Dream Lucidity and NDE...John Wren Lewis

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Dream Lucidity and Near-Death Experience:

A Personal Report by John Wren-Lewis

Attempts to investigate correlations between the incidence of lucid

dreaming and

near-death experiences (NDEs) have so far been inconclusive (Lucidity

Letter, Vol. 1,

Nos. 2 and 3, 1982). The following are some observations following my

own NDE in

November, 1983, which suggests a new approach.

My NDE itself, which I have described elsewhere (Wren-Lewis, 1985),

lacked almost

all the dramatic features emphasized in the now voluminous literature

on the subject

(Lundahl, 1982). I had no " out-of-body " vision of myself in the

hospital bed, no

review of my life, no experience of hurtling through a tunnel towards

a heavenly

landscape and no encounter with supernatural figures urging me to

return to bodily

existence. I simply dissolved into an apparently spaceless and

timeless void which

was total " no-thing-ness " yet at the same time the most intense,

blissful aliveness I

have ever known.

The after-effects of the experience, however, were dramatic indeed,

and I have found

no account of anything comparable in the NDE literature. I have been

left with a

change of consciousness so palpable that in the early days I kept

putting my hand up

to the back of my head, feeling for all the world as if the doctors

had removed the top

of my skull and exposed my brain to the infinite darkness of space.

In fact the Living

Void is still with me as a kind of background to my consciousness.

The effect is that I

experience everything, including this sixty-year-old body-mind, as a

continuous

outpouring of Being, wherein every part is simultaneously the whole,

manifesting

afresh moment by moment from that infinite Dark. As " John " I seem to

have no

separate existence, but am simply the Void knowing itself in mani-

festation, and in

that process of continuous creation everything seems to celebrate

coming into being

with a shout of joy— " Behold, it is very good! " Yet the exper-ience is

in no sense a

high, for its feeling-tone is one of gentle equanimity. My impression

is rather that I

am now knowing the true ordinariness of everything for the first

time, and that what I

used to call normal consciousness was in fact clouded.

I still slip back into that old clouded state frequently, but this is

not a process of

" coming down. " What happens is something I would have found

unbelievable had I

heard of it second-hand—namely, I again and again simply forget about

the pearl of

great price. I drift off into all kinds of preoccupations, mostly

trivial, and become my

old self, cut off from the Void-Background. Then, after a while,

there begins to dawn

on me a sense of something missing, at which point I recall the Void

and usu-ally

click back into the new consciousness almost immediately, with no

effort at all.

I think this is what is meant by the mystical notion that so-called

normal human life is

really a state of chronic forgetfulness of " who we really are, " and I

suppose my NDE

must somehow have shocked me into recognizing my identity with the

Void, with the

result that my forgetfulness is now spasmodic rather than chronic.

Needless to say, I

was bowled over by all this at first, and spent many weeks coming to

terms with it. I

soon found that the new consciousness did not seem to demand any

drastic changes of

life-style. In keeping with its sense of utter ordinariness, I

remained recognizably

John, and neither my tendency to drift out of the new consciousness

nor my ability to

 

click back into it seemed affected in any way by variations in diet,

environment, or

activities such as meditation.

Changes in Dreaming Patterns

One change that did impress me, however, was that to begin with my

sleep seemed to

become quite dreamless. Hitherto I had always been a big dreamer. In

fact I seemed

no longer to experience sleep as unconsciousness, but rather as with-

drawal into

something like the pure void-state of the original NDE. Then, after

about two weeks, I

woke one morning with a dream, and was very disappointed to find it a

rather

" boring " scenario totally lacking in mystical consciousness. My

disappoint-ment grew

as this experience was repeated several times over the following

weeks, and I

wondered if it meant my new consciousness was somehow superficial,

doomed to

fade before long. In fact, however, the consciousness remained

undiminished in

waking hours and at sleep onset; with a scientist's hankering after

quantification, I

estimated that I stayed in it between 30% and 50% of my waking time.

The explanation of its absence from dreams became apparent as soon as

I put aside

disappointment and resumed regular dream-work, using the approach

devel-oped by

my wife, Dr. Ann Faraday (Faraday, 1973; 1976). I found that my

dreams now, just as

in my pre-NDE life, were working over, in their own distinctive

dramatic-symbolic

mode, various specific unresolved concerns of the day—and I

immediately

recognized these as the very preoccupations that had obscured

mystical consciousness

during my " drifts into forgetfulness. " In fact my disappointment came

from not taking

our own dream theory seriously enough.

In the Faraday view, most dreams—even happy, creative, numinous,

archetypal and

transpersonal ones—derive from waking concerns requiring further

attention, mainly

thoughts, feelings or subliminal vibes passed over during the day

because we were

either too busy or unwilling to examine them. The essence of my

mystical

consciousness, on the other hand, is that each moment is enjoyed with

full feelingattention—

not because I stop thinking or imagining, but because I am coming

from a

state of complete satisfaction with whatever is in the moment,

irrespective of what has

to be completed along the line of time. The clouds descend when

consciousness gets

caught up in some concern, high or low, and forgets its identity with

the Void-Ground

—and normal dreaming, in which the self is completely involved in

whatever dreamdrama

is going on, is an exact reflection of this state of preoccupied

forgetfulness.

Realizing this, I understood why many mystics have referred to

unenlightened human

life as a kind of waking dream. I also recalled the claim often made

by J.

Krishnamurti that he had " no need to dream " because he completes each

waking

moment in fully satisfied feeling-attention. He awakens each morning,

he says, to a

world completely new and fresh, having spent the night in a state

beyond both dream

and dreamlessness—perhaps the same state which Tibetan yoga describes

as

transcending the state between sleep and waking (Chang, 1963). Could

this have been

what I experienced in the first two weeks after the NDE?

What About Lucidity?

I remained very puzzled, however, about where lucid dreams fit into

this picture, and

tried several experiments to induce them by pre-sleep suggestion,

without suc-cess.

 

And then, at Easter 1984, I got my answer, and also my first dream

that did include

mystical consciousness, through an entirely unforeseen circumstance.

The occasion was a dinner party in Sydney at which my host continued

unob-trusively

to fill my glass with superb Australian wine to the point where I had

drunk more than

is my custom. All my Puritan Christian conditioning, reinforced by my

studies in

Eastern mysticism since the NDE, closed in on me with the fear that I

might have

sabotaged my mystical consciousness. In actual fact I could not

detect any clouding at

all—the party, and the streets on the way home after, were full of

the usual blissful

" Isness. " But my worrying Topdog voices wouldn't be shaken off, and I

went to bed

half convinced that I would wake next day to find I had betrayed my

gift of grace,

dissolved the pearl of great price in a mess of alcohol. Instead, I

had the most

remarkable dream of my life. Since it occupies seven pages of my

dream diary, I can

only give a bare summary here. It began as an ordinary dream.

I was wandering around Sydney and gradually becoming aware that most

people

couldn't see me because I was dead. Of the few who could, one was

Ann, and another

the real-life President of the Australian Institute for Psychical

Research, Eric Wedell.

He seemed to have a special responsibility for instructing me in how

to handle this

strange post-mortem existence, and when he mentioned wine I suddenly

became

lucid. I knew this was a dream, in which my ghostly invisibility

symbolized my post-

NDE state and the dream-characters who could see me were the people

who in

waking life recognized that I was living in heaven here on earth,

dead to " this world. "

I also knew I was creating this dream to explore my concern about

drink and mystical

consciousness, and I became aware of lying in bed in our apartment

overlooking

Sydney Harbor Bridge with my mouth dry from mild alcoholic

dehydration.

Still in the dream, I recalled the discussion in Lucidity Letter

following Charles Tart's

proposal (Tart, 1984) to restrict the term " lucid " to dreams in which

there is full

rational consciousness, including awareness of lying in a particular

bed asleep. I

thought to myself, `Well, here's one for you Charlie!', and continued

with the dream,

main-taining simultaneous consciousness of lying in bed in one room

while talking to

Eric in a quite different dream-room. I asked him outright what were

the heavenly

rules about drinking, to which he replied that " here, " drink just

wasn't available for

people likely to abuse it—and wouldn't I like to try this new

vintage? With a flash I

saw that the real threat to my mystical consciousness lay not in

drink itself but in

getting caught up into an internal dialogue about drink, and to

celebrate this " break "

in dream-terms, I walked straight through the wall of the dream-room.

As I emerged into the street by the harbor my dream was flooded with

mystical

consciousness, not as something new, but as a simple recognition of

what had actually

been there all along, the exact same sense I have when I click back

into the consciousness

in waking life. I flew over the water, borne by a wind I knew to be

the breath of

God on creation's first morning, and fainted at the beauty of it all—

to wake in bed,

my eyes brimming with tears of gratitude.

The gratitude has returned many times since, for I have used the

insight again and

again in waking life to break out of internal Topdog/Underdog

dialogues (of many

different kinds) and click back into mystical consciousness far

sooner than I would

otherwise have done. Largely thanks to this particular piece of dream-

work, I am now

 

enjoying the mystical state for well over half of most days,

sometimes much more,

and this has been accompanied by some quite astonishing effects—for

example, an

ability to take even quite unpleasant experiences like pain into the

consciousness and

find them, too, " very good " as I have described elsewhere (Wren-

Lewis, 1985).

For the record here, I must state that I have not noticed any

decrease in my dreaming,

but this is no surprise. Dreams deal with specific unresolved

concerns, any one of

which can sometimes be worked over by several dreams of the same

night, so even a

small amount of time caught up in preoccupation during the day could

still generate as

much " need to dream " as a whole day of clouding. The " Krishnamurti

phenomenon, "

if it occurs, would represent a quantum jump to com-plete

dreamlessness when daily

drifting into preoccupation is reduced to zero, and I am a long way

from that yet.

Interpreting Lucid Dreams

Meantime, my main concern here is to report what I have learned from

all this about

lucid dreaming, and once again I must necessarily resort to summary.

My dream

described above completely confirms Faraday's view (Faraday, 1976)

that the

contents of lucid dreams, including breakthroughs, flying and even

the act of

" awakening " to lucidity, can be interpreted in the same way as the

contents of nonlucid

dreams. Faraday links varying degrees of self-reflection or lucidity

in dream-ing

to occasions of comparable " awakening " during the day, when we catch

our-selves

out (albeit only partially or fleetingly) getting lost in some

internal drama of our own

making. In my case, the fleeting moment of waking lucidity must have

occurred on

the drive home from the party, when I looked around the Sydney

streets and found

them still full of blissful " Isness, " despite my Topdog trying to

persuade me

otherwise.

The dream very clearly portrayed mystical consciousness as beyond

the " awakening "

to lucidity. Following the logic of a Faraday interpretation, I see

this as a reflection of

the fact that mystical consciousness includes but goes beyond psy-

chological

" awakening " to one's internal dramas. This jibes with Ken Wilber's

repeated

insistence (Wilber, 1981; 1983) that psychotherapy and human

potential work can

never themselves bring fulfillment or liberation, which is

transpersonal, though they

provide an essential foundation for it. In Wilber's paradigm,

mystical consciousness is

presented as a separate stage of development, requiring yogic or Zen

techniques, after

psychological self-awareness has been attained; in my case, having

been catapulted

into mystical consciousness by the shock of the NDE, I now find

myself having to use

the self-therapy of dream-work to claim fully what I already have

much of the time.

Because my NDE has given me this foothold beyond psychological self-

awareness, I

would expect, on Faraday principles, to have fewer spontaneous lucid

dreams than I

did before, since any time I catch myself out in an internal drama

during the day I

normally click straight back into mystical consciousness with no

opportunity for the

self-awareness to become an unfinished concern. I think lucid dreams

are likely to

arise for me now only in rather special circumstances like the Easter

party, and so far

I have had no further instances. For anyone without a mystical

foothold beyond

psychological self-awareness, on the other hand, I would expect the

practice of

regular dream-work of other human potential disciplines to be

accompanied by an

increase in all the stages of lucidity in dreams, just as Faraday

reports (Faraday, 1976;

1978).

 

I suspect that my Archimedean foothold beyond self-awareness was also

in some way

responsible for the fact that my Easter 1984 dream gave me full " Tart-

style " lucidity

for the first time in my life, though the precise logic of this is

not yet clear to me. I

think Tart is wise to emphasize (Tart, 1984) that there could be some-

thing like a

difference of kind, rather than merely of degree, between knowing

clearly in a dream

that one is its author and actually being aware of sleeping in bed

and of dreaming

simultaneously. While the former would seem, on Faraday's prin-ciple,

to reflect

some unacknowledged moment of self-awareness during the day, Tart's

lucidity

seems to imply a state of consciousness transcending the distinction

between sleep

and waking, as envisaged in Tibetan dream yoga. I should therefore be

extremely

interested to know if Tart or anyone else who has experienced what he

wants to call

lucidity in dreams has ever done it spontaneously, or whether it is

the result of some

special exercise, as would be expected on Wilber's paradigm.

In the light of all the above I would expect no simple correlation

between NDEs and

the incidence of lucid dreaming. There might even be a negative

correlation if NDEs

regularly produced mystical consciousness with full feeling-attention

and complete

satisfaction in each waking moment. Most NDEs, however, seem only to

produce

conversion-experiences, which, if they involve an impulse towards

greater selfawareness,

might bring an increase in lucid dreaming according to Faraday's

paradigm.

References

Chang, G. (1963). Teachings of Tibetan yoga. New York: University

Books.

Faraday, A. (1973). Dream power. New York: Berkeley Books.

Faraday, A. (1976). The dream game. New York: Harper & Row (Perennial

Library).

Faraday, A. (1978). Once upon a dream. Voices (Spring).

Lundahl, C.R. (Ed.) (1982). A collection of near-death findings.

Chicago: Nelson-

Hall.

Tart, C. (1984). Terminology in lucid dream research. Lucidity

Letter, 3(1), 4–6.

Wilber, K. (1981). No boundary. Los Angeles: Shambhala.

Wilber, K. (1983). Eye to eye. Garden City, New York:

Doubleday/Anchor.

Wren-Lewis, J. (1985). The darkness of God. Bulletin of the

Australian Institute for

Psychical Research, No. 5.