On occasion, the LDE features book reviews of lucid dream related books.
This month, Katie - an accomplished lucid dreamer herself - shares her views
of Olga Kharitidi's book, "Master of Lucid Dreams".
Book Review
By Katie
Master Of Lucid Dreams
by Olga Kharitidi, MD
Hampton Roads Publishing, 2001
I've been having lucid dreams all my life, so they seem wonderful but
natural to me. I was astonished in my early 20's to come across one of
Stephen LaBerge's books about lucid dreaming and find out that it was a
recognized and studied phenomenon. I had the privilege of volunteering with
the "oneironauts" for a while, trying out some of the masks, participating
in the experiments. Great fun, amazing to hear other people's experience and
carry their curiosity and enthusiasm into my next LD.
Kharitidi's book is about as far from the sleep labs of Stanford as you can
get: don't let the "MD" fool you into thinking otherwise. Khartidi is a
practicing psychiatrist; the subtitle of this book is "In the heart of Asia,
a Russian psychiatrist learns how to heal the spirits of trauma". Kharitidi
relates the story of her guided shamanistic enlightenment about human trauma
and the use of lucid dreaming to resolve it. She brings this learning back
to her psychiatric practice and gives us one example of a woman already
trained in trance states and psychotherapy who hears Kharatidi's story and
releases herself from the psych ward to go home and have a complete healing
within a couple of hours. (I work at a psychiatric facility and am
"professionally" skeptical of 2 hour cures.)
And yet... the book had a pretty strong impact on me. My belief about dreams
is that they encompass every label ever applied to them, from the
meaningless firing of neurons in the brain, to Freud's almost as meaningless
day residue, to a brain function that helps build experience into memory and
learning, to a kind of psychological mirror, to as far out as you want to go
on the spiritual side. I've had such varied and amazing dreams in my life
that I place dreams in the same category as religion: It's too profound a
subject for anyone to comprehend completely, and anyone who believes they
have divine truth does -- have part of it. Like the elephant and the blind
men, whatever bit we're able to grasp and comprehend is true, but
incomplete.
So I enjoyed Khartidi's book a lot; part of it rang quite "true" to me;
others I rejected. But that's just my piece of the elephant. If you're
looking for a read on lucidity from a shamanistic standpoint (what Jung
would call "neuroses", where energy is "stuck" by an event; the author would
refer to "memory demons"), this book will interest you. If your interest in
lucidity is more based in brain function, probably not. If psychological
integration is what you believe lucidity can help develop, maybe, maybe not.
A reference point may be the books of Robert Moss -- if you've read him and
found him worthwhile you may like this book; and the opposite may hold true
as well.
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