What can lucid dreaming teach us about the waking state?

[Charliemcsnarly]

It's been sometime since I have had a lucid dream, I had a few as a kid and a few more about 4 years ago when I had a serious alcohol problem. What I felt during them was a great sense of bliss, vividity and empowerment.

It's only recently since quitting alcohol and waking up spiritually that I really feel like I've learned a great deal from the past experiences.

It feels to me like they teach us to realize what it feels like to wake up within this (waking) dream, and how it is possible to lose boundaries and fear in what we consider reality, as it too is just another dream state which we will wake up from. Also I feel like they may teach us that we have complete choice in how we think and act in this waking state, and learning from experience and consequence we may eventually choose to act out of love and compassion.

When we identify within the dream as we normally do, all of the emotions, pain and suffering feels very real until we either realize we are dreaming or wake up. Is it the same in waking consciousness? Is being enlightened like being lucid within the waking state?

I'd love to hear peoples thoughts!

[Horse]

One major thing they teach you is about self imposed limitations and how to override them. They teach you that theoretically knowing something is very different to intuitively knowing it. Its the difference between being able to do something and not being able in an LD. When I first starting lucid dreaming, I knew it was a dream so I should be able to do anything so I tried to fly but I couldn't. One day, in a non lucid dream in which I happened to be flying, I became lucid in mid air and from that day on, I intuitively knew I could fly in dreams. So next LD I had I started trying to fly and although I couldn't get off the ground initially, eventually it started working and I learned to fly. It was like learning any skill, took lots of practice before I got good at it. Now its second nature to me. That observation reveals a lot about the mind and what we call reality. This is why its not so simple to just use the placebo effect whenever we want. We need to find a method of overriding the doubt, in order to gain an intuitive knowing that we are capable of controlling our physiology at will.

[amy green]

For the latest news on lucid dreaming i.e. which areas of the brain it activates, see the Science & Spirituality section - "Current Spiritual News" #35