Lucid Dreaming and the Meditation Connection

Charles Clarkson
Sep 7, 2018 · 3 min read

Many studies of lucid dreams suffer with theoretical and empirical insularity. A lucid dream apparently, is a lucid dream. Of course things and experiences are always unique unto themselves. However, to discover what something is and what it means, it is often helpful to compare it with related phenomena.

So it is with lucid dreams. A lucid dream, of course, is being in the know that you are in a dream while the dream is happening. It is sometimes seen as an approximation in the dream to our waking cognitive faculties, but that is doubtful since it makes it sound like lucidity is necessarily unique to dreaming and since experienced lucid dreamers do report confusions of thought and memory that are characteristic of the rest of dreaming. Rather, lucid dreams are as different from waking experience as waking experience is from dreaming.

Lucid dreams share characteristics with meditation, a special sense of clarity, exhilaration, and freedom that comes with emergence of a detached receptive attitude in the midst of our more narrow everyday involvements. Lucid dreams are a form of the state of mind sought within the so called “insight” or “mindfulness” meditative traditions. They transform dreams in the same way that meditation transforms wakefulness. Meditation is privileged in this comparative series because we know so much about it from the point of view of very different theories and methods. If this comparison is useful, then not only will meditation cast a uniquely clarifying light on lucid dreams, but lucid dreams will help us with otherwise obscure points about the nature and goals of meditation.

The strongest connection of lucidity and meditation comes from the development of lucid dreams in advanced Tibetan Buddhist practice. This is understood as the form of meditation available during sleep. The recognized dream is to be transmuted in various ways and one also attempts to understand ongoing waking experience as itself a dream, both of these being an aid to realising the non-substantial open bases of all experience. Dream meditation on the dream experience leads to a direct insight into the way that things are at once definitely formed and clear, yet open, empty, and illusory.

There are significantly more lucid dream experiences in long term meditators and a correlation between lucid-control dreams and intensity of major alterations of consciousness, such as white light or luminosity experiences with years of meditative practice. Since there is no association at all between degree of lucidity and deliberate attempts to change one’s dreaming toward lucidity, it may well be that dream lucidity and control develop automatically as the result of long term meditation. Meditators experiencing lucid dreaming sometimes cannot tell whether they have awakened and are spontaneously meditating or whether they are asleep and experiencing a lucid dream.

A common underlying cognition between lucid dreams and meditation is implied by the way that meditation gradually extends itself into dreaming as lucidity and by the way that developed lucid dreams become more and more visionary and oriented toward a spiritual interpretation of life. And part of the traditional function of any seriously held spiritual belief is to create the “lucid” sense that we are simultaneously part of this world and its doings and yet detached from it by virtue of a broader intelligence of context which does normally elude us.

And on that deep note…

Thanks for reading

Charles V.P. Clarkson, BSc MSc.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade