Something just dawned on me: I’ve read both Man and His Symbols and Carl Jung: Selected Writings, and as extensive and brilliant as his work is, I cannot remember a single instance where this man mentioned LD.
But it just seems impossible. I can hardly think of any man who was more engaged in the subconcious and the world of our dreams than Jung. How could he have never mentioned them, or not used them in his research into the collective unconscious?
Entire books have been written on dreams and dreaming without mentioning the words “lucid dream” or making a special issue about being conscious of being in the dream state. Until the anthropologists had published that the Islanders were doing what they termed “lucid dreaming” no one had really thought in exactly those terms before.
But Jung did talk about Big Dreams which he defined as particularly vivid, and as we all know, at least from our best Lucid Dreams, that they are indeed rather vivid.
Also, about Lucid Dreams, as they are now popularly understood, well, we can not expect them to ever have been mentioned by any reputable scholar for the simple reason that, as they are now defined, they do not really exist, now do they. People talk about having ‘complete dream control’, and, well, we know by our own experiences that we do not have complete control of our dreams, and that in fact our Dream Minds actively fight against us taking over our dreams (with false awakenings, and such). Yes, certain people ‘claim’ to have complete control of their dreams, but when such people write their expositions, we find that we cannot really be sure if they have the reflective capacity to even know the details involved in asserting ‘complete’ control, and it rather simply looks like they are using words they have seen very often and do not really know what they mean.
So Jung talked about Big Vivid Dreams. Well, perhaps that is safest, because we can agree upon that. But much of the Lucid Dream conceptual model and structure is still up in the air. Here, check out this page – a collection of scholarly essays regarding Lucidity sawka.com/spiritwatch/tableof.htm
Some of these essays are critical of what were some of the original claims and promises for Lucid Dreaming that are still rampant and loudly echoing about even after years of discreditation and reproof. Read Dr. Ann Faraday’s “The Selling of the Senoi”.
You see, Lucid Dreaming has become one of the New Age Industries, a gold mine that the carnival barkers do not want to give up on. So it has almost become a right of passage for young people to discover Lucid Dreaming, to explore all the promises, and then to decide that, yet again, they have been deceived, once more, by the older generation… who gets to walk away with a few more dollars.
Leo, you strike me as a person who has never had a high-level lucid dream before. Which is fine, of course, though it does seem to be influencing your view on what defines a dream that is under “full control” of the dreamer.
Yes, particularly in recent years, lucid dreaming has become a topic that seems closely bound to spirituality and new-age beliefs. But the difference becomes evident in the relatively modern research that has proven its validity to mainstream science. There’s no doubt that people have the ability to become conscious in their dreams, as demonstrated by various experiments (many of which hosted by leading researcher Stephen LeBerge), and it seems viable that experience and dedication can lead to heightened levels of vividness and control over time. In my own experience over the past five years, there seems to be an almost limitless potential for just how aware one can become while still in the dreaming state.
Consider for a moment that I’m a strict atheist. I don’t subscribe to unearthly phenomena unless I’ve seen it for myself, and let me tell you, there’s nothing superficial or unrealistic about high-level lucid dreaming. You raise a good point, and I agree that earlier records don’t describe the experience with quite as much enthusiasm as modern practitioners tend to do, but this seems to be an artifact of popularity rather than an attempt to claim “rite of passage” as you suggested.
Perhaps I’m missing your point. Feel free to clarify if I’m drawing the wrong conclusions from your post.
I wonder that you read what I wrote, or whether I was not very clear. We seem to agree on the most important things, and I don’t hear you defending what I am arguing against, and so I wonder that you are coming up with arguments.
What you say indicates that you correlate Lucid Dreaming with intensity of awareness. Fine. So why are you dumping on me?
You don’t seem to be defending the infantile impulse to make all dreaming about self-satisfaction and total control, that is the impulse of the little baby to see the entire universe as centered upon and circled upon the self, who only cares about sucking the tit. This is basically what the Doctrine of Dream Control is all about, to turn Collective Dreaming back toward the Self.
Now, Dreaming with Awareness, and allowing Dreams to take their course even while achieving full consciousness will open the Self to the Universe and will pull one toward Collectivity.
Practically speaking, I have noticed over the years that I have become less the individualist and more part of a larger group within my dreams. Dream Control brings isolation, but simply by focusing on higher awareness, one’s identification becomes greater as one enlarges up from Self to Group.
Forgive me if I misinterpreted your last post, but I got the impression you were denying our ability to take full control of our dreams. “We can not expect them [lucid dreams] to ever have been mentioned by any reputable scholar for the simple reason that, as they are now defined, they do not really exist.” You seem to be implying that we’ve recently invented the idea of being able to control our dreams fully, to the extent that we control our own waking actions. I’m simply here to state that I respectfully disagree. I believe there is ample documentation from earlier cultures to suggest that people have been learning to control their dreams for a significant portion of documented history. While I could still be misreading your comments, I get the impression that you’re treating lucid dreaming as new invention. A kind of vivid dream that we’re all pretending is the result of real, conscious control.
This doesn’t seem to make any sense to me, and I wonder how it would even be possible to respond to such a comment. Could you be more clear about what you’re trying to suggest?
Leo, could you elaborate on what you meant when you said “LD as they are now defined”?
Because both Fenwick and LaBerge have scientifically proven the individuals ability to be fully aware and take complete control over their dream state.
Also, in what books or articles did Jung mention ‘Big Dreams’?
Leo Volont is no longer a member