THE DREAM-CONSCIOUS STATE: A PERSONAL JOURNAL OF INNER EXPLORATION
Bruce G. Marcot
BACKGROUND
Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.
--Charles William DementIn the 1970's I kept a personal log of lucid dreams and other extra-ordinary dream experiences, as a way of charting my progress toward what has been called "personal power." Far from a new-age fashion, I believe that lucid dreaming and dream control has vast implications for personal "centeredness," directly tapping into and balancing with the subconscious ... and beyond.
The "beyond" may entail what the Tibetan Book of the Dead and similar writings have referred to as the Bardo, or the Between. The Bardo is the expansion of the mind following death. In the Bardo, what the mind thinks, usually subconsciously, is what one then perceives as real.
Bardo images can be intensely terrifying, according to the Book of the Dead. But they also can be utterly controlled, by practicing lucid dreaming. In fact, the entire intent of the Book of the Dead -- which is really intended to be read by and for a living person -- is to "awaken" the consciousness of oneself, including the recently departed. Awakening to such realization, to Buddhahood, while wandering in the Bardo is instantly triggered the moment that one becomes self-aware, and consciously realizes that the images being perceived are mere projections of the mind. Like dreams, the Bardo images can be controlled, if the subject has practiced sufficiently in meditation, lucid dreaming, and dream control.
Whether the Bardo really "exists" or not (or something like it, such as the Catholic concept of limbo or purgatory, or the Aborigines' concept of dreamtime and the dream world) is, of course, rather unprovable scientifically.
So at the worst, practice in meditation and lucid dreaming throughout my life has allowed me to link tightly with my subconscious and to treat each moment as its own eternity (meaning intense quality of existence, not duration of time), as Zen precepts assert. At the best, like some askew Pascal's wager, it has prepared me for death and whatever may lay beyond. And like the Book of the Dead asserts, the greatest gift would be to die lucid.
This report is not necessarily a treatise in Zen, nor in death or the Between. Rather, this is a summary journal of my experiences over the years in lucid dreaming and dream control. Let's begin.