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No Need to Escape?

Dreamed c.1976? by Stephen LaBerge

...many novice lucid dreamers may at first tend to use their new powers to find more clever ways to escape their fears. This is because of our natural tendency to continue in our current frame of mind. If, in a dream in which you are fleeing from harm, you realize you are dreaming, you will still tend to continue escaping, even though you should now know that there is nothing to flee from.

During the first six months of my personal record of lucid dreaming, I occasionally suffered from this sort of mental inertia until the following dream inspired a permanent change in my lucid dreaming behavior:

I was escaping down the side of a skyscraper, climbing like a lizard. It occurred to me that I could better escape by flying away, and as I did so, I realized that I was dreaming. By the time I reached the ground, the dream and my lucidity faded.

The next thing I knew I was sitting in the audience of a lecture hall, privileged to be hearing Idries Shah (an eminent Sufi teacher) comment on my dream. "It was good that Stephen realized he was dreaming and could fly," Shah observed with a bemused tone, "but unfortunate that he didn't see that since it was a dream, there was no need to escape."

I would have had to be deaf not to get the message. After this dream lecture, I resolved to never use my lucidity to avoid unpleasant situations. But I wasn't going to be content to passively avoid conflicts by doing nothing. I made a firm resolution regarding my lucid dreaming behavior: any time I realized I was dreaming, I was required to ask myself the following two questions:
  1. Am I now or have I been running away from anything in the dream?
  2. Is there now or has there been any conflict in the dream?
If the answer was yes to either, then I was honor-bound to do everything I could to face whatever I was avoiding and to resolve any conflict. I have easily remembered this principle in almost every subsequent lucid dream and have attempted to resolve conflicts and face my fears whenever it was called for.

SOURCE: Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge & Howard Rheingold, 1990, p231-2. Original passage untitled.

THE EDITOR GETS SNARKY

This rather Gestalt approach sounds sensible enough--if you share LaBerge's assumptions.

  1. He admits lucid dreams can rehearse skills and solve problems--surgery, sports, music, math--yet he ignores the obvious corollary that nightmares, especially recurring nightmares, can be skill-building too. Shamans have asserted for millennia that it's scary to be forced out of one's cultural trance, but staying practical under horror-siege is essential on that arduous career path. (The many suicides among psychotherapists suggest their training neglects this Nightmare Bootcamp.) And what if you're considering firefighting, like Mark in A Gamer's Dream, or drafted in a war like the Marine in Wound-Bargain? Hellscapes may be your workplace. Sure, learn assertion and negotiation; but also, as the song says, "Know when to walk away; and when to run."
  2. LaBerge assumes you'll find it easy to turn and face your monsters, as he did. I didn't. So I started beating myself up for repeated failure to confront! But... all my adult life, chronic illness limited my tolerance for stress; I learned the hard way I often needed to put off showdowns, for even if I did well, there's a fall-out of stress that can trigger illness in the physically/medically fragile, and collapse or self-harm in the psychologically fragile.
  3. LaBerge is sure all dreams merely reflect our inner state; they can't foresee real crises, real dangers. Half of this is ideological--dreams just can't be predictive or clairvoyant or telepathic, and dreamers acting on them are just superstitious (even though in real life, it works. See the studies of Louisa and Sally Rhine). The other half looks to me like class privilege; his dreams don't need to scan for abusers (domestic or other), trigger-happy cops, muggers, rapists, car crashes, toxic food water or air, harassment, discrimination, persecution and war. Mine do. Maybe yours do. If your life's not safe, and you have repeated nightmares of specific dangers, then they may be an inner fear or a warning of outer danger, and LaBerge may sway you to assume it's inner, and something to 'resolve', when it's not. Worse than no help!
In short: it's understandable that a comfortable, privileged man like LaBerge says facing your devils is always the best policy. But a feral dreamer like me, skulking on the fringes of civilization, trying not to get shot or bulldozed, has learned that running, hiding, and even procrastinating can be wiser--or at least all I can manage today.

--Chris Wayan


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