become aware of your true state and surroundings as often as possible; and one thing you're bound to discover is how often unusual and interesting things occur
in waking life
.

In other words: Remember the mongoose.

My first morning in Hawaii, that strange brown blur of the mongoose caught my attention, providing a perfect opportunity for me to conduct what LaBerge calls a reality or state test. I must warn you: at first, in practice, the reality test feels awfully silly. But whenever something unusual occurs in waking life, take the time—six, eight, ten, or twelve times a day—to ask yourself that central question:
Am I awake, or am I dreaming?

Don't answer automatically. Take a moment to think: What evidence would you look for to really answer that question?

Over the years, LaBerge has developed some insightful answers. In a dream, anything you see in print is only written in your mind. So to conduct a state test, read something. Then look away. Now look back at the printed page in your hand. If you're awake, what you see can only be what it was the first time you looked.

But if you're asleep? Whatever you read in the first place was only a figment. And when you look again, your mind can and most likely will retrieve something different from your mental storehouse of written images.

The numbers on a digital watch can turn into words. The words of a great poem might turn into nuclear launch codes.

Machinery also malfunctions quite a bit in dreams, so if you're conducting a state test, reaching for the nearest light switch is a good idea. If you're awake, the light switch is connected to a power source. In a dream, the light switch is connected to anything you might associate with electricity—and, because it's a dream, to absolutely nothing. So if you flip on a light switch and the light flashes like a disco ball, or if an elephant walks into the room, smoking a cigar, you, my friend, are dreaming.

In Hawaii, I cued myself to conduct a state test whenever there was a noticeable shift in the lighting and whenever I saw the brown blur of a mongoose go scrambling by. As I continued talking to a fellow workshop participant or my fiancée on the phone in Philadelphia, I read a nearby sign or the digits on my watch. I looked away, searching the landscape for some detail that might illuminate my condition. Am I dreaming, or am I awake? And more important, I found myself listening to whoever was talking even more intently than normal—really listening to what they had to say and the character of their speech.

The more state tests you conduct while awake, LaBerge told us, the more likely you are to question what state you're in when you're dreaming. And once you ask that question during a dream, it's game on.

The problem is that walking around conducting state tests all day might seem like a big distraction—and at first it is. But after a couple of days, even beginning practitioners will find themselves continuing conversations and silently carrying on state tests at the same time, with no ill effects. In fact, state tests lead to such a high level of awareness that, like meditation, the practice of lucid dreaming quickly leads to a fuller experience of life.

In meditative practice, this is known as the pursuit of “mindfulness”—of being immersed in the experiences of the moment. Andrew Newberg had spoken to his class about this: “When you take a shower,” he said, “don't think about your homework or the conversation you just had or are about to have. Think about what you're doing: feel the water on your skin. Think about each action you take as you take it. And nothing else.”

The practice also illustrates how alike dreams and waking really are, how many odd or unique experiences are available to us, all the time. I grew to love my state tests, and during my time in Hawaii, some of the most magical, revelatory moments occurred while I was upright and awake.

As a group, we were all alert to the behavior of digital clocks, which always malfunction in dreams. So when the digital clock in our meeting room began blinking, randomly, we all momentarily froze.
Were we asleep?
We all started conducting state tests, then burst out laughing.

I even had a terrific personal encounter with a tree. A cloud passed in front of the sun while I was walking to the general store, the shift in lighting being my cue for a state test. There was nothing around for me to read. And there was no machinery nearby for me to operate—no light switch to flick. So I seized upon the most interesting thing in my field of vision, a small grove of trees. Advancing upon them, I thought,
I will try to magically bend the branches of the nearest tree
. I quickened my pace, still self-conscious enough to be glad no one was in sight, and seized a branch as thick as my calf—maybe fifteen inches around. I didn't believe the thing would bend, but I playacted and heaved to with the raw optimism of the dreamer, unconstrained by the laws of physics. And in a split second, I bent the branch easily—at almost a 90-degree angle.
Whoa!
I thought.
Am I dreaming?

Just like I had expectations that Steve the Texan Tibetan was a simple hippie, I had expectations of how a tree that big would behave. But in a new environment, those previous experiences had left me with an inaccurate mental model of the world. In my mind, the tree was rigid. But in waking life, the
Ficus Elastica
planted near Kalani's general store bent easily. It was, literally, a rubber tree.

The lesson in all this was profound: lucid dreaming allowed me to engage in a kind of waking meditation
all day long
. It isn't easy. Maintaining that kind of awareness takes some effort. But it's available to me all the time.

One of the workshop participants, Jeff Dalton, captured the benefits best, a few days in. “The mindfulness I get from practicing lucid dreaming,” he told the group, “makes me a better father. Things can get out of hand fast with kids because they are so emotional. And I can get caught up in that. But that act of stepping back and reassessing things, of saying, ‘All right, what's
really
going on here?' instead of just reacting, has helped me to really
hear
my children, and what they really want.”

The whole room responded to this, the energy of the workshop palpably picking up as Jeff spoke. And the truth was, by this point, we were all so engaged with the world around us—well, I think we were
all
high. Tuned in, turned on, and holding absolutely no intention of dropping out.

Understand: this was just the effect of
trying
to have a lucid dream. Actually getting lucid, in this context, is a massive, psychedelic cherry on the cake.

As I mentioned, I had by this time already experienced a lucid dream at home, and it was powerful enough that I knew I was ready to invest the effort it would take to have more.

I triggered that first dream a few weeks before the workshop, using one of LaBerge's other means of incubating a lucid dream. The MILD technique, which stands for mnemonic induction of lucid dreaming, requires the practitioner to focus or meditate on a specific thought:
The next time I'm dreaming, I'll remember to recognize that I'm dreaming
. One effective way of practicing this technique is by reciting this mantra and also remembering a dream in as much detail as possible. I used a recurring nightmare, imagining myself really
in it
—recalling all the images and sounds and associated emotions. Then, using LaBerge's instructions, I'd imagine becoming
aware
that I was dreaming during some part of the dream—and what I would do as a result. This, too, is a meditative practice. And in my case, the nightmare I chose to meditate on had first appeared about twelve years earlier.

In this dream, I was home alone when a man's face appeared in the window. He saw me notice him and receded slowly into the dark, his face disappearing like a fish tickling the surface of the water and retreating into the depths. But a moment later, his face emerged from the dark again. Each time I had the dream I was terrified by this point, wondering,
Who in the hell is this creepy dude?

The way the dream usually went, he eventually moved away from the window and knocked on my front door. Slowly. Each beat of his hand on the wood was interrupted by long seconds of silence. The dream would always end the same way: after a few minutes of his knocking, I just got pissed.
Who is this guy?
I'd think.
Trying to terrify me like this?

“Come on!” I'd start yelling in my dream. “Come get some of this. You're gonna kill me?
I'm
going to kill
you
. I'm begging you to come in here, so I can murder you. I
dare
you to come in here!”

I'd had variations on this dream maybe two dozen times or more, and every time, before long, I was double-dog-daring this boogeyman to come into my dream house so I could beat him to death. And each time, he obliged me. Suddenly, he kicked the door open. We flew at each other in a rage. And just as we began to grapple, I woke up throwing punches, my right hand balled into a fist.

Using the MILD technique, I imagined all this repeatedly, only instead of becoming filled with fear or anger at the sight of the man's face in my window, I imagined myself realizing,
This is a dream
.

From just this part of the exercise, I quickly realized something startling: I'd had lucid dreams in the past, during nightmares. But in those dreams, when I realized I was dreaming, I used that incredible power . . . to wake myself up. LaBerge consoled me, saying this is a common reaction. Just not terribly helpful. “When we realize it's a dream,” said LaBerge, “the appropriate response is to take that seriously. The boogeyman chasing you has no external reality. You don't have to wake up or fly away. In fact, the best results people get are when they react to whatever's chasing them with curiosity and compassion.”

And so in the next stage of MILD, I started imagining more fruitful responses than abject fear and murderous rage. And after a few days of meditating on this, maybe twenty minutes per day, I saw the bastard. I was asleep and there he was, at my window, leering.
I've had this dream before,
my dream self thought. And that was all it took to bring me the awareness I needed. For the first time ever, I had real lucidity in a dream.

The walls of my apartment seemed to grow more stable and more vivid. The floor underneath my feet felt solid.
Dear God
, I thought.
This is just like
The Matrix
.
I felt as if
I
had just appeared, in some alternate reality. I could even feel the pads of my fingertips tickling my palms as I nervously considered balling my hands into fists.

Feeling in control of my fear, I went to my front door—and opened it.

A few seconds later, my tormentor appeared. And to my surprise, he was not particularly malevolent looking. In fact, he looked like any ole guy at all—a generic beer-drinking dude. But he was having none of this new Steve. He filled the doorframe, looking at me quizzically, as if to say,
Hey, this isn't what we do . . .

But I held my ground. I said nothing.

His face took on a sour cast then, like he was offended that I wouldn't play along. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a gleaming black handgun. He paused for a moment, the gun pointed toward the floor, and regarded me carefully—to see if my reaction changed.

To say that the moment
felt real
describes nothing and everything. In normal dreams, images retain a kind of washed-out quality. In lucid dreams, conscious awareness can bring out every detail. LaBerge says this is because we're not just seeing objects, as we do in waking life, but every image we've ever seen of the object, every idea we've ever had about the object—and all our emotional associations, besides.