My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody.
U.G. Krishnamurti
Hello, everyone! My name is Stephen Berlin, and this is my series on dreaming, lucid dreaming, and transcendent states of consciousness accessible through your dreams. Now, before we set sail into the series, we need to acknowledge the albatross that’s going to be accompanying us on our voyage! And that albatross is this: the dreaded dream journal. And, everyone out there who has ever started a dream journal, knows what I’m talking about. You start out with the best of intentions, like a New Year’s resolution, and then… how long does your dream journal last? A week, maybe two, but, generally speaking, it comes to an end. It is a discipline. It is work. And, after all, you’ve got to get up and go to work… you don’t really have time for this, you know? You get up in the middle of the night, you might not get back to sleep. And then you’re cranky the whole next day. So, written dream journals have issues. However, a dream journal is the quintessential tool that every master dreamer will tell you is absolutely a requirement. It’s like your holy book! Without this, you’ll have no dream recall or very very little, you wouldn’t learn anything about your dreams… this is… necessary. So, that being said, and knowing what the issues are, and having had to deal with the issues myself, I’m going to give you a few tips to ease the pain, so to speak.
All right. So, do you want the bad news first, or the good? (pause) All right. Let’s start with the bad news. The bad news is, you decide to keep a dream journal, and so you get everything set up on your nightstand. You’ve got your lamp, you have your notebook, you have your pen—and you go to sleep. You wake up in the middle of the night, and you’re in this groggy dream state, and you’re still halfway in the dream, and you realize, “Oh! I’m supposed to be keeping my dream journal.” And, while you’re thinking this, the first thing is, you have to come up with a decision. Like, you want to stay in your dream, which, when you’re groggy, and it’s kind of a good dream, it’s really hard to wrench yourself out of that dream and deliberately interrupt it and wake up, because who knows, if you stay in the dream, maybe you’d get lucky in the produce department. So, that’s always a tough call. Now, if you do stay in your dream, chances are you’re going to forget it. So, if you do decide to go ahead and interrupt the dream and do your dream journal and be a good little boy or a good little girl and turn on the light and pick up your notebook and your pen and do your assignment, you will wake up with a payoff because you will have your dream journal and, ah, I’m off and running—I’m doing a good job. Okay. Well. That’s essentially problem number one.
The second problem is, you’re going to wake up and usually think, “Well, before I do my dream journal, I have to go to the bathroom.” Well, don’t go to the bathroom, hold it. Because when you get out of bed and start walking towards the bathroom, your dreams start swimming away in all directions, at the speed of dark. And, you will realize how quickly that is, over time—This is not a joke! So, you learn not to move very much, because when you move, your dreams start leaving.
Now, it’s also true, in the same regard, that don’t think that the simple act of waking up from your dream, rolling over, turning on the light, grabbing your pen and your notebook and getting into position, and, in my case, being old, I’m going to be sixty within a year, you know, putting on my glasses—all of that is disturbing my dreams and they are once again pretty much dissolving. So, these are issues. So, now I’m going to get on into the good news.
The good news is, just go out and buy yourself one of these. This is a micro-casette recorder. This happens to be a Sony. You open it up, it has a little micro-casette in it, you can get digital versions of these, I don’t care for digital versions because I’m likely to erase them, but the tapes hold up to an hour, and I just set this next to my bed. Now, when I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m in that groggy state sort of half—you know, between two worlds, between waking and dreaming—and I can’t quite make the decision whether I want to wake up or not, well—and I call that state “purgatory”—I reach over, I pick this up, I push a button, it comes on, a little red light goes on if you want to know that you’re dreaming, if you want to glance down at it, and the microphone is right there on top and you just talking. And this keeps up with you, unlike your pencil or your pen, and this doesn’t run out of ink. It might run out of tape, in which case you open it up, and you flip it over. Which, you know, is not rocket science. You get real good at it. And, there’s always a spare sitting there, just in case.
So, this is what I use. Now, this is a three-tier level of learning. This is better than a written dream journal, in my opinion, because the first level of learning is when you start just recording your dream, even if you never listen to your tapes, even if you never transcribe the tapes, just by being in that in-between ideal state, you will learn how much of your dream you can recall. As you’re talking along, as fast as you’re talking, other things in your dream start coming to you, they’re attached to that by association, and a flood of material comes back! And every now and then, you’ll even hook a dream that was swimming upstream in some tributary and you’ll be able to reel it back in, and you’ll get a much earlier dream scene. It’s fascinating. So, that is tier number one of your learning, even if you do nothing else but this.
Of course, you will forget most of your dreams if you don’t end up listening to them, and that’s what you learn in the second tier, when you actually take the time—a month, a week later, to push the button and listen to your dreams. If you have the time to listen to me, you should have time to do that. And when you start listening to your dreams, the first thing you’re going to recognize is, “Let’s see, I had that dream, and then I recorded that dream—and I still forgot it! But here I am, listening to it.” And then, you move on and then you discover associations and things you didn’t discover before, now you’re looking at it for the first time with your full waking consciousness. Now then, you go to the third tier of learning which is actually transcribing your dreams. And you’ll learn, “Okay, that was just a typical anxiety dream, I’m not going to waste time writing that down, nothing in there of significance to me.” And you will write down your more significant dreams. Now, when you start out, you start writing out things like examples of day residue and faulty logic, and false remembrance, that’ll be very interesting, but once you learn that phenomenon, then you won’t write all of that down you just write—especially, particularly interesting versions of that may deserve being written down. And then, your best dreams, the best of the best, your transcendent dreams, your out of body expeinces, your alien abductions, whatever your thing is, anything that is really— you know, visiting a dead relative—whatever, that’s really significant—then buy a special journal for that. Now, this one happens to be bound in black goat. Now, I’m not saying that to impress you, I did it to impress the person that finds this book when I’m dead! So that this does not end up in the trash can in the city dump. Hopefully, the quality of the book will indicate to someone the quality of the contents, and this black goat might outlive this old goat.
Okay, well, I’m going to move on next into transcendent states of consciousness in dreams, and I know that there’s a lot of people that don’t really like that subject, they think it’s all B.S.— skip over that section, then! But I will say in advance that I am very very careful not to suggest any metaphysical, paranormal, religious, scientific—anything—interpretation of those experiences. I just want you to know about them. You can apply them to your own life own belief systems, and I take some pride in being able to do that for you, because these are essential.
And so, that’s about it, please enjoy this series and I am really grateful that you are here.
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