I was arguing with someone last night who insisted that enlightenment entailed constant awareness during the dream state. That’s pants! I said. He’d based his opinion on assertions made by a Tibetan Buddhist nun. I’m wary of monastics. They have a lot of time on their hands. I suspect the best of them get enlightened after a few years, then spend the rest of their lives sitting around the monastery inventing stuff to do next.
Anyhow – that kind of chat before bedtime was like a red rag to a bull. I found myself in a snowy cemetery and marvelled at the dazzling brilliance of the ice and the detail on the tombstones and monuments, which changed their perspective as I walked, just as I’d expect in reality.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). Frontispiece: Ancient Intersection of the Via Appia and Via Ardeatina.
The last few occasions I’d been lucid the state had dwindled rapidly when I’d focused my attention closely on the sensations creating the illusion. This time I held back, and discovered as a consequence that the state became more stable. I continued to play with it as I moved forwards, and it became obvious there are things you should do in a lucid dream to make the state perpetuate itself.
Foremost among these: do not look at anything too hard. In the lucid environment, objects and settings morph or appear from nothing between one moment and the next. If you focus on a single point, or try to pin down what’s there and what’s not, then the fabric of the dream gets ripped, as if we were holding it too tight. Buildings appeared: large, ornate mausoleums, and – in the distance – a vast cathedral of white marble that I knew hadn’t been there a moment ago. The lucid world is similar to the phase of hypnagogic imagery that precedes sleep; leave it alone and it will restlessly throw up more of itself out of itself in a style both brittle and fluid. It reminded me of Piranesi’s drawings and De Quincey’s descriptions of opium visions:
With the same power of endless growth and self-production did my architecture proceed in dreams… The splendours of my dreams were chiefly architectural; and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as never yet was beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds. (De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater)
I pushed the state a little further now. I knew I wasn’t really in this fantastic landscape at all, but asleep, so as I walked I tried to feel the position of my body in bed. I figured that if I knew where my real body was then I’d be able to distinguish it from my astral body and then take the latter off on an astral projection.
But this is not a viable technique for getting into an out-of-body state from a lucid dream – or so it seems at the moment. First off, it was very difficult to feel the physical body. Dimly, I managed after a while to sense myself lying on my right side in the bed, but it simply wasn’t possible to hold both the physical and the dream body together in awareness to a significant degree. During an out-of-body experience we are vividly aware of both bodies, but this is not the case in a lucid dream because it seems to depend on impressions not being ‘pinned down’. Images bubble up and replicate in a rich and complex froth of impressions. Introduce anything into the mix that solidifies things – such as rigid attention, or sensations from the physical body – and its soufflé-like texture sags and tears.
If we’re looking for an out-of-body state, then it seems we must first exit the lucid state and find a separate state altogether. The two states certainly share characteristics, but – as other experiences have suggested in the past – they do not appear to be organised along a continuum.
