Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others…

by Brown, David Jay

  DJB: Just a dream.

  Stephen: Right. Where you do see this developed to high levels however, is in Tibetan Buddhism, since they’ve been practicing lucid dreaming probably for a thousand years.

  RMN: It seems that the criteria for a successful lucid dreamer is similar to that for being a successful Buddhist. But Dzoghen, one of the branches of Buddhism which practises lucid dreaming, sees it as a very advanced technique only to be embarked upon after a great deal of preparation.

  Stephen: Some practises of Buddhism indeed regard it in that way. The Nyingmapas don’t tend to. They tend to say, "Well, give it a try!" So in some cultures this had been taken to great extremes and today we still don’t know how far Buddhist practitioners of this art are able to take lucid dreaming. I’m hoping to be able to do some research on that some time in the future.

  RMN: Have you found any correlation between people who practice some kind of meditation and the ability to have lucid dreams?

  Stephen: There’s a study by Henry Reed based on some ten thousand dream reports, in which people were asked whether or not they had meditated the day before the night that they collect those dreams on. Then the percentage of lucid dreams occurring on nights following meditation the day before was measured. The difference was seven per cent versus five per cent, so that’s two per cent difference with people who meditated the day before. We don’t know what kind of meditation, how much or anything of that nature, so there are a lot of questions about it, but the point is there is a small difference.

  DJB: It can also be the type of person. The type of person who would be interested in meditation would be more aware of alternative realities and that sort of thing.

  RMN: Have you found any other criteria such as age, creativity or even sex which affects how successful someone is at lucid dreaming?

  Stephen: We’ve asked about all of those things and have not found any way of predicting to any large extent whether or not a person will report lucid dreams, except for one thing, and that is, how often you remember your dreams. Frequent dream recallers are more likely to have lucid dreams. If you ask do you recall your dreams at least once a night, or find the median split on dream recall, then you’ll find twice as many lucid dreams in the group that reports more dreams in general. You can see why that makes sense, because if people don’t remember their dreams they don’t ever reflect on them in the waking state. Also, what determines dream recall has a lot to do with the habits of what you do in bed. So if you wake up while lucid dreaming, that’s one thing, if you wake up thinking, it’s time to get out of bed then you’re not going to remember dreams.

  RMN: You talk in your book about a woman, Mary Arnold Forster, who was teaching lucid dreaming to children at the beginning of this century. Do you think that children may be more receptive partly because they don’t have so many fixed beliefs about what can be?

  Stephen: Exactly. That’s something I’d very much like to see - more children learning about this. I think it could be of great value to them considering that most children have extremely little power; they’re basically at the mercy of what everybody else tells them to do. So here’s a world in which they can be the master. Also, in this society, we have various problems with drugs that are associated with children. I think children as adolescents are the people least likely to benefit from drugs.

  Certainly psychedelics can be useful to some people at some circumstances in their lives but I’d say that hardly ever applies to adolescents who already have plenty of change and structures that are in flux going on. It’s most valuable for people who have rigid structures that have built up over the years and who need them loosened up. So the problem is that our current approach to this seems to be ‘Just Say No’, and the idea that the only reason that kids ever take drugs is peer pressure.(knowing laughter) Let’s realize that there may be other reasons. They may want something else, something new, something that’s fun, something other than the routine they’re used to, and lucid dreaming could provide that for them, in a way that is safe and legal and harmonious with their development. So I think that there could be real value in developing lucid dreaming as a kind of drug-abuse inoculation.

  DJB: What kind of techniques, do you think, are the most effective for dream recall and actually producing lucid dreams?

  Stephen: If you were to say, I want to become a lucid dreamer, how should I go about it? I would say that means you’ve got some extra time and energy in your life, some unallocated attention that you could apply to working on this. If you’re somebody that’s so busy that you have hardly time to take a walk, you’re not going to have the time and energy to do this. We have developed a course in lucid dreaming that is designed for people to use at home. The first lesson in there is about how you develop dream recall.

  After you’ve got a sufficient level of dream recall you start studying your dreams for the dream signs; what’s dream-like about them? You then start doing exercises that use your focus in your mind on your typical dream content, becoming more reflective and developing your ability to have specific intentions that you carry out in the future and so on. The course in lucid dreaming right now is something you can use either with or without a DreamLight® which is a device we developed primarily in response to people’s requests for methods to help them have lucid dreams. It’s a mask that you wear while you’re asleep and it flashes a light during REM, not so much as to wake you up but enough to remind you in your dream that you are dreaming.

  RMN: A lot of people hear about this phenomena and then have a lucid dream for the first time; it happened to me when I first read your book. How much do you think that realizing this is possible is linked to the ability to lucid dream?

  Stephen: That’s clearly important, and what you’ve just described happens very frequently. Part of what you learn when you learn how to have lucid dreams is that you can do it. However, if you’re thinking, "I’m not sure I can", that ‘I’m not sure I can’ is a barrier. The problem is, since it rarely happens for most people, then it gives you the idea that it must be difficult, instead of thinking that it rarely happens simply because you never have the mental set where you’re thinking I want this to happen, and I’m intending to do this.

  RMN: What are some of the benefits that you’ve observed and experienced from developing this skill?

  Stephen: The applications of lucid dreaming range from the poor man’s Tahiti, the adventure and exploration and thrill part of it, to the mental rehearsal, the practice, trying things out in the dream state that you’ve learned. You can also develop motor skills or work on overcoming shyness, overcoming nightmares, dealing with fears and of course there’s the mental health aspect of it that might have extensions into a broader sense of health. On the basis of mind-body experiments that we’ve done at Stanford using the signaling technique, we’ve found that when you dream, you do something to your brain that’s as if you’ve actually done it. So there are very strong relationships between dream content and physiological response which we think could be used for facilitating healing, facilitating the function of the immune system in some way.

  DJB: Have you done any studies on that?

  Stephen: No but in the book Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, we published anecdotes of people doing some kinds of healing. These are all uncontrolled in that they decide at some point in time that they’re going have a lucid dream in which something is healed and sure enough it gets better, but we don’t know if it would have got better on it’s own or at what rate and so on.

  RMN: What about the potential for incorporating lucid dreaming into an educational program in the sense of sleep-learning?

  Stephen: The most important kind of sleep-learning that you can do is not having a tape-recording and trying to pipe more factual information into you. Sleep time is not a very good time for taking in information, but lucid dreams are an excellent opportunity for experiential learning, for finding out about the wisdom of life. Having an encounter with a dragon, for example
, which you won’t ever have the opportunity for in the waking state. You have to have the courage to resist the fear that you’ll actually feel, to say this dragon is a mental image - a mental image can’t hurt me, and then to act on that. I would advise having a conversation, making friends with the dragon. The point is, is that what you can learn from your experiences in the lucid dream state are things that can apply to your waking state. When you learn that when you face your problems and fears you overcome them, and things turn out better than they do when you simply try to avoid them, that generalizes and you have more sense of self-confidence that you can do things. Your security can improve as you realize that you can handle difficult situations if you keep your head about you.

  DJB: It actually sounds real similar to Virtual Reality.

  Stephen: Right. To put it in terms of Virtual Reality, I would say that lucid dreaming is high resolution (actual laughter) Virtual Reality with appropriate technology now. The best computers we can get are our brains. If you look at the pluses and minuses of the two approaches, you see with lucid dreaming that you have something which is not directly shareable; I can’t record a lucid dream and say here, you try it. The Virtual Reality with an external computer that generates everything has the potential of doing that, but it’s just like a playback, it’s more like watching a video-tape than it is actually doing something. Jaron Lanier has complained about VR not having that unexpectedness and intuitive suprise, and of course there’s plenty of that in lucid dreaming. Clearly the lucid dream state has much more felt reality. At this point no one has anything near to a solution of how you can be embodied in VR. If you’re driving a car, or flying, you know, that’s easy to represent because all you see is, here’s the wheel and there’s the picture out there - and that feels real. Yet the moment that you want your body to be walking, you see the picture move, but you don’t feel like your doing it.

  DJB: Well in North Carolina they’ve developed treadmills that simulate the sensation of walking with tactile sensors.

  Stephen: Okay, suppose you want to go to the lab? (pointed laughter) Sorry you can’t, you can only walk this way.

  DJB: It actually has a steering column that allows you to change direction.

  Stephen: Well, okay (virtual laughter) the point is, at this stage the technology is limited.

  RMN: In terms of the difference in the potential for empathy between VR and lucid dreaming, have you explored the possibility of conscious dream sharing with another person? I’ve read about Alaskan shamans who claim to be able to visit their shaman buddies in their sleep.

  Stephen: I haven’t really experimented with that. I consider to it be theoretically possible, but it’s not something that I felt was of developmental value first of all. There are many aspects of dream control that I haven’t pursued. I’ve emphasized instead controlling myself and my responses to what happens, instead of making it magically different, because I’ve wanted something that would generalize the waking state. In this world we don’t have the power to magically make other people appear and disappear. There have been a few people who’ve said, "I can visit you in your dream" and I’ve said, "Okay do so." But I’ve never experienced an unequivocal success that I remember. I think the problem is that we tend to bring mental models from the waking state into the dream state.

  So we have expectations in the dream, especially in a lucid dream. Here it is, it’s all so real, and so hey! you two people look perfectly real to me so you’ll remember this conversation later, right? Now why would I think you’d do that, any more that I would think this table would remember this conversation? One of the things you have to do in developing skill with lucid dreaming is to be critical of your state of mind. So you wake up from a lucid dream and you think, did I make some assumptions that were inappropriate or do something that didn’t make sense? So you can therefore refine and clarify your thinking and build up mental models that are appropriate to the dream world. I dreamt in a lucid dream that I was flying above the San Francisco Bay, and I had the thought, my body is asleep over there, I’ll go visit it. (inappropriate laughter) And I woke and said, what? This is a dream! Your body’s not in there or you’d be in trouble if your body’s asleep in your own dream, how could you wake up? People who don’t make that extra effort don’t tend to learn.

  RMN: Some inventions have come about through lucid dreaming-- for example, the sewing machine and part of Einstein’s equations. Have you found a link between creativity and lucid dreaming?

  Stephen: We have anecdotes from people who’ve used lucid dreaming for creative problem-solving or artistic creation of some kind. It’s surely a state where you can get a great many ideas, the problem is that not every idea you get is good. I think the major value of lucid dreaming is in giving people the sense that we live in a much wider world than we might imagine.

  DJB: So becoming lucid in a dream can be analogous to what people call a spiritual awakening?

  Stephen: Yeah. Giving people the idea of what life would be like if we realize that everyday life is sleep-walking and that there can be a further kind of awakening.

  RMN: It seems that lucid dreaming can do much to help people broaden and develop their sense of themselves. Do you see lucid dreaming becoming a successful part of a psychotherapeutic program?

  Stephen: Oh yes, very clearly. I think that’s one of the strongest applications we have, what I think has the most definite proved value so far. There are a few psychotherapists who are using it, but it has been slow to catch on. Lucid dreaming is the most obvious approach to overcoming nightmares, telling people that they are imagining fears and they just have to exercise courage to face it somehow. I’d say that the great value of lucid dreaming is as a means of self-development, a sort of self-therapy. This would apply to people that have an interest in getting to know themselves better and becoming more whole. I would think that people who are interested in something like Jungian analysis would be good candidates for this kind of thing, where they can take responsibility for the individuation process and help to further it in the dream state.

  DJB: Has your experience with psychedelics influenced your research?

  Stephen: In a way. It was one of the things that inspired me to take an interest in the mind and before that, as I said earlier, I had no interest in the mind, I was interested only in the outside world. At first I wanted to be making analogs of tryptamines because I was thinking we just need to modify these molecules and then they’ll really work instead of almost telling you all. That was my naiveté, not realizing that the problem wasn’t the molecule, the problem was the mind.

  From going from the ordinary state of perceiving the world to an extraordinary state of perceiving the world, I would think, so this is what it’s really like! Of course the next day when I was back in the usual state, comparing the two, I realized, of course, that wasn’t what it was like and this is not what it’s like. They’re both mental models or simulations. It’s something that was very important for me in terms of understanding the power of the mind and seeing how just changing some of the operations parameters in the perceptual system could lead to a radically different view of the world. I think it’s shocking and a tragedy what’s happened with the illegality of these substances, preventing scientific research and therapeutic use and I look forward to the day when that changes.

  RMN: There seems to be a correlation between psychedelic consciousness and lucid consciousness in the dream state.

  Stephen: There’s a lot in common between the two states. In fact people can in the dream state, take a dream "psychedelic" and have it produce an effect.

  DJB: Terence McKenna says that he smokes DMT in his dreams and then has the full experience.

  Stephen: And what that shows is that what prevents us from having these experiences is not the chemical, it’s the mental framework. So in a way psychedelics can be a kind of guide in revealing some of the potential in the mind. I think they have limitations in terms of taking us to the visions they show
us. One can take the mistaken path of saying, well since I had the taste of it with the substance, if I keep taking it I’ll eventually get the whole thing because more of the same should help. It doesn’t seem to work that way.

  RMN: Do you think that lucid dreaming is a more valid approach to personal development than psychedelics in as much as it can become more of a yoga, or do you think they’re equally likely to have a long-lasting beneficial effect on someone’s life?

  Stephen: Well, I would say almost any experience can be valuable to a person if they’re prepared to make use of it, and psychedelics or lucid dreams can be very useful if a person heeds the lessons that experience brings. It’s not what happens to a person that matters, it’s what they make of it. In a way lucid dreaming requires more of your own responsibility in making it happen and dealing with it. It’s easy enough to take a pill and that can put you in a relatively passive role.