“I was sitting on a bench with a dream character while lucid dreaming. I turned to them and calmly said, ‘I’m dreaming.’ The character continued to look straight ahead and said, ‘I know. Me too.’ I think about it to this day.”
— comment on the Reddit r/LucidDreaming Forum
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Ancillary characters playing a minor role in your dreams offer you an opportunity to understand and influence the dream. These characters are relative bystanders, like theatrical extras in a drama being put on for your benefit.
Because these characters play narrowly defined roles, they can react spontaneously and, in doing so, provide a perspective that differs from what’s being shown in the dream. They rarely have much to say or the ability to say anything at all, but their responses will be illuminating if you take the right actions.
You are not the only person who lives in your head. You may think so, but your autonomy is a figment of your imagination. You are an artificial intelligence, but you are not the only one inside you. You are just the most widely capable one. There are others who are more adept at putting ideas together. They are the source of your ideas and your dreams, and you would hardly recognize them.
Dreams Make You What You Are
Dreams consolidate your personality, which is built upon attitudes, inclinations, memories, and desires. You cannot see the full process because it’s too holistic. It is not logical or deductive, so what you see is a collapsed time-narrative view of a higher dimensional structure.
What you see and remember in a dream is like what a dog sees traveling down the road with their tongue hanging out and their head out the window. For a dog, the experience is more one of smell than sight, and for you, the dream experience is more a procession of characters than thought forms.
I had a menacing dream in which there were two lanes of traffic on a busy road. An army or police force was stopping all the traffic going in one direction and forcing everyone to turn around. The road was being dug up, and those cars that didn’t turn around were being buried in the asphalt.
Many people were in distress. I was by myself and I didn’t recognize anyone, but at one point I found myself in a crowded room with many upset people. No one knew what was happening, and the current of the dream was foreboding.
I did not fully believe in the whole scenario. It seemed implausible, with chaotic crowds and unreliable authorities. This is what I think of most authorities. The competence of all authorities is questionable.
Breaks in the dream narrative give you a moment of clarity and provide the opportunity to question the experience. Finding breaks in the narrative is the most important step in therapeutic dreaming. These are doorways to insight because you have no opportunity for reflection until you have alternatives.
Dream Invitation to Alternatives
Dreams serve a larger purpose than the dreamer is aware of. They are not speaking to your conscious mind, they are constructions by and for your subconscious. For you to get any benefit, you must have an authorial voice in them. You cannot become a primary author because you do not have the power or resources, but you can take a role that’s greater than a bystander.
This is the difference between being an actor who reads his or her lines, and the drama’s author. Dreams are the exploration of multiple possibilities and you, as the dreamer, are incapable of appreciating their full, multi-threaded content. This is why you don’t remember them.
You see the dream as a wandering narrative when, in fact, it is woven of many narratives. Some are dominant and opaque, while others are suggestive and translucent.
In dream therapy, you want to avoid imposing your needs on the dream. This is both because it is interfering and because the dream will not tolerate it. Hijack your dream and the dream will disappear.
This is a bit like psychotherapy in real-time. A therapist is there to listen, guide, record, and draw attention. The therapist is not being called upon to define or recast the client’s narrative. If they do, they will lose the client’s trust, and the client’s authentic self will disappear.
Would You Like Some Ice Cream?
In my dream, I felt drawn to comfort. I remembered I had ice cream in the freezer, which was true in the real world. Combining these thoughts—the anxious crowd, the desire for comfort, and the ice cream—I offered the ice cream to all the ancillary characters, characters who would normally have remained indistinct and undeveloped. The result was a break in theme, as all the NPCs dropped their fear, gained identity, and became lighthearted.
This injection of levity was all it took to break the dream’s negative tone and release the narrative. It was as if I’d brought a cooler of ice tea to a sweltering movie set.
I would have gotten no response from these characters had I argued with them, but I could offer something that addressed the role they were playing. I acted with them in character, and they responded. This is the key point: NPC are not nobodies, they’re signs and symbols with spirit.
All things in your dreams have spirit. That’s what makes dreams living things. They have some resonance with everything, and resonance is a two-way connection. At its most basic, lucid dreaming is resonating with your dream so that you and the dream mutually interact. You’re not rewriting the dream as much as you are working within it.
Most of us have had moments of semi-lucidity in our dreams. It’s not obvious what it means to be fully aware in a reality that is entirely nonexistent, so it bears stating.
Being lucid in a dream means that you’re aware that a message is unfolding for your benefit. It means both suspending disbelief while being simultaneously aware that your impressions are affecting the event. This is not all that different from waking life, except that in a dream, all you need to do is think outside the narrative.
You do this in a dream in the same way you do it in waking life, by questioning reality. Ask yourself how often you do this in real life and you’ll realize the answer is rarely. It is no surprise that you are not inclined to do it in your dreams.
Are You Fully Lucid Now?
The most tried-and-true method for gaining lucidity in dreams is to question reality in waking life. Ice cream was an option in my dream because it was an option in waking life. It’s not so much that you need ice cream, which you don’t, of course, but that you need to have a facility to introduce alternative thought frames into your dream world.
We have the mistaken belief that we’re creating our world through acts of will when we’re mostly receiving our reality based on a dense network of impressions we believe in. Most people are no more likely to reconsider the meaning of what they see when awake than when dreaming. You want to develop this skill. It’s as essential to your waking mental health as it is essential to creativity in your dreams. These two are connected. Imagination is your most valuable tool for building your life.
The first requirement of lucid dreaming is to gain some lucid foothold in a dream. This comes with practice, intention, and a soft touch. Don’t ask too much and be satisfied with small gestures.
Two more essential requirements for therapeutic dreaming pertain to remembering them. They are time and effort. Lucid dreams take effort. You have to want to take part and you cannot be inert. You have to be mentally online while the dream is occurring, and you must hold on to the dream memory as you ascend into wakefulness.
Dream memories are as fragile as a souffle taken out of the oven. They collapse in minutes, but where a souffle loses all structure, a dream falls into pieces. You can reassemble the pieces if you record them before they disappear. The easiest recording tool is a scrap of paper, but you could also use a handheld voice recorder.
The difficulty is that conscious focus washes away faint memories, so you must engage your volition only to a slight degree. Like walking on tissue paper without tearing it, upon awakening, you must speak or write from a perspective that is as close as possible to that of the dream.
I discuss the mechanics of lucid dreaming in my book, Becoming Lucid. More than anything, lucid dreaming emerges from a sincere interest in yourself.
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