A Personal Experience in Lucid Dream Healing

Abstract

First, let me describe my own qualifications and orientation in dreamwork. I normally recall three to five dreams per night, and have over the past decade or so written down and then fairly comprehensively indexed over 5,000 of my dreams. Of these dreams I have had several hundred that I characterize as fully lucid, meaning that within the dream I had at least the same degree of consciousness and free will (the ability to make conscious decisions) as in my physical reality waking state. During these experiences I have applied many of the standard tests for "realness" that one can apply to the physical world (from pinching myself, saying my name out loud, checking my dream body sensations, self-remembering, checking for consensus with other dream persons, etc.) and in each case dream reality has passed the tests. Of course, dream reality compared to physical reality has many profoundly different attributes, and I do not in any way wish to make light of those differences. But from a phenomenological point of view, which bases itself in experience rather than in theories about experience, I have found no basis other than prejudice for assigning any less "realness" to the lifeworld of my lucid dream state than to that of my awake physical state.