Lucid Dreaming

Undiscovered lands, or well mapped territory?

I have been reading and working through some of the exercises in Mark Stavish’s Between the Gates: Lucid Dreaming, Astral Projection and the Body of Light in Western Esotericism.

Mark is a modern Alchemist and Hermeticist with a reputation for integrity and an extensive literature. He founded the Institute for Hermetic studies, and continues to write and lecture on the topic.

I was drawn to this book because I have long been interested in lucid dreaming, though I have never successfully maintained such a dream state over time. I read this however, in a review online, and I purchased a copy:

This book contains all you need to have the direct experience of lucid dreaming, astral projection and the Body of Light, and rather quickly as well. Focused and dedicated practice will unlock the doors of perception to a series of individual and collective nonmaterial realities within a few months. From these experiences, confidence will be built and sustained, which, with concentrated effort, can lead to deep and profound revelations through direct experience about the very nature of life, consciousness, matter - reality - itself.

Well, I thought, that’s what I am talking about!

Still working through the book, I can assure, it is not so easy as that. The key there is focused and dedicated practice. One must be very diligent. This is a deep dive into cabala, esoteric practice and theory, with elaborate meditation, visualization and ritual work - nothing at all like the breathy sort of self-help books you will find in abundance, in Target or Barnes and Noble.

I’m still not even clear about what astral projection or the Body of Light is.

But I have been doing the inital, fairly simple exercises to elicit lucid dreaming, and I can confirm after only two weeks, TSW! (this shit works.)

Really, all I have been doing is reading the book, doing the recommended purification ritual/meditation/visualizations, and waking up regularly overnight and writing down whatever I have been dreaming. In that short amount of time my dreams have gone from nothing at all remembered, to elaborate all night dreams, while still waking in the morning feeling refreshed.

And you (especially new subscribers) will never guess who I have been seeing repeatedly in my dreams: my old friend Snake.

I saw him the first time about a week ago. I paddled a canoe into some border waters, and found him inside a cabin at some kind of camp. We chatted very briefly about nothing in particular, that I recall, and then I woke up and was like, wow, I just dreamed I was talking with Snake.

Then last night I was sitting alone in a car, in the back seat, and Snake sauntered by, with a giant foam cowboy hat on, just the sort of thing he might have worn as a gag.

His was more equally red and blue. He walked to the car, leaned as far into the open window as he could with the hat on, and asked me, “did you bring your hat?”

“No, I think I left it at home.”

“Hmm, too bad,” and he started to saunter away, grinning like he used to, practically skipping.

I leaned out the car window and shouted to him, inexplicably, “Did you wear that thing to coffee this morning?” He used to have regular morning coffee with a revolving group of men.

He turned back and shouted, “I sure did!” and continued on his way.

Then last night I was laying in a street reading a book, outside the driver’s door of my van, outside my sister’s “house”. I walked inside the house, there was a men’s meeting about to start, I walked into the room and there was Snake, seated, talking to someone else I’m not sure who. As I stood there looking at him, I said to myself, that is Snake, but that can’t be, Snake is dead, I must be dreaming, except I can’t be, because I was looking around the room and everything seemed as vibrant and visceral as waking life. In the past whenever I have had such a dream I ususally wake up right away. Instead I sat down across the circle from Snake and watched him, waiting to see if he would acknowledge me or talk to me, though he never did. And then I looked out the window, my van was no longer there, I left the room and the house, not by steps but by skiing down the dew covered trunk of an immense, ancient tree…and the dream continued on a long time, all night, just not so consciously.

I do not think what I am seeing is actually Snake. I think we see in dreams and trance what we expect to see, or what we are conditioned to see according to the traditions and beliefs of the society we inhabit. Snake represents something integral to me, his image is appearing in these dreams because I want to see him, I want to talk to him, and because somehow I need to see “him” and talk to “him.”

This isn’t earth shattering news or anything like it, I’m just sharing my experience. I feel like a neophyte, really, but I can see something of the promise of it. We tend to think dreams, trance, the astral realm of imagination and possibilities is a mostly undiscovered country, if we think about it at all, but in fact it is a well documented, architected landscape, mapped for many thousands of years. It is a forgotten landscape because it is suppressed, denied and disparaged, because it is empowering, because it is enlightening, and there are powers in this world that would keep us ignorant and oblivious.

Mapping The Mystic: Geographies of Ecstasy in Consciousness and Culture

Modern studies of mystic states focus on the 'ineffability' of the ecstatic experience — the impossibility of explaining what the experience was like. Yet mystic experience might be indescribable in modern culture simply because we’ve failed to culturally describe it. For those cultures historically who tread the mystic space with great regularity, there’s nothing indescribable about it. Mystic unity has been mapped. The people who have tread its spaces for thousands of years describe in scintillating detail landscapes, architectures, points, vortexes, luminosities, mandala-like configurations, all alive with animate entities. And these geographies are not simply described as personal visions, but as tangible externally existing landscapes that others can visit too. So where do such mystic scapes live? Are they a function of brain chemistry? An externally existing reality? An overlap of individual consciousness and the external world? All of the above? This episode unpacks the articulated geographies of mystic states and looks at the mystic experience beyond 'just brain chemistry' but rather as a state of alignment to greater patterns and forces that already exist within nature, forces that shaped our biology to begin with. Within this ongoing relationality, art, ritual, story, and song, work together to create a fully formed mythic structure through which human beings contextualize the world, and in an age of decontextualization and fragmentation, this mythic structure is as vitally important to the human bodymind as it has ever been. 

Lucid dreaming and the mystical experience of trance Schrei is speaking about, are not identical but they are synonymous. It is part of what has long been called the Great Work of coming to know thyself.

I am like a neophyte as I said, but I report faithfully, and I think this is only the beginning.