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By now we’ve all at least heard of and many of us have experienced the lucid dream state. In a lucid dream you wake up in the dream, realize that you are in a dream, and can then take some control of the dream. Dreams are fantastic all by themselves, but when you are in the lucid state, you can make anything happen in them. While I’ve not made a real discipline of it, I have had many lucid dreams. I’ve run superhumanly fast, flown and played games with others that involved making objects violate what would be physical laws, but that do not apply at the density of the dream state. This has been great fun.

Here and there I’ve seen some good instructions on how to wake up to the lucid dream state and to gain greater focus and control. Standouts from them include: A passage from Don Juan to Carlos Casteneda telling him that if he’s waking up in a dream, to look at his hands and concentrate, pulling his consciousness into sharper focus. You’ll notice that it can be very hard to read in the dream state. An effort of will is required to hold the letters and words on a page still as they tend to squiggle around as you try to read them. A great scene from the movie Waking Life by Richard Linklatter, where the protagonist (it’s never made completely clear whether he’s lucid dreaming or in transition) is in room with four guys who take turns instructing him in waking up to the lucid dream state. One tells him that if he thinks he’s dreaming, to go to a light switch and if flipping it up and down does not change the light in the room, then it’s a good bet that it is a dream. A year or so ago I had just that experience and got so excited jumping up to fly that I woke myself up to the physical. That is something that will often happen when practicing to lucid dream.

I want to suggest another level. Often when I am explaining the meditation process that I teach I will say, “They’ll tell you that the physical plane is Maya, an illusion, a dream plane. And they’re right, it is a dream plane like any other plane. But when you stub your toe it freakin’ hurts, and when you feel extreme pleasure you do feel that pleasure, and the reason for those experiences is the density of the physical plane.” It is the density of the physical plane that makes for the seeming solidity of it. While fantastic things happen in dreams, they lack the tangibility, the “realness” of what happens in the physical world. But the physical is a dream plane no less than the lower astral where dreaming mostly occurs, and this brings me closer to the point.

The world that we seem to live in is a shared dream, a consensual reality that we all co-create together. We each have our own piece of it, and create that for ourselves, but it takes place within the context of the larger matrix we all contribute to. It is a dream. And we can wake up in it and lucidly experience and create it consciously just as we can in the sleeping dream state. The difference is only that the physical dream is much denser than the other.

We have to realize that while the physical is not as malleable as the astral, it far more malleable than it seems. One of the more dramatic examples of this is the spontaneous remission of cancers and other diseases that sometimes miraculously disappear from one day to the next as the individual’s consciousness shifts and makes that happen. It may not be as easy to shapeshift the physical as the astral, but it can be and is done all the time.

By whatever meditative practice you’re attracted to, wake up to your physical dream and create it consciously. We are all manifesting our existence, shaping the unformed into the formed, by our consciousness, such as we maintain it. The dream metaphor works as well as any other. So, as I wrote in an earlier piece. Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, ever more merrily, life is but a dream.

As Jeanne has noted in her column last month and this, the edition of The Monthly Aspectarian that you read this in is our 30th anniversary issue. She has well said what needs to be said about that. But as we enter the next 30 years, we wish you, yours, and all the world, sweet dreams.

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