by Steve Volk
I should stop here, for just a moment, to remark that I now count this dream as among the most incredible experiences of my life. I say this because until I had spent long minutes lucid, inside of a dream, I had no idea the power such an experience could hold. The sensory reality of everything I saw was just one aspect: yes, the colors and shapes and the feel of the air rushing around me were incredibly vivid and tactile. And then there is the carnival-like nature of the dream: because no physical law can constrain, existence becomes a kind of boundless circus—life as a character inside of a sci-fi movie or video game. But more profound than any of this is the feeling of finding myself inside an entirely subjective experience—only to find that this interior world seems to be as big as the universe itself.
I got comfortable and began to experiment. I willed myself to move left, right, back, forward, even up. But then I chose a course of action: LaBerge had advised us to approach our dreams with a curious spirit; and when I had attained lucidity in this dream, I had been dropping downward, toward the Monopoly board below; so I wondered what my subconscious mind had cooked up for me; and with a kind of happy, banzai recklessness, I again allowed myself to fall. Immediately, like an elevator cut loose from its cabling, I plummeted downward.
I fell faster than before. And in just seconds, I passed through the hole at the board’s center. There was a momentary blackness. The walls of the hole I’d dropped into were all around me. And then I was out. Immediately, I saw a second game board beneath this first one. And again, as I drew near, I could make out the details: the squares on this board were filled with images of machinery—cogs and wheels, gears and crankshafts. I passed through the hole in the center of that board, too, like passing through a highway tunnel with the lights out. And beneath that was a third board. But this one was fundamentally different.
Even from a distance, I could see there was almost nothing written on this board. And after a few seconds, what detail there was became clear: all the squares were empty but one, which contained the illustrated image of a single man in midstride. This man appeared in the upper left-hand corner of the board, and again in the center there was another hole. But between these two features was the thing that got my attention: a single word, printed in big, capitalized letters:
HELL
Instinctively, I panicked. This hole, I thought, is the entrance to hell. I started flying upward, away from the board. I was raised Catholic, after all, and these concepts still hold a primal sort of power. But then I remembered why I had come here—to explore the dream world, and moreover to explore myself. All the dream images I saw, the dream sounds, were just constructs of my own mind. So whatever hell lay below me, it was one of my own creation. This is a dream, I reminded myself. I’m safe.
I let myself go again. I began dropping toward the HELL hole and actually tried to interpret a dream—for the first time ever—while I was in it. Does this dream mean, I thought, interpreting it literally, that if I stay on my current path, I’m going to hell?
But another thought occurred to me, just as automatically: No, there is no hell.
I changed my attitude. I told myself I should be excited. And by the time I closed in on the darkened opening, I found myself feeling much the same way I do on a rollercoaster—filled with anxiety and the expectation of a coming thrill. I was about to see HELL—and live to tell about it. And a moment later, I was inside the hole. Blackness enveloped me. The only sensory input I received was the dream air rushing around my dream face. Then I saw flames below me, flickering. And I even felt the heat. But at this point, I spoke to my own dream: No, I said, this is just what I expect to see. What am I really here to see?
And suddenly, in an instant, the flames were gone. In fact, I landed. I had come to a stop. I was face down on the floor of a room, in the same position I had fallen. I lifted my dream body, from the torso up, in a push-up position, to look around. My knowledge of where I was came to me, immediately, in the strange way knowledge often arrives in a dream—as an inexplicable flash of insight.
This, I realized, was my maternal grandfather’s bedroom. This surprised me because it hardly even looked like my grandfather’s bedroom. There was a sink in his room, an odd feature, and this room had a sink, too. But beyond that, there was little resemblance. His room was neat and orderly. This room was cluttered, with racks of clothes and bottles of alcohol. And as I took all this in, I had another thought, which seemed to make everything else fall into place: Oh, I said aloud, in the dream world. This is my foundation.
A tremendous surge of energy rose within me. I felt like there was something I’d been looking for, something that had never quite been clear to me, and now I had all my answers. If the beginning of the dream, before attaining lucidity, felt like disconnecting from a socket, this was like plugging back in. Every fiber of my being seemed alive with electric current. And that was it. The dream was over.
I opened my eyes. This mental image of my grandfather’s room, cluttered and unrecognizable, gave way to the sight of my own well-ordered room in Hawaii. I transitioned from one reality to the next in a seamless instant. I had no sense of “waking up” because I had already been awake and aware the whole time. It was as if someone had just switched the computer program I had been running.
I thought for just one beat, and an interpretation of the dream came to me, which I shared that day for the workshop participants and LaBerge in Hawaii. But I’m not going to write about it here. Because all the interpretation I did afterward felt anticlimactic. Over the next few days, in fact, I tried out different ideas but none ever took. What had mattered was the experience of the dream. I felt as if I had really touched my own foundation—and the sensation had been electric.
But LaBerge had something more to say on the subject—the Mad Hatter answering questions I hadn’t even asked.
THE WHOLE TIME I was in Hawaii, I was curious to suss out LaBerge’s take on paranormal topics. But for much of the workshop, he seemed to let opportunities to go there go sailing by. I wondered if he had made a kind of tactical decision. After all, the acceptance of lucid dreaming has been hindered by its long association with the paranormal, an association that will likely never go away. Robert Waggoner, for instance, has built a sturdy niche for himself in the community of lucid dreamers by arguing that some of the dream characters we encounter may enjoy an objective, independent existence. By way of contrast, LaBerge’s own writings on lucid dreaming continue to stand out for their comparatively materialistic scientific outlook.
I was surprised, then, by a lecture he gave on the topic of telepathy. “The question comes up a lot,” said LaBerge, “because people report these kinds of strange experiences, both in and outside of dreams, in which they seem to gather information outside the normal sensory channels.”
LaBerge, however, had something more than anecdote to share. His story was about a scientific experiment.
LaBerge had been asked, he told us, by a branch of the American military, to study whether people could gain accurate information about the waking world in lucid dreams. And so he helped to construct an experiment, volunteering to do double-duty as one of the subjects. “I didn’t expect to succeed,” LaBerge said. “But I figured it was worth a shot. People had been reporting some success in these matters, and though I was doubtful, I decided to see for myself.”
I won’t go into all the details of the experiment here. But dreamers, including LaBerge, were charged with opening up an envelope in a lucid dream, examining its contents, and awaking to write a detailed report. In each case, the dream envelope they were supposed to open had a real-life corollary. And the goal of the experiment was both simple and wild: Would the contents of the sealed, waking-life envelope, when opened, match the contents of the envelope opened in dreams?
According to the experiment’s protocol, each dreamer had a 20 percent chance of scoring a hit, purely by luck. But the hit rate produced by the experiments was 33 percent. Further, dreamers were more than three times
as likely to score a close match with the target image than any non-target image. “I have to admit I was greatly surprised by these results,” said LaBerge. “But the statistics seem to demonstrate that something is happening here.”
LaBerge also showed us a particularly evocative example of success from his own archives of that experiment. Upon awakening from his own lucid dream, he drew a series of wavy lines and four words: sandy, patchy, dark, light.
When the sealed envelope was opened later, without LaBerge’s presence, the target image turned out to be a set of rolling sand dunes, with heavily shaded areas offset by patches of bright sunlight.
As LaBerge acknowledged, any one example of success could be dismissed as coincidence. Maybe even this spot-on match was just that. But the experiment he took part in rules out coincidence as any sort of explanation for the results as a whole. “We found compelling results,” said LaBerge, “that were, statistically, significantly above chance. But the results we got were similar to other credible research, in that whatever’s going on here can’t really be operationalized. There is some other way of knowing then our standard senses, it seems, but it’s a weak signal—and hard to pick up on.”
After that lecture, I caught up to LaBerge before he could leave and asked him what we were to make of this. Like anyone else, I’d had experiences of my own that could have been put down to prophecy—or more likely, mere coincidence. One woman in class even shared a story about dreaming of a fatal accident that befell a young boy before it happened. How should someone view a potentially telepathic experience when it could just as easily have been random chance?
“I’d say,” said LaBerge, “that if you believe you have picked up on information in this way, the appropriate response is to believe what the experience is telling you. In other words, let it open your mind to the fact that there is more to this world than we know.”
And so, over time, it was clear to me that LaBerge was more complicated than I had known; he even told us of a lucid dream he had in which he asked to see his highest self and flew, in his dream car, to a place he could only describe as a “holy nothing, a beautiful nothing, an ecstatic nothing.”
His dream mirrored the classic peak meditative experience, which he described as “the total absence of any sense of self, and a sudden, joyful connection to everyone and everything.”
Over time, said LaBerge, he had come to see the dream as, perhaps, a “metaphor for what happens when we die. When the drop of water, as it were, realizes its true identity as part of the ocean.”
At another juncture, LaBerge sat by quietly as his assistant and friend, Keelin, shared an incredible story about healing herself in a lucid dream. She was struggling, in real life, with excessive menstrual bleeding. Her doctor was advising her to have a hysterectomy. Your uterus is tilted, she was told. But after this diagnosis, Keelin habitually misspoke, telling her friends: “My universe is tilted.”
She didn’t want to have a hysterectomy, but she feared she would have no choice. And she was reaching the stage at which circumstances would force a decision. Then she had a lucid dream in which she was able to reach directly inside her body and heal herself. It was an energizing dream that made her feel as if she had personally done everything she could to avoid the hysterectomy. But the crazy thing was, after the dream, her excessive bleeding stopped. Immediately. And it never came back.
As she put it to me, “That’s not science, I understand, but—”
Yes, but … what shall we do?
I mean, we live in a world where we have to define this sort of thing, don’t we, as nonsense or reality? If an event like this isn’t science, shouldn’t it be disregarded entirely?
The answer LaBerge’s entire career suggests is, in a word, no. We don’t have to make the choice that popular culture gives us; we don’t have to choose one and dispense with the other. This is not a world of binary opposites. We just live that way. We could, in fact, choose to believe what Keelin’s experience is telling us: that there is more to this world than we know. And then, it seems, the most rational response might be to explore it—to see if the events she described could really be so.
The problem is, in this culture, when a claim carries the whiff of hoo ha, too much of the intelligentsia goes running for the hills. And on the opposite pole, when a scientific finding seems to undercut our spiritual belief, we dismiss it—that is, if we even bother to read it. “We live in a world in which there are a lot of extremes offered,” LaBerge said, summing up the current culture wars. “The view of many modern neuroscientists is that the subjective experience of consciousness, is what they call an epiphenomenon, or product, of brain function, and therefore scientifically unimportant. But then I’ve also met Tibetan Buddhists who think the brain’s only function is to keep our ears apart.”
We all laughed. But LaBerge kept going.
“I recommend,” he said, “balance in these matters.”
The thing is, balance can be so hard to come by.
To the media, balance is best maintained by gathering the most extreme combatants, wielding the most far-flung opinions, to debate. The result, nearly always, is a shrill argument in which the truth seems to lie, tantalizing and undiscovered, somewhere between two self-serving accounts. And among the most strident of believers and atheists, there is no balance at all—only right and wrong, the heretics and the saved, the intelligent and the foolish.
LaBerge captured this dynamic most thoroughly, inadvertently, with the aid of a prop.
Standing up from his chair in the front of the room, he retrieved a mask bearing the face of the devil: big fat tongue, blood red skin, menacing expression—the whole deal. LaBerge held it to himself tightly and smiled. This tableau was already dreamlike, the barefoot scientist and the devil, but he was just getting started.
He told us the story of one of his own dreams, in which he confronted an ogre. He was lucid, and he knew the creature could not harm him. But still, he backed away. The beast was smelly, so rank he could barely go near it.
From where, he wondered, in the recesses of my own self, did this awful creature emerge?
This question was the source of his curiosity, the thought that enabled him to get past his own reluctance and advance toward the ogre. The smell, at first, was still overpowering. But he forced himself up closer to the animal. And he resolved to accept this ogre, to accept its ugliness and its odor as part of himself. And magically, as in the way of dreams, the ogre simply melted into him. LaBerge awoke then and felt—great.
“Dreams are often about this sense of feeling fragmented,” LaBerge said, “about taking the parts of ourselves we consciously hide and integrating them. Such dreams are about acceptance.”
In this dream, the things LaBerge hides had manifested in the noxious form of an ogre. I was surprised when LaBerge, as he finished this story, suddenly shifted his gaze toward me. But then he explained how his dream revealed the substance of my own dream, in which I dropped through a series of Monopoly boards on my way to hell.
The holes I passed through, he said, those symbolized the concept of wholeness, of integration. And as for HELL, the word that stood between the little man on my last board and the wholeness waiting for him in the center? “If you take this interpretation,” said LaBerge, “hell is this sensation of not feeling integrated; hell is this sense of not feeling whole.”
In this view, the act at the end, of accepting my foundation, was like LaBerge absorbing his ogre. No wonder, when I did it, I felt plugged back in.
A lot became clear to me then. Because LaBerge’s dream analysis does a pretty neat job, not only of explaining one function of dreaming as a tool for psychological healing, but also as a metaphor, explaining our society’s current relationship to the paranormal.
We are not integrated. We are carved into tribes, believers and unbelievers. And as a society, I think, we will persist in a kind of hell—a hell of separateness—if we do not understand what it is we’ve done to each other.
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The saved and the damned.
Muslims and infidels.
Brights and dulls.
The rationalists and materialists, lined up against the dark forces of “superstition.”
And where do these divisions get us? No closer to one another, certainly, and no closer to any real answers.
Instead, we demonize each other, putting the equivalent of devil masks on our foes. But in the case of science and spirituality, these seeming opposites might yet converge. We can even see them come together, in Andrew Newberg or Stephen LaBerge—two researchers who used the tools of modern science to verify the experiences mystics had been reporting for millennia. And in each case what they found as a guiding principle was not division—but connection.
The question is whether or not we’re prepared to accept these findings, to accept a world in which religion and science don’t have to clutch at each other’s throats. The question is whether or not we’re prepared to accept a world in which science and spirituality really do serve each other.
The Big Ghost, of course, hovering at the back of this entire discussion, is God. Human beings are always fighting about which version of God to worship, or whether any God exists at all. But it seems to me we are only likely to find answers about the nature of the universe, or the possibility of a creator, if we look. And we can’t do that in any meaningful way if our only commitment is to the answers we’ve presupposed.
At this book’s outset, I mentioned the noted atheist Sam Harris, whose words I find instructive here, as they speak to the kind of opportunity we now hold, in the advancement of science, and the contribution it can make to human spirituality.
“For millennia,” writes Harris, “contemplatives have known that ordinary people can divest themselves of the feeling that they call ‘I’ and thereby relinquish the sense that they are separate from the rest of the universe. This phenomenon, which has been reported by practitioners in many spiritual traditions, is supported by a wealth of evidence—neuroscientific, philosophical, and introspective. Such experiences are ‘spiritual’ or ‘mystical,’ for want of better words, in that they are relatively rare (unnecessarily so), significant (in that they uncover genuine facts about the world), and personally transformative. They also reveal a far deeper connection between ourselves and the rest of the universe than is suggested by the ordinary confines of our subjectivity… . A truly rational approach to this dimension of our lives would allow us to explore the heights of our subjectivity with an open mind, while shedding the provincialism and dogmatism of our religious traditions in favor of free and rigorous inquiry.”