East Meets West, Buddhism Meets Christianity: The Lucid Dream as a Path for Union

Abstract

When I think about lucid dreaming I think about a vast universe. In particular, I think about Christopher Columbus and regard his epic voyage as a perfect metaphor for what we are attempting to do in exploring the lucid dream state. When Columbus discovered a new world (new to Europeans) there were many ramifications of his discovery. I have always been intrigued by the maps that appear in our history books, maps of the new world that originated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, attempts on the part of those early cartographers to begin to describe and delineate what the explorers were discovering. Some of those early maps had some degree of accuracy and some were intriguingly misshapen. I think it is important for us to keep this metaphor in mind as we approach the vast spectrum of lucid dreaming which we are beginning to explore. I would like to discuss one end of this vast spectrum, the end that constitutes one of my primary areas of interest, namely the lucid dream as mystical experience.