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"Awaken; return to yourself. Now, no longer asleep, knowing they were only dreams, clear-headed again, treat everything around you as a dream."

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

We spend a large portion of our lives asleep, dreaming. On a given night, you will have several dreams, most or all of which you won’t remember. While you may be aware of the importance of sleep for one’s health, sleeping and dreaming are still widely considered unproductive hours, with dreams being attributed little importance. Dreams may not be valued on a spiritual level the way they have been in many civilizations throughout history, but there still exists a small, niche community of oneironauts, individuals who set out to explore the world of dreams.

Why do we dream?

Before jumping to more philosophical conclusions, we can quickly assess the practical application of dreaming. The most realistic explanation is that dreams help prepare us for dangerous or difficult situations we may encounter in the real world. It is well understood that much of the skill-development and learning we do during the day is actually instilled in us while we sleep.

While dreams are often peculiar and not necessarily related to real life, you could imagine that hunter-gatherers in the pre-agricultural period of human history must have had a much different scope of things to dream about. Dreams would have simulated encounters with predators, harsh terrain, hunting, and a variety of our interactions with other humans. We could assume that nightmares prepared us for danger, by simulating fight or flight instincts when faced with something we fear subconsciously.

Yet the practical explanation still leaves plenty of room for questioning and curiosity. Our brains are wonderfully complex machines, capable of gathering a variety of external input in waking life and turning that input into a convincing simulation of reality while we are asleep. When you are aware that you are dreaming, known as lucid dreaming, you may be shocked at how real the experience may look, and feel, at the sensory level.

Lucid Dreaming

If you have ever had the realization that you are within a dream, that constitutes having been “lucid”. What most people are after in a lucid dream is the ability to see and do things beyond the confines of reality.

Simply imagine any given dream you’ve had in the past, and now imagine having had the agency to say, “Oh, this is my dream! I can simply do whatever I want.” You’re being chased by a monster? You can give it a hug. You’re standing on a cliff face overlooking a valley? You can jump off and fly. You’re stuck in a house or bathroom? You can flush yourself down the toilet. (I’ve done this multiple times. It’s a reliable way to change the setting of a dream.)

It sounds very silly to explain this to someone who’s never tried lucid dreaming for themselves, and it would be rational to question what the point of this activity even is. Dreams, at least on the surface, often appear to be nonsensical and of little consequence to our day-to-day lives. Any such activity with no value in the material world deserves a personal justification, so I will offer mine.

Esoteric Philosophical Territory

My interest in lucid dreaming started before I had even entered my adolescence. 2010 marked the release of Inception, a fun movie about dreaming that makes absolutely no sense when its broken down. But regardless, I saw it when I was only 9, and following many rewatches of the Blu-ray DVD I received for Christmas, I was left obsessed with the importance of dreaming and the concept of lucid dreaming…

Over the course of several years I watched every YouTube video I could on the subject, and read multiple books that divulged the techniques and practices others had developed in order to lucid dream on a regular basis. This began when I was young, and was not yet absorbed in the material world or the zero sum game of life. At that point, an interest in an activity with zero clear benefit to my material success was perfectly acceptable to me. I think my interest in “spirituality” today comes from a similar interest in things that are intangible in the physical world, yet somehow offer practical benefits to one’s life.

When I was 16 or 17, I still held a lot of interest in lucid dreaming, but I reached that age where I was becoming increasingly absorbed by the material world. All of the sudden, I cared about things that hadn’t occupied my mind up until that point: girls, money, a career, my physical appearance, my personal achievements or the lack thereof. Inert activities such as dreaming or video games became less and less important.

What has drawn me back to lucid dreaming, years later, is an obstinate belief that things that seemingly have no value in the material world are not worthless, and material success by itself isn’t enough to make you happy or wise.

This is partially why I shirk the idea that just because dreaming is an internal experience, with few obvious physical consequences, that it isn’t also “reality”. Everything you experience is on some level made manifest in the physical world.

A dream, no matter how seemingly imaginary, is still a reflection of a physical process occurring in your mind, like a tiny microcosm which dies upon awakening. If you zoom out through time and space, every life lived on earth may as well be another dream, that is as soon forgotten as it is woken up from.

From light years away, neither a random human life or a dream would appear less important than the other. That is not meant to sound bleak or nihilistic, frankly the opposite. Your dreams make up a real, large portion of the rare, strange experience we’ve been given of being anything at all.

It would not be useful for me to regurgitate instructions on how to lucid dream, as there are a number of resources out there to do that. I also got lazy writing this post and might come back at a later date to write a few more ideas down.

Two books I recommend for learning more about lucid dreaming are Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge, who pioneered research on the subject, and A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming, which is a bit more of a fun read.