Lucid dreaming and other experiences

Something I have pretty much lost since my childhood is the ability to have lucid dreams. I’ve discovered, thinking back, that most, if not all, of my somewhat extraordinary experiences as I child, were developed or given to me out of necessity. I believe we are all able to have all kinds of experiences that one might call “spiritual”, but that we aren’t necessarily given them until they serve an actual purpose in our lives. I would love to elaborate on this, but let me first tell you about my experience of lucid dreams. I had frequent nightmares as a child, they were pretty bad and might actually have contributed to the fact that I am still, at 45, not a very good sleeper (although I rarely have nightmares nowadays). Seemingly by chance, I one day discovered, that by flickering my eyes really fast in the dream, I could flicker my actual physical eyes open and wake up. At first, this was merely a practical tool I used to wake up from nightmares, but with time, I started becoming aware that I was dreaming even if it was just an ordinary, boring dream. I would actually say things to my friends in the dream, like: “Hey, did you know that we are just dreaming right now?” and continue by bragging: “I can wake up from this dream any time I want”, and then I would flicker my eyes open and wake up.

I didn’t grow up in esoteric or religious surroundings; I had never heard of lucid dreaming or any of the other stuff I thought I had invented myself that later turned out to be a “thing”. Like when I was twelve and started having severe trouble going to sleep and thought to myself that if I could just stop thinking, I would be able to fall asleep. One night when seemingly thousands of thoughts were swirling in my head, I happened to notice, that if I breathed a certain way, I was able to keep the thoughts away. I kind of made it into a sport and the rule was that I wasn’t even allowed to think that I wasn’t allowed to think – my mind had to be totally blank. Everytime a thought managed to slip through, I just changed my breathing pattern, and all thoughts would be gone again. It wasn’t until almost 25 years later that I came to understand that I had been practicing some kind of breathing meditation, without knowing that there even were such things as breathing techniques or meditation. As I child, I didn’t understand that it was my focusing on the breath that kept the thoughts away – I actually thought that it was the way I breathed that had some sort of magic affect on the thoughts! It feels kind of funny thinking about it now. But this is what I mean when I say that I believe we all have the ability to tap into spirituality; clearly I was able to do it without even knowing that lucid dreaming or breathwork meditation existed. We seem to somehow have it in us, but maybe, as was the case for me, most of us have to really need the practices to be able to fetch them from within. In my life, different types of adversity has been the catalyst for spiritual growth. Although I prefer to call it spiritual discovery, because I believe that certain events have the potential to simply wake us up to who we already are, and by that I mean spirits. Perhaps we initially have to forget who we really are in order to be interested in playing around in this matrix, experiencing everything that our five human senses can provide us with (and the matrix would be nothing without the taste of dark chocolate, I’ll tell you that much ;)). Then when we die, we go back to being only spirits, awake again to who we are and richer in experience. Since we have obviously been playing a bit too hard lately (climate change, poverty, all sorts of illnesses …), it seems to have become necessary that we wake up to who we are while we are in the matrix, so that we can behave in a loving manner towards ourselves, each other and the planet and hopefully clean up our mess. This is just a theory I have, based on the fact that so many people seem to be waking up right now. What do you think? 🙂