The Mystery

Waggoner and McCready broaden the approach to lucidity way beyond simply achieving it. They present lucidity not as the result of techniques or the ability to fly when you want to in a dream. Rather, they raise with the reader an inquiry into of the awareness of consciousness and its role in 'waking' and 'dreaming' reality. As a longtime meditator, I realized I can go through this doorway to get to lucidity and that truly, dreaming is about playing with the web of consciousness and its interrelatedness with all that is! Waggoner writes that through his practice of lucid dreaming, he discovered a 'consistent framework of rules and principles beneath lucid dreaming events' and that this 'hidden framework suggested that dreaming and the unconscious actually followed rules and had structure'. Dreaming is not just 'random firing of neurons'. In fact, he explores the idea that there is an intelligent awareness that exists behind our dreams and that thi

Lucid dreaming refers to realizing within a dream that you are dreaming. It is an ancient spiritual technique (used in Buddhist dream yoga, Taoism, Sufism, and numerous native wisdom traditions). However, the scientific evidence for lucid dreaming emerged in 1980, which makes lucid dreaming a fascinating subject, since this ancient spiritual technique has achieved scientific acceptance and investigation. In the video link below, Robert Waggoner examines the experiments which provided evidence for lucid dreaming, along with the more ancient view of lucid dreaming as a pathway to accelerated spiritual growth. He also examines the use of lucid dreaming by modern day psychotherapists to resolve recurring nightmares in people with PTSD, along with lucid dreaming's potential use in areas such as accessing inner creativity, exploring the unconscious, and spiritual practice. In 1975, Robert Waggoner taught himself a simple technique to lucid dream or become consciously aware of dreaming, w

Quantum effects in physics have been used by new agers and others to argue for all kinds of silly things concerning consciousness and human behavior, but it has to be said that at least these folks have tried to come to grips with philosophical issues of this science. Quantum information theory in particular, which sees the basic constituents of physical reality as bits of information, carries huge philosophical implications for psychology because the Mind is essentially an information processing system. Yet I can find no mainstream psychology reviews of quantum information theory at all. Even a cursory understanding of this new science suggests that the mind simply cannot be understood in terms of the old mechanical materialist dogmas that holds so many psychologists in thrall and unable to see facts that present themselves before their very eyes. We need to, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett (himself enthralled by mechanical materialism and speaking about religion rather than his fav

In the modern age, we've lost our reverence for the dream state. But REM sleep is what has made us special. We see glimpses of these other possible worlds in our dreams, and more and more evidence is accumulating, which suggests that REM sleep was absolutely critical to the evolution of the special cognitive capacities that human beings; evidence and therefore, critical to our cultural evolution, and our special creativity. And what REM sleep normally does is it creates this very high cholinergic environment in the brain. And that environment allows for intense creativity because it promotes connections between otherwise disparate ideas. So it creates all kinds of bizarre ideas, but all kinds of creative ideas as well. So, when our ancestors in the upper-Paleolithic acquired greater access to the REM sleep state, both during sleep and during waking consciousness, it helped to fuel the onset of cumulative cultural evolutionary processes. We know that REM sleep is especially importan