Introduction: Dream School

This manuscript is born from a traumatic period of my life in which knowing how to dream was a matter of survival. Spiritual traditions and scientific disciplines are often interested in the relationship between dreaming, lucidity, trauma, death, dying, meditation, perception, sensation, cognition, and realization. In my own healing journey and ongoing research I have focused exclusively on these kinds of relationships. Taken together, they provide an excellent starting point for talking about the nature of reality. They describe an underlying, fundamental architecture illustrating the nature of perception as a dream dynamic, both within and beyond our physical universe and physical bodies. Phenomena defined by transitional states of consciousness and the dissolution of the “default” self are meaningful events in and of themselves. However, they are also vital examples that can help us model and navigate ordinarily inaccessible knowledge about how being and reality work.

For better or for worse, this work will begin with the premise that consciousness, perception, energy, mass, matter, and the forces of classical physics are interchangeable substances. Modern science no doubt will come along to this conclusion in its own time, but requires proof on its own terms, which creates significant difficulties. Ancient spirituality has leapt far ahead of science in many regards, but also lacks important cosmological frameworks physics and quantum modeling has illuminated. Unfortunately, more often than not talking about transobjectivity is taboo in science and anthropomorphized in spirituality, both of which reduce an important and clear point about reality: it is a continuous, relativistic, interconnected series of accumulated dream perceptions. We cannot merely call such things “physical laws” nor “spiritual angels” nor “divine providence”–they can easily be all, more than that, and not like that at all. 

Nor will this work to convince anyone that lucid dreams and out of body experiences are real things. It will not actually “teach” anything (at least, not in the same way as self-help books about dreaming, lucidity, spiritual development, etc.) how to dream. Instead, we will begin at a premise that takes several large leaps aside from how most people think dreams work and what they think dreams are. That being said, I believe this text, if read considerately, will do more to help one live and dream with lucidity than a thousand self-help books. This is because dreaming, pursued directly through being, has a different angle of approach than trying to dream as an extension or byproduct of one’s ordinary existence.

This premise is what I concretely realized during my three years of research in the Damanhurian School for Awakened Dreams: One can achieve lucidity directly if it is approached as a fundamental and unifying property of the cosmos. Much of my life has been spent trying to unravel this mystery called by different names: consciousness, enlightenment, liberated perception, the absolute, emptiness, a holographic universe… Growing up I was an atheist, then studied developmental psychology in college, then joined a Hindu monastery to study meditation and philosophy, then exchanged my spiritual path for a therapeutic one focusing on trauma recovery, and finally arrived at a path researching lucid dreaming. This is also how I found Damanhur, standing like an island in time, expressing complex philosophy and highly refined disciplines extending far beyond the traditional considerations of eastern contemplative spirituality, western perennialism, indigenous wisdom, and the interests of scientific and academic enterprise. Damanhur is a place but also a stage of human development that is missing from any known kinds of civilization. Although every part of my journey has been valuable, in Damanhur I began an intensive and necessary process of dismantling all of my beliefs, values, ideology, and foundations. I realized that if I wanted to relate to my dreams, this is the price I should pay, not just to transform myself but to dismantle and reassess the limits of perception.

Even if there are no real shortcuts, I am extremely interested in developing methodology that can replicate my own success without suffering and trauma. There is enough space, I think, in this pursuit to hold high the ideals of an empirical methodology, embracing the raw impressionistic power of human experience, while also remaining humble and attentive before the mysteries of an acausal, living universal cosmology. These are also the rules for individuals and species that want to approach the foundations of everything. We must remember that what we do and don’t know is due precisely to the roots, not the fruits of our theories, principles, methods, tools, and practices. A premise is a concrete thing, a force, a speed limit. Knowledge arrives from but also reinforces fundamental assumptions about all levels and dimensions of phenomena, noumena, and sensibility. Foundational assumptions oppress, liberate, and help us navigate forward through chaos and complexity. Thought must be built up in a finely-tuned, responsive way. Our ability to think not only influences our choices and conclusions about life, but also literally assembles our sensation and perception of reality. It saturates our tissues, organs, and nerves and propagates our continuation through the afterlife.  It is an abiotic precognitive orientation that dictates what we can literally and figuratively see about ourselves and the universe around us. What is important for the direction of our evolution is that we can change this orientation and assemble reality in different ways: lucid dreaming. The level and power of our dreaming dictates how and what we can touch, recognize, relate to, transform, and become. 

Dreaming is essentially cognitive perception without limits, or with limits that extend out across transpersonal, abiotic, and primeval thresholds we are rarely prepared to cross. When we dream at night, we wrestle with this cosmic faculty, to filter it down through the associations of our level of perception. This renders certain layers of reality and ourselves invisible, making other aspects obtrusive, excessively dominant, and eclipse fundamental parts of life with exaggerated verisimilitude and self-importance. To reorient oneself more holistically requires changing one’s center of gravity—and often also tedious years of personality inventorying, dramatic cycles of unlearning, and relentless trial and error. Certainly it has for me. However, it is also a process that is expedited through the superorganizing mechanics of dreaming, which took me a long time to appreciate and cooperate with. Dreaming can accelerate the grafting of a more appropriate cosmological framework, becoming a fulcrum that reassembles our axis point with reality. Dreams may have personal meanings, but to realize “who” and “what” our dreamer is, it is vital to rediscover a human primeval urge to dream that we have conveniently justified into nonexistence. 

These are considerations I have seriously and deeply entertained for the purposes of lucid dreaming, self-healing, specialized transpersonal research, and preparing to write this thesis. I have had a long time to reflect and, of course, have tried many other techniques, disciplines, self-help strategies, and outcome based methodology to satisfy my primeval urge for movement. I have also used my own healing journey in order to seize precious opportunities to learn more about consciousness and reality. This includes several long bouts of insomnia, periods of psychosis, near death experiences, erratic out of body adventures, and superlucid projections exposing my psyche to bewildering transpersonal hyperdimensionality. I believe that to embrace these things, holding high the torch of an inquisitive and experimentally driven mind, are hallmarks of a great and responsible science yet to be born. 

It is an enterprising attitude which characterized my first year of Dream School, at which point I began to naturally lucid dream and travel outside of my body every night (whether I wanted to or not). With help from my teachers, I learned to organize my experiences with less pain and more direction. After decades of study, personal development work, and psychological and spiritual experimentation, in Damanhur the missing pieces of my inner world and outer model for the universe came rushing to realization all at once. Germinating seeds of theoretical knowledge burst forward into clear, active perception… It certainly helped that things I had timidly imagined possible were already well founded in Damanhur, often enriched by thirty or forty years of research and development. Relying on the framework and techniques offered by my teachers, my dream experiences gave me raw access to levels of perception I was able to repeatedly understand, navigate, and reapply. Night after night, for many years, my research and experimentation continued like this, as did my subjective healing and self-discovery process. This process sobered and tempered my initial supposition that everything is dreaming, and everything dreams. 

I once started dreaming while driving on the highway at night: My awareness tunnelled into a long series of lucid visions before evaporating from my physical body, which rather than going limp froze up on the steering wheel. I saw my dream and I saw the road at the same time. I managed to shift my foot off the accelerator. I nudged the wheel over to the right with my last few physically responsive fingers, drifting across six lanes of heavy traffic. I dreamed my way through a single chink in a long line of concrete dividers, coasting into a construction site, rolling to a stop just before a 20 foot ditch. My muscles eased up and I took a few gasping breaths. I opened my sun roof and finished my dream, leaning back and looking out at the stars. Although alarming, in the moment I was able to apply knowledge of lucidity and dreaming. Afterward, I was also able to better decipher and understand what had happened and why, and how to prevent further accidents which thankfully have not recurred. 

In my first year of Dream School, I slept only an hour or two at night and often had panic attacks during the day. I processed trauma from my own life, but also trauma born of deep and confusing exchanges with transpersonal forces that continuously assaulted my senses. Trauma can come from other lives, other ends of the universe, other timelines… A kind of “mock transpersonal trauma” can also occur when strong information and energy floods the physical body through a filter of fear. Distilling and processing these multifaceted streams of nonlocal consciousness took courage and patience. When I did try to deeply rest, I left my body, watching myself from above nervously trying to protect and stop myself. Or much worse, if I went fully "unconscious", I often woke to rushing tunnels of intense movement, crackling light, flashing faces of people, the shimmering bodies of plants and animals, interstellar superstructures, matrices of living entities, threaded networks of vibrating movements, rivers of hieroglyphic coding communicating across dimensions. At first, I didn’t understand any of my experiences and really did think I was going crazy. I stretched knowledge born from Jungian psychology, the Vedas, Tibetan Buddhism, and Toltec wisdom to make sense of things as best I could. Mostly I relied on what I learned in Dream School, which taught that primeval laws and their derivative expression defines both physical and nonphysical reality through an equal and proportional “armistice” of exchange. Understanding these relationships and their archetypal behaviors allowed me to refocus my perception on an opportunity for objective research, therapeutic self-care, and the evolution of my lucid dreaming.

In Dream School there are many tools, schemas, techniques, and strategies we utilize to use dreaming to research the nature of reality and being. I used my lucidity as a tool while traveling beyond my body, increasingly without fear and bewilderment. Dreaming could start immediately upon closing my eyes, end immediately upon termination of my final dream, and be paused in a kind of timeless, sublucid torpor while I rested. My sensation of memory changed and I no longer had hard stops between states of being. In fact, I began to identify these transitional stops as underdeveloped cognitive systems, misconstrued or dissonant ideologies, and a deep fear of the unknown which “polluted” lucidity’s clarity. I practiced dreaming while awake to confirm what I discovered while asleep. I dreamt in faraway places, repeating techniques and prepared dream maneuvers, then watched my psyche weave extrasensory, hyperdimensional memories instantaneously upon my waking sense of reality. From an analytic perspective, this way of dreaming has been very useful for me. It allows me to study what consciousness is, how subjective-objective dilation and translation work, how the mind projects and then returns to itself across thresholds of energy and information, and the ways in which somatic, brain-based, and nonlocal consciousness behave interdependently. 

Actually, dreams do need some traditional anchorpoints to construct reality, which in Dream School we refer to as inner senses, which actually imply a capacity for perception at a level we would ordinarily never imagine possible. The inner senses, which can also be used externally while awake, are like complex instruments that we often oversimplify as “intuition” or "instinct." Dreaming, memory, exchange, desire, inspiration: With enough lucidity, energy and information from other dimensions of being imbue local consciousness with simultaneous nonlocal coherence. One can exist in many places and in many ways at once. This can also render ordinary perception compatible with very large forces and transitional states of matter, collective consciousness, and evolution. These senses carry one beyond their body, and also beyond the experienceable relativity of ordinary existence. They are precious lifelines that become necessary for navigation, in death and life, preventing distortion of the self and degradation of its continuity. 

Dreaming itself is a capacity for many other kinds of inner senses. Dreams are internal generations, everything is a dream, and everything is inside of us, including ourselves. It is a level of perception requiring many transpersonal faculties to seamlessly translate information between subjectivity and objectivity, consciousness and unconsciousness, time and space, self and collective, biotic and abiotic, corporeal and cosmological… Even if my dreams repeatedly violated thresholds of consciousness that made no sense from my waking ideas about identity, cosmology, and physics—learning to use the inner senses allowed me to constantly repurpose my emotions and associations, reorganizing them upon greater vistas of consciousness. Learning to perceive, use, and strengthen the inner senses allowed me to grasp a higher order of continuity that I continue to follow every day and night. 

In Dream School, we became our own metaphysical technicians, putting ourself and our realities back together again with modifications and improvements. We learned to use dream schemas and time seeds like bumper lanes, training our dream energies to recondition our physical nerves and personal philosophies. In monthly classes we talked about the physics of dreaming in unique and extraordinary ways. Together we experimented with new possibilities to manipulate time, to communicate with forms of life beyond our dimension of perception, and to engage the mechanisms through which awareness enters and exits the physical body. 

I learned from my teachers and my dreams at the same time and, importantly, the information matched. Lucidity was something much more than I ever imagined. I learned to use it in order to interact with the primeval laws and forces, utilizing energetic qualia possessing two-way subjective and objective cause-effect relationship. Lucidity pushed and pulled ordinary dreams into new dimensions, breaking down the walls of personal projection, powerfully ejecting consciousness out across the cosmos until it learned to adapt, self-regulate, and focus its lens through hyperspace. In extreme superlucidity, no form seems to exist, and perception assembles itself like a mote in spacetime, with pulsing spherical sensations. Sublucidity is also useful, and can assemble other dimensions with equal and greater verisimilitude as physical, waking consciousness. 

There are also inner personalities which stretch and defy notions of individuality, plurality, and oneness. Accessing a collective memory complex is like learning to use different kinds of dreams to build complexity and hunt for archetypal pathways. Personalities, archetypes, and lucid dreams can also be further deconstructed, becoming energetic patterns, geometries, sounds, tessellating sensations, which in turn act like doors to even more exotic kinds of hyperdimensionality. I began to dream less and less about my own life, and instead enjoined my dreaming to a pursuit of reaching out into the unknown: to recognize, navigate, separate, distill, study, become, and repurpose foreign energies and forces. This is an exciting field of a progressive, intermediate, and holistic science that extends far beyond the notion of a “spiritual path” or a “discipline of psychology”. 

Everyone can learn to dream in powerful ways, and there is no right or wrong starting point. In my first year of Dream School, my biggest achievement was simply learning how to sleep soundly and remember my dreams upon waking. In the second year, I learned to dream within and beyond ordinary states of consciousness, and to catalog and reference my journeys with courage and coherence. My peers and I were encouraged to recover, transform, and harmonize our memories, all the way back to our earliest childhood experiences. This had a broadening effect on my lucidity and introduced me to new ways of experiencing transpersonal time, transincarnational experiences, and even transpecies temporal exchange. In the third year I began to finally understand how dreaming worked, not only as an inner sense that becomes more active at night, but also as a cosmological force and substrate that governs our universe at the largest and tiniest levels. 

For those that already know how to lucid dream, or are well studied about dreaming and the nature of self and consciousness, the Damanhurian Dream School is an excellent, experiential higher education. There are also plenty of opportunities for those simply wishing to better remember their dreams, or to understand themself and their life purpose at a deeper level. However, I would be remiss not to state that what this school offers is something uniquely challenging and technically advanced in nature. Its program approaches dreaming in ways not available at any other place or time on Earth. Students are encouraged to create unique disciplines and specializations to realize a formula for personal dream power. There are real dream allies and safe passageways to deep, difficult to access places where extraordinary experiences are made possible. 

After graduating from Dream School, I became convinced that the power to dream is a precious ability our species has somehow lost or forgotten. Everyone can and does dream to some extent, but the kinds of hyperdimensional and transpersonal extensions that carry us deep within and far beyond ourselves are of a different order. In the following thesis I will explore this idea in detail. However, I will also explain why, in order to dream with more power, we also need to invent a better methodology to weigh, language, and model frameworks that more accurately represent the complexity of dreams. The final frontier of understanding the mechanics of dreaming have not been firmly established anywhere. To realize this project, there are still many missing principles, underdeveloped premises, and strange new theories to develop. 

This thesis, born out of a compilation of research assembled in my third and final year of Damanhur’s School for Awakened Dreamers, seeks not only to explain what dreams are and how they work, but also how to better study and model them. I will also suggest, as a species, where dreams seem to lead us. I hope this invitation will attract sober research, capable of moving within, through, and beyond the ideas of classical canons and reductionary apprehension about the relationship between consciousness and reality. This manuscript will not be for everyone. Perhaps it is more appealing to read how-to guides on lucid dreaming which promise various results or states of personal empowerment. Perhaps it is more appealing to study physics, in which particles and laws can be dissected but never experienced. 

In this paper, we will take a more difficult and original approach, examining the raw mechanics of perception, being, and reality through the impeccability of dreams. Furthermore, although we cannot simply adopt the methodologies and techniques that come before us, we will absolutely study, understand, apply, evaluate, test, and reapply what has been written and taught about dreaming. Even if, ultimately, we will need to render a new kind of examination of the substance and quality of the phenomena around, within, and beyond us. 

The following technical outline is a way to do just this, and one that dreamers may consider and apply according to their own reasoning, purpose, and taste. In this vein, the shared mission of dream researchers should be to clearly map out the universal significance of dreams in order to reorient ourselves, individually and as a species, to a more accurate experience of reality and being. What one does with this knowledge is their own business, and more specifically the business of their dreamer. Dreams quickly take us to a place where “right” and “wrong” have little meaning. Instead, choices are negotiated with degrees of free will, levels of justice, the present moment, and the evolutionary drives of vast temporal ecosystems we are only a tiny part of. Hopefully this process will also reveal to us why humanity dreams at all, and how this hidden and underdeveloped potential reveals the nature of our species as a creature well suited to bridge vast swathes of a living, lucid cosmic architecture. 

May your dreams be strong.