Step 10: Layers of Lucidity- Sunlit Realm, Twilight Realms, Ocean Floor

Texts from Last Night: "Let it be known thatyou sleepinmythoughts amonst a typeof lucidity that can onlybe foundinthe canyton that makesour existence whatitneeds tobe."

Me: "Adam, what do you mean?!"

"Its possible and indeed happens. Ihada friend speaktome ina dream afewnitesago. Hetoldme thingsinever knew. WhenIwokeup, iwrote his idea and wisdoms down. Heis visitingfrom outoftown thisweek andwe mettogether. Itoldhimofthedreamihad. Wethen discussed whoseidea it really was. Mine, the dreamer, Or his, the messenger."

Roger Dean's Tales from Topographic Oceans

No conclusion to the above discussion has been reached between Adam and I. Like the deep ocean, the largely unexplored subconscious awaits full inspection. According to the book The Deep: Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss:

"The oceans offer 99% of the space on Earth where life can develop. And the deep sea, which has been immersed in total darkness since the dawn of time, occupies 85% of ocean space, forming the planet’s largest habitat. Yet these depths abound with mystery. The deep sea is mostly uncharted—only about 5 percent of the seafloor has been mapped with any reasonable degree of detail—and we know very little about the creatures that call it home. Current estimates about the number of species yet to be found vary between ten and thirty million. The deep sea no longer has anything to prove; it is without doubt Earth’s largest reservoir of life."

The movie Inception features such a voyage into the subconscious, and what makes Inception so mind-blowing is the symphonic timing of the action, much like the elegance of an epic-length opera. Each layer explored is a different dream within a dream, until the fourth layer becomes the subconscious. To escape the dream safely, "Kicks" (waking procedures) were timed with musical passages which dreaming characters listened to using headphones. And by the masterful skill of Christopher Nolan, the audience simultaneously enters new levels of time, like a dream, using the slowed-down "kick" music passages in the actual movie soundtrack. Lucid dreaming, from the Latin word "Lucidus" or "clear", is the awareness of dreaming. Wikipedia says "The term lucid dreaming was coined by Dutch author and psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden in his 1913 article "A Study of Dreams." However, the term lucid was used by van Eeden in its sense of 'having insight'."

With many people sharing a Lucid dream, and foraging to the timeless subconscious (deep ocean), you have the ingredients to a mind-blowing epic.

Recall from the post on Lanterns that Wiley is told in "Waking Life" that "The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything." To do this in Inception, the crew employs sedatives, dreaming-link devices, and totems to explore the uncharted mind, but the realistic way of entering deeper dreaming layers is a difficult but elegant process where one can eventually enter timeless realms in dreaming like the Inception 'subconscious level.'

According to The Book of Dream Symbols, descending into an abyss means "paying attention to the unconscious, because that is where the reason for the present difficulties resides.  Also a challenge to look deeper inside."

  According to the website, Deep Ocean Expeditions, which expedites deep sea submarines:

"To descend in a submersible to the deep-sea floor entails a journey through three distinct depth zones, distinct worlds stacked in layers. The familiar sunlit layer of the open ocean, where dolphins frolic, is only a few hundred feet thick. It soon gives way to the twilight realm, where dim twilight prevails. Although light is limited, predatory fish and squid with well-adapted eyes abound, and an elaborate game of cat-and-mouse ensues. This is where the legendary giant squid lurk. Many of these twilight zone animals swim towards the surface to feed each night, returning home just before dawn, collectively the largest mass migration on Earth.

Deeper still… Below the twilight zone lies the dark zone. Here darkness is total except for the ghostly glow of bioluminescence. More than 80 percent of deep-sea animals can glow, and this entrancing ability is found in almost all major animal groups, ranging from worms to sharks. Anglerfishes, for example use the glowing tips of their head-mounted ‘fishing rods’ to lure prey.

These glowing fish correspond to our subconscious Lanterns, friends and archetypes.

Ancient Civilizations craved the surreal effects of dreams: According to BeeLine Hempwick, 

"Studies have shown that burning beeswax stimulates the pituitary gland, increasing intuition, creativity and heighten dream activity. It has been found in Pharaoh’s tombs, Viking ships and Roman ruins. Interestingly, the spectrum of light from burning beeswax is identical to that of the sun."

In the spirit of Inception, taking this mythic inner quest requires glorious music. This is the shield and conveyor between realms: according to Donald Lee Williams, "In dreams we frequently see the ego and the durability of one's conscious world threatened by tidal waves and floods." So, find something fleeting, sweeping and fluidly coaxing, waxing and waning, churning and thunderous, then back to soft and mesmerizing (try this 16-second clip of Richard Wagner's mythic opera Die Walküre). Because lucid dreaming involves an awareness that commands dreaming reality, it is a scientifically-proven way of overriding nightmares. Thinking with a flowing, changing symphony provides the transitional mind-set for in-between dreams and environments, as well as segues between deeper layers and voids. 

Our dreaming instructor is none other than don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian and shaman born in 1891. He lived Central and southern Mexico from 1900 until 1940, then met his most interesting apprentice in 1960: Carlos Casteneda, a student of anthropology at UCLA. His works span the course of his apprenticeship and beyond, with teachings and advice full of directions, suggestions and riddles. The books have been claimed as a work of fiction by many anthropologists, and that is a reasonable claim when the books are examined at face value: there are abundant oddities, and yet there is a certain necessity of the way the stories are told: vague in some details, but overly-descriptive with his own reactions. They are crafted to allow the disbelief to mellow out until the major teachings emerge with a very complete basis of Yaqui spiritualism. This is a picture overview of his book collection.

Don Juan's Words may be considered literally or metaphorically. In the third book, Journey to Ixtlan, which I highly recommend beginning with, the way of dreaming is explained.

The Sunlit Realm of Lucid Dreaming

"I am going to teach you the first step to power," don Juan said, beginning his instruction in the art of dreaming. "I'm going to teach you how to set up dreaming."

"What does it mean to set up dreaming?"

"To set up dreaming means to have a precise and practical command over the general situation of a dream. For example, you may dream that you are in your classroom. To set up dreaming means that you don't let the dream slip into something else. In other words, you control the view of the classroom and don't let it go until you want to. ...In order to get used to it yourself, you must start by doing something very simple. Tonight, in your dreams, you must look at your hands."

Don Juan continued: "But when you actually dream, be as light as a feather. Dreaming has to be performed with integrity and seriousness, but in the midst of laughter and with the confidence of someone who doesn't have a worry in the world. Only under these conditions can our dreams actually be turned into dreaming."

Next, Carlos Castaneda explains that he tried months of attempting to look at his hands but was unsuccessful. While Inception features four layers of dreams-with-dreams, the Yaqui Shaman uses seven "gates of dreaming." Don Juan explains:

"The first gate is a threshold we must cross by becoming aware of a particular sensation before deep sleep," he said. "A sensation which is like a pleasant heaviness that doesn't let us open our eyes. We reach that gate the instant we become aware that we're falling asleep. ...There are no steps to follow. One just intends to become aware of falling asleep. ...Don't try to force yourself to be aware of falling asleep. To intend is to wish without wishing, to do without doing. ...It requires imagination, discipline, and purpose. In this case, to intend means that you get an unquestionable bodily knowledge that you are a dreamer. You feel you are a dreamer with all the cells of your body."

To ensure success, psychologist Donald Lee Williams writes:

"Don Juan teaches that we must learn to blink when we experience the unconscious. The ability to blink is the ability to break the spell of the unconscious. It is the ability to carry with us into the other world the thread of who we are in everyday life. (It is interesting to note that shizophrenics do not blink with as high a frequency as others; they are inundated by the unconscious.)" This dreaming thread is similar to the symbolism of a Drawbridge in a dream: according to The Book of Dream Symbols, the Drawbridge is the "connection between consciousness and the unconscious, sometimes being open and sometimes not. If the dreamer has self-confidence, the fear of the abyss may be going away. Carl Jung saw the unconscious as different islands in the sea. For him, a bridge connected these islands and is therefore a symbol of working toward a strong consciousness."

Salvador Dali's The Broken Bridge and the Dream

Mythologist Joseph Campbell writes that "The dreamer is assisted across the water by the gift of a wooden box, which takes the place, in this dream, of the more usual skiff or bridge. This is a symbol of his or her own special talent or virtue, by which she has been ferried across the waters of the world." Glaciers and ice hold similar symbolism; A Dictionary of Symbols says: "Ice has been defined as the rigid dividing-line between consciousness and the unconscious (or between any other dynamic levels)." Linking the two inner zones with a 'bridge' or 'thread' will help the process of dreaming. Don Juan says that dreaming "is freedom to perceive worlds beyond the imagination."
The Twilight Realms of Lucid Dreaming
According to A Dictionary of Symbols, the "Twilight" symbol means "the dividing-line which at once joins and separates a pair of opposites." In other words, there are shades between consciousness and the unconscious. In Inception, this layer is the second and third dream-within-a-dream, where time exponentially slows down in the outside (waking) layer. 

Castaneda recounts his progress with Don Juan: "I went from [dreaming] scarp faces to mountain peaks until I had no more drive and could not focus my dreaming attention on anything. I felt myself losing control. Finally, there was no more scenery, just darkness.'

'You have reached the second gate of dreaming,' don Juan said. 'What you should do is cross it.' Don Juan said there are two ways of properly crossing the second gate of dreaming. One is to wake up into another dream, the alternative is to use the items of a dream to trigger another dream.'"
Keeping a record of dreams with a dream journal is a good way to progress through dreaming awareness. Researching dreams' interpretations through symbols using online dictionaries is a counterpart to this method. Carlos Castaneda writes:
"I had a very difficult time keeping the idea that I was dreaming a dream. What I was facing was a structure that looked like an enlarged picture of a beehive."
The internal voice, which don Juan called the "Dreaming Emissary," began speaking to Castaneda. "You are inside an inorganic being. Choose a tunnel and you can even live in it."
Castaneda's "The Art of Dreams" detail the intricate dreaming procedures.
The Ocean Floor of Lucid Dreaming
 After letting go, or the floating or sinking into dreamworld, leads one to the depths of the subconscious. Dreaming of entering caverns, and according to Williams, provides "an introverted and archetypal place of transformation." The void of caves or caverns is where freedom in total awareness can be found. The Pink Floyd epic called "Echoes" (23.5 minutes long) is a musical representation of deep-ocean exploring, with strange sounds and a middle section giving sensations of being in a cavernous vacuum, before resurfacing with scintillating grandeur.

 Gatefold Cover of Pink Floyd's "Meddle"

In the deepest depths of the subconscious ocean, there is comfort in the chaos. In playwriting, plays that capture the freedom in despairing situations are known as "theatre of the absurd," pioneered by Irish Playwright Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). In the book Beckett Remembering Beckett, Martin Esslin recounts that "Sam told me that he remembers being in his mother’s womb at a dinner party, where, under the table, he could remember the voices talking. And when I asked him once, ‘what motivates you to write?’ he said ‘The only obligation I feel is toward that poor enclosed embryo.” Consequently, his works provide liberation from the darkness through the stagnant pauses between words or phrases in nearly every line. Beckett's Inspiration was French playwright Jean Racine. In some of Beckett's lecture notes, he discusses Racine's character-transformation technique:

"Thus the play ends when the minds become depolarised, when it becomes a oneness of consciousness, an awareness. This is what the critics mean when they talk of the growth of lucidity is in Racine’s characters. A gradual invasion by one mental sphere of another."

Play director Jan Jonson knew this deeper aspect to Beckett's plays, and chose "Waiting for Godot" for the inmates at San Quentin Penitentiary. During the rehearsals, the prisoners (actors) were having incredible personal revelations when delivering the dialogue. One man exclaimed: "What Vladimir is saying, thinking, waiting for, laughing and crying about is almost identitcal to my life!" Jonson told these findings to Beckett, who became very intrigued by the matter. Before the performance of the prison's version of Waiting, the inmate cast decided to escape. According to Jonson:

"Soon I was sitting with Mr. Beckett again in Paris. He took one look at my face before asking me softly, “Whatever happened?”

‘Six hours before curtain-up  all of them except Pozzo escaped.’ For a moment Sam held his breath, then burst out laughing and said softly, “That’s the best thing that has ever happened to my play since I wrote it!”

Jonson said: "I love the silence in your work. I even love the silence in your face." We got up and then Sam kissed me on my forehead and said, “I saw that you have got to the heart of my play. Do me a favour; go back to these people, taking my Endgame with you.”

M.C. Escher's Liberation