Tag Archives: synchronicity

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Keeping Up the Meds

I fell into the trap of assuming that a little meditation is as good as a lot. But I’ve rediscovered recently that a lot is so much better than a little.

I’d fallen into the habit of snatching 20-40 minutes a day (max), usually skipping it altogether at the weekends. I was labouring under a fantasy that where meditation was concerned, I was done, and it had no surprises left.

What switched me back on was a simple craving for some peace. So I sat for a whole hour, twice in a day, and noticed how much easier it was to do the same the following day. This was the first thing I’d forgotten: more meditation gives you more energy (to expend on whatever you wish.)

I’d also assumed that, after fourth path, meditators no longer experience the cycles of insight. Yet after sitting again for 1-2 hours per day, rather than 20 minutes, it was easier to see that they do – it’s just that the cycles can turn quite fast. Sitting occasionally for 20 minutes simply isn’t conducive to a firm grip on where we are.

Then I had the shock of my life when I ran into a fruition! Conscious thought faded and I was watching my mind forming a dream. I recognised it as one I’d dreamt a few weeks before, yet it was unfolding all over again from its beginning, in real time. I was not remembering the dream, but experiencing it over again, except also watching it fully conscious. This blurring of thinking and dreaming, remembering and experiencing, changed the usual mental landscape into something completely alien and indescribable, and – pop – a fruition. The afterglow lasted a couple of days.

Here’s how a typical one-hour sit generally plays out for me.

To begin with, there’s awareness of the broken mechanism of self. The act of looking fails to join with any trace of a looker. Looking is like scanning a mobius strip of experience, failing ever to find its non-existent other side.

Yet this is only ‘failure’ from the perspective of the looker – and he’s not to be found anyway. So eventually the ‘brokenness’ yields to what is truly the background to experience, which remains uncreated and boundless. This I’ve come to regard as the living, working presence of the Holy Spirit.

Concentration and mental quietness can heighten the connection, bringing into awareness experiential insights. These might include the compassion inherent in existence: how everything is allowed to arise from nothing, and vanish back into it without trace; or how God is that which is absolutely unlimited by Itself, which makes It so good, It even accommodates that which isn’t good at all.

When it occurs to me that I’m not as focused as I could be, or that the mind is wandering, then concentration is exposed as a fraud. Because if ‘this’ isn’t already what I’m trying to make my focus, then just what the hell else do I suppose there is? The whole concept of ‘concentration’ is senseless!

This realisation quickly puts the kibosh on thought. It kills ‘intentional’ mental activity stone dead. Internal chatter falls silent. Dreams still arise, but can be watched consciously. I might even fall asleep, but can be conscious of sleeping.

If awareness remains alert, without lapsing into a murky identification with the content of dreams, eventually the dreams, too, fade out. What’s left is the milky-blue radiance of an impersonal consciousness with no content or commentary. (Which is rather relaxing.)

I might stumble across any of these insights or states, or stumble out again. Towards the end, usually I begin to feel bored, restless, or hit some other form of suffering – because that’s what happens when human beings sit dead-still on their arses for a while.

As the suffering grows louder than other sensations, I turn my mind into it. Or if I find my mind turning away, I turn my mind into how it’s turning away. If it becomes unbearable, I turn my mind into its being unbearable. Because if ‘unbearable’ can be looked at, how is it unbearable? And if it can’t be looked at, then how do I know ‘unbearable’ is what it is?

There’s no escape from consciousness. Always here. Always effortless.

Finally, meditating for longer seems to re-open the gate to paranormal experiences. The 13th of this month was the anniversary of my father’s death. He was also born on the 13th, and had moved into a house numbered 13 a few months before he died.

So I sat for an hour on the 13th this month, before it was light. Nothing remarkable happened, and I wasn’t expecting anything. At the end of the session, my stopwatch sounded – but didn’t give its usual 20 beeps. It got just over half-way, then crapped out. When I picked it up, it was flashing ‘12:00’ and had reset. It had never done this before and I assumed the batteries had died. But, after resetting the correct time, it has worked fine since.

I wish I’d mentally counted the beeps, as I often do. Something tells me I would’ve reached 13. A coincidence, of course. But meaningful coincidences seem to come a little thicker and faster when I’m putting in more time on the cushion.

No prizes for guessing my resolution for 2013. Happy New Year, everybody!

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The Effects on Lucid Dreaming of Alpha-GPC (Glycerophosphocholine)

In Advanced Lucid Dreaming: The Power of Supplements (Lulu, 2006), Thomas Yuschak describes how a combination of galantamine and alpha-GPC (glycerophosphocholine) can help induce powerful lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences, and how other substances can be used to support this.

Unfortunately, galantamine is now available only by prescription (in the UK, at least), probably because it has been found effective in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, so my experiment was limited to alpha-GPC alone.

The following is a simplified description of how alpha-GPC effects dreaming. To anyone seeking more detail and ideas for further experiments, Yuschak’s book is likely to be of interest.

The technical part

Alpha-GPC crosses the blood-brain barrier and acts as an acetylcholine precursor. Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter that research has linked with the ability to think, learn and remember. It also plays a major role in the regulation of sleep: its levels gradually rise during the night, in tandem with decreasing levels of serotonin.

[(2S)-2,3-dihydroxypropyl] 2-trimethylazaniumylethyl phosphate

Chemical structure of alpha-GPC. (A source of Choline, which is supposedly good for you — in appropriate doses.)

Our sleep consists of alternating phases of deep, dreamless sleep, and of relatively lighter, dream-filled sleep – also known as ‘REM sleep’. As the night begins, the phases of dreamless sleep are longer at first and the phases of REM shorter. This relationship gradually reverses as morning approaches. REM sleep is therefore associated with lower levels of serotonin and higher levels of acetylcholine, whereas in deep, dreamless sleep the ratio is reversed.

I went to bed at 10.30pm and fell asleep as normal. Then, at 3.40am, as my acetylcholine levels were naturally beginning to rise and the phases of REM naturally growing longer, I took 600mg of alpha-GPC and returned to bed. I had some difficulty getting back to sleep, and after about 30 minutes I got up again for the toilet.

The fun begins

Some time later my landlord came in to say he was taking his niece out for the day. I heard him explain, ‘Duncan is testing the effect of supplements on dreams’. But then I remembered I was at my partner’s house – so the appearance of my landlord could only mean one thing…

‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ I exclaimed.

It was totally indistinguishable from being awake. It didn’t feel at all like I was dreaming; I only knew, logically, that this had to be the case. When I looked closely at articles in the room (some coloured chess pieces near the window, for example) I knew they didn’t exist in reality – and then I noticed how other items were in different places from where I knew they really were.

Still a little nervous that I might be making a huge mistake, I drew the curtains apart and forced myself through the glass. It gave way like jelly.

So now I was certain – and I recognised it had to be the drug, making the dream more vivid than usual. As I floated to the pavement, the dream showed no sign of breaking apart. The concrete under my feet was as solid as reality.

Beforehand (for reasons I won’t explore here) I’d set myself the task of visiting the gospel scene where Christ raises Lazarus. ‘Take me to Lazarus!’ I shouted at the sky, spreading my arms. Darkness rushed over me and I sank into the ground. But then, disappointingly, I awoke.

Back in again…

Hoping to regain the dream, I lay still with my eyes shut. But whilst awake, I was becoming conscious of the effects of the drug. The mind felt fluid, in a state of rapidly rolling forward. For a time, there was hypnagogic imagery of a printing press. Black characters on white scrolling past. The typography and arrangement of letters was gorgeous: isolated characters, sometimes in combinations, as if to draw attention to their beautiful shapes.

This gave way to some internal dialogue, which immediately detached itself and became an external character: a tall woman, hair in a black bob, wearing a floral-print dress. My reaction to this also split off and became a person. In an instant, there were four of them, distinct personalities, all gabbling away in conversation on the effects of the drug.

The next I remember, I was at my parents’ old house, helping my mother stack food in the cupboards, our long-dead cat weaving between our feet, looking as scraggy as she had during her final months. I was holding a sack, and when I bent to sniff inside, discovered it was full of huge cornflakes, each a couple of inches wide. Making sure Mum didn’t see, I let some drop near the cat, who wolfed them down gratefully.

I’m not sure I was always entirely lucid. It seemed that four or five times during the night, I realised I was fully conscious, threw myself out through the window, and tried to realise my Lazarus goal. But the drug wasn’t particularly improving my habitual shortcomings when it comes to lucid dreams: either I wasn’t quite lucid, or – when I was – it lasted only a short time. The drug was heightening the intensity and fluidity of my usual experience, but it wasn’t fixing its usual problems.

'Advanced Lucid Dreaming', by Thomas Yuschak.

Yuschak’s book is self-published, but available from usual outlets.

After a couple of failures, I gave myself a break and simply enjoyed the scene from the window. My partner lives on one of Brighton’s quirkier shopping streets. The architecture was now augmented, upwards and outwards, with hardly any sky or road between the facing buildings. Everywhere were ramshackle stalls and entrances, giving the place a third-world feel.

When I jumped down, someone told me that two Buddhist monks had come to work on a neighbouring stall. I grabbed some cartons of lychee juice – which seemed an appropriate gift. The two monks had shaved heads and dark-red robes. As we chatted, it became clear they were more concerned with the rules and culture of their tradition than in mastering meditation and gaining insights. Still, they were nice guys, and it was interesting to talk about their travels.

In fact, everyone, everything, seemed to want to talk. The mind itself was in a state where it felt far easier than usual to discourse at length, to spin out stuff in a swift and ceaseless stream. But it was a problem to make any of it stick. It seems I have forgotten a great deal. I had to make a conscious effort to rescue these fragments.

Deep stuff

Things other than dreams were occurring. Before bed, I’d read an email from a friend about working with spirits. She was wondering how supplication of spirits or gods relates to that deeper level of religious insight, in which we recognise all is well – right now – just the way it is. If the goddess Yemaya gives us something that isn’t this all-pervading sense of wellness, then what is Yemaya?

I didn’t have an answer until, between the dreams, one arrived. It said: ‘The question is wrong.

Yemaya

Icon of the goddess Yemaya. In Santeria, she is the mother of all living things.

‘Yemaya isn’t anything. This is the realisation that everything is well. But if we can’t help having to take something from her, then with the infinite compassion of nothingness, the goddess will give.’

I made another tilt at Lazarus. Transitions in lucid dreams between scenes and states are always tricky, and can often chuck you out into waking consciousness. Yuschak describes a technique he calls ‘seeding’ (p. 163). Whilst falling asleep, we drop into our mindstream conscious images which, if our timing is on, will grow into our desired scene as we slip into dreaming. The challenge is to do this lightly enough. If it’s too conscious, we won’t fall asleep. If it’s too lax, the images will grow in unintended directions.

Of course, I failed. Despite picturing myself outside the tomb, hoping Christ might show up once I’d dropped off, I was too loose. My images took on their own life and meandered far, far away. Somehow, I ended up sitting on the floor beside four people on a sofa, explaining what I was trying to do. A plump girl in glasses, with curly hair, seated closest to me, kept talking across everyone. Finally I realised it might be good to shut up and actually listen to her.

‘There was a phone call for you,’ she said.

‘Who was it?’

‘A beautiful voice. Can you imagine,’ she went on, ‘picking up the phone and hearing this most beautiful voice reciting the most beautiful passages?’

‘What were those passages?’ I asked.

‘Captain Pigeon.’

‘I’m sorry?’

She repeated the name.

‘I don’t know who Captain Pigeon is,’ I apologised. ‘We don’t have him where I come from.’

The people on the sofa stared in amazement and pity.

‘Of all the TV programmes,’ the girl explained, ‘Captain Pigeon is the only one with no death or violence.’

I smiled, because although I hadn’t made it to the tomb of Lazarus, this felt like some kind of sign. The pigeon or dove is an important Christian symbol for the Holy Spirit, for peace, and for John the Baptist. If I’d been awake, this might have been a synchronicity. But I wasn’t awake, so it was only a dream of one.

Piero della Francesca, 'The Baptism of Christ' (c. 1448-50).

Captain Pigeon, a.k.a ‘The Holy Spirit’ or ‘the dove from above’. (Francesca, The Baptism of Christ, c. 1448).

In a synchronicity, mind and reality come into alignment: a girl dreams of a golden scarab, and the next day a golden beetle flies through the window. I had wanted to see Christ raise Lazarus, but instead I’d had a phone call from Captain Pigeon. This might have been a synchronicity inside the dream, but – I realised – outside the dream it would not be meaningful at all.

‘Wow,’ I thought. ‘In here, I have absolutely no terms of reference.’

And then, bizarrely, the meaninglessness suddenly assumed an intense and paradoxical meaning. The non-synchronicity became one. Because Captain Pigeon, by drawing attention to his own senselessness, had transcended the dream. It felt like a message smuggled from another dimension.

Debrief

I woke at 7.04am, when the drug would have reached its peak and was starting to decline. I could tell I wouldn’t sleep again, so I took the opportunity to examine the remaining effects in a more conscious state.

Its basic quality was that state when we’re consumed by an activity and cannot let it go; the feeling of being interested in and happy to work away at something all night. The label on the jar promised ‘mental acuity’. I’m not sure I quite agree with that. It seems to provide momentum rather than focus.

I can also confirm Yuschak’s observation (p. 71) that dreams under the drug seem inclined to feature music. At one point, from no visible source, I heard a funky piece played on a harpsichord; and whilst sitting by the people on the sofa, I heard trashy, but oddly light, dubstep being played. Whenever the music played, it was loud, which created an odd effect: because it was not actually sound, but a mental image of sound, it was possible for it to play at an ear-splitting volume, yet I could still ‘hear’ perfectly well (at the same time) conversations and other events in the dream.

A jar of alpha-GPC.

Alpha-GPC is available from health shops. (Other brands are available.)

Reported side effects for alpha-GPC include insomnia and nausea. At 600mg I experienced none of the latter. The former was mitigated by ensuring five hours sleep before taking the drug. After this, indeed, my sleep felt rather light and brittle. After waking at 7am, I was fine at first, but 3-4 hours later started to feel tired. I also felt a little low and irritable as the effects wore off, but I’m a miserable git anyway, so this was nothing extraordinary.

I’ve seen numerous posts on forums from people who tried alpha-GPC without results. This is not surprising. It’s a diet supplement, not a psychedelic; it only enhances the conditions for lucidity and does not directly induce it. Combining psychological techniques with alpha-GPC makes it more likely to trigger lucidity, and it’s absolutely necessary to time the dosage correctly. A few hours of sleep should always be taken beforehand, not only to guarantee some rest, but also to ensure maximisation of effect during the later stages of the night (or early morning), when the REM phases are at their deepest and longest.

I shall definitely be using it again – sparingly, so as not to build tolerance. But I won’t be following the directions on the jar to use it as a dietary supplement and chug a couple every day. However, as I make my living mostly from writing code, it struck me that it might occasionally prove handy in this context.

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A Defence of Synchronicity

Stephen Braude is a philosopher who was written extensively on the paranormal, ever since he witnessed close-up, whilst working on his PhD, a table levitating clean off the ground.

Braude’s books are dense and analytical, but he gives his ideas a more populist airing in The Gold Leaf Lady And Other Parapsychological Investigations (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), which I discovered recently, read with much enjoyment, and highly recommend.

Psychokinesis (PK) is the aspect of the paranormal that most floats Braude’s boat. The main refrain of The Gold Leaf Lady is that although the standard, statistics-based laboratory experiments for identifying paranormal phenomena are all well and good, a far more compelling type of evidence would be to see big-arse objects appearing or floating around the room – what researchers call ‘macro-PK’. This is what Braude sets out to reproduce. He argues passionately that it’s not impossible to produce good evidence where it is most likely to occur (i.e. in a non-laboratory context) yet with effective controls in place. The book is presented as a series of case histories, some intriguing, others patently bogus, through which Braude documents the dilemmas of encouraging phenomena whilst eliminating fraud and self-delusion.

The Gold Leaf Lady, by Stephen Braude

The Gold Leaf Lady, by Stephen Braude.

Braude argues that a training in philosophy equips us with incisive tools for eliminating flim-flam. Surely, that’s often correct. But I parted company with him in the chapter that feeds synchronicity into the philosophical mill, and seems to grind it to smithereens.

Jung was clear that it’s not human beings who cause synchronicities, but some other agent. Yet if God or some other agent were responsible, Braude points out, surely Jung wouldn’t countenance this either, because it would mean that synchronicities were caused by something, rather than being acausal. However, the alternative, that synchronicity is a basic operation or principle of nature, doesn’t hold either, because if the meaningfulness of a synchronicity is not simply our interpretation of events, but those events are somehow actually linked independently of the way a human being would arrange them, then synchronicity would be acting on properties that events possess in themselves rather than those we ascribe to them. On the contrary, Braude argues, ‘things count as similar only within a shifting context of human action, needs and interests’ (p. 137). And even if synchronicity could link events, that would assume there were particles of history that it could act upon and which could be identified as discrete happenings. ‘[H]ow many events were there in World War Two?’ Braude asks pithily. ‘Nature does not parse herself’ (p. 140).

Archetypes were, of course, the means by which Jung attempted to ground his view of synchronicity as an acausal law of nature. No good, says Braude, because archetypes are accidental products of biological evolution and human conceptualisation. He gives the example of the ‘mother’ archetype which, although it may be universal, would certainly not have arisen except for the evolutionary accident of the human body being non-hermaphroditic, and of child-rearing being viewed as a female activity. Braude’s view of archetypes exposes them as very much effected by natural laws, rather than in the position themselves of natural laws. On the broader question of whether meaning is a self-subsistent ‘thing’ that has effects on other things, Braude tends instead to the view that meaningful connections between events require a perspective relative to which they become meaningful.

The only way – Braude suggests – that we can admit a role for synchronicity (other than writing off all synchronicities as merely chance) is to admit it is a principle which is causal in some way. Whereas the principles of physics have great generality and predictive power, synchronicities are specific and have no predictive use, so that role is unlikely to be as a law of nature. The perspective relative to which events linked by synchronicity become meaningful is a human perspective. On this basis, Braude goes on to outline his view that synchronicities are engineered by human agents, in some cases by creative interpretations of events, in others by perhaps unconscious but otherwise orthodox means, and – in a remaining few – perhaps by paranormal means, possibly by macro-PK exerting an influence on our own circumstances or on those of others.

Evidently, analytical philosophy is great for ripping apart Jung, but I think it may have led Braude to an unnecessarily limited conclusion.

First off, Braude’s description of the experience of synchronicity is very much ‘from the neck upwards’. Yes, it entails meaningful linkage of events, but we confront meaningful linkage of events many times during a single day, yet these are not the same kind of experiences as a synchronicity. ‘Meaningful coincidence’ doesn’t do it justice. The experience of a synchronicity is to feel the melting of a boundary between our internal thought processes and what we had hitherto perceived as reality. It is like finding ourselves at the exact centre of the cosmos, and seeing how everything else is being levered into place by a sentient, conscious universe.

It is possible to launch an argument against the contents of such an experience, and dismiss them on logical grounds, but this misses out on what makes synchronicity the phenomenon that it is. A synchronicity is not simply a meaningful link, but has a specific emotional and perceptual structure: it entails feeling and seeing our internal processes as indistinguishable from the outer world. Explain this away, if you must, but then you must acknowledge that you have also explained away whatever sets synchronicity apart from the usual meaningful linkage of events that forms the routine background of everyday cognition.

uroboros

The Uroboros, a snake consuming its own tail. Symbol for the Unus Mundus.

Synchronicity, for Braude, is a human creation rather than a phenomenon of nature. Yet it’s so obvious that it feels churlish to point out that human creations are part of nature too. Our minds have evolved as all things have evolved, upon and out of the planet. The dichotomy between human cognition and the principles of physics, upon which Braude’s argument rests, from this perspective no longer looks so secure. Mental processes that appear ‘internal’ are necessarily also a part of the nature that appears ‘external’. So although we may not be able to identify properties of relationships or events as discrete entities in external nature, the fact that we can identify them internally means there’s still ‘natural’ material there.

There seems to me adequate grounds to argue that synchronicity may be a principle of nature after all. It is the principle that mind and nature are one and the same. If this were so, then it would be unique among principles in being something we could experience directly. Other physical principles, such as gravity or entropy, we can observe acting upon us, or upon other things. But the physical principle that mind and nature are one and the same would be a force in nature through which we could perceive our own consciousness. If we had the same relationship to gravity, it would be as if we ourselves were putting the stars and planets in motion. As things stand, our experience of the principle that mind and nature are joined is synchronicity. As a physical principle, synchronicity indeed lacks any ‘generality’ or ‘predictive power’, but this is because mind forms part of the condition through which it operates, much as time and space enable gravity to work. If our consciousness fell along with the apple dropping from the tree, then our assessment of its motion would always be ‘just here’ and ‘right now’. This is precisely the case in synchronicity. Because mind is implicated, it can manifest only as the experience that right here and right now the internal and the external are one and the same. But what this principle lacks in predictive utility is compensated by the directness of our relationship with it. This relationship is maybe what makes paranormal abilities possible.

Despite the holes in Jung’s argument, I think synchronicity as a law of nature still carries some weight. It’s been a while since I read Jung, and I’ve never found it the pleasure I always set out hoping it would be, but synchronicity for Jung was always a manifestation of the Unus Mundus – the underlying reality in which matter and mind are joined.

Returning to Braude, whereas he argues that PK may cause synchronicity, I favour the opposite view: that PK is an (acausal) manifestation of synchronicity. A PK event is a meaningful coincidence between a person’s will or intention, and the behaviour of physical objects. Yet more than this, for the person concerned, it is a direct experience and enactment of the principle that mind and nature are one and the same.

As a side note, one of Braude’s many interesting arguments in The Gold Leaf Lady is that people fear psi because, once it is accepted, then we must countenance a whole new world of possibly malign influences. For instance, if someone can move a matchstick a couple of millimetres by mental power alone, then it’s a small step towards assassinating another person by the same means, through constricting an artery perhaps.

Nina Kulagina

Russian PK mistress, Nina Kulagina. It could be your internal organs that she's moving around with the power of her mind...

My own gut reaction is that it simply doesn’t work like this. The history of the paranormal is surprisingly light on casualties. Consider all the stone-throwing and fire-starting poltergeists on record: how easily they could have killed many, many people, had they wanted to or truly been able. But remarkably, there are very few cases on record of ghosts causing fatalities. Likewise, UFOs. Sure, there have been instances where UFO encounters appear to have caused deaths. But if we really are being visited by hostile forces from distant stars, we’re getting off remarkably lightly.

Indeed, if the paranormal is calling the shots, and it is PK that brings about synchronicity, then all manner of mayhem is possible. But if synchronicity is what facilitates the paranormal, then manifestations of the paranormal depend upon consciousness, which depends in turn upon life. In that case, killing people simply removes the conditions on which both synchronicity and manifestations of the paranormal depend. Someone strangled in their bed by a ghost, or killed by a psychic assassin, wouldn’t be in any position to facilitate the unity of nature and mind (their own or any one else’s). Maybe for this very reason, the attempt by one entity to kill another entity to which it is fundamentally joined is always doomed to fail…

It would be nice to think so, anyway.

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Dreaming With Integrity

I passed through the vibratory prelude to an out-of-body experience (OOBE) and drifted up from the mattress. But then I sank down under the bed and stayed there, content to lie drowsily, staring at the fluff-bunnies and dried-up tissues.

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!

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A Military Angel

I was in the park, in my home town, when I realised that I was dreaming.

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.