In the meantime, Robert was kind enough to allow me to share a free preview of his book, in PDF format, giving out 3 chapters for anyone who is curious to read!

Check it out, and then come back next Tuesday to read 3 Questions for Robert Waggoner.

Click here to download a FREE 58 page preview (3 chapters) of Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, by Robert Waggoner.

Actually – Let Me Just Buy it Or Read The Reviews at Amazon!

Thanks Robert for letting me share a bit of your book to my readers!

Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self by Robert Waggoner

It’s rare that a book comes out these days that advances the discussion and understanding of Lucid Dreaming, but this is what Robert Waggoner has accomplished with his new book, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self
.

The official description reads…

Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self is the account of an extraordinarily talented lucid dreamer who goes beyond the boundaries of both psychology and religion. In the process, he stumbles upon the Inner Self.

While lucid (consciously aware) in the dream state and able to act and interact with dream figures, objects, and settings, dream expert Robert Waggoner experienced something transformative and unexpected. He was able to interact consciously with the dream observer-the apparent Inner Self-within the dream. At first this seemed shocking, even impossible, since psychology normally alludes to such theoretical inner aspects as the Subliminal Self, the Center, the Internal Self-Helper in vague and theoretical ways. Waggoner came to realize, however, that aware interaction with the Inner Self was not only possible, but actual and highly inspiring. He concluded that while aware in the dream state, one has both a psychological tool and a platform from which to understand dreaming and the larger picture of man’s psyche as well. Waggoner proposes 5 stages of lucid dreaming and guides readers through them, offering advice for those who have never experienced the lucid dream state and suggestions for how experienced lucid dreamers can advance to a new level.

Lucid Dreaming offers exciting insights and vivid illustrations that will intrigue not only avid dreamworkers but anyone who is interested in consciousness, identity, and the definition of reality.”

Peer Review & Reception

Dream researchers, writers, and heavyweights such as Jayne Gackenback, Robert Van De Castle, Robert Moss, and Stanley Krippner lended their endorsement to Waggoners new book on the back cover, and thus far, Amazon.com reviewers have all given it a 5 star rating, the highest rating possible, with some calling it the best book ever written on lucid dreaming. Big words!

Interview with Author — coming soon!

I will be interviewing Robert Waggoner on the subject of lucid dreaming and the themes discussed in his book.

I’m really excited for the opportunity to interview an individual who has logged over 1,000 lucid dreams, has 30 years of experience in the subject, and currently serves as the President-elect for IASD, The International Association for the Study of Dreams!

Be on the lookout for this combination book review/author interview next month here on Dreaming Life.

In the meantime, you can learn more about (or buy) his book on Amazon.com.

Um – what is an isolation tank, you ask?

“An isolation tank is a lightless, soundproof tank in which subjects float in salty water at skin temperature. They were first used by John C. Lilly in 1954 in order to test the effects of sensory deprivation. Such tanks are now also used for meditation and relaxation and in alternative medicine. Isolation tanks were originally called sensory deprivation tanks. Other synonyms for isolation tank include float tank, floating tank, floater tank, flotation tank, REST tank, flotation baths, John Lilly tank and sensory attenuation tank.”

-Wikipedia Entry on Isolation Tanks

Ironically, the film Altered States is even (loosely) based on the work of John Lilly, although I don’t think in real life he de-evolved into an ape and went on a rampage attacking people and eating raw animal flesh. :)

A few days ago I happened to find a nugget of gold at my local used bookstore. Sitting on the shelf, almost offensively in the new age section, I saw John Lilly’s definitive book on his research into isolation tanks, titled The Deep Self: Profound Relaxation and the Tank Isolation Technique.

Published all the way back in 1977, this book is a bit of mixture of 2 things – scholarly research into sensory deprivation via the isolation tank & how it effects the brain, and the philosophical underpinnings of the experiences and what it means as far as reality/mind.

About half the chapters convey a very scholarly approach on the topic at hand, covering everything from how to build a tank, to problems, obstacles, issues you might have in using the tank, to what to expect in the tank, to how they conducted their research, and so on. This is based on 20 years of research.

The other chapters are somewhat strange and occasionally hard to follow  – these are the chapters with Lilly espousing his ideas on reality, but (for me) too often draped in very scientific and mathematical terms.

It’s more than that though – he has this unique angle of how he writes & even a separate vocabulary of words and concepts that now, in 2008, sound quite odd to me. For instance, he regularly uses words such “biocomputer” , “metabelief”, “cybernetic” and “inperience”. External reality becomes e.r, and internal reality becomes i.r. Lilly constantly jumps his words together using a bracket or hyphen to connect similar concepts, resulting in very odd sentences such as “most other minds are not prepared to hear-understand-grasp what it means to explore-experiment-be-immersed-in such states.”

But don’t get me wrong here – it sounds like I’m putting down Lilly, and I’m not. He’s become a sort of personal hero to me, as I feel drawn to his passion for wanting to understand and his bravery and dedication towards using himself as a research subject, even at the cost of his own personal life and professional life.

I truly think he was tortured by his search for understanding, and this passion was the guiding principle of all his actions, no matter what the cost.

On page 72, he writes:

“Many of my former colleagues disavowed me…I understand their belief systems and the power such system have over our minds. I do not recriminate them, nor do I blame formers friends for not maintaining contact with me.

In my search (for “What is Reality?”), I have driven myself (and hence, close associates-relative-friends) to the brink of the loss of all communicational contacts for months at a time…. I have explored and have voluntarily entered into domains forbidden by a large fraction of those in our culture who are not curious, are not explorative and are not mentually equipped to enter these domains.”

These chapters on reality contain some of the most fascinating pieces in the book, with Lilly mapping out stages and ranges of consciousness/experience and exploring the old mind / brain / body problem (but in a way that I felt he was adding to the argument, and not just rehashing the same old ideas).

Finally, at the end of the book, we get to read logs of peoples experiences in the tank!

This is maybe the best part of the book.

Really, I had no idea just how far out you can go through sensory deprivation inside one of these tanks.

Some of the experience reports are so far out there, I have to wonder if they were conducting the experiment in combination with a psychedelic substance. (Lilly and friends were no stranger to LSD and other drugs, by the way!)

I want to quote at length from these logs, because I think the reports of the actual experience make for a more immediate understanding of what isolation tanks are all about.

Take a look at these excerpts:

“Gradually I seemed to make a head-on 180 degree roll so that I was facing down into an impenetrable night. Dawn broke from the eastern horizon, illuminating a vast desert of glittering sand a hundred feet below me. The sand became transparent and directly below me was a polished black granite monolith……in the center…was encased a sculptor of Jill. The effigy was of monumental size… when her eyes met mine, two lines of graphite streaked across the desert, straight to the source of sunrise beyond the distant mountains.”

“Immediately experienced floating out of body shell. Roamed and sauntered through a kind of cosmic park, full of density but infinite boundaries. People’s images occasionally came in and out of this…. Then as wondered on this, sudden enlightenment  – there is no such things as separate consciousness.”

“Although nothing happened in the first two sessions, hallucinations were experienced nearly every time thereafter…. They would continue for hours. I was always aware that I was hallucinating and part of my mind was nearly always making observations. There were the usual out of body…hallucinations…. When I moved my hands (actually in the water) I would see them move and sky appear between the fingers. I have later had imaginary flights over scenery. “

“I lost boundaries and time sense, immediately disappeared and I experience total peace and a feeling of unity…. What I experienced was a continuous void that was not boring, yet empty, not engaging, yet full.”

“Moving into an absolute void (experienced as consciousness of the interstellar space.) Timelessness. No difference between minutes and millions of years. Ending up the experience with feelings of regeneration, purification, refreshment, clarify.”

(This last quote is from Stan Grof. You may recognize his name. Interesting, I also saw Andrew Weil in the name of tank loggers, along with Richard Feynman (Yes, the Richard Feynman of quantum physicists fame. He spent something like 35 hours in the tank for Lilly’s research), and Ralph Metzner. )

…..

I really cannot believe how “far out” these logs read though. Many times over, I get the impression that floating in the tank, consciousness becomes like that of a dream. Sometimes people can direct the hallucinations, creating a sort of waking life lucid dream hallucination. This just blows my mind!

Why don’t more people know about this?

Why isn’t the use of these tanks more common?

I am now on the hunt for a tank in my area, as I really want to try out the experience* for myself!

*or as John Lilly would say, inperience.

Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna

By the last page, the book has taken a somewhat discontinuous step into a different territory, with McKenna penning a manifesto of sorts on the integration of psychoactives into our current culture. He calls our culture the Dominator culture, and sees the use of consciousness-expanding plants as part of the Archaic Revival, a reference to the return of a  pre-monotheistic, integrated, “whole” way of living that we as a species once had with our environment and each other.

History buffs may find the first few chapters more exciting than I did. Being very ignorant of the specifics of history, I could not more challenge McKenna’s findings than agree with them – I can only take them at face value.

The book became most fascinating when it leads into the introduction of sugar, spices, and tea into the last few centuries, and how these substances caused an upheaval of society and are directly related to the enslavement of fellow human beings.

I found myself raising an eyebrow at some his theories on TV as a drug, and I was surprised how quickly he dismisses monotheistic religions in such a manner that his contempt and dislike for monotheism is obvious.

Where his writing is most engaging is the topic of our modern relationship with drugs, and why it is that our culture sanctions the use of certain substances (caffeine, sugar, alcohol) and shuns the use of others (marijuana, for example.) In a culture based on competition and dominance, we’ve embedded plants into our daily life that help promote these types of behaviors.

For instance, why is it that it’s socially acceptable to hype yourself up on caffeine and sugar at work but not marijuana?

McKenna’s point is that caffeine and sugar feed into the goals of “dominator” culture, whereas substances like marijuana (and other psychedelics) promote a less competitive, less egocentric individual.

The types of plants and substances that ultimately promote “dominator cultural values” is what we, as a culture, promote and use, and anything that’s a threat to these values is either illegal, shunned, or both.

This led me to think about my own life:

In the morning at work, what do I do? I drink Diet Cherry Coke or coffee, or both. I tell myself, I need some caffeine. I know soda isn’t healthy for me, but I justify it because I need the pick-me-up of caffeine to help me at work.

And then in the evening or in the night, what do I often do? I drink alcohol, something that’s going to relax me, mellow me out. Often I’ll drink alcohol because I want to wind down from the stress of work, or the stress of life.

It’s impossible to imagine switching these, isn’t it? I would never drink alcohol at 8am, nor would I drink coffee at 10pm at night.

This example is by no means dramatic or even interesting; in fact, it’s its blatant regularity and trivialness in our day to day life that I find fascinating in contrast to McKenna’s arguments on how our cultural values are evident in the plants, drugs, and substances we allow or omit.

The other topic I found most fascinating was his discussion on DMT and just what the hell the mind-bending experience of DMT means… I will resist elaborating, and instead, insist you read the book to find out. (Spoiler: unfortunately this topic is only skimmed. I believe he covers this more in depth in another book of his, which I’m going to read next.)

…. 

Here’s an interesting quote:

“The Archaic Revival is a clarion call to recover our birthright, however uncomfortable that may make us. It is a call to realize that life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego and its fear of dissolution.”

- Terrence McKenna, Food of the Goods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge – A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution

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Authors Jayne Gackenbach and Jane Bosveld tackle lucid dreaming at many, many different angles. While they explore the basic concepts of dreaming, what dreams are, interpretation, and techniques for working with your dreams on up to controlling your dreams via lucid dreaming, they go far beyond this.

The authors talk extensively on the connection between dreams and lucid dreaming to positive visualization, the power of the mind to heal the body, the similarities between meditation and the dream state, near-death and out of body experiences, and even the dreaded UFO abduction story. It is the discussion of all these additional subjects in relation to dreams that makes this book worth reading.

If you have an aversion to relate lucid dreaming with eastern mysticism or meditation, than steer clear of this book! It becomes apparent early on that the authors are fascinated by meditation and they relate its practice to lucid dreaming constantly throughout the book, more than any other subject mentioned above.

This culminates in the chapter entitled “Dreaming Buddhas” where we are given an in depth analysis of meditative practices, techniques, the results and the meditation experience itself as it relates to the higher states of consciousness present in both lucid dreaming and meditation.

One aspect of this book I’ve not seen in others is the citation of so many studies and research programs on lucid dreaming! The writing is liberally sprinkled again and again with stories of people using of lucid dreaming in many contexts I had never heard much about before. This includes the skater who used his lucidity to perfect his skating moves or people who used the lucid experience to focus on healing their bodies, which led to a corresponding change in their actual physical body.

I commend the authors for citing dozens of scientific studies and research projects on lucid dreaming as a basis for much of the material in this book. It’s great to see this in a book on dreams – and rare too, as most of the books on dreams are just…well, don’t get me started on that subject!

Yet it drives me crazy that they’re paradoxically and simultaneously guilty of referring to uncited sources throughout the book. I don’t see how you can get away with writing lines like “Two studies have found that people who have near death experience’s are more likely experience dream lucidity,” and then note cite the source or give any further informationon the study. I saw examples of this throughout the book, side by side with cited examples. What gives?

…

ULTIMATELY, this book is about more than lucid dreaming. It’s about taking in our experience of reality and trying to make sense of it. Lucid dreaming then becomes just one piece of a bigger puzzle the authors navigate through in trying to solve the biggest questions of them all.

Buy the Control Your Dreams book from Amazon.com

He’s not simply having a subjective journey inside his mind; DXM actually takes him to an objective realm with other beings – some of which are the souls of recently departed friends and associates!

Yes – he’s talking about meeting the dead!

Along the way, he has out of body experiences, witnesses the seat of dreaming and memory, interacts with strange beings, lost souls, and other characters, and of course, has some seriously ego-crushing experiences, forever messing with the idea of the “I”.

Dan writes that DXM takes him to the Hive Mind.

What is this place? Who is there? What’s going on in here?

Dan likens the term Hive Mind to Terrence McKenna’s idea of the OverMind, which is a living Super Mind created through pooling the consciousness of the dead into one group mind. (I find it interesting that he does not see the Hive Mind as an omnipotent God, stating that although it is self-aware, it has problems, learns, grows and changes.)

Once inside, he met with a friend who had recently died. He also saw a friends father who had died in “real life” – yet this fact was unknown to Dan while he was tripping. He sees this as proof to the idea that he is visiting the same realm of the dead.

Within the Hive Mind, he also met Buddhist Monks, who he believes were dead or possibly alive and meditating (!!), and Native Americans. He met people who seemed confused, trapped, unable to move or grown on – hinting at the idea of purgatory.

And he also met the infamous “elves” that also pop up in other psychedelic literature.

….

It’s a bit hard to pin down the more abstract run-ins he had in the hive mind, but Dan describes an amazing encounters with dreams, or, a he describes it, the seat of dreaming.

After seeing what he calls The Dream Chamber, Dan recorded the following into a tape recorder:

“I’m flying over a scene that looks like an elaborate model train set. Amazing… what it is is a dream landscape. It’s a three-dimensional scene of every dream I’ve ever had. I can at this point remember/see every dream I’ve ever had. Now I’m drifting down into it. People, animals, archetypes, childhood monsters…they’re all here! And this is not a memory, but a place! Everything still happening – alive – a living hologram.”

Reflecting on this, he later writes: “It seems I was looking at a sentient world of thought – my thoughts! – being the dreams “thought up” by me over a lifetime. I must emphasize: everything in this place was ALIVE still…moving, happening.” What would it mean if our dreams actually existed in some place? And more than that, they permanently existed, living in three dimensions and existing forever?

The only way I could take in something like this would be with the perspective of parallel universes and a holographic universe.

And even then, the idea is baffling and far out.

Psychedelics are known for the ego-crushing properties, and Dan’s experiences with DXM are no exception. He discusses this at various points in the book, trip by trip, stating such things as:

“Initially, my personality was revealed to be not an “I” but an orchestra of “I’s” working in unison to create a sense of one “I.”

I find this interesting because, from what I understand, this notion of multiple selves working together to create the illusion of a single “I” is understood to be true by mainstream neuroscientists and others who study consciousness.

His descriptions of the self get creepy, reminding me of what others write about DMT, when he says things like:“The psychedelic had held a door open into one “me,” allowing another “me” to see in…and “I” was a squirming electric flesh-chemical ant colony.”

And later, almost reassuringly, he writes about what part of him moves on after death, saying that witnessing “these tiny knowing bits of me, by deduction, the “I” in the Anti-Ego state doing the watching, must be incomplete.” Therefore, he concludes that the state he is currently in feels stripped down “because it is existing as a partial self.” This essence, the part that’s left over after everything else is stripped down…”must be the “real” me – the me that crosses into death.”

This brings up the questions I wrote about in this post on reincarnation and what it is that actually carries on after death. Unfortunately, it doesn’t answer them.

……

A Psychonaut’s Guide to the Invisible Landscape

All the questions brought up in this book answer to a bigger question, perhaps the biggest question of all:

Can we trust our own subjective experiences?

This innocent-sounding question is one of enormous implication.

At times when I read his words I thought to myself that if I accept what he says, than by the same standards, I should accept the words and experiences of those who profess many other subjective experience, many of which contradict each other. (For instance, the prophets of various religions all claiming that theirs is the only truth and everyone else is wrong.)

On the flipside, if we can’t trust our own experiences, than what the hell are we to do?

Hard-nosed scientists would say that all we can trust is objectively measured data i.e. then science, and only science, in the strictest sense of the word, is the only path towards knowledge and truth.

I agree that a scientific approach yields literally awe-some results but this approach falls short in explaining our everyday experience of the world and that which we know most intimately: the conscious experience, the spiritual impulse, the subjective, inner self… the “I” that we all experience.

So the question is how do we reconcile the subjective experience with the objective measure of science?

The Dalai Lama says it best in his book The Universe in A Single Atom, when he asks:

“Given that one of the primary characteristics of consciousness is its subjective and experiential nature, any systematic study of it must adopt a method that will give access to the dimensions of subjectivity and experience.

A comprehensive scientific study of consciousness must therefore embrace both third-person and first-person methods: it cannot ignore the phenomenological reality of subjective experience but must observe all the rules of scientific rigor. So the critical question is this: Can we envision a scientific methodology for the study of consciousness whereby a robust first-person method, which does full justice to the phenomenology of experience, can be combined with the objectivist perspective of the study of the brain?”

….

A Psychonaut’s Guide to the Invisible Landscape

While he does get into this a bit, occasionally using quantum physics to help makes sense of the experience, unfortunately this book is more of a collection of trip reports, like those found on Erowid, rather than a full book about what he learned.

Near the end, he boldly writes that “exploration with psychedelics must be the exploration of death in the final outcome,” and tops it off by saying that “my approach has been absolutely spiritual despite its appearance to some.”

Later, in reflection on the totality of his experience, Dan – displaying the top notch writing he is capable of – writes:

“I estimate that I have spent about one hundred hours in the Hive by now. And I always find the same things…rooms, appliances, beings – the Dead!

All of these descriptions of things seen in the closed-eye trance are maddeningly hard to pin down. As in the area of say: What’s brain? And What’s Other?

In the early days all was new, and I wasn’t sure that anything I was seeing was “outside” of me. Inner space, outer space, was there even a difference? Well, no; it was beginning to seem to me that despite the glaring problem of not knowing how or why we humans got here, I had seen much to enforce this growing idea of some It Behind – a blind groping hand of “God” reaching from Behind the soup of atoms and up the DNA strands to feel its created self in the Here.

…….

Rob was kind enough to chat with me via email and answer some questions I had after reading the book and that’s what I’m here to bring you today.

Table of Contents

watch the video
Watch Part 1 of 2 of the video clip “Imagining the Tenth Dimension”
Watch Part 2 of 2 of the video clip “Imagining the Tenth Dimension”

read the interview
part 1 – on the book itself and the animation
part 2 – what the bleep style thinking & the bicameral mind
part 3 – ghosts & science fiction
part 4 – drugs and the ten dimensions
part 5 – ten dimensions and a lot of dreams

go exploring
Imagining the 10th Dimension – main page
Tenth Dimension forum – Rob is often here chatting with visitors
Rob’s Blog – Lots of additional writing here by Rob on a variety of subjects

buy the book

Click anywhere on the image below to start this clip.

Click here for Part Two of this clip.

Click here for interview index page.