Chasing Your Dreams?

 

I'm sure almost all of us have had the experience of dreaming about something that seemed very real. Perhaps it was a nightmare and you woke up in a sweat with your heart pounding; you say a quick prayer of thanks to God that it was only a dream and not real. Conversely, you might have had a dream that was so delightful you never wanted it to end; you were talking with a deceased loved one, or maybe you had the ability to fly like a superhero and you woke up wishing the dream was real (or at least wishing the dream itself would have lasted longer). 

Almighty God has made use of dreams to communicate with humans on rare and special occasions. The three most famous accounts of such appear in the Bible: Genesis 28 tells of Jacob's dream and how it relates to his descendants; Genesis 37 to 39 tells of Joseph and the dream he had, as well as his ability to interpret dreams; and in the New Testament, St. Matthew's Gospel tells us in chapter one that St. Joseph was informed by an angel in a dream that Mary is pregnant by the Holy Ghost with Christ, and should not fear taking her as his wife. 

Unfortunately, dreams can also be an occasion for evil. One example is psychoanalysis of dreams by Freudian psychologists and psychiatrists giving dreams undue importance and, in many cases, telling the patients he/she should commit sin because the alleged interpretation of the dream "should be followed." 

Another example of dreams used for evil (and the subject of this post) is lucid dreaming. This phenomena is a kind of dream state in which the person is awake enough to realize they are dreaming. According to the Lucidity Institute, the term was first coined by Dutch author and psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden who used the word "lucid" in the sense of mental clarity. (See lucidity.com). Dreams are a big part of our lives — the average person dreams for two hours per night and roughly six years over the course of their lifetime. (See nih.gov/health-information/public-education/brain-basics/brain-basics-understanding-sleep). 

The theme of those who promote lucid dreaming is that dreams can impact our future, in this life and the next. Some proponents claim that lucid dreams help us experience joy while sleeping that maybe we cannot or simply have not experienced in real life. Co-authors of the book Lucid Dreaming Plain and Simple note, “Often when people become lucid, they report a kind of spontaneous euphoria in which they feel a strong sense of energy and mastery coupled with a profound sense of awareness and clarity.”

(See Robert Waggoner and Caroline McCready, Lucid Dreaming Plain and Simple: Tips and Techniques for Insight, Creativity, and Personal Growth (2020), pg. 10). 

This post will expose the occult and pagan origins of using lucid dreams, and how it opens one up to the demonic. (N.B. I wish to acknowledge the myriad sources, both online and hardcopy books, I used in my research. I attribute the information in this post to those sources, and take no credit for myself except in condensing the information into a terse, readable post---Introibo). 

The History of Lucid Dreams

Lucid dreams are dreams in which the person who is asleep is conscious that they are dreaming. They can control who they interact with, what they experience, and in some cases, when it ends. For centuries, Tibetan monks have been practicing “dream yoga” — a process by which the practitioner learns how to become conscious during dreams. Although they are not asleep while exercising dream yoga, the yogis are preparing for lucid dream experiences. Hindus have a similar practice called Yoga Nidra.

In the West, lucid dreaming is less associated with religion (though not completely detached) and more related to psychology. Interestingly, the Greek philosopher Aristotle alluded to the ability to be conscious while dreaming in On Dreams, stating, “When one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream.” (See classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/dreams.html). 

Dutch psychiatrist Frederik Willem van Eeden (d. 1932) coined the term “lucid dream” in 1913 in his article, “A Study of Dreams.” He noted that he intentionally avoided using the terms conscious and unconscious in his analysis, but he still suggested that lucid dreams are controllable by the dreamer. In the decades that followed van Eeden’s dream study, several other researchers tackled the topic of lucid dreams. In 1968, British occultist Celia Green published a book called Lucid Dreams (Institute of Psychophysical Research) in which she described how people could gain control of their dreams. A large body of research into the topic was performed in the 1980s and continues today.

In 2021, a team of international researchers attempted to speak with 36 participants who were asleep and engaged in a lucid dream. (See Benjamin Baird et al., “Two-Way Communication in Lucid REM Sleep Dreaming,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 25, no. 6 [2021], 427–428).  The results were mixed, but the research has spawned more interest in the scientific community to continue to investigate lucid dreams. The purpose was to see if people in lucid dreams had a sort of telepathic power. 

Why Study Lucid Dreams?

Those involved in lucid dreaming make several claims as to why people should want to cultivate those dreams. It has been claimed by various authors that by having lucid dreams you can:

• explore your inner self; open doors to the "unconscious mind" to reveal and help resolve hidden emotional conflicts or other problems
• find inspiration for writing, poetry, songs, and other so-called "artistic endeavors”
• achieve peace of mind and bodily health as lucid dreaming puts the person in a deep meditative trance
• achieve higher consciousness
• develop "hidden abilities" such as clairvoyance
• bring about bodily health through the deep dream state
• receive messages from "God," and spirits

The Occult Connection

My research has shown (as already indicated above) that most of those involved with lucid dreams are occultists seeking power over reality. It mostly began as a subject to be pursued in the pagan East. World-of-lucid-dreaming.com relates how lucid dreams "...helps [me] to enter altered states of consciousness at will." The same source tells us Tibetan Buddhist monks use lucid dreaming on their path to enlightenment. Just like lucid dreams, the aim of Dream Yoga is to awaken the conscious self from within the dream state, which they call "apprehending the dream." However, Buddhist monks have more esoteric goals in mind. Their aim is to harness the power of the conscious dream state and then complete a number of set tasks to take them to the next level, including:

• Practice sadhana (a spiritual discipline)
• Receive initiations, empowerments and transmissions
• Visit different places, planes and lokas (worlds)
• Communicate with yidam (an enlightened being)
• Meet with other sentient beings
• Fly and shapeshift into other creatures  (Emphasis mine).

Five Serious Dangers of Using Lucid Dreams

1. False ideas of Communicating with God. 

Many people (including Traditionalists) will be told that lucid dreams can put you in touch with God and allow you to communicate with Him. This belief that God communicates to us regularly, directly, and personally by dreams makes dreams become normal vehicles for supernatural activity (allegedly divine communication), rather than normal byproducts of consciousness that are most of them. One unfortunate result of this belief is when dreams become divinatory or vehicles for occult revelations. They can supposedly warn of future events, bring spiritual enlightenment, assist physical and mental healing, function as an adjunct to inner work, or guide in making daily decisions. In this role, they can become an actual replacement for the guidance of the Church. These dreams can also cause a lack of prayer, which is real communication with God. 

2.  Raising "Consciousness."

Although in the lucid dream sense, consciousness refers to being aware or knowing you’re in a dream, consciousness in the occult sense means connection to a "higher self "or some kind of universal energy. It is the heresy of pantheism, i.e., that the universe and "God" are One. It also goes along with the occult belief that "you are God"---the "god within." If you buy into it you are a heretic.

3. Falling Prey to Other Occult Practices.

All important skills for a Wiccan [witch], or any spiritual seeker. Working with dreams can also help develop your psychic skills. (See wicca-spirituality.com/dream-work.html; Emphasis mine). "Skills" that can be developed include clairvoyance, astral projection, and communication with the dead (necromancy). 

4. Talking to "Beings" in Your Dreams.

Those proponents of lucid dreams will often tell people to interact with people (or other things) capable of communicating with them. Remember that in a deep meditative state, you open yourself up to demonic influence. The pagan meditation that goes along with inducing lucid dreams purposefully is the same meditation techniques as pagans and shamans use to make "contact with the spirit world." 

As opposed to Christian meditation which is thought about something (e.g., the Mysteries of the Rosary, etc.) occult meditation is about stopping thought to induce a trance or altered state of consciousness (ASC). Trance states and ASCs have been traditionally associated with the occult world, demonism, and other forms of spirit contact, such as shamanism, witchcraft, neo-paganism, magic ritual, Satanism, mediumism, and yogic disciplines. 

David Wilcock, author of Awakening in the Dream and frequent guest on History Channel’s Ancient Aliens, has spent his life evaluating his dreams and trying to connect the dots with his spirituality. He writes, “My dreams were making it clearer that I needed to somehow form a bridge from the world of UFO research into the spiritual side of dreaming, lucidity, ancient spiritual teachings, and higher consciousness.” (pg. 268).  Do I even need to state how this "spirituality" is occult?

Stephanie Meyer, author of the occult Twilight series (which also spawned a franchise of movies) tells how the character of Edward the vampire (portrayed as "good" in the books and movies) actually came to her in lucid dreams:

"I woke up (on that June 2nd) from a very vivid dream. In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately. For what is essentially a transcript of my dream, please see Chapter 13 ("Confessions") of the book."

 (See web.archive.org/web/20080730025156/http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/twilight.html). 

She further relates that after her dream, she began to hear voices that would not stop until she wrote what she heard:

"All this time, Bella and Edward were, quite literally, voices in my head. They simply wouldn't shut up. I'd stay up as late as I could stand trying to get all the stuff in my mind typed out, and then crawl, exhausted, into bed (my baby still wasn't sleeping through the night, yet) only to have another conversation start in my head. I hated to lose anything by forgetting, so I'd get up and head back down to the computer. Eventually, I got a pen and notebook for beside my bed to jot notes down so I could get some freakin' sleep. It was always an exciting challenge in the morning to try to decipher the stuff I'd scrawled across the page in the dark." (Ibid--Emphasis in original).

After she wrote her books, Meyers relates that "Edward" came to her in a dream to let her know he wasn't good. She told Entertainment Weekly, "(Edward told me) I had gotten it wrong, and he did drink blood like every other vampire and you couldn't live on animals the way I'd written it. We had this conversation and it was terrifying." (Emphasis mine). 

5. Leading to Immorality.

Lucid dreams give the dreamer total freedom. If you want to fly, you can fly. If you want to talk with George Washington, you can talk with George Washington (or at least the George Washington you consciously create in your dreams). If you want to have an affair with your neighbor…welcome to mortal sin.  If we are aware, and if we can choose our own adventure, so to speak, those choices in our dreams have eternal consequences. Unlike a typical dream that comes about without our consent and over which we have no control, the lucid dream would carry moral significance. "“But I say to you that whoever looks on a woman, to lust after her, has committed adultery with her already in his heart." (St. Matthew 5:28). 

Conclusion

If, by chance, you have a lucid dream, you have not done anything wrong. To actively pursue and try to cultivate such dreams is intimately bound with unproven assertions, such as psychological healing (at best), and occult practices, like pagan meditation (at worst). Instead of chasing lucid dreams, redouble your Traditionalist Catholic prayer life to get to Heaven. To be successful at that goal will get you happiness beyond your wildest dreams. "But, as it is written: That eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what things God hath prepared for them that love Him." (1 Corinthians 2:9).