Lucid Dream Discourses
Stephen Berlin
Hello, and welcome again in to my ’zen, all you denizens of dreams. I’m Stephen Berlin, and today I’m going to be talking about the dynamics of dream emergence. Yes, I know, I said I’d be talking about something else, but, before you go out and proclaim that the cursive serpent speaks in forked tongue, I’m going to go ahead and subtitle this “geography and navigation in dreams, part one”. It was my intention to discuss your four primary choices for getting around in a dream, for getting to your destinations, and then outline the advantages and/or disadvantages of each, but in preparing that, I got thinking, hrmm, you know, before I start talking about how to navigate the dream state, it’s kind of important to know what we’re navigating, and one important feature of the state that you really need to be aware of before we intrude upon it with our lucidity and attempt to influence it. So, what are we navigating? Well, you all should know this by now: We’re navigating ourselves. You’re navigating the unfolding contents of your unconscious mind in all the glory, splendor, power, good, evil, potential… that’s there, as described by all the great depth psychologists, you know, Freud, Jung, Adler, all those guys—that’s all your own personal private unique inner self. And, I want you to know, I don’t presume to tell you how to navigate yourself. If you disagree with anything I say, in any of these talks, uh, do I have any idea what’s going on inside your dreams? No. And I don’t presume to—(laughs) nor do I want to! And the same is true, so, anything that I say is not necessarily the gospel, at least, you know, in many cases, not for your own reality.
Okay, well, I need to move on to what’s important about this state that we need to understand before we start navigating it. Well, the dream state is different than our waking state for one obvious reason: our waking state appears to our sensory apparatus as relatively stable: what’s outside your front door today, is probably going to be outside your front door tomorrow. Now, in dreams, things are constantly changing, constantly moving, so your dreams are moving forward, in fact your dreams are constantly in a major transformotion—pardon the word, but I love it, I’d give it as a definition for dreaming! Transformotion. ’Cause your dreams are moving ahead (empathically) really quickly by association. And when I say “association” I mean every synonym of association: by correlation, by approximation, by analogy and metaphor and wordplay, like alliteration and rhyme—and, your dream is making all these connections and it’s moving forward by those connections which will be better demonstrated by an example I’m going to give. But before I do that, there’s one kind of transformotion that needs specific emphasis, and that is homologous variation. Now, the term homologous variant was coined by a Swiss biologist or biochemist, Claude Rafat (spells out surname), and I regret to say Claude is dead. He died in 2002. But, thankfully, before Claude died, I think—in the mid-eighties, he gave us this cult classic (reaches offscreen for a stack of paper) "Conscious Dreaming and Controlled Hallucinations" and in this, he coins— although, he coins the French term for it, so— not going to go into that— I’m sure the nation fans will be grateful for that—okay? Uh, but it’s homologous variants I’m going to spell that because I think it’s an important word— (spells out). Now, Claude had in a pre-sleep state, a brief vision of a mushroom, which he would call a disattenuated image, and in his vision of the mushroom, he watched it in a matter of just a couple of seconds, transform into a candle in an ashtray, and Claude concluded from that—accurately, I think—that our memories store things by pattern recognition. In other words, we don’t have a candle department in our mind, and an ashtray department in our memory, and a mushroom department. What happened in this short visual that he had, was when he saw a mushroom, that his mind recognized the pattern as resembling and being connected with the image of a candle in an ashtray, which Claude apparently had seen some time in his life or imagined. So that was a homologous variation. So, that’s a very important concept. Let me move on, now, to a dream to demonstrate these principles.
Now, I’ve been having some issues with my computer, lately. And so, one thing I’ve been checking—my hard drive space, it’s rapidly disappearing, so I checked it, and my computer presented me with a pie chart, which shows you what slice of the pie you still have left to use.
Well, anyway, I’m dreaming the other morning, and I dream of being in front of my computer screen, and I’m looking at my system resources again, evidently, but instead of a pie chart, my dream presented me with a bar graph. Now, I think the pie chart was the day residue, but instead of a homologous variation of that, my mind, I believe, used an association to a bar graph because they’re both pictorial representations of data.
So, now I’m in my dream and I’m looking at this bar graph in my system resources, and it’s two-dimensional, and then it suddenly becomes three-dimensional. Well, that’s a homologous variation. Okay, now I see this three-dimensional bar graph across my screen, and I thought to myself, “You know, this looks like a city skyline” and no sooner did I think “city skyline” than the screen transformed again, and the two bars in the middle became really tall, the Twin Tower bars, you’d say, of the city skyline, so now, it’s gone to another homologous jump so to speak, or variation—and—and then, when I realized it was the New York City skyline, the whole— the bar graph changed into, like, a post card of New York City, and then it became animated, and—in my dream, they fell at the same time, but, in my dream, these two bars start collapsing (mimes collapse)— You all know the visual on that. And it’s coming down—I’m looking at this in horror, it wasn’t the same horror I felt at 9/11, in this case it was the horror of seeing my computer crashing. And so, the towers came down (mimes collapse)— unfortunately, they collapsed into my computer’s footprint. And, anyway, so then the crash screen came up, which, in Windows normally says, you know, “Contact your system administrator” but in my case, in the dream, it had two big words there in block letters: “HAVOC” and “WRECKED”. Well, then I woke up, and I realized— and I got thinking—like, I analyze my dreams pretty quickly, while the associations are still kind of fresh, and I thought “WRECKED”—Well, I could see where the word “Wrecked” came from, because my computer crashed, the towers came crashing down, you talk about car crashes, you talk about car wrecks, they’re kind of synonymous… so, wrecked, when my computer crashed, made some sense. But how about havoc? So, I’m sitting there going (thoughtfully) “Havoc… havoc, wrecked… havoc wrecked… wrecked, havoc— wreaked havoc!” You know, you hear that the tornado swept through the Mid-west and wreaked havoc. Bad financial news wreaked havoc on Wall Street! Wreaked havoc. So, my mind went from crashed, to wrecked, to wreaked havoc. (pause) All in just a matter of—this all happened in ten to fifteen seconds, tops! All of these homologous variations and associations. Now, I do want to point out that it’s possible that wreaked havoc maybe wasn’t wordplay, it could have been day residue. Maybe I walked by the television, or heard on the radio, maybe somebody used the expression— I didn’t quite consciously catch it. Maybe I passed a newsstand, it was on some headline—I didn’t consciously remember. That’s another possibility, if you watch that discourse. (checks watch) So, anyway, I need to get going here, and—So, we coined a new word—and maybe we started a new dance craze (sings to the tune of “The Loco-Motion” by Kylie Minogue) “Everybody’s doing a brand new dance, now / Come on, baby, do the transformotion”—
You know, I like to give lucid dreaming’s true profundity some fecundity and I utilize the tools of brevity and levity. And that’s about it, in a nutshell.
(fade out)
A Cursive Serpent Production
2007
My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to produce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the persmission of anybody.
U.G. Krishnamurti
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