Thread: Animism and Dreams

Fun conversation! I regret not being more educated on animistic cultures...

About the first question, let me have a go at it... For starters, "lucidity" is a concept that is not so intuitive to me even in the modern era. Seems no one here naturally began their lucid journey by defining it as becoming aware they were dreaming (unless it started on the Internet). As a child, I dreamed. And that meant many things. But the knowing did not matter.

I remember sometimes expressing to myself or to others the idea that "It was so weird how I did NOT know I was dreaming", but never the other way: "It was so weird that I knew I was dreaming."
Honestly, I feel silly telling people I enjoy "knowing that I am dreaming". So what? People find the idea weird because they are out of touch with their dreams. But otherwise, it seems very unremarkable.

I discovered lucid dreaming on the internet, wanting to learn how to better remember my dreams and I (read: we) never respected (unknowingly) the real meaning. When I talked about lucid dreams, I really meant dreams with heightened awareness, not dreams where I knew I was dreaming. Yet, that is what I trained to do: have dreams where I realize I am dreaming. Those dreams were exciting but I never mastered that. I think my dreams have evolved though, in a way that is more natural with the way I experience dreams. I have control over my dreams, not only dream control, but from outside of them. By this, I mean: I use dreams to learn about myself and how I perceive the real world. I use my dreams to grow. My dreams change as my perception of the world changes and I start to act in my dreams in a way that reflects my previous dream experiences. I have had dreams where I did not know I was dreaming, yet, I had a very lucid understanding of my experience. These experiences were more spiritual than my lucid dreams. This is my way; it doesn't sound very pagan, I know. I just feel they might also have experienced dreams as dreams. They probably recognized that they were sentient and aware in all dreams, some more than others. Anyway, this is how children nowadays intuitively understand it, I think.

I don't think lack of reports of lucid dreaming from animistic cultures is because they did not ask the right questions, or because it was too obvious, etc. I just do not think lucid dreaming (defined: knowing you are dreaming) is relevant at all for any of us. Except in our internet culture where we set each other goals like the monthly quests or Spellbee's competitions (which I love). I just don't think these things are the natural way that I experience my dream journey nor did the animistic cultures, nor most of you. But maybe I am just projecting a repressed bitterness because I never mastered a consistent clear cut lucid dream count.

If anything, this thread is a reminder that what we are looking for as oneironauts, as dreamers, is in another direction than lucid dreaming. Imagine if Dreamviews stopped trying to lucid dream at all, yet kept the same passion for dreaming. Imagine, no more DILDs, no more WILDs... (I am not necessarily condoning this, just reflecting on it as I go to bed now... good night)

* Never fasted nor had a dream guide, sorry.

^^ Well said, Occipitalred, well said.

Your post brings me back to the years I spent "just" dreaming, long before there was an internet, and before LaBerge's book gave us all those ILD's. In retrospect, and with the necessary confirmation of checking old dream journals and not just trusting my old-guy's memory, I can safely say that, before the terms that defined lucidity came into effect, I really didn't care about whether I knew I was dreaming or not. Yes, I felt my presence in dreams regularly, but it was the dreams and dreaming that mattered, and not necessarily the fact that I knew that I was dreaming. I never had one of those "ah-ha!" moments that are spoken about so often here; lucidity was just another facet of of a much greater gem, so knowing I was dreaming was more tool than goal. In other words, lucidity was there, but the priority rested on the dreaming part, and not on the knowing part.

Here's another bit of disclosure: In the last few years my work with dreaming has intensified dramatically, and with that intensification has come not more lucidity (as defined on these forums) but less. I didn't notice it at first, and was still being frustrated by failures to, say, complete a WILD transition or remember to pursue a certain goal, but my turn away from lucidity as priority finally became obvious when I noticed that I hadn't made an entry in my dream journal (where only "important" LDs are recorded) in over six months. The turn, I think, has been in the right direction and long overdue; I honestly think I was holding myself back from greater discoveries by maintaining the "knowing I'm dreaming" part as not just the priority, but as my singular goal.

Here's still more disclosure (please don't tell anyone ): Pretty much the only time I give much attention to lucidity these days is on this forum, when I'm responding to questions in my WILD class or posting the occasional opinion on the subject in threads like these. It's like, now, that I have to flip a special, slightly rusty old switch in my head to post thoughts about LDing -- and, if you read some of my posts carefully, you might notice my growing disinterest in techniques and other processes, like prolonging or stabilization. I was never a fan of techniques (my WILD class preaches a sort of an anti-technique technique), but I've come to wonder if all this talk of techniques, mixed with an odd hierarchy based on LD counts, and the relentless drive toward "knowing it was a dream," and little else, has somehow drowned out what should be the real priority here: the dreams themselves. As I look back over the last 20 years or so, since I first allowed the definitions to steer my work, I can see that much for me was drowned out as well; I'm feeling very relieved that I was able, finally, to grasp that wheel, shake off the definitions and artificial priorities, and get back to the real priority that started me down this path in the first place: dreaming itself.

So I guess the tl;dr: here is that, though I still have LD's all the time, and certainly value them, as my dreaming life has progressed I've found myself returning to the real core of my passion for dreaming: the dreams themselves. I don't wonder if this bit of heresy is a wrong turn for a minute, though, because I already can tell that my dreaming life -- my entire life -- has been soundly enriched already.

... perhaps all those "primitive" cultures were seeing dreams in the right light all along, and it is us modern folk who have chosen to drop a curtain on one of the greatest gifts humans enjoy by obscuring our dreaming lives behind a wall of definitions, control, and the singular goal of knowing we're dreaming. Something to think about, anyway...

Originally Posted by Occipitalred

If anything, this thread is a reminder that what we are looking for as oneironauts, as dreamers, is in another direction than lucid dreaming. Imagine if Dreamviews stopped trying to lucid dream at all, yet kept the same passion for dreaming. Imagine, no more DILDs, no more WILDs... (I am not necessarily condoning this, just reflecting on it as I go to bed now... good night)

Imagine, indeed.

Originally Posted by Sageous

Here's another bit of disclosure: In the last few years my work with dreaming has intensified dramatically, and with that intensification has come not more lucidity (as defined on these forums) but less. I didn't notice it at first, and was still being frustrated by failures to, say, complete a WILD transition or remember to pursue a certain goal, but my turn away from lucidity as priority finally became obvious when I noticed that I hadn't made an entry in my dream journal (where only "important" LDs are recorded) in over six months. The turn, I think, has been in the right direction and long overdue; I honestly think I was holding myself back from greater discoveries by maintaining the "knowing I'm dreaming" part as not just the priority, but as my singular goal.

Here's still more disclosure (please don't tell anyone ): Pretty much the only time I give much attention to lucidity these days is on this forum, when I'm responding to questions in my WILD class or posting the occasional opinion on the subject in threads like these. It's like, now, that I have to flip a special, slightly rusty old switch in my head to post thoughts about LDing -- and, if you read some of my posts carefully, you might notice my growing disinterest in techniques and other processes, like prolonging or stabilization.

This matches my experience over the last 4 years so well that I feel as though I could've written this myself.

I find that I'm much more interested in my non-lucid experiences, and I've not actually actively tried to LD at all for quite some time. I still have roughly 40-60 LDs yearly, with many, many more of my dream experiences being varying degrees of "semi"-lucid where I my level of interaction and awareness with the dream can be all over the place, but even get to the level of being plain lucid without actually exerting direct conscious control in any real way or even desiring to at all to begin with. It's more like having a waking experience while dreaming, where even though I know I'm pretty much aware that I'm dreaming and control my actions in the dream, I don't do so in a way that's really at all similar to how I used to when I would become lucid (even becoming lucid is different--I more or less just am, and don't ever experience any "aha" moment and completely interrupt what is already happening). In this way, it is more like my lucids are merely extensions of my non-lucid dreams with increased awareness rather than there being a clear divide where at one moment I wasn't lucid, and the next I was.

Similarly, I rarely focus on LDing techniques or really even LDing outside of posting every once in a great while in the On-Topic sections of the forum to try and help others or otherwise give some input. As such, my change in habits and outlook has resulted in what I believe to be an immeasurably greater holistic dreaming experience that's in a way, almost a new kind of amalgamation of all the altered states of consciousness I feel capable of experiencing... or I suppose that is to say, the experience feels distinctive and unique enough from the normal dreaming and lucid dreaming experience that it's almost not really accurate to continue referring to them in that same way.

To me, it seems like both my conscious and unconscious mind are more at harmony with one another while dreaming and during other altered states like hypnagogia. It's like a balance has been achieved whereby how consciously aware I am or become dynamically shifts during the experience and in a way that doesn't interfere with the unconscious thought processes forming the dream or pre-dreaming perceptual phenomena itself, and I find this infinitely more rewarding and interesting. Not to mention it allows for a natural evolution and progression of what you might call my awareness capabilities, for a lack of a better way of putting it. The focus, being shifted toward dreaming itself seems to allow for the bypassing of the regular roadblocks and hang ups that seem to affect most people who focus strictly on becoming lucid, because I have no real expectations of what might go wrong given the goals I have in mind and don't have any "failures" I might wind up dwelling on.