Robert: How did your lucid dreaming develop after the birth of your son?

Beverly: My mom was feeling better during the years after my son Adrian was born. She visited us often, and we would go to Chicago to see her, as well. Adrian and she became best friends. In the year 2000, I had the biggest challenge of my life. Adrian had started kindergarten. I talked to my mom on the phone almost every day. She was still living in my childhood home, near Chicago. Six days before her planned trip to visit us in California for the holidays, she drove a friend to lunch. That night she told her neighbor that she was feeling good. I had a dream that night, which I shared with Chris and Adrian during breakfast. In the dream, I went to help a woman I loved, who was hanging on her house by her fingertips. Soon, I was hanging by my fingertips, as well. Chris told us that he dreamed we were going on a trip, and I was quickly getting ready.

That morning, in Chicago, my mother didn't answer her door, so her neighbor came in. She found my mom on the floor, next to her bed, unconscious. The doctors called me to say that my mom had had a sudden, massive stroke, and all four quadrants of her brain were instantly destroyed. She would only exist in a vegetative state. I needed to take her off life-support, as she requested in her living will. Chris, Adrian, and I flew to Chicago immediately. Needless to say, the next twelve days before Christmas were a very difficult and emotional time.

Robert: I remember the year before my father passed away, I had a number of lucid and apparently precognitive dreams giving me information - but on one level, nothing can prepare you for it. How did you deal with this?

Beverly: First, I needed to give the okay to remove her ventilator. Everyone thought that she would die at this point. The night before this was scheduled, I had a dream that my husband and I were at the edge of the beach. A tidal wave was coming. In the distance, we saw angels flying toward us in a "V" formation. We thought the tidal wave would demolish us, but instead, the angels flew right over our heads and protected us. This dream told me that I would be able to survive this ordeal. Coincidentally, the ventilator was removed at the exact time that her plane to California was scheduled to take off. However, she still lived, and we had more decisions to make. Do we give her an IV? Is glucose considered food? We did not want to prolong her life in this state. One time, I stayed up all night with her in the hospital. When I finally did go to bed, I had a dream of her. She said to me, "Get some sleep, I'll take care of the body."

Finally, it was Christmas Eve. My mom and I had been together almost every year of my life at midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, in my hometown church. Christmas Eve was her favorite day of the year. She always said, "If we are ever lost, let's meet on this night at our church, in our regular seats". My mother died right at midnight, officially Christmas Day morning.

After her funeral, I stayed alone in my childhood home for another few weeks, to go through fifty years of stuff that had been collected. I made the decision to rent out the house.

Robert: That must have been an extremely difficult and emotional time. Did dreaming help, or was that painful too?

Beverly: My life, as well as my dreams, was quite a struggle after this. In my dreams, I hated to see my mom, only to remember that she had died, which would happen when I was lucid. This was too much to handle. I didn't want to be reminded, once again, in the sleep state, that my mother had died. It was enough to deal with it while awake. I decided not to have lucid dreams for a while. I had a strong intent and a physical need for this to happen. I did have regular, non-lucid dreams of her.

At each stage of my grief, these non-lucid dreams of my mother evolved. First, I dreamed of her and I doing our usual activities. I could have enjoyed these dreams, if I didn't have to feel such shock when I woke up and remembered that she had indeed died. Next, I started dreaming that my mother did not die after all. Then, I had dreams in which she had died, but mysteriously came back to life. I didn't question this in the dreams.

I had many dreams of my childhood home during this time, as well. I did not get lucid, even with great clues, such as when house was changed in impossible ways. Things were very bizarre. Other people were living there, as was now the case with the renters, in reality. I felt angry and confused.

I went to grief therapy for over a year. Using peer counseling and group sharing, I demonstrated more and more acceptance of my mother's death. Little by little, I took the knowledge of her death into my dreams and began to explain it to other dream characters. Finally, after explaining my mother's death to my "father" in a dream, I was able to interact with my "mother," and actually discuss her death. At this point, I had a significant degree of lucidity, and my dreams felt more comfortable, and sometimes enlightening.

Robert: I recall that a month after my father's death, I became lucid and insisted on seeing my father. Amazingly, the dream characters told me that "no, it is too soon". So instead, I had a fascinating conversation with them. After that my dream characters in lucid dreams were quite supportive and caring, and I did go on to have lucid conversations with my deceased father. How did your lucid dreaming progress?

Beverly: In the spring of the year 2002, a year and a half after my mother's death, the lease was up on my childhood home. I needed to sell the house. But could I? Spontaneously, I dreamed that I found the witches in my childhood home. I surrendered to them, and they pulled me under the closet door, where they came from. I merged with the witches. The biggest fears of my childhood were resolved. In my dreams, my fear was to go with the witches. In life, my fear was my mother's death. At last, I could sell the house easily, and I felt that I had healed quite a bit. In the last dream I had of my childhood home, I flew out the picture window like a powerful witch.

After this, I would bring my mother into my dreams. We would embrace and I'd say, "I love you and I miss you, mom." Sometimes, in my dreams, I am still convincing her that she really died. This tells me that some level of grief still exists. One time, in a dream, I said to my mom, "You are safe now, you are in heaven!" I heard the message for myself, as I see my mother as part of my higher self, the Dreamer of life. I presented my grief dreams in a paper at ASD2003 called, "Witches, the House, and Grief: Developing and Avoiding Lucid Dreaming." I was now in a place to get on with discussing my work on "lucid living!"

Robert: Yes, please tell us about lucid living.

Beverly: Before I discuss lucid living, I need to define a few more terms. When discussing a non-lucid dream while awake, I refer to my dream self as "me" or "I," (as in: "I was flying") and I refer to my physical self (or part of my physical self's "mind") as the one who creates the dream, whom I call the dreamer. By definition then, I can not call my dream self the dreamer, although I recognize that some people do. Note, that I do not feel my physical self's brain contains my physical self's mind. I also assume that a "mind" is not physical. In a lucid dream, although I also refer to my dream self as "I", I can sense my connection to the dreamer, and I feel like a "larger, expanded self." Sometimes I even feel connected to what I'll later describe as the "Dreamer of life."

Robert: So in a regular dream, you consider the dream creator as apart from the dream actor. But in a lucid dream, you are aware that the dream creator is also a portion of the dream actor, and in that sense, the awareness is expanded. Right?

Beverly: Yes, but I'd clarify that in a regular, non-lucid dream, from the "perspective" of the dream actor, the dream creator seems to be separate or actually never even considered.

Although I usually say that my dream exists in my physical self's mind, it usually feels as though my dream self, whom you have called the dream actor, and my physical self exist in separate dimensions, and when I "wake up", I change dimensions (or perspectives.) Most importantly, when I become lucid, I feel that my thoughts definitely do not come from my dream self's mind or brain, but from my physical self's mind. For example, my dream self will often have a different life, history, motivations, and goals than my physical self.

So, to summarize, in a lucid dream I usually experience myself in a 3-dimensional, vivid world that I believe my physical self's mind has created. Therefore, I feel safe because I feel I exist in my physical self's mind and not in physical reality (where my physical body resides). Because I see the dream as being created by my physical self's mind, I also know that anything I (the dreamer) can imagine can happen. By believing that everyone and everything around me in the dream, including my dream self and other dream characters, exists in my physical self's mind, I experience everyone as "one", or "made of the same substance" and all "parts of a whole."

Robert: Okay, I think I am following you. How does this relate to lucid living?

Beverly: When I view my waking life as a dream, a dream in which I know I am dreaming (to various degrees, of course), I call this lucid living. Waking life may feel 'real' and unlike a 'dream,' merely because I lack lucidity, just as non-lucid dreams can feel like physical reality, until I become lucid. I try to view life as an "actual dream" and not to merely use lucid living as a therapy or philosophy. The assumptions that come from viewing life as a dream can be very powerful and can expand what we feel is possible in life.

If I look at waking life as a dream, then I can also use lucid dreaming techniques that I learned from my sleeping dream experiences, to more easily become lucid in my waking life. When lucid in waking life, I can become more "free", have fun, accomplish goals, feel connected, and maybe even experience magic in my waking life, as I have in my sleeping lucid dreams.

Robert: So you try to transpose the lessons and experiences of achieving results in lucid dreaming, to the world of waking reality. In so doing, you have used this knowledge and perception to support your experience of lucid living.

Beverly: In lucid living, I think of our physical selves as dream selves in a dream called "waking life." I also imagine a Dreamer who is dreaming our lives. Note the capital "D" to distinguish from the use of dreamer as part of a physical self's mind. Sometimes, I view this Dreamer as some "Being" asleep in a bed in another dimension. Other times, I view the Dreamer as a nonphysical "God" or an all-encompassing, collective "Mind." I guess there could be levels of Dreamers as well.

Either way, when I am lucid in waking life, I sense a connection to this Dreamer, whom I sometimes call my Higher-Self. I begin to respond to things from the perspective of this Dreamer. As in a lucid sleeping dream, I feel "safe," I believe in "limitless possibilities", and I see everyone in waking life as "one" or "parts of a whole."

Robert: So how do you suggest one go about achieving this state, and living waking life lucidly?

Beverly: Throughout my life, I have developed techniques for becoming lucid in my sleeping dreams, and I have found there are many uses for lucid dreaming. Some of these uses include: psychological development, trying new behaviors, healing, and more. I've found that all of my techniques, below, can apply, whether we find ourselves asleep or awake, i.e., in sleeping dreams or in waking life.

To become lucid in my sleeping dreams, or in my waking life, I often look for unusual or impossible situations. In my sleeping dreams, I will often see someone who has died and that will clue me that I am dreaming. At times, in my waking life, especially during tense situations, I look for the unusual and wonder if I am dreaming. Without knowing for sure, I begin to find more evidence, my reactions turn powerful, and I began to relax.

Robert: In other words, you use odd actions or events as a notice to step back from the event and become more broadly aware, just as we all do in lucid dreams. This is opposed to regular dreams or regular waking life, where, unaware, we let ourselves get more drawn into the odd or fearful event. In lucid living, you act like your lucid dreaming self, right?

Beverly: Yes, sometimes I "act as if," or pretend I am dreaming. I often ask myself, or others, if I am dreaming. I also make sure to "test" if I am dreaming. An example of a test is when I try to float. If I do float, I know I am dreaming for sure, and I become lucid. I have not floated in my waking life, but I do not rule it out as an impossibility. I have become more open, for example, to stories of yogis levitating.

Another valuable technique is to review recurring dreams and nightmares and practice imagining myself having new reactions. I have learned to modify my reaction to a monster in a recurring sleep-state nightmare. I have also changed my response to friends at key times in waking life. The key involves viewing the monster as part of my physical self's mind, in the case of the nightmare. In the waking life situation, I view my friends as part of my Higher-Self, or the Dreamer of life.

When trying to become lucid in my sleeping dreams, and in my waking life, I find it valuable to get myself motivated. For example, I can teach or take a class on lucid dreaming or lucid living. It helps to record, share, and visualize my sleeping dreams and my waking life situations. I especially like to do exercises to help me become lucid in both sleeping dreams, and in waking life.

Robert: Could you tell us about a possible exercise to become more lucid in either state?

Beverly: Here is an example of an exercise. I stop and I ask myself if I could be dreaming several times a day, perhaps every time I wash my hands, or climb down steps, or do some activity that doesn't happen too often or too seldom. What I practice while awake, I eventually find myself doing in my sleeping dreams, so this technique helps me become lucid both in my waking and sleeping states.

One of the most valuable tools I have used for motivating me to become lucid in sleeping dreams involves setting goals. Sometimes, I become lucid and decide not to change the direction of my dream, in order to carry out a goal. In this case, I go with the flow of the dream. However, when I do have an interesting goal, I get motivated to become and remain lucid. In my lucid dreaming classes, I suggest that my students start with a simple goal to accomplish in their lucid dream. I ask them to decide the first steps that they can accomplish from wherever they might find themselves, and I tell them to decide this ahead of time, while awake. I find that a goal of "becoming lucid" does not work as well as a goal of doing something fun in the limitless world of dreams. This applies to waking life as well.

As a sleeping lucid dreamer, I learned to remain in my dreams, to wake up out of them, to change them, to go back into them, to become more lucid, and to accomplish intricate goals within them. I would like to do this in my waking state as well.

Robert: Well that sounds like something anyone could try. But what about lucid living?

Beverly: There are aspects of lucid dreaming that apply to lucid living and can help us live our lives more fully. In waking life, we may identify our physical bodies with our selves. The same thought occurs in non-lucid dreams, where we identify our dream bodies with our selves. We may believe that if our dream body dies, we die. We feel this way because we are not aware of our physical self in non-lucid dreams. We continue to feel this way until we wake up out of the dream and discover that the dream happened in our "mind" and not in "reality". We think, after the fact that we could have responded differently had we realized that we'd dreamed.

Of course, even in sleeping lucid dreams, we might not, for example, jump off a cliff, if we didn't feel positive that we were dreaming, and that we could, for example, merely fly away. We might just continue to dream that we had a very bad accident.

In general, after waking up from dreams, we don't think that our dream bodies have 'died,' but understand that we have merely switched focus. Will we someday wake up out of our lives and merely change focus as well?

Our goal, then, in lucid living, involves learning to respond differently, at times, and with less fear in our waking lives. We do not need to wait until 'after the fact' to realize that we could have responded more fully and with more freedom in our lives. Instead, we can 'wake up within our waking life!'

Robert: It's interesting in lucid dreaming, and perhaps this goes for lucid living as well, that a broader awareness leads to the realization of a new type of relationship with the so-called reality around you. In turn, the aware person begins to act in that so-called reality in a new way. In lucid living, are one's actions different?

Beverly: Yes. For example, lucid dreamers have experienced the amazing feeling of having an exciting goal for a dream and making it happen. We can experience the joy of making things happen more often in our waking state, by learning to become lucid in waking life and set upon accomplishing tasks with a new outlook that anything is possible. At the very least, we can probably gain an understanding of how we may block our selves and try again, knowing we have endless possibilities.

An example, from an early stage of my sleeping lucid dream development, illustrates this point. In my dream, I could not fly to my destination because I kept hitting telephone poles. When I decided that "this is my dream," I was able to fly right through the poles. I also realized that it was my physical self's mind that created the telephone poles to begin with!

When we increase our lucidity in waking life, we can also feel a sense of oneness with everyone and everything. We can live as if our Higher-Self does indeed "create our own reality." We can experience an altered state of consciousness, and at the extreme, we can have what one might call "mystical experiences."

Robert: Okay, but even in some of our lucid dreams, we become frustrated - we can't fly very well, or the dream characters won't do what we want them to do. What about those cases?

Beverly: In lucid dreams, I try to remember that all the dream characters make up parts of my dreamer's mind. Similarly, the next time we find ourselves in an undesirable situation in our waking life, we can take action with the belief that other people make up parts of our Higher-Self, the Dreamer.

This can help us to stop and listen to what others have to say, not because we have been taught to, but because we want to understand the Dreamer. Like puppets who act as though they are separate and disconnected, we often feel disconnected. Using the puppet analogy, we can begin to identify more with the puppeteer, realizing that it is the puppeteer who makes everything happen.

Robert: Well, I'm not too happy with the word, "puppet", but I do get the point that the creator of the dream/waking reality is also involved, consciously or not, with the creations in that dream/waking reality. So there is a connection there, if we are lucid enough to wake up to it. Do you have examples of lucid living that would demonstrate your point?

Beverly: Remember, the true puppet has no more or less powers than the puppeteer. In essence they are "one and the same!"

Here are a few examples of how I have become lucid in my waking life. Once, during an argument with my cousin in the waking state, I suddenly stopped to think, "If I look at this as a dream right now, then my cousin actually expresses a part of the Dreamer (my Higher-Self.) At that exact moment, I acted from the perspective of the Dreamer, and she actually started to explain how our points of view seemed related instead of opposed.

Another time, a friend, in the waking state, was yelling and hovering over me like the witches from my sleeping dreams. I noticed the similarities to the witch nightmares, and I saw this as a pattern in my life. The situation actually happened in the same physical place in my house with different people. I faced up to my friend like I faced up to the witches, without fear, but with acceptance, and my friend suddenly stopped, walked away, and the pattern in my life ended, in the same way my witch nightmares ceased.

My marriage, my child, my degrees, my career, and my amazing adventures, too numerous to mention, are all examples of how lucid living has assisted me in having such an incredible and diverse life.

Robert: For many of us longtime lucid dreamers, we have similar stories. But do you think these ideas can be accepted by someone new to lucid dreaming?

Beverly: In my experience as a lucid dreaming teacher, my students found it easier to become lucid in their sleeping dreams, once they understood the concept and believed it possible. When they began to question whether or not they dreamed and looked for evidence, they often noticed something unusual and became lucid. Once they had experienced results, they no longer had to believe, they knew they could become lucid. We can do the same with lucid living.

Perhaps people would accept psychic phenomena, or synchronicities in waking life, more readily if they viewed waking life as a dream. Viewing life as a dream, gave me a foundation for understanding how I could possibly have had my first amazing, precognitive dreams. Psychic phenomena could also serve as clues for becoming lucid in waking life.

Robert: You know, I have often thought that in life, we simply live our assumptions. In lucid dreams, you begin to see that idea in an immediate sense. When you change your expectations in a lucid dream, the dream changes to accommodate the changes. It seems the same thing happens in waking life.

Beverly: Yes, I believe lucid living can have a profound effect on all our lives. Of course, as in our sleeping dreams, we can easily go on automatic and lose lucidity. However, the more we practice lucid dreaming skills, whether when asleep or during our waking life, the more likely we will become lucid at all times. By practicing lucid living, we strive to live the most illuminating, clear, and conscious waking life as possible.

We can also obtain a greater understanding of what spiritual practices, great writers, movies, fairy tales, and songs have been telling us for ages:

Hindu Maya: Waking life is an illusion; Buddhist: Philosophy of Connectedness; Christianity: Resurrection after death; The Course of Miracles: Live the Happy Dream; The Wizard of Oz: There's no place like home; Shakespeare: All the world's a stage; Star Trek: Holodeck; The Matrix: The world has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the truth.

The list goes on and on. My favorite is: Row, Row, Row, your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

Robert: Beverly, thanks for your sage advice and insights. Life is but a dream.

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