“He who dreams of drinking wine may weep when morning comes; he who dreams of weeping may in the morning go off to hunt. While he is dreaming he does not know it is a dream, and in his dream he may even try to interpret a dream. Only after he wakes does he know it was a dream. And someday there will be a great awakening when we know that this is all a great dream. Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman - how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle. Yet, after ten thousand generations, a great sage may appear who will know their meaning, and it will still be as though he appeared with astonishing speed.” - Chuang Tzu’s Great Sage Anecdote
The link between knowing you’re having a dream – and if you’re anything like me, then practising flying – and spirituality may not be immediately obvious.
But such links have been studied for millennia in meditative traditions, and enterprising scientists have been researching the topic.
They’ve investigated people using lucid dreams to meet the Divine, whether in personal form, such as Jesus or Buddha, or as formless energy. They’ve looking at subjects experiencing kundalini energy or non-dual awareness while asleep. (More on these in coming weeks.)
Some Tibetan Buddhists practise Dream Yoga, which teaches that the physical world of separation and form is as much an illusion as the content of dreams. Check the Chuang Tzu quote that opened this week’s newsletter, even more on point than his famous musing over whether he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man, or a man dreaming he was a butterfly.
We’ll open with a 2019 study in Psychology of Consciousness, which studied the possibility of a link between meditation, mindfulness and lucid dreaming (LD).
The study took three approaches: what were the differences in LD frequency between long-term meditators (LTM) and meditation-naive (MN) individuals? What was the relationship between LD frequency and certain aspects of “trait mindfulness”, or nonjudgmental attention to the present moment? Finally, did an eight-week mindfulness course change how often people had a LD?
The authors supplied arguments for their belief that there might be a link, including that skills developed during meditation – such as holding attention and being aware of being aware – could be useful in generating and holding lucid dreams.
But the handful of existing studies, while supportive of a link, had what was coyly described as “methodological limitations”. A 1986 paper which determined that transcendental meditation followers had more lucid dreams than a control group recruited students from not just different universities but different countries – Maharishi International University and the University of Northern Ohio – also failing to account for differences in intelligence. Science!
Our study was more rigorous, recruiting 38 LTM and 140 MN from around the Madison, Wisconsin base of the local university, whose Wisconsin Institute for Sleep and Consciousness was hosting matters.
There was a hefty list of exclusions, too, including pregnancy, a history of mental disorders including bipolar, taking mood-altering medication and recent eating or sleeping disorders.
The MN individuals needed to have steered clear of meditation or other mind-body practices such as tai chi, and the LTM needed at least five years behind them with an average of about 30 minutes each day.
Two questionnaires were used to measure mindfulness, using standard five-point agree/disagree scales, recording answers to seven distinct facets. Directly quoting from them:
Curiosity: “awareness of present moment experience with a quality of curiosity”
Decentering: “awareness of one’s experience with some distance and dis-identification rather than being carried away by one’s thoughts and feelings”
Observing: “noticing or attending to internal and external experiences”
Describing: “labelling internal experiences with words”
Acting with awareness: “attending to one’s activities of the moment”
Nonjudging of inner experience: “taking a non-evaluative stance towards thoughts and feelings”
Nonreactivity to inner experience: “the tendency to allow thoughts and feelings to come and go”
The eight-week mindfulness course followed the original structure developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, with a control group taking a health enhancement program which included music therapy, nutrition and stretching.
The LTM group had almost 2.5 times as many lucid dreams as the MN group (1.11/0.45 per month), with no differences in outcome between meditation styles, which consisted of Theravada, Tibetan, Zen and Vipassana.
There was an intriguing difference when it came to the mindfulness results. The MN group who had the most lucid dreams scored highly on the Describing scale, while the LTM scored higher on Observing and Acting with Awareness.
Of the MN result, the authors wrote (deep breath), “While this finding initially surprised us, it is not difficult to see how the capacity to verbalise is related to lucid dreaming when one considers that for ‘typical’ lucid dreams in order to become explicitly lucid, one has to verbalise to oneself the nature of one’s experiential state ie ‘This is a dream’.”
They failed to support their hypothesis that the cumulative time spent in meditation would increase the frequency of lucid dreaming, and that the eight-week mindfulness course would increase the number of lucid dreams. (There may be a higher threshold before any benefits appear, of course.)
It remains possible that the link between meditation and lucid dreaming is indirect.
“While we do not find this interpretation to be the most likely,” they write, “given this pattern of results it remains possible that the link between meditation and lucid dreaming is indirect, and is caused by some other variable such as personality differences or interests.” Such interests may drive certain people to take up meditation and have lucid dreams.
Next week: Lucid dreaming II - Tibetan dream yoga.