Discussant

Abstract

I’ll start with some interesting features in both Jayne Gackenbach’s and Celia Green’s descriptions of lucid dreams which I believe become understandable if we relate lucid dreaming to what we know of meditation. Specifically, I’d like to start with what Green in her 1968 book calls the psychological and perceptualrealism of lucid dreams, possibly in turn related to what Jayne today has talked about as a sort of thematic flatness. Such observations are important, but have been hard to fit with other findings. Certainly, the cognitive clarity of lucid dreams does seem to be the opposite of the tendency in normative dreaming toward clouding and confusion, what Rechtscaffen calls their single-mindedness. And since cognitive reflection within the dream can initiate lucidity, this has given rise, for many of us to the view that lucid dreaming might be an approximation to our full waking faculties within the dream, with their supposed clarity. Similarly, Green has rightly pointed to the perceptual realism and clarity of lucid dreams, their tendency at times to meticulously imitate physical reality, and to the relative absence of extreme forms of bizarre transformation, which was also reflected in some of Jayne’s comments today. So again we could get the picture of a single continuum running through dreams, from bizarre dreams through more realistic true to daily life dreams and into lucidity and control. And if dream bizarreness is to be taken as direct evidence of creative symbolism operating in dream formation, which follows from both Fraud and Jung, then we seem to again to have a single continuum between symbolic dreams and lucid dreams on which all dreams could be placed.