When I told this anecdote to a friend he raised a reasonable objection: that I couldn’t know the individual I’d identified was the person intended. Surely, there could be others with the same name who lived in the same era and wore similar hats. In this case, this was not ‘information’ but only coincidence.

The criticism raises a wider problem in magick: how, when we specify persons or places in our intent, does magick ‘find’ its specific target? Likewise, when an oracle provides a message that has a general application, what justifies us in assuming a particular meaning?

Let’s stay with our original example: I receive information about my name in a previous incarnation. How do I know to which individual this name refers? The name is a sign that potentially could point to a number of people. If there were real information here, then the spirit supplying it would have given signs that narrowed the range of referents to a single person. Isn’t it reasonable to demand this?

Perhaps it would be, if we ourselves obeyed the same rule, but we don’t. If I think to myself ‘I will see Stephanie at the weekend’, how do I know that the Stephanie named in my thought is the same as the one I intend to meet? How do I know that any object that arises in my thoughts as a name that can have more than one referent is the particular one I’m referring to?

It seems a nonsensical question, because I just know, the reason being that ‘Stephanie’ is not functioning exclusively as a sign, but as the object of my intention. ‘Stephanie’ is only part of what will happen at the weekend, because what I’m actually referring to is something I’m going to do. I’m not simply ‘naming’, I’m specifying something that is going to happen.

In language, when considered as a whole, names can be used to refer to an individual, but in a personal act of speech or thought – whether spoken or mental – names can be used differently, in precisely the way we’ve just seen, in order to define an object of intention. In this case the function of the name ‘Stephanie’ is not so much to define an individual, but to describe an intention I am seeking to fulfil.

When we open ourselves to communication with a spirit, the only means it has to communicate with us is our own thoughts, feelings and acts. The medium of magick is always subjective personal experience. Therefore signs received, in magick, are often in the context of individual acts of speech rather than in consensual language. The two never wholly match up, but they can overlap. The greater the extent to which a subjectively meaningful experience can be translated into consensual language, the more dramatic and impressive the result. For example, if I receive a vision of a ravenous many-headed monster, I get a powerful sense of what that means; the people I tell it to, less so. But if the monster has the logo of a particular multinational corporation tattooed on its head, then the vision includes an aspect of consensual language, and everyone gets a sense of what it means.

At the moment the spirit told me who I was in a past life, what I received was only a sense of ‘that one‘ or ‘it is him‘. The intention of the spirit has no specific referent. It is like sensing the intention of another person; we feel I will meet Stephanie, but because we do not share the other’s experience we do not know to whom or what ‘Stephanie’ refers. We have a vague sense of what the spirit intends, and we must try to arrive at specifics as best we can by encouraging the intention to clothe itself in commonly understood signs.

Attention to emotional tone is the primary means of achieving this. An angry intention, for instance, provokes different images and associations in the mind from a sorrowful one. Likewise, a feminine temperament feels different from the masculine, and inclines the mind to different images and words. These will suggest themselves when we take our awareness deeply into the intention, but they are not the form in which the communication is expressed. We can arrive at signs, but the original communication is an intention.

Although some people will inevitably write-off all messages received in this way as nonsense, it should be remembered that this is precisely the way we often receive communications from ourselves. We often sense or intuit something from within us that we have to make a conscious effort to feel and enter into, before it can be resolved into language. Dismiss this process as invalid, and we dismiss the possibility of accurate information concerning our own inner life.

On the other hand, we can also have an intention and know it directly without any need of language. In spirit communication, however, that intention is not our own, so our means of coming to know it is by necessity more indirect. It is much harder to clothe the intention in language because it does not reside in our own thoughts or experiences.

The situation is as if we were caring for someone who was cut off from the means of expressing their intentions. We know that the person has desires and wishes, and we can sense in a general way whether that person inclines to sadness, anger or generosity, but we have only our own mind with which to discern what specifically they want to express by their intention. If we assumed there were no intention or they didn’t know what they wanted, this would be to obscure or override the source of the communication, and what would come through instead would simply be our own thoughts.

This is not to claim that if we respect the spirit’s intention we will always arrive at ‘truth’. I see no reason that a spirit couldn’t intend to lie or mislead, in which case its message would be untrue even though it were accurately received. What I would suggest is that if a message lacks specific referents to pin it down to particular objects, this needn’t invalidate it, because its source lies in intention, which operates outside the level of consensual signs.

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.

She led me to the seminar room. The organiser was a high-powered professor who had made his name in quantum physics. On my right sat an expert on the chemistry of calcium, particularly limestone and the process by which organs calcify inside the living body. Almost everyone at the seminar had published a book in a distinctive series of volumes that was bringing together knowledge in all these various fields. I wondered if I wasn’t a little out of my element, but the oriental woman and the physics professor both seemed happy to have an occultist on the team.

On my left sat a expert from South America on heart massage techniques. He offered to demonstrate his skills and reached inside my chest. He grasped my heart and palpated it with his fingers, working around and behind to release – he said – the significant tension that had built up there.

These sensations reached a point where they were no longer pleasant, and I turned to him to ask him to stop. But instead of doing so, I woke up. I lay awake with my eyes open, the dream dissolved, yet I still felt the sensations in my chest just as strongly.

Something has changed in my heart chakra. It doesn’t feel as it did. The way it used to feel, like a small fuzzy stone in my chest, has given way to something more inclusive. It’s not simply as if something is in there; it feels like something is working on me, exactly like the image in the dream of an expert hand doing something on the inside.

I’d scoffed a little at accounts of people who imagined they were going to have a heart attack when it was only their chakra working. I won’t be scoffing again! There was a tightness across my chest that put me in mind of cardiac warning signs. It did indeed occur to me that perhaps I was about to die, but I noted how the sensation was focused dead-centre in my chest, rather than to the left, and it wasn’t exactly ‘agony’, although it was uncomfortable and weird.

Also new was the way the feeling persisted into normal consciousness. I’ve never experienced this from the heart chakra before. Usually I feel it only during meditation, and it fades quickly as soon as I get up. Now it was lingering, well into the rest of the day, and I kept noticing the sensations whether I wanted to or not.

I’ve written on Open Enlightenment recently about my thinking – so far – on what chakra experiences are. But the occasion for the article was sensations I noticed gathering strength in my heart chakra again, after a long period of quiet. It seems now that this renewed interest and practice has borne some fruit, or has at least triggered some kind of change. Unless I keel over tomorrow from a cardiac arrest. Time will tell.

A staring match with a Minotaur.

In the sky a man was floating; a man in the form of an elongated Friesian cow. He split into two, and the half with the head drifted down and through the window. Once the cow-man was inside he changed in a black demonic creature with the head and horns of a bull. The black Minotaur stood on the carpet and stared at me with orange eyes.

This is fine. It’s okay, I reassured myself, aware that I was having a nightmare, that the figure represented a shadow aspect, and that I could control my fear. But such strong waves of weirdness radiated from the thing that I lost my cool. The silence of its penetrating stare spooked me and I woke up, frightened.

Later, Rudolf Steiner came to address a spiritual community I was visiting. Steiner was very busy, but I pulled him aside and roused myself into the lucid state so we could have a proper chat.

We walked together briskly, both aware there wasn’t much time before he had to give his talk or I lost lucidity. We spoke quickly, but I noticed the words made little sense. He asked: ‘How’s Bill?’ (Even at the time it seemed very unlikely Steiner would actually say this.)

Rudolf Steiner. I caught up with him for a quick chat...

I asked him for a way I could make contact whenever I wanted to. He showed me a black onyx wand and said, ‘This will easily do the job.’ He was surprised that I should need a physical object, so I told him, ‘In the world I come from you’re not available to people any more.’ This surprised him. ‘Oh, I see,’ he said, as if it were something that hadn’t occurred to him.

Then the dream unravelled.

I didn’t deal with the nightmare as successfully as on previous occasions, but I’ve noticed a pattern where facing down a nightmare can lead to a subsequent dream, which seems to reward with an insight or numinous message.

To assume that because Steiner’s words were senseless then the message makes no sense is probably to misunderstand the level on which the dream communicates. ‘Bill’ was the name of the person who first introduced me to Steiner’s work. The words ‘How’s Bill?’ make little sense taken literally, but taken as ‘How’s your connection with my work developing?’ it starts to mean something more.

I realised there was no need to feel frustrated if I couldn’t remember the details of the conversation, because the feeling of walking with Steiner and enjoying his presence remained. We depend on words for conveying meaning when we are awake. We need to learn to look elsewhere when we’re dreaming to discover the meaning of the experience.

My return to Milton was inspired by a magical working in which I’d asked passersby ‘Who’s in Charge?’ each time I found myself in a lucid dream. On every occasion I was directed to an angelic being. Finally I chatted with the Archangel Raphael himself. But ever since then, despite trying regularly, I haven’t been able to attain lucidity.

I take this to mean the working has ended and I’ve achieved my result.

I suspect now that each of the angels I met was a step up the hierarchy: the giant, the invisible presence upstairs, the golden cat, the Trolley, the military angel, until finally Raphael himself.

Only now do I understand Raphael’s message. He didn’t say anything, but handed me a pellet of twisted paper, one of those tiny firecrackers that kids throw around. When I was a child these were called ‘devil-bangers’. Raphael, then, was handing me something ‘for banging the devil’. Indeed, in Paradise Lost the rebel demons invent gunpowder and canons and turn them on the angels (VI: 469f). So Raphael was showing me that it takes only a puny firecracker of understanding to bang the devil.

The spirit Tempe also appeared in the dream. He gave me the key to the vision by throwing me an apple. Latin for apple is malum, which is similar to ‘evil’ (malus). The plurals ‘evils’ and ‘apples’ are the same word: mala. It’s because of this lexical link that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, whose consumption by Adam and Eve screws up humanity and forms the main theme of Paradise Lost, is traditionally depicted as an apple. Yet in Milton the description of the actual fruit sounds more like a mango – or something far more appetising than a common apple.

All four major archangels appear in Paradise Lost, but Raphael has by far the most contact with Adam and Eve. I also remembered a murky reference in a previous communication from Tempe, concerning a Puritan in the seventeenth century (‘Stebson’) who had written something that would prove relevant (Chapman & Barford 2009: 194-5).

In my dream, Raphael reached into an attic to get me the devil-banger, as if by talking with him I’d come as far as I could. The answer seemed to lie not within my grasp but his. I’ve realised now how the ultimate answer to the question ‘Who’s in Charge?’ is there in Milton for everyone to read.

Satan by William Blake. Every inch the Romantic hero.

The answer, of course, is God. Yet commentators have muttered for centuries that Satan is the real hero of the epic. Blake summed this up most famously:

the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it. (Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 4)

But this is more complicated than it seems at first, because Satan can’t pass wind without God first having decreed it. Despite Blake, it’s evidently the devil in Paradise Lost who’s in fetters.

Satan’s jealous, because God has installed the Son of God on his right-hand throne. Satan and his allies rebel because they object to the appointment of this new senior partner. For their trouble, they get their arses kicked out into Hell. Having lost a third of his angels, God embarks on a new project: the earth and humanity. Satan gets wind of this and decides that if he can’t fuck up the Son, then he’ll fuck up humanity instead.

But Satan doesn’t get it that it’s God’s plan for humanity to fall, because only if humanity falls can we be redeemed, and only if we’re redeemed can Heaven and Earth join finally in one eternal kingdom. Yet at the same, Satan manifestly does understand this. He bemoans frequently that God can’t be beaten. But with his pride and jealousy he can’t help acting like a jerk anyway. As he puts it:

in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n. (I: 261-3)

Satan is pure karma. He’s a big bag of habits and impulses. I suspect he even knows that’s what he is, but can’t resist indulging himself anyway. If it were self-love or self-hatred that motivated him, we couldn’t be able to tell from his actions. Satan is indeed more entertaining than the insipid ‘good’ angels, who go about singing hymns all day, but his refusal to act on a level with his understanding is deluded and tragic.

This is what Milton is showing us through Satan. Blake, however, presents a left-hand alternative to Milton’s right-hand path:

Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling. And being restrain’d it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of desire. The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, & the Governor or Reason is call’d Messiah. (Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plates 5-6.)

You can get enlightened by submission to God, but you can also get enlightened by knowing and understanding the nature of your desire. That’s the path a poet usually takes. Milton is of the devil’s party not because he hates or opposes God, but because he approaches God through understanding his own desire. Poets will always tend to identify with Satan. Yet Satan’s jealousy and rage are ultimately the vehicle by which God enables humanity to gain redemption.

Satan, by Gustave Doré. Evidently feeling the strain.

On the surface, Adam and Eve demonstrate a lack of obedience toward God when they eat from the Tree of Knowledge. But in fact they never stand a chance against Satan, because he knows their nature whilst they are ignorant of themselves.

God runs the whole universe and we’re all part of it. We’re all the instruments of God. Satan knows this too. So, in reality, the choice boils down to this: either you act knowingly as the instrument of God, or unknowingly. Either you wake up to how there is nothing apart from God’s plan, or you remain a part of the plan for waking up. It’s all God.

People laugh at the awkward cosmic furniture of Paradise Lost: the angels roughing each other up; the Son chucking mountains; Raphael eating lunch with Adam. But Milton states more than once that he’s writing about ideas that cannot accurately be translated into words and objects. The state of humanity before the Fall is one of these ideas. Until they eat the fruit, the lives of Adam and Eve revolve around light gardening duties, guilt-free prophylactic sex, and a perpetual summer of vegetarian plenty. After the fall they get pissed off with each other, feel scared and ashamed, and realise that they can fall ill and will eventually die. So it’s difficult to separate their change in state from the clunky idea of God simply shovelling a heap of circumstantial shit into their lives. What the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge really boils down to, however, is this: the sense of self.

Before the Fall, Adam and Eve just are. They do what they do. After the Fall, they are burdened with the awareness of being somebody.

Only a person who knows they are a person can be afraid, feel illness as a personal assualt, become annoyed or do something wrong. Before, they were innocent, which meant taking everything on its own terms: ‘Just confidence, and native righteousness, / And honour’ (9: 1056-7). Afterwards, they have experience, which entails a recognition of things happening to a someone. That, in short, is what the ‘evil’ apple does to them.

Paradise Lost is a perfect answer to the question ‘Who’s in Charge?’ because it presents a hierarchy of beings from the most perverse to the most enlightened, and shows the role of each in God’s plan.

Blake’s reading of Milton often takes an inverted view, but it’s the same plan that he seeks to reveal. What does not stand up, however, is the post-Romantic view of Satan as a hero on his own terms, because fundamentally the desire of Satan is God and not God’s antithesis.

Of the Son of God, Milton tells us:

in him all his Father shone
Substantially expressed, and in his face
Divine compassion visibly appeared,
Love without end, and without measure grace. (III: 139-142)

William Blake, The Expulsion from Eden.

Indeed, only a hairsbreadth separates the Son and Satan. One is the agent of the Fall (the birth of ego), and the other of Redemption (the transcendence of ego). Neither of these is anything without the other, and thus both are God ’substantially express’d’. Both Satan and the Son represent an enlightened level of consciousness, but whereas the Son’s actions match his understanding, Satan’s do not. The Son both expresses and is the expression of Divine Love. Satan, on the other hand, is only its expression.

Thank you, Raphael, for the devil-banger.

References

William Blake (2009). The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Alan Chapman & Duncan Barford (2009). The Urn. London & Brighton: Heptarchia.

John Milton (2008). Paradise Lost. Edited by W. Kerrigan, J. Rumrich & S.M. Fallon. New York: Modern Library.

Drift has artistic and political dimensions. Political, because the intersection of the social environment and your lived experience stands exposed. Very quickly, drift uncovers the limits imposed on where you’re allowed to go and what you are suffered to do there. Artistic is the fresh perspective drift affords on the everyday; it impregnates the familiar with new meaning.

Most of the published work on drift is artistic, political, or both. Yet drift is also a magical technique. I’ve used it for divination, illumination and in the course of a drift have often encountered and communicated with spirits. You might even choose to meet with a specific deity, Ganesha or Hecate for example, and go out into your neighbourhood to speak with or witness him or her.

EARTH

Drift is shamanic on its surface; it reveals things hidden formerly to consciousness. But it can be used also for enlightenment. It can be turned about to explore experience itself.

A Zen koan asks: Where is this?

To work on the koan ask yourself the question until the answer arrives. It will come not as an explanation or idea, but as a lived experience.

So let’s try it. Where is this?

The consensus answer is a physical location: in my room or at the bus stop or in Trafalgar Square. But these, although they speak to where I am, don’t reveal where this could be.

What is ‘this’?

We realise how it seems to us that I carries with it a ‘this’, which is the experience of where I am. I know I’m in Trafalgar Square, but where is this, the experience of I being here? The answer ceases to be fulfilled by a concept of location and becomes instead a deeply mysterious experience.

WATER

Ordinarily, we assume that open questions such as how or why are more difficult to answer than who or where, which suggest closed and definite solutions. Practising enlightenment, however, asking who am I? or where is this? leads to a lived realisation that the answers are far from fixed. The answer – when it becomes apparent that there is one – is beyond all ideas.

I discovered by accident how drift can work like this, during some walks around Brighton with the aim of discovering sites of power.

The first drift led me to a concrete maze set in the earth. The second, to a circular pool of water. Earth and water… I wondered if this were a pattern, and wasn’t disappointed when the third led me to a clock tower looming in the air, reminding me of buildings I’d glimpsed in dreams.

Setting off on the fourth, I was primed to arrive at a scene connected with fire. The ruined West Pier, perhaps, or the Albion Hotel.

Instead, the working collapsed into farce. I was forced to break off for an urgent crap in the amenities of a supermarket. It was a bitterly cold day. Something felt all wrong. The signs I followed led repeatedly to the same residential street, where there were no landmarks and nothing happening. It wasn’t even far from home.

I hoped the history of that street might throw up a fire connection. When my search yielded nothing, I wrote it all off as a failure.

A book on near-death experiences, which I happened to be reading, revealed the significance of the drift. It contained a reference to Nishida Kitaro, a twentieth century Japanese philosopher, and his concept of basho or ‘place’:

[I]nsofar as the I can be conceived in confronting the not-I, there must be that which envelops the opposition of I and not-I within and which makes the establishment of the so-called phenomenon of consciousness possible within itself. I shall call that which is the receptacle of the ideas in this sense, following the words of Plato’s Timaeus, basho [place]. (Nishida, cited in Corazza 2008: 72)

This philosophical jargon is really only Nishida’s take on our koan: Where is this?

AIR

We answer the question usually by separating ourselves (I) from experience (not-I) so that we can say: I am in Trafalgar Square. But the deeper question is unanswered: Where is this experience of being in Trafalgar Square? The mysterious answer is described by Nishida as basho or ‘place’. It is the non-dual ground of consciousness containing both I and not-I.

Nishida points to Plato as his source. I discovered how the passage in which Plato introduces the idea of the ‘receptacle’ is in the course of a discussion on how the four classical elements – specifically fire – lack any inherent existence (Timaeus 49a).

Of the classical elements, fire is highest, the most ‘metaphysical’. What the drift had pointed to was not a place, but the notion of place.

A crap at the supermarket: that was no ‘break’, because there never was an ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ to the drift. A residential street with nothing going on is not disqualified from ‘place’. Everywhere is somewhere. Nothing was what was happening. Taken as the object of meditation, the nature of place transports us beyond art, politics, meaning. Ultimately, beyond experience itself.

References

FIRE

Ornella Corazza (2008). Near Death Experiences. London & New York: Routledge.

Plato (1997). Timaeus. Translated by Donald J. Zeyl. In: Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.

A chapter in Occult Experiments in the Home (the book) is devoted to the more shamanic and political aspects of drift.

Even as I experienced this, there was a faint awareness it wasn’t what it seemed. The OOBE vibrations had been only a simulacrum; they had had none of the jarring viciousness of the real thing, in all its tooth-jangling violence. And if I was truly lucid, then why was I content just to lie there with my nose in the dust?

No. This was merely a standard dream after all – perhaps on the verge of becoming lucid, but standard nonetheless. My body wanted sleep, and it had fobbed off the psychonaut part of me with a shoddy simulacrum of the lucid state. The psychonaut was fooled into thinking it was going somewhere; meanwhile, the body snatched a sneaky forty winks.

Some practitioners might have chalked this up as an OOBE success. To judge from their accounts in mass market books on lucid dreaming, I suspect that many would. It’s all too easy to have a standard dream about having a lucid dream, but this is not a lucid dream. And it’s also possible to have a lucid dream about having an OOBE, but this is not an OOBE.

It seems to me that practitioners of these arts demonstrate greater skill by admitting and learning to tell the difference between the real and fake versions of these states, rather than trying to pass everything off as ‘true’. There are all kinds of states available to us when we practice, but we gain the deepest insights of all from grasping their intrinsic nature. By this route we arrive at an understanding of the structure of human experience. This is not to be gained by accepting at face value what is merely the content of an experience.

Yet there’s nothing wrong or inferior about a standard dream, when considered in relation to a lucid dream or OOBE. In magical practice, a standard dream can fulfil a role just as important as any other mental state. For instance, in my current ‘Who’s In Charge?’ project, it was a non-lucid dream that furnished that rather amazing ‘Davina McCall’ synchronicity.

Another instance recently grabbed my attention. I’d been agonising over whether to teach meditation. I’d pledged on the internet to set up a group, and people had responded, yet I found myself putting off the chore of finding a venue and booking a room. I admitted to myself finally that this was because I couldn’t actually be bothered; I didn’t really want to teach at all.

That night I had a dream. A deeply ignorant woman, whom I’d taught years ago and forgotten all about, came up to me and declared: ‘You were the best teacher I ever had. You made an impact on me and now I want to start learning again.’ In the dream I was amazed: ‘If I can make an impression on someone like her, then this must really be my calling after all.’ I turned to the woman and asked: ‘So what is it that you want to learn about now?’ Enigmatically, she answered: ‘Ships that sink.’

The next day I went to the centre where I meditate every week. There was only myself and the group leader, but then a woman arrived whom we’d never met before. After talking with her, I found myself thinking she seemed precisely the type to whom it would be very difficult to teach meditation.

Later, the group leader announced he was going on an extended retreat for several months and formally invited me to take over the group in his absence, if I was interested. And so a venue with a regular meditation teaching slot had dropped into my lap with a minimum of effort. The presence of the woman seemed a synchronistic echo of my dream, on the basis of which I accepted the invitation.

From that dream I had woken with a renewed sense of purpose and motivation. Lucid dreams and OOBEs can connect us deeply with the etheric and astral levels of our being, but I suspect that there’s nothing like a bog-standard dream for connecting us with our gut issues, with the earthly yet unconscious strata of our daily lives. Yet I’m still curious to find out whether ’ships that sink’ might turn out to be a warning rather than an epiphany!

First off, your relationship to sleep. If your body is tired then it will take its fill of unconsciousness until it is no longer tired. There is little point in trying to attain the lucid state if you are mentally or physically exhausted. Conversely, if you go to bed with any problems or issues nagging your mind, it will opt for consciousness as a means to deal with them, rather than abandoning itself to sleep. There are occasional exceptions to both these sets of circumstances (especially when first starting out on practice), but for success in the long run it is important to approach this work with a fully rested body and mind.

A sure-fire way to ensure that you are fully rested and fit to try for the lucid state is to oversleep.

Make some time and have a lie-in for an extra hour or two. Or take an extra nap in the afternoon.

Some people – myself included – find the sensations that arise from oversleeping a tad unpleasant. I usually feel heavy, torpid and irritable if I’ve had too much sleep, yet I’ve never encountered any evidence that these symptoms lead to any lasting harm. It’s best to regard any effects from oversleeping as simply an occupational hazard. Their effects can be overcome by physical exercise and stimulating yourself mentally.

The art of lucid dreaming is a form of concentration meditation, or ‘shamatha‘, and it is advisable to practise straight-up shamatha in addition to lucid dreaming. To become good at shamatha it’s vital to learn patience and acceptance. There will be prolonged periods when lucidity eludes you. This is because it is in the nature of mind to frustrate the demands and expectations of the ego. Resist the temptation to become frustrated or disconsolate. Resist also the urge to focus on a perceived sense of failure. Rest the attention instead upon the object of your practice; upon what is, rather than your reaction to it.

As in concentration meditation, in which we re-focus the mind back on the object whenever we notice it has wandered, so in lucid dreaming practice we constantly abide with whatever arises, rather than identifying with our response. Lack of lucidity is simply that; it needn’t be the occasion for getting swept away in some self-recriminatory story.

To lie on the back whilst sleeping is very helpful; I don’t know why. So is learning to keep still in bed, not moving the limbs but keeping the attention focused upon bodily sensations, without opening the eyes. This can keep you ‘in the zone’ of the lucid dreaming state when it becomes difficult to sustain it, or when a dream ends and you’d like to begin another one.

A recent article in New Scientist (Ananthaswamy, 2009) described some research that suggested out-of-body experience is connected with activity in a region at the back of the brain, called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ).

This region seems to be concerned with spatial and proprioceptive awareness and the sense of embodiment (p. 35). Separate studies confirmed the activation of this region in people with neurological disorders that had resulted in sensations of disembodiment; but also in healthy subjects who had been set a task in the laboratory of merely imagining their body to be in a different position from its actual position (p. 36).

My own experience suggests that there is something very helpful in this research. Visualising yourself spinning around or falling backwards can help induce the lucid or out-of-body state, when done correctly. Your visualisation should focus on the bodily sensations that would arise from the spinning or falling, rather than the purely visual effects.

Even more effective, I’ve recently discovered, is simply to imagine (in the same way) as strongly and persistently as you can, whilst falling asleep, that your body is in a different position from its actual position.

If you are lying on your back, imagine that you are lying on your side or front, or are standing next to the bed. Each time the mind wanders or the visualisation loses its intensity, bring back awareness to it.

I made the unexpected discovery that, even whilst awake, persisting in this provokes unusually vivid mental images to arise quite automatically, alongside the physical sensations that are consciously being imagined. The look-and-feel of these visual images was strikingly like those of a lucid dream, even though I was still fully awake.

The intensity of the imagery increases as sleep approaches, until finally it is entered into entirely. But for some reason there seems a much higher chance of regaining consciousness in the dream that has arisen by this means, rather than from simply falling asleep naturally.

The scientific research has left the neurologists wondering: ‘how are the self and body related?’ (p. 36). I suppose this seems a valid question – if you’re a dualist! But perhaps what is happening is simply what it ’seems’: our body-identity-world is a unity and will coalesce from any sensations to hand. If those sensations come from non-material images rather than physical sensations then we have re-clothed ourselves in a different mode of both world and being.

Reference

Anil Ananthaswamy (2009). The mind unshackled. New Scientist (10th October) 35-6.

It was early evening and the city was damp. I realised I could fly and raised myself to the top of a telegraph pole. I felt exhilarated as I shouted out: ‘Who’s in charge?’ I was certain some powerful and interesting being would appear and talk to me. But no one did. The city was deserted. It felt like a rebuke – as if I had not approached this exercise in the right manner.

Then, last night, there were lots of lucid incidents joined in a chain.

In one, the moon was rising above the rooftops. Again I could fly, so I rose up, curious to look directly into the moon’s full light. It was very bright, but the bulk of its face was hidden behind a chimney. Yet each time I changed position so that I would see, the world revised its perspective; the moon and the earth shifted so that again I couldn’t see.

I attempted this a few times, amused, but with the same result. It was some kind of rule: that the world I was in didn’t want me to look at any light above a certain threshold.

Then Alan and I were at different ends of a long street. I yelled to him that I was lucid and that he should interpret the object I was about to throw as a direct message from the spirit Tempe. I threw a tennis ball, and watched as it transfigured along its arc, becoming a plastic bottle, a cricket ball, and landed at Alan’s feet too far away for me to see. When he threw it back it struck the concrete as a golf-ball, yet smacked into my palm as an apple, shiny green and red. So this was the message from Tempe: an apple.

Then I was in a pub and the quality of the lucidity felt quite solid so I determined it was time to press on with the project. I asked the woman behind the bar: ‘Who’s in charge?’

She couldn’t speak, but pointed me toward the restaurant area. Something about her expression made me ask: ‘Is it worth me finding out?’ She gave me an exasperated look.

The dining area was small but quite crowded. I looked around, and it didn’t take me long to identify the man the barmaid meant. He was skinny and tall, dressed in a yellow shirt and trousers with thick black horizontal stripes. As I approached he stood up on his chair and fumbled for something above him in what appeared a skylight or an attic hatchway.

I recognised him at once: ‘You’re Raphael!’ I said.

He nodded and smiled, and said something like: ‘You are the man to say that.’ (Once again, I had the sense that the speech of angels is difficult to reduce to human terms.) He had a pointed, roguish face. There was an earring in one ear and a short ponytail in his greying hair.

It occurred to me I’d been too hasty. I’d presumed he was the archangel Raphael, but any old spirit would probably be only too happy to take on this projection.

‘Are you Raphael?’ I said. To which he answered: ‘Yes.’ So now I knew it was true.

From the skylight or hatchway he handed down to me a small twist of paper with something inside. It looked like drugs, or maybe it was just one of those little explosive wraps of powder that children like to throw around.

The dream ended abruptly before I could take it in my hand. But I’ve started to come around to the idea that there’s never any failure with these visions. I’m pretty confident I saw and heard everything I was supposed to.

The shift from non-lucid to lucid is not as dramatic as it used to be. I also noticed how this state of consciousness seemed as unsatisfactory as any other. I found myself thinking ‘this isn’t very vivid’, yet at the same time I saw it was merely a non-vivid experience, not a failure of my experience as such. (How could there be such a thing?)

There were hulking chunks of wreckage strewn about the park, the skeletal and burnt remains of metal vehicles. Between the wreckage crowds of people milled around. To convince myself I was lucid I ran a hand across the hard edge of some burnt metal and received a tactile impression of a kind that never arises in a non-lucid dream.

I stopped a scruffy, geeky-looking man, but took care to pay him all the attention I could. I’ve concluded that it’s not right to overlook a figure in a lucid dream, just because he or she happens to seem human. I made eye-contact and explained a little about my project. He responded warmly. When I asked who was in charge, he pointed me to a uniformed figure: a tall man wearing a military uniform and an identification vest. One the back was a short serial number that I couldn’t read. It was a short sequence of perhaps four or five letters and numbers.

The uniformed man was tall, but not abnormally so. He radiated an air of calm and assurance, which persuaded me of his ultra-human status. I told him who I was and what I’d come to find out. When I said my name he gave a murmur of recognition, which boosted my ego. We sat down on the grass: the man, me, and a couple of people nearby who seemed interested in our conversation.

‘What I’d like you to tell me,’ I said, ‘is whether we’re all the same kind of being, or whether you are different from me and the other humans, or whether we’re all different from each other.’

I immediately realised this kind of talk was a mistake. It was too academic and long-winded. The lucid state, which had seemed stable, was beginning to break down. I tried to focus and prolong it, but everything unravelled.

In retrospect, it was silly to expect and wait for a verbal answer. I could tell from the body-language and reaction to my question that the tall man would have said that all the beings in a lucid dream are capable of different natures. Some are angelic, some human, and some belong to levels below the human.

I had woken, but didn’t open my eyes and so remained close to the dreaming state. I remembered LaBerge’s advice to visualise spinning around on the spot, as a means to prolong lucidity. It worked, to a degree. Because I was already close to the dreaming state, the image of spinning was more vivid than if I’d been more awake. Because it was vivid it made me feel ‘unfixed’ in space, as if there were no possibility of coming to rest anywhere. Our sense of ‘fixity’ is usually provided by our sensory perceptions. ‘The sense of fixity provided by our sensory perceptions’ is another name for what we call ‘reality’. The technique of spinning, then, can keep reality at bay because it enables consciousness to situate itself in the ‘unfixed’ domain of images and imagination, rather than perception.

Suddenly I found myself in my parents’ lounge, late at night. The lights were on but the house was silent. I waited around for a while and willed the tall man to reappear. But no one came and the dream soon faded.

I continued spinning, but spinning was all I could manage. The dream world refused to coalesce. I span for what felt like a long time, hopeful that something would appear. But then my girlfriend made a noise in her sleep and instantly the ability to spin vanished also. The noise was a perception, and with it came the sense of an external world. My proximity to the level of images was terminated and I fell helplessly awake.

That afternoon, whilst we were cooking, I turned to my girlfriend and said: ‘I met another angel in a lucid dream last night.’

Without another word she instantly snatched up the picture of her grandfather from the wall, and said: ‘Was it him?’

The picture was taken during her grandfather’s service in World War One. He is in his military uniform, which includes a peaked cap.

Later, I asked her: ‘Why did you pick up that photograph when I mentioned my dream?’

‘Because he looks like an angel,’ she said.