“Dream Lucidity and Near-Death Experience”: A Lucidity-Meditation Analysis

Abstract

Wren-Lewis’ fascinating account shows an apparently very rare approximation of near-death experience to a felt dissolution into voidness and mystical enlightenment. If such full experiences do occur in the actually dying then one could infer that most resuscitated patients are pulled back earlier from its access stages. Consistent with other accounts of mystical realization, previous daily life is now seen as a clouded forgetfulness closely akin to ordinary dreaming, both being characterized by a narrowed pragmatic involvement that is “forgetful” of just that overall context or perspective that comes with enlightenment (temporary or long term) and is made more likely with meditative practice (the major historical self-awareness technique). Similarly, deep dreamless sleep now occurs with ongoing awareness as the direct experience of voidness and there is an at least initial paucity of dreams--possibly because background phasic physiological discharges are no longer clustered within the REM state or are more generally reduced and equilibrated. The dreams that do occur are correspondingly ordinary-based on “day residue” in-completion. He plausibly suggests that any association between NDE and lucid dreams would depend on the enhancement of reflective self-awareness resulting from intermediate level NDE carrying over into dreams, which is also consistent with several suggestions that dream lucidity is itself a spontaneous meditative state. Indeed both developed meditation and lucid dreaming share a receptivity to a broader sense of context that balances off the narrowing involvements of the everyday world with all its “projects” (necessarily completed because endlessly renewed and redefined). I have recently reported two studies in which we found a correlation between meditative practice and tendency to lucid-control dreams.