The brilliance of lucid dreaming.

For as long as I can remember, dreams have been a huge part of my life.

When I was young, I had a few recurring nightmares. In one I was walking down the hall to the bathroom late at night, and the robot came. Always one of the same three. I heard it first. Never enough time to run back to bed, I dropped to the floor and pretended to be dead. I knew I couldn’t move or it would kill me. It’s not easy to breath shallowly when you’re terrified. I must have had that dream hundreds of times.

When I was in my late twenties I got into lucid dreaming. After a few weeks of studying and reading up on it, I started having success. The first few times I realized I was dreaming I got so excited I woke up. Eventually, I managed to stay asleep and that was the night I stepped outside and flew into the night sky. IT WAS AWESOME!

As with dreams in general, things can get weird in our other worlds. I recently watched a Ted Talk on dreams that probably explains something I never understood. It was around the time I was practicing lucid dreaming, and I was having nightmares, waking scared. This happened a few nights in a row. Always some black shadow figure coming after me and always I turned and ran. I knew I had to do something. One night I’m having the dream but this time I know I’m dreaming. Now, one of my mantras in life has always been ‘You can face fear, or you can feel it. Feel it and it eats you alive, face it, and you win.”

So, I’m having this dream and scary shadow figure is coming right at me. I know I have a choice now. Instead of running away, I ran straight for it and literally dove head first into the body cavity. It was exhilarating! And it worked. The nightmares stopped. According to that Ted Talk video I had unknowingly faced and embraced my own dark side. Ha, so there, Vader.

In hind sight I think I had a hint at what was going on a few days prior to this. I was in bed and got up to go to the kitchen for something. I was afraid, but I didn’t know why. I opened my bedroom door and standing there facing me was myself. Sounds funny now, but it scared the crap out of me at the time, and woke me up.

A few days after the facing my dark side event I dreamt I existed as a single point of light. Maneuverability isn’t really an issue when you are a single point. I was back in space and moving so quickly that I could draw shapes. Like holding a stick with a burning tip and flicking it back and forth to create a line in the dark, I zoomed in various forms. Making a square made me laugh. Something about making ninety degree turns with such speed and precision was exhilarating.

I recently had a life event, a series of events really, that shook me to the core. It broke me and my dreams. During my mental recovery I went months without remembering a single dream. For someone like me, that was a horrible, lonely, lost thing to happen and this on top of all the rest. Not a good time for me. A shit year, really. Slowly, my dreams returned but at first, for another few months in fact, they were dreadfully mundane. No passion, no fire, and definitely no flying.

Eventually, I put the pieces of my life back together. They don’t fit the way they used to, but that’s ok. They’re not supposed to. They’ve formed a new picture that is richer than I ever imagined.

The universe is talking to me and I’m listening. Eyes wide open. I’m showing up and paying attention and it’s BRILLIANT.

My dreams are improving, too. I recently had a lucid dream and decided I wanted to fly. Remembering that there are no limits in our dreams, I shot up through the atmosphere and in blinding speed zipped through the rings of Saturn!! How cool is that?

I think our dreams are an incredible resource for understanding our lives. They tell us things even if we don’t want to hear it. They show us secrets and open doors. If we pay attention.

Sweet nightmares,