Are You Dreaming Now?

I have a challenge I’ve accepted: to open the space of lucid dreaming, and go deeper into it than I ever have. First step is to awaken within the dream itself, the next is to fly. There will be other tasks down the road, but these are considered foundational.

So…how to awaken? When I learned about this at the Transformative Arts Institute, the suggestion was that I go through the waking day asking “am I dreaming NOW?” With the notion that eventually I will ask myself that question in a dream, and awaken. And once awaken, you can control your experience with Godlike power. It really can be astounding.

There are other approaches as well: looking into mirrors, picking up books and seeing if the text remains constant or shifts, and so forth. There are aspects of this process that I understand, and others I do not. While there are certainly modern dream labs that have experimented with these things, I’d prefer to look at what ancient traditional cultures said about it first.

The idea seems to be that waking reality and dreaming reality have more in common than we understand or even WANT to understand, and that what is done in one will have powerful influence on the other. For instance, asking “am I dreaming now” and waking up in the dream is conducive to “awakening” in consensus reality, realizing the degree to which we are “asleep” in life.

There are people who don’t even believe it is possible to awaken in dreams, and I’ve wondered what they base that on, other than the fact that they, personally…