Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
I was on a Buddhist retreat once when somebody at breakfast
asked the teacher how he slept,
to which he replied, "Very well, I had some wonderful nightmares."
At the time I thought he was crazy.
But years later, when I became a teacher of lucid dreaming,
I discovered what he meant.
Because to face both our personal and collective cultural nightmares
with lucid awareness
can be an amazing route to self-discovery, insight and healing.
A lucid dream is a dream in which you know you are dreaming, as you are dreaming.
Scientifically speaking, it is a hybrid state of consciousness.
And although it's only been a scientifically verified phenomenon
for the past 30 years,
within Tibetan Buddhism, it's been a verified mind-training method
for over a thousand.
Once you know you're dreaming,
there's a whole range of psychotherapeutic benefits
you can choose to carry out.
One of the most powerful, and one of my favorites,
is that within the lucid dream,
you can intentionally engage the source of your nightmares.
I taught myself how to lucid dream at 16 years old.
And although my lucid dreams
had occasionally presented me with nightmarish aspects,
it was not until much later that I discovered the true potential
of how lucid dreaming can transform these nightmares
into spiritual and psychological growth.
A few years ago, I was instructed to start teaching lucid dreaming
by a meditation master called Lama Yeshe Rinpoche.
Although Buddhism and lucid dreaming had been a big part of my life,
they were never a career option.
And in fact, at the time, I was actually making my living
as a hip-hop rapper working with disadvantaged kids.
So, as you can imagine, going from that to the world of lucid dreaming
came as quite a surprise.
And in response to that surprise,
I found I became quite serious and kind of puritanical
with my own lucid dreaming practice.
I tried to banish all dark or nightmarish aspects
from my lucid dreams,
in the mistaken belief that a proper lucid dreaming teacher
must have full control of his lucid dreams.
Yeah, right, of course -
any attempt to sanitize or to control your dreams
only represses the material.
And so the more I tried,
the more these nightmarish elements would reappear.
So in the end, I went to see one of my Buddhist teachers about this.
A brilliant man named Rob Nairn.
Incidentally, the same guy
that thinks that a good night's sleep is one full of wonderful nightmares.
So I sat him down and told him all about this.
He waited until I was done and then he gave me the kind of look
that only really a monk or your meditation teacher would give you,
the kind of look that says,
(Sighs) "Charlie, I love you, but you're an idiot."
I was like, "What's up?"
He says, "I advise you to do precisely the opposite of what you've been doing -
these nightmarish elements you refer to, may well be shadow aspects.
You must embrace the shadow!
You must integrate the shadow!"
"Right," I thought.
But what is the shadow? And how do we integrate it?
The shadow is a concept pioneered by Carl Jung,
used to describe the parts of the unconscious mind
made up of all the undesirable aspects of our psyches
which we have rejected, denied or disowned.
The shadow is our dark side,
but a side of ourselves which Jung himself commented that,
in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness,
or perhaps because of this,
the shadow is the seat of all human creativity.
So the shadow is not bad.
The shadow is a potential wellspring of creative energy.
But because it is the part of ourselves
which is incompatible with who we think we are,
most of us go through life denying its existence.
And so we go through life
denying and rejecting a large part of ourselves.
But Jung believed that until we recognize and acknowledge the shadow as part of us,
we will never be whole.
So, a few weeks after this meeting with Rob Nairn,
I am having a lucid dream,
and the shadow turns up again.
And this time it means business!
The shadow had manifested as a full-on three-headed demon,
radiating pure darkness.
There I am, face-to-face with this thing.
Now, before we move on, it's worth noting
that a fully lucid dream is often not very dream-like at all.
A fully lucid dream can be so hyper-realistic
that many people believe they have entered another dimension of reality.
In fact, they have.
But that dimension is not out there somewhere,
it's in here.
There I am, face-to-face with this demon, fully lucid -
so I know I am in my own head and I know there's no real threat.
But, it's still pretty scary.
So, instinctively, I get ready to fight.
And then it hits me: hang on, this must be an aspect of my shadow;
this must be what Rob was talking about.
Right, um, uh, I've gotta integrate this thing; I've gotta embrace this thing.
How do I do that, exactly?
I will give it a hug.
So, I run up to this thing in the lucid dream, and I bear hug it.
This dream was so realistic,
I could feel it struggling against my embrace,
I could feel its breath breathing down my neck.
You know, the shadow is the sum total
of all your repressed capacity for violence and aggression.
So, as you can imagine, it's not much of a hugger.
But there I am, hugging this thing that does not want to be hugged
and it's struggling to get away and I'm holding on for dear life.
And then ...
it does something really unexpected.
It starts to shriek.
Within my embrace,
this big three-headed shadow monster started to shriek.
And I keep holding on, and it keeps shrieking,
and then ...
it stops.
And there is a moment of stillness.
I release my embrace.
And I realize I am hugging myself.
This three-headed demon is transformed into me.
A carbon-copy of me. And there I am, face-to-face with myself,
maybe for the first time in my life.
We shared a smile.
And I woke up. In floods of tears.
Not only am I in tears,
but I've got this weird feeling in my belly,
like as if a knot has been untied -
some deep emotional knot that has been there so long
I'd forgotten it was there at all.
I don't know what part of my psyche that shadow aspect represented.
Maybe some denied childhood trauma, maybe some disowned emotional complex.
Who knows?
But what I do know, when I was embracing that demon,
I was embracing some deeper part of myself.
And I was engaging the innate healing potential
which resides within us all.
In a lucid dream,
you have the opportunity to engage psychological concepts, immediately,
in a seemingly physicalized form.
This is a unique opportunity to directly apply healing intent
to mental embodiments and personfications of your own psychology.
This is deep healing territory.
This is what thousands of people pay thousands of therapists
thousands of dollars to do.
Now, I'm not saying you should all go and sack your therapists,
but what I am saying is if you can learn to lucid dream,
not all of the time but just some of the time,
you can make their jobs a heck of a lot easier.
If you can learn to dream lucidly, and it is a learnable skill,
you can begin to integrate your shadow
and reclaim, as Jung said, the seat of all human creativity.
So learn how to lucid dream.
Give it a shot.
It takes sustained practice, but anyone can do it.
Go to a workshop, buy a book, get downloads from the net -
just do it.
Although there are thousands of techniques out there,
a prerequisite for most of them is dream recall.
So, if you want to get into this stuff,
you need to remember and record your dreams in a dream diary.
That's enough to start you off, at least.
You know, we sleep for a third of our lives.
Lucid dreaming allows us to make some use of that time
and gives us the tools we need to heal ourselves -
to get to know ourselves.
And to enter into a friendship,
not just with our shadows, but with every aspect of our psyches.
All while we are sound asleep.
That is effective time-management.
There's no club to join; there's no equipment to be bought.
All you need is your dreams.
Now, before I go, I want to leave you with my big idea.
I believe that the concept of waking up to the illusion of the dream
and becoming lucid, goes way beyond our personal dreams.
As a global society, there are cultural, collective shadow aspects
that we refuse to integrate:
elements of our humanity
which are too dark and too nightmarish to face.
But until we face them, until we get lucid collectively,
we'll never be home.
Lucid dreaming can lead to lucid living.
Now is the time to wake up, together.
Now is the time to get lucid
in this dream of life that we've been sleep-walking through.
Now is the time to embrace the shadow of the world.
Because it is in our grasp.
But we have to be awake to grasp it.
Value your dreams.
And especially value your nightmares.
You are sleeping on a gold mine of potential wisdom and insight.
So be lucid when you dream.
And those insights can be yours.
Sweet dreams.
Or should I say, sweet nightmares.
Thank you.
(Applause)