Blog Posts - Lucid Coaching, LLC

Just Published in DreamTime Magazine

2/13/2018

I am excited to share the news that my article entitled "How to Travel Without Luggage (In Your Dreams)" has just been published in DreamTime magazine, the official magazine of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. The article is an adaptation of one of my prior blog posts. I discuss what I learned from a trilogy of luggage-themed dreams that I experienced in 2012. You can view or download a .pdf of the article by clicking on the image below.

Your Mind is a Magnet: Shifting Your Reality with Synchronicity and the Law of Attraction

11/6/2017

Do you believe in meaningful coincidences? I was excited to be invited by Unity of Charleston to deliver a talk in October about Synchronicity and the Law of Attraction. This slideshow video combines the audio from my talk, originally delivered on October 22, 2017, with the Powerpoint slides that I showed during my live presentation. Please enjoy the video and feel free to pass it along to a friend.

My "Lucid and Jungian" Lecture at Charleston Jung Society

9/25/2017

Special thanks to the Charleston Jung Society for inviting me to deliver the opening talk of their 2017-2018 lecture series. Below is a video (along with Powerpoint slides) of my presentation: "Lucid and Jungian: Doing the Opposite". I've also included a few still images from the event.

An encounter with a "deer at the edge of the forest"

6/11/2017

People often tell me that they have trouble remembering their dreams. In response, I frequently offer them a quote from Jungian analyst Marion Woodman: "A dream is like a deer at the edge of the forest: If it’s welcomed, it will come out. If you feed it, it will develop a relationship with you. But if you don’t care about it, it will disappear." In fact, I probably repeat that quote in random conversations a few times every month.

So, I took notice when I recently saw a real-life "deer at the edge of the forest" (see image below). I was playing golf at Kiawah Island over Memorial Day weekend. I did not notice the deer until I was right upon him or her. Amazingly, the deer did not flinch and continued grazing as my golf cart whizzed by along the cart path. As a practitioner of "dream yoga" (life is a dream), I take animal reflections quite seriously as messages, especially when there is synchronicity involved (in this case, the synchronicity of representing a phrase that I commonly use). This deer's message for me? I think it is something like this: "I do represent dreams. I'm not running from you because you have cultivated a relationship with me. Not only am I a deer at the edge of a forest, but I'm also a deer at the edge of a fairway. I'm easily accessible to you. Just keep your eyes open as you drive along your path."

Even Lawyers Dream: Adding a Dream Journal to Your Wellness Toolbox

6/5/2017

A few months ago, I was invited to give a talk about dreams at an attorney wellness luncheon. Special thanks to Mike Ethridge for the invitation and for recording an audio of the presentation. In the talk, I explore six (6) wellness applications of dream journaling. I've created a slideshow that combines the audio of my talk with some of my Powerpoint slides:

Do you dream about your pet? If so, check out my article in DreamTime Magazine

2/16/2017

DreamTime magazine, the official magazine of the International Assoc. for the Study of Dreams, has published an article that I wrote about pets and dreaming in its Winter 2017 edition. This 3-page article is an adaptation of one of my previous blog posts. Here is a like to the .PDF of the relevant pages of the magazine: goo.gl/xPduVe

Some early morning clarity

2/1/2017

In addition to recording dreams in my journal, I occasionally record "Meditation Notes". These are insights that just come to me spontaneously during a meditation, a yoga class, or upon waking in the middle of the night. I recently found fresh inspiration from re-reading the following journal entry from 2014:

February 11, 2014 (Tuesday)
Meditation Note (4:40 AM). An insight of sorts came to me after waking in the middle of the night. It is difficult to describe in intellectual terms and the concept is really not “new” for me. It just seemed like a deeper understanding of the concepts I’ve been entertaining for years. The general idea is that I’m simply vibrating in a never-ending “now”. The linear patterns that I encounter on a day to day basis (e.g. the sun rising and setting; the apparent slow aging of my body; the patterns of people and animals moving about in a very linear way) are illusions that create a particular kind of experience. If I can disentangle myself from these recurring patterns, I’m left with the idea that I’m just shifting my focus / vibration and experiencing manifestations consistent with my recent focus / vibration. All the things that could appear as manifestations already exist. I make them visible through my focus / vibration. One analogy might be Google Earth. All the data is already there (with Google constantly adding to it) and I just zoom around the field of data. When a manifestation appears, it generally has to appear in accordance with a logical sequence because that is how Earth life patterning is set up – manifestations generally arrive in a linear way that you can explain to your friends. But their true nature is dream-like and they could appear, disappear, and shift instantaneously (as they do in dreams). They only appear in logical or linear sequence because that is what all of us participating in Earth agreed upon before we came in. I don’t need to exercise any “effort” to change the manifestations that appear before me. This can be accelerated by releasing resistance, judgment, ideas of limitation etc. I can simply focus / vibrate and enjoy what flows in next as a manifestation. Like a radio dial, I’m basically adjusting my tuner. Instead of a limited number of radio stations, my tuner can select from an immense field of manifestation options.

The Creative Power of Dreams

10/6/2016

The setting is Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Ten minutes into overtime of the 2012 NFC championship game, the San Francisco 49ers and the visiting New York Giants are still deadlocked at 17 points apiece. Then Giants kicker Lawrence Tynes nails a game winning field goal to send the Giants to the Superbowl. Interviewed on the field afterwards, he shared: “It’s amazing, you know, I dreamed about this last night.” The real life kick was from 31 yards out, which was easy for Tynes considering that he made the game winning kick from 42 yards out in his dream rehearsal.

Do you typically remember your dreams? Should you bother? Beliefs about the meaning and importance of dreams vary widely. Nowadays, if you visit a psychiatrist, you are more likely to be offered a regimen of prescription drugs than to be asked to share your dreams. Some leading neuroscientists see dreams as nothing more than the brain’s attempt to make sense of the random firing of neurons. This scientific trend toward devaluing dreams contrasts notably with the perspectives of the founders of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud saw dreams as important manifestations of repressed or unsatisfied desires, calling them “the royal road to the unconscious”. Carl Jung’s seminal work blended psychology and spirituality. He regarded dreams as important communications from the dreamer’s soul or larger self.

During waking hours, most of us rely heavily upon the logical thinking of the left hemisphere of our brain to get us through the day. In contrast to this, the dreaming brain seems inclined to completely bypass the filter of logical thinking. While this can cause dreams to be bizarre, the absence of logical constraints yields dreams that are highly creative and original in nature. Whatever their source, the creative power of dreams is indisputable and worthy of our attention.

In a recent dream, I was seated in a small circle of people along with Bono from U2. Bono was strumming an acoustic guitar and singing a beautiful song that I had never heard before. I’m not trained as a musician. So, when I awoke from this dream, I had no ability to record Bono’s harmonious guitar chords. But many talented musicians can do this quite easily. For example, Paul McCartney heard the melody of “Yesterday” in a dream, and then rushed to the piano to play it out before the tune escaped his memory. Sting claims that he awoke in the middle of the night with the lyrics to “Every Breath You Take” playing in his head, and then completed in the entire composition in about 30 minutes. Billy Joel once speculated to an interviewer: “My feeling is that all of this stuff exists in a different plane and we tap into it somehow and I think I do it in a dream state.”

Salvador Dali snatched creative ideas for his surreal art by intentionally waking himself from brief naps. Sitting in a chair, he would drift toward sleep while holding a heavy key in one hand. When he slipped out of waking consciousness, the sound of the key striking the ground would soon awaken him – often with a fresh creative inspiration.

For a more contemporary example of such creative napping, consider Elizabeth Gilbert, the accomplished author best known for her bestseller, Eat Pray Love. She claims that she once dreamed a complete short story while napping on a commuter train. She elaborates: “I awoke from my dream, grabbed a pen, and wrote down that story in one fevered burst of inspiration . . . the words poured forth for page after page without any effort whatsoever.”

In the midst of a major golfing slump, Jack Nicklaus awoke from a dream where he was striking the ball much better after making a minor adjustment to how he was gripping his golf club. He applied this grip change in waking life and shot two scorching rounds over the next two days -- a 65 followed by a 68. He told a reporter: “I feel kind of foolish admitting it, but it really happened in a dream. All I had to do was change my grip just a little bit”.

What creative inspirations are awaiting you in your dreams? Are there areas of your life where you could benefit from adjusting your grip just a little bit? I encourage you to experiment with recalling your own dreams and find out for yourself.

Author's Note: This article by Chris Cunniffe was originally published in the September/October, 2016 edition of Oblique magazine.

Talk at Unity of Charleston

8/22/2016

Thank you, Unity of Charleston, for inviting me to speak yesterday about lucid dreaming and dream yoga.

What is "Dream Yoga"?

8/6/2016

“Dream Yoga” is a phrase that I borrow from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. The simplest Western phrase to describe dream yoga is the idea that “life is a dream”. When we awaken from a sleep-state dream, we understand that the dream took place in a mental environment and that symbolic meaning can be attributed to many of the people, animals, places, and events that were encountered in the dream. A “dream yoga” worldview looks upon our so-called waking reality or physical reality the same way. There is the understanding that, upon our death (or sooner, in some cases), we will “awaken” from the dream of physical life. Given this, we can interpret the animals, people, places and events that we encounter in physical life as having symbolic meaning, just like a sleep-state dream.

The Tibetan dream yoga tradition is richer and more complex than the foregoing snapshot description. You can check out some of the books quoted below if you want to explore the idea further. I also want to emphasize, however, that there are many other historical, cultural, literary and philosophical sources for the proposition that life is a dream. I’ve outlined some of these in the quotations and descriptions set forth below.

• Tibetan Buddhist “Dream Yoga” Tradition. Oral tradition goes back approximately 1,000 years.

“Upon waking in the morning, think to yourself, ‘I am awake in a dream.’ When you enter the kitchen, recognize it as a dream kitchen. Pour dream milk into dream coffee. . . . In this way a new tendency is created in the mind, that of looking at experience as insubstantial, transient, and intimately related to the mind’s projections.” - Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep (1998)

If one’s dreams are clear, but one is not lucid within the Dream State, then with great determination train the mind by thinking “all daytime visions are a dream.” Continually remind yourself that all that you see and all that is done is none other than a dream. . . . If you concentrate a great deal during the day, imagining that you are living a dream, then during the night the dream itself will also seem less real. - Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light (1992).

“Our waking reality . . . is like a nonlucid dream, from which we awake only when we recognize the extent of our participation in the creation of the world we experience.” - B. Allan Wallace, Dreaming Yourself Awake: Lucid Dreaming and Tibetan Dream Yoga for Insight and Transformation (2012).

• Physicists

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” – Albert Einstein

“Everything that we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” – Niels Bohr

"Atoms consist of particles and these particles are not made of any material stuff. When we observe them, we never see any substance; what we observe are dynamic patterns continually changing into one another -- a continuous dance of energy." - Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (1975)

“When we recall that numerous physicists maintain that each so-called real object exists as a conglomeration of energy, of spinning atoms rotating in a field of space, we begin to see that our perceived reality exists as a version of reality – one perspective of reality, one sense of reality. In a manner of speaking, our experienced reality is the one largely predicated by our senses. It can hardly be considered the only reality; rather; it is a sensed, mentally mediated reality – in many regards, much like a dream.” – Robert Waggoner, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self (2008).

• Greek Philosophy - The Allegory of The Cave. Plato, The Republic (380 B.C.E.)

Glaucon: You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
Socrates: Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?

• Taoist Tradition – The Zhuangzi (3rd Century, B.C.E.)

Once upon a time, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting about happily enjoying himself. He did not know that he was Zhou. Suddenly he awoke, and was palpably Zhou.

• Rumi, 13th Century Sufi Poet

This place is a dream.
Only a sleeper considers it real.
Then death comes like dawn and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.

• Shakespeare

The Tempest (1610)
Prospero: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

As You Like It (1599)
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts

• William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting”

• Edgar Alan Poe

Dream Within a Dream (1849)
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
. . . .
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

• Nursery Rhymes

Row Row Row Your Boat (first published in 1852)

• Children’s Literature

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1871).
Alice (Chapter 12): “Now, Kitty, let’s consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear, and you should not go on licking your paw like that— as if Dinah hadn’t washed you this morning! You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course— but then I was part of his dream, too! was it the Red King, Kitty. You were his wife, my dear, so you ought to know— Oh, Kitty, do help to settle it! I’m sure your paw can wait!”

• Carl Jung (1875 – 1961)

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (published 1963)
“But then I saw that on the floor in front of the altar, facing me, sat a yogi in lotus posture, in deep meditation. When I looked at him more closely, I realized that he had my face. I started in profound fright, and awoke with the thought: ‘Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream, and I am it.’ “

• Paramahansa Yogananda (1893 – 1952)

"You are walking on the earth as in a dream. Our world is a dream within a dream.”

• Channeled Wisdom Teachings.

Abraham (Esther Hicks)
“You get to write all the parts. You get to write the parts of everyone who plays with you. And how they respond to you. And how they feel about you and how you feel about them. But, you do it with your vibrational language, not your language of word or action. . . .The other day, Jerry awakened from a dream with a powerful awareness formulated within him. And he said to Esther, as they were eating breakfast: ‘It occurred to me that, as I dream, that I am the creator of everything in the dream. I wrote in all of the characters. I put the words in their mouth. If someone is treating me badly, I have given them those words. If someone is treating me sweetly, I have given them those words. I am the writer of all of the parts.’ And Esther said, ‘That’s what Abraham has been saying about every aspect of our life experience.’ What I think and feel and what manifests in my life experience is always a perfect match. It is true of dream state. It is true of wake state. You are the orchestrator. You are the creator. You are the bringer-about-er of every bit of all of it.” – Workshop recorded August 18, 2001 (San Francisco, CA)

Seth (Jane Roberts)
“In your system of reality you are learning what mental energy is, and how to use it. You do this by constantly transforming your thoughts and emotions into physical form. You are supposed to get a clear picture of your inner development by perceiving the exterior environment. What seems to be a perception, an objective concrete event independent from you, is instead the materialization of your own inner emo¬tions, energy, and mental environment.” - The Seth Material, Chapter 10 (1970)

Bashar (Darryl Anka)
“Are you telling me physical reality isn’t mystical? Is that what you are saying? . . . . The idea of going to those [altered] states is to let you understand how to view physical reality in the same miraculous, mysterious way . . . . Physical reality is a mystery school – very magical, very mysterious, very powerful. You just need to learn to define it that way and you will experience it that way . . . . It’s just that you don’t think physical reality is a dream . . . . You have to know it’s a dream and you have to allow yourself to realize it’s a dream. . . . And when you become lucid in physical reality, you can also change physical reality in miraculous and magical ways because you know it is a dream and you are lucid in it. - “Cycles of Nine” Workshop Recording (2013).

• Shamanic Traditions.

Carlos Castenada, Journey to Ixtlan (1972). In one dialogue, Don Juan (shaman) instructs Carlos to “stop the world” or achieve “non-doing”.

Don Juan (page 211): “For instance, our rings of power, yours and mine, are hooked right now to the doing of this room. We are making this room. Our rings of power are spinning this room into being at this very moment.”
Carlos: “Wait, wait. This room is here by itself. I am not creating it. I have nothing to do with it.”

• Near Death Experience Literature.

“For me, it felt as though when I “died,” I woke up from a dream. It didn’t feel as if I went anywhere, but as though I’d awakened and had omni-visual senses—that is, 360-degree vision and complete synesthesia, or simultaneous perception of the senses. I could see, hear, feel, and know everything that pertained to me! I was living my past, present, and future simultaneously. I also knew what was going on beyond walls and space, as long as it related to me—hence the visuals of my doctors’ conversations, my brother on the plane, and so on.” Anita Moorjani, Dying to Be Me (2012)

“The place I went was real. Real in a way that makes the life we’re living here and now completely dreamlike by comparison.” - Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven (2012).

• Some Other Contemporary Sources

“Think about all the things that take place in the one-third of your life while you sleep. There is no time, no cause and effect, everything you experience is created by your imagination. The people and events are all illusions, simply figments of your imagination. There is no beginning, there is no end, no linear progression, and it all seems to make perfect sense as long as you are in the dream state. I’m reminded of Henry David Thoreau’s observation that: ‘Our truest life is when we are in [our] dreams awake.’ It seems logical to me that if during one-third of our life on planet Earth we are capable of manifesting anything we place our attention on without having to expend any physical effort only by allowing ourselves to transcend time and space, then why not in the other two-thirds of our life.” - Wayne Dyer, Wishes Fulfilled (2012).

“When death approaches, we may look back on our life and wonder if it was just another dream. Even now you may look back on last year’s vacation or yesterday’s drama and see that it is very similar to last night’s dream. There is the dream, and there is the dreamer of the dream. The dream is a short-lived play of forms. It is the world – relatively real but not absolutely real. Then there is the dreamer, the absolute reality in which the forms come and go. The dreamer is not the person. The person is part of the dream. The dreamer is the substratum in which the dream appears, that which makes the dream possible. It is the absolute behind the relative, the timeless behind time, the consciousness in and behind form. The dreamer is consciousness itself – who you are. To awaken within the dream is our purpose now. When we are awake within the dream, the ego created earth drama comes to an end and a more benign and wondrous dream arises. This is the new earth.” – Eckhardt Tolle, A New Earth (2005).