Step 13: The Breakfast Club and Synergy

"Strangers passing in the street by chance two separate glances meet and I am you and what I see is me and do I take you by the hand and lead you through the land and help me understand the best I can" -Pink Floyd

Wish You Were Here

I saw a random fact on some packaging once that said "Pet-owners live five years longer than people who do not own pets." And then I thought, how is this possible? Why is this subject not taught at schools and universities? What would the classes be called? What I do know is that pets can generate comfort, warmth, understanding, and most importantly, love. The subject of Love has enthralled poets for all of history. Love rejuvenates and replenishes and is not restricted to one species. It's also a requirement for every script in Hollywood. I don't like generic love stories, but I do like movies where hard-boiled characters slowly let their soft spots mellow up through their surface. Anyone who loves movies with characters with soft spots, I also love.


The Breakfast Club is a love story, but it is also far more than that. It begins with five high schoolers in Saturday detention: The Criminal, The Princess, The Basketcase, The Athlete, and The Brain. Each one of them has personal issues and problems with their parents, but their High School is the archetypal school with students divided into cliques, which typifies everyone and restricts social interaction across groups. What makes this movie so incredible are the ways these characters open up to each other, some, like The Basketcase (Allyson Sheedy) literally opening her purse and spilling the contents across the table. By the end of the movie, everyone has realized that they are not so different as their cliques led them to believe. As the last narrated line of the movie explains, they become an entirely new group: The Breakfast Club.


According to the dictionary, Synergy is defined as "The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual." Synergy is the result of the movie but also the process of the co-evolving characters who undergo the stages of connection on personal levels. Once they open up to each other become friends, their relationship becomes symbiotic, or mutually beneficial to each other. One notoriously symbiotic relationship is fungus and mycorrhizal fungi, where 70% of all plant roots in the world have been beneficially bonded with fungal roots called mycorrhizal to aid growth. According to Phillip McIntosh,

"With the exception of the Brassicaceae (the mustards), virtually all plant families participate in a symbiotic relationship with root-colonizing fungi. Many experiments have proven that mycorrhizal plants---especially trees---thrive, while those without mycorrhizae don't do well. The benefits of mycorrhizae include improved soil structure, beneficial effect on other soil microbes, greater water transport from soil to plant, greater nutrient transport from soil to plant, enhanced mobilization of minerals and better competitiveness against weed-plant species."
Corresponding with nature's symbiotic relationships is the human and pet bond:
According to The American Association of Human-Animal Bond Veterinarians (AAH-ABV), the bond that people have with their pets in part as, "The human-animal bond is a mutually beneficial and dynamic relationship between people and other animals."

In the Breakfast Club, each character lends a new perspective to the missing pieces of each others' views. Even the most unlikely function of the group, the so-called Basketcase, is able to produce realization for the other characters when she tells the Athlete: "You Have Problems." He replies, "Oh, I have problems?" She responds, "You do everything that people tell you to do, and that is a problem." 

  To add a cultural viewpoint to the synergy of a group, Erich Neumann, author of "The Origins and History of Consciousness," writes:

"The group is a living unit in which all members are connected with one another. Moreover, it is the nature of the group to have a permanent character which is guaranteed by the unconscious ties between the members. Every genuine group is a permanent group ... Even temporary groups such as school classes, regiments, etc., show a tendency to manufacture a history for themselves so as to become a genuine group. The group in which the individual is contained represents a natural whole whose parts are integrated."

What force assembles the five characters from individuals to integrate? The answer is, each other. However, as a catalyst to their boundary-crossing interaction, The Criminal  (Judd Nelson) is quick to point out the faults of the other characters - beginning with the least targeted of their cliques, The Princess (Molly Ringwald). 

John Bender (The Criminal): Hey, Cherry. Do you belong to the physics club? 

Claire Standish (The Princess): That's an academic club.

John: So?
Claire: So academic clubs aren't the same as other kinds of clubs.
John: Ah... but to dorks like him, they are. What do you guys do in your club?
Brian Johnson (The Brain): Well, in physics we... we talk about physics, properties of physics.
John: So it's sorta social, demented and sad, but social. Right? 

Behind his multi-layered wisecracks, The Criminal character becomes the fountain for the group's collective unconscious. Erich Neumann continues:

"The collective unconscious of the group manifests itself by taking possession of the individual, whose function it is, as an organ of the group, to convey the contents of the unconscious. In this way he becomes the mouthpiece of the transpersonal and conveys to the group the contents it needs."

Everything The Criminal points out to the other detention hall members is exactly what the other characters were thinking, but would never consider actually vocalizing. Through The Criminal's blunt and sometimes aggressive comments, the group begins to consider themselves in a new light. When the Principal, Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason) demands to know who removed the pressure from the door, it becomes the first indication of the group's cohesion when none of them decide to snitch. Defending themselves against authority, the group is given a common purpose and cleverly follows through. The next example of their group identity comes from communally smoking, an example of a collective ceremony.

As the characters reach each other's inner cores, where the turmoil is brewing, they finally see that their school identities have been a total sham. Each one of them has some sort of disconnected relationship with their parents that continues to leave them with the feeling of inadequacy and heightens the need for social acceptance. In modern times, these feelings continue to pervade the cultural climate. We can each find a description of the characters from our own experience, but it is important to break away from these monickers. Instead, we must see the world in its richness and complexity, and end the need to typify or organize our identities. This is what director John Hughes illustrates through the beauty of the similarities of each character. Towards the end, The Athlete (Emilio Estevez) remarks that "We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that's all." The movie ends with the narration of Brian (Anthony Michael Hall), who the group has trusted to write their detention essays: "You see us as you want to see us - in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That's the way we saw each other at 7:00 this morning. We were brainwashed." 

To see synergy in action, find the nearest concert venue, protest, theatre production, or sports team - or you might just have to find a way to watch the old cartoon, Codename: Kids Next Door.

Step 12: Tarantino and Karma

"Revenge is never a straight line. It's a forest, And like a forest it's easy to lose your way... To get lost... To forget where you came in." -Hatori Hanzo

Reservoir Dogs

When a movie is so violent, gripping and powerful that it bludgeons senses, it normally wouldn't be considered a source of moral value. However, like the disconnected, non-linear plots of his films, Quentin Tarantino expects the audience to assemble the thematic frameworks themselves. Unlike the usual artistic representations of culture, Tarantino delivers his themes open-endedly. In a 1993 interview with Graham Fuller, Tarantino says:

"I'm not trying to preach any kind of morals or get any kind of message across, but for all the weirdness that happens in my movies, I think that they usually lead to a moral conclusion." In another interview in 2004, Tarantino said "I'm kind of making the same movie again and again and again." Whether or not this is the case, the same themes of vengeance, mercy, gut reactions to insults, betrayal, justice, the cyclical nature of violence, and excessive testosterone each interweave the plots of his films.
Another concept that permeates his films is Karma. Simply put, in gardening terms, Karma is "reaping what is sown." According to the book "Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy: How to Philosophize with a Pair of Pliers and a Blowtorch," philosophers Luke Cuddy and Michael Bruce write: “Karma does not deal with any notion of justice. It deals with what is, and what causes what. Simply stated, all the actions a person takes have consequences.” The reason that Tarantino piques my interest in this topic is that I too understood the full extent of Karma the hard way -- as I was being choked!


Pulp Fiction is the story of a hit man Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) who enters a 'transitional period' of his life from gunslinger to that of a 'shepherd.' His partner, Vincent Vega (John Travolta) does not join him on this path of righteousness, and is killed as a result at the hands of Prizefighter Butch (Bruce Willis), whose only concern is protecting his father's watch from the World War II given to him as a kid by Christopher Walken. When Butch saves the life of mob boss Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames), he remains one of the few survivors in the film. Tarantino's most recent film Inglourious Basterds can be considered a history-rewriting satire designed to give the Nazis a dose of their own medicine - namely cold-blooded violence. Because the audience knows that it's a fictional film, the movie gets its appeal from the overdue poetic justice delivered in the form of Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and his crew of dirty Basterds. However, for a film filled with examples of characters interlocked in a cause-effect environment, we turn to the two-volume series Kill Bill.  


At face value Kill Bill is a story of revenge.  After losing her child as a result, a woman whose name isn't revealed until Volume 2, Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman), suffers greatly as a result of the massacre of her wedding by her groom-to-be Bill. Standing between Beatrix and her revenge is Bill's assassination squad and the crime syndicate the Crazy-88's. Like previous Tarantino films, Kill Bill is out of order, but every sub-plot has an impact upon the other scenes, in an extremely interconnected causal-reaction web. Cuddy and Bruce write: “In the interconnected world, causes and results are linked and are therefore interdependent. Think of an ecosystem. Every part of the ecosystem plays a specific and interdependent role. If there is a change in one aspect of the system, then every other facet changes in causal response. The river is the home of the fish, crawdads, water spiders, and beavers. The river is cut into the bank of the surface of the earth. Plants and shrubs grow in the top soil and their roots grow down to drink from the river and water below. Deer and other animals consume the vegetation, fruit, and river water, and there is a whole life-dependent cycle of predator and prey which seeks a balance of sustainability. In other words, an ecosystem is a collection of interdependent causes and results, existing in an interconnected world.”
Of course, total understanding of cause-and-effect would make for a pretty uneventful action flick, and so the characters each have different limitations. Bruce and Cuddy continue: “Beatrix lives in the interconnected, interdependent world of Kill Bill where the law of causation (Karma) is in full effect. On one level she understands her interconnectedness with the world and her place in it. Unfortunately, she doesn't see the extent of the interconnectedness. Her understanding is limited. She sees Bill and the assassination squad as the course of her suffering, so she kills Bill and the assassination squad. What she doesn't see is that this is a band-aid and that more suffering will occur.”

Bill's assassination squad: Elle Driver, Vertnita Green, Budd, O-Ren Ishii

As an actual depiction of 'Reaping what is sown,' Cuddy and Bruce write: “To illustrate, imagine your mind is a plot of land or a garden which has been planted with positive or negative seeds. It is up to you to water the right seeds in order to convert anger, fear, and jealousy into compassion and right actions. When your roommate yells at you for eating the last microwave burrito, you know she is acting that way because she is suffering. You can relate to her suffering, and instantly, you are closer and have compassion for that person. If Beatrix adopted this empathetic perspective, then she would water those positive seeds and not seek revenge. ...To truly end suffering, Beatrix has to look inside and begin to eliminate that internal static. Her lack of a true understanding of interdependence does not allow her compassion to grow.”

The first Volume of Kill Bill is much like a Samurai epic, while the second Volume is similar to a Sergei Leone Western. In the first Kill Bill, Beatrix Kiddo slays Vernita Green in her kitchen, only to notice that Vernita's daughter Nikki was witness to the whole event. Beatrix acknowledges that while she is punishing others responsible for her misery, her actions will also be punished. She says to Nikki: "It was not my intention to do this in front of you. For that I'm sorry. But you can take my word for it, your mother had it comin'. When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I'll be waiting." She expects the retaliation of her anger to return in the form of an older, revenge-driven Nikki. Because Beatrix chooses violence to solve her problems with, her suffering will continue through the cycle of vengeance.

In the second Volume of Kill Bill, Budd is speaking to Bill outside of his trailer about the bloodbath of Beatrix's revenge. Budd says: "That woman deserves her revenge and we deserve to die." Then, pointing out the newest branch of cause-and-effect generated by violence, he curiously says: "Then again... so does she." In other words, one cannot cause suffering to another without there being suffering delivered in return in some way, shape or form. Understanding this single principle will deplete the urge to vindicate, avenge or punish others, while being compassionate will cycle a new, positive momentum. 

Recognizing that we live in a changing world, that nothing remains the same, and that anyone has the potential to become a 'shepherd' is a monumental step for a divided society, and that feelings of envy, anger, revenge are unnecessary because personal actions carry with them personal consequences. When re-watching any movie, take a moment to decide if the decisions each character takes is in accordance with Karma. As a result, do the characters break free, or continue to suffer? The goal is to spread self-generating compassion to everyone until positivity returns full-circle. Like Jules Winnfield, all it takes is one mind-blowing experience to discover the potential to change paths and find the one that resonates most with who you are. In the words of Don Juan: "For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel looking, looking, breathlessly."

Step 11: The Yoga of Eating

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." -Henry David Thoreau

De Antro Nympherum by William Blake, 1821

I often feel that we, as a species, have been thrust into a world suffering the abuse of relentless competition. While athletics are a healthy environment for such a situation, society and populations as a whole are not. The competition this refers to is one of success or failure - with only limited room for success in most cases. This is not an environment we should passively accept. Neighbors, classmates, acquaintances are all caught in the crossfires of mass judgment, apprehension, and insecurity. What the world needs today is an equal force on the people's behalf to counteract this competition - cooperation.
Absolving fragmented situations and obtaining cohesion begins at a personal level. Luckily, the book "The Yoga of Eating" does not enforce suggestions, but artfully asks the reader to fully align to his or her true self. I find the passages worthwhile, and the author is passionate to "Transcend dogmas and diets to nourish the natural self." Charles Eisenstein is a Yale Graduate who currently teaches at Penn State University. He describes everything essential to trusting one's own body, while laying waste to diet books that enforce the reader to keep a "standard" for his or herself. He writes: "The need for nurturance is a genuine human need. To combat an unmet need with willpower is both foolish and futile. Only when we heal the wound of separation and accept and love ourselves without judgment does the need for external nurturance gradually whither away." He defines this Yoga as a "practice that brings one into greater wholeness or unity. The Yoga of Eating develops greater sensitivity to the body. We stop seeing the body and its appetites as the enemy, but instead listen to the messages encoded in cravings, appetites, and tastes. As we develop trust in these messages, we discover subtler levels of sensitivity and greater unity of mind and body. The Yoga of Eating does not sacrifice pleasure; on the contrary it uncovers unimagined dimensions of it."


To explain the nuances of listening to the body, Eisenstein (who is also an instructor for breathing) employs the metaphor of breath. Breathing is the ultimate illustration of a cycle in life. The foundations for deep breathing is natural breath - or breath that has been to free of its constraints. Therefore, natural breathing cannot be learned, but it can be found by un-learning Eisenstein writes:
"Forget any preconceived ideas about what constitutes proper breathing. Do not try to breathe deeply, or slowly. Without trying to change it, observe where your breath is going in your body, how your body expand and contracts with each breath. When you become familiar with the feeling of your breath, then begin to notice ways in which you might be holding, constraining, or channeling it. Any kind of tension has a strong effect on breathing as well. When you have totally relaxed around your breathing, it feels like the breath is breathing your body, not your body breathing the breath."
In India, "Prana", which means "vital life" from the Sanskrit word "Pra" (to fill) is the type refers to life-sustaining Air, and Pranayama describes different techniques of breathing.

Prana Exhalation by Robert Venosa

Eisenstein continues that breathing "is a tool, because breath is a powerful link between mind and body; it is a bridge spanning various levels of one's being. Breath is much more fundamental than such things as thought as emotions. As such, breath is an excellent vehicle for accessing deeper levels of the self. Liberating your natural breath demands in the end that you liberate your natural self as well; natural breathing is a pathway to self-liberation." He then continues with detailing the exercises of The Knee-Down Twist, Maha Mudra Breathing, Sun Breaths, and The Tree. 

The book then advises to enjoy the eating process in its totality. As a concept, food embraces  the concept of totality: "Starting with milk from the mother's breast, food is a physical expression of connection to source.Food, an expression of Mother Nature's unconditional love and generosity, makes us feel nurtured and cared for. Food is the primitive reminder that the world is good, that the world will provide." Eisenstein asks the reader to notice the aroma, texture and temperature of food before tasting it. Rather than deriving pleasure in segments, he says that the flavor of food is a "multidimensional experience extending through time." If one bite has not been thoroughly chewed before another is taken, then the process becomes incomplete. However, there is no need to enforce any sort of bodily guidelines on chewing (which would convert the pleasure into a disciplined chore). Rather, it must be like breathing: "Exercises will foster deep breathing, but it is not forced; rather it is only a byproduct of patience and awareness in breathing, thorough chewing will happen naturally when you maximize your pleasure in breathing." This deeper eating experience means that simpler food will be needed, as it will become more pleasing to eat.

For eating toward satisfaction, Eisenstein recommends, near the end of a meal, to "pause for a moment with mouth empty and experience a deep, unhurried, complete breath. This automatically puts you into closer communication with your body. " The threshold of eating is this satisfaction, which may arise after the meal, or during. The book enters territories of self-love, fats, meats, sugars, and finally an application to our global conditions. He writes: "No genuine healing of society or the planet is possible without a concomitant transformation on the individual level. Even if the planetary environment were miraculously restored, in the absence of a transformation we would just go about ruining it again. You can't build a solid house on a rotten foundation. If a utopian socialist state were imposed without eliminating the roots of greed and competitiveness in each one of us, the old injustices would quickly reappear. In fact, one could argue that all such attempts have failed precisely because a social revolution cannot revolutionize the deepest reaches of the human heart: that the urge to power, to domination, to profit can only be cleansed from the inside out." This is both our symptom and our solution: the foundations to inner-love naturally give rise to the foundations of selfless love. There are no need for limitations when it comes to the self, just love-motivated motivations! Sometimes it takes a little stencil graffiti to show the way...

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

Step 9: Ways of the Luminary - Lanterns, Beacons, Lode-Stars

"If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values - 

that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control."

 -Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors." -Hunter S. Thompson

"All human beings are dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together." -Jack Kerouac

Telling stories has always saved the planet. Consider one of the most legendary stories of all time: When Martin Luther King, Jr. took the stage on the March on Washington, the world would never be the same. His opening words are a decree to the levels of power and magnitude his speech steadily conjures and ignites:

"I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice."

It is not long before his heart-clutching rhetoric reaches its heavenly-charged climax. It is at this point when he shifts from addressing grievances of oppression to igniting depth-charges of power in an attempt to destroy racial prejudice once and for all. King cries:

"I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream!"

Luminaries (derived from the Latin word for light "Lumen") are purveyors of stories, ideas, knowledge, words of wisdom, justice, light and peace. These are messages that requiring feeling and cognition. Martin Luther King shook America's very foundations by invoking the decrees of the Founding Fathers and enforcing it with a dream to signal our souls by, a testament to revolutionary ignition. His vision has yet to be completely realized because of the effort required to meet its magnitude. He awakened, solidified, and reinforced the call for freedom, becoming embedded in the cultural fabric of legends and lore. His dream of Moses-proportions transcends time to fuel the patriotic masses.

Ideas are not stationary; they are transported through observable expression. As the ideas (light) gather more and more adherents (lanterns) - the power of the idea increases. Founding father and revolutionary Samuel Adams said:

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds."

A bumper sticker on Willy Street in Madison reads: 

According to "A Dictionary of Symbols," the symbolic method of 'traveling' means "To move, by exercise of the imagination and awareness, away from one world and towards another." In one of his most famous lectures, ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna said: "And I think that we cannot understand the history that lies ahead of us unless we think in terms of a journey into the imagination." If day commands the waking hours, then night gives the dreamworld in which we frequently travel. When dreaming, the right brain and left brain work in harmony. Consciousness may be considered the 'waking' state, and according to Modern Mythologist Joseph Campbell, the unconsciousness "sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind - whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity. [When] dangerous messengers begin to appear in the brain, they are fiendishly fascinating, for they carry keys that open the whole realm of the desired and feared adventure of the discovery of the self."

Santana's Third Album

The symbol of the lake relates to personal depth, but the symbol of the ocean is the collective realm of story telling and mythic imagination.  "A Dictionary of Symbols" says: "The ocean is equated also with the collective unconscious."

In the movie Waking Life, the main character Wiley can not escape the cartoonish dreaming state, and begins to question his original ideas of "reality." He meets a dream-explorer named Guy Forsyth, who tells him:

"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."

His imaginative travels take him through various kinds of guides and philosophical checkpoints. One encounter is with a train-hopper who represents the active call to imagination. He asks Wiley: "Are you a dreamer?" He answers that he is. The train-hopper:

"I haven't seen too many around lately. Things have been tough lately for dreamers. They say dreaming is dead, no one does it anymore. It's not dead it's just that it's been forgotten, removed from our language. Nobody teaches it so nobody knows it exists. The dreamer is banished to obscurity. Well, I'm trying to change all that, and I hope you are too. By dreaming, every day. Dreaming with our hands and dreaming with our minds. Our planet is facing the greatest problems it's ever faced, ever. So whatever you do, don't be bored, this is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting."

Many schools of psychology, however, do include the teaching of dreams. One such psychologist of the Jungian school is Donald Lee Williams explains the preparation: "In both the dreaming and active imagination, the conscious personality actively participates in the unfolding of an unconscious process, either by introducing consciousness into an ongoing dream or by bringing up the unconscious while awake. In both methods, one is expected to act in a dream or fantasy as one would in any other time."

Traversing through the ambiguities, absurdities, and insanities of dreams requires a wide range of "Novelty," or the psychology term used to describe the discovery of things that are new. Creativity is also measured in terms of tolerance to Novelty, with more tolerance giving greater range of communication. Dreams are also rife with symbolism. Williams writes:

"The mediating through symbols has gone on since the beginning of history, ever since consciouness emerged from the unconscious. Jung calls it the process of individualization"

"A Dictionary of Symbols" explains the basic ideas: "Symbols in whatever form they may appear, are not usually isolated; they appear in clusters, giving rise to symbolic compositions which may be evolved in time (as in the case of the story-telling [Lanterns]), in space (works of art, emblems, graphic designs [Beacons]), or in both space and time (dreams, drama [Lode-Stars])."

Lanterns are the story-tellers of any generation. In the ancient Mediterranean, lyres were used by Bards to accompany hours-long recitals of epic poetry, written in a meter commonly called "Dactylic Hexameter." Rather than heartbeat-rendering rhythms of the Shakespeare-era Iambic Pentameter, this type of verse was conducive to the telling of epic tales with its intricate syllable patterns, often inconsistent. These bards were the primary story tellers of their time, giving them a significant role in culture. Bards shed light on human morality and virtues (myth), and spread the news of discoveries.

According to "Symbols and their Meaning," Lanterns are symbols of spirit, truth, and life itself. According to "A Dictionary of Symbols," "like all 'lights' that are independent of the Light – the lantern symbolizes individual life in the face of eternal truth."

During Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," Jimmy Page encounters such a lantern:

The movie The Song Remains The Same shows the wizard wave a multi-colored collage of swords, transforming Jimmy into a seasoned old lantern/prophet/guide himself. With an abundance of folk medleys (see Led Zeppelin III), the band has captured the subtle nature of telling tales and spinning yarns. Scribes, dancers, musicians, artists, and bohemian scallawags are also Lanterns, as Kerouac was. In his The Dharma Bums, a line of dialogue goes:

"But what did people think about you hitchhiking around with a bare shaved head?"

Kerouac: "They thought I was crazy, but everybody that gave me a ride I'd spin 'em the Dharmy, boy, and leave 'em enlightened."

Other bands that have captured the bard or "minstrel" spirit are Jethro Tull (Minstrel In The Gallery: He brewed a song of love and hatred- oblique suggestions-and he waited), The Grateful Dead (Ballad of Casey Jones), Simon And Garfunkel ("The words of the prophets/Are written on the subway walls/And tenement halls/And whispered in the Sounds of Silence"), The Doors (Roadhouse Blues), Bob Marley ("There's a Natural Mystic blowing through the air/if you listen carefully now you can hear"), Creedance Clearwater Revival (Fortunate Son), The Beatles (A Day in the Life) and any band that travels the expanse for the sake of music and uniting the masses. 

Another type of encounter Wiley faces is the elusive prophet (Beacon). On his way to a Kwik-E Mart, an old man brushes past him and delivers the following riddle:

"As the pattern gets more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough."

In dreams, these snippets of wisdom are delivered by Archetypes, or people whose characteristics or ideas are embedded in dreams. "A Dictionary of Symbols" eplains that archetypes are "all embracing parables: their meaning is only partially accessible; their deepest significance remains a secret which existed long before Man himself and which reaches out far beyond man."  According to psychologist Carl Jung, archetypes do not "Stem from various forms or from figures or objective beings, but from images within the human spirit, within the turbulent depths of the unconscious." 

Those who convert their life into a pursuit take the form of a beacon of light, accumulating greater and greater energy. The mythic quest of seeking some kind of glory - and becoming completely epic - has not been extinguished from the modern stage. All around us are the prophetic instructions and riddles of short-lived dreamers embedded into our culture. Alexander Supertramp, who hiked to Alaska where he succumbed to starvation, as captured in "Into the Wild" said "Nothing is more damaging to the advantageous spirit within a man than a secure future."

Rogue Journalist Hunter S. Thompson is one of the most interesting people who ever lived. His life was indeed a pursuit, albeit one of pandemonium: "All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name." He followed the instinctual call to exceed all limitations, a servant to forces of chaos: “The greatest mania of all is passion: and I am a natural slave to passion: the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase." His love of passion made Hunter S. Thompson into a sheer archetype. On his mythic quest to find the American Dream in the heart of Las Vegas, he tore through police conventions, hostage situations, lechery, and oblivion with the mantra "Buy the ticket, Take the ride" and "He who can make a beast of himself can escape the pain of being a man." His ventures were so unusually-charged that they could only be captured by the frantic, fraying sketches of the twisted Ralph Steadman:

While Hunter S. Thompson was a talented capturer of vivid experiences, he was also a flagrant outlaw, which is very ill-advised. Friedrich Nietzsche writes: "To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both -- a philosopher."

The book "The Mystic Lake Sioux: The Sociology of the Mdewakantonwan Santee" by Ruth Landes, describes the particular roles of the Shamans, or medicine healers, in Native American tribes:

"A Shaman became a village leader upon evidencing supernatural powers for organizing the village or villages, for chasing deer, buffalo, or enemy. A Shaman in a Santee community projected his gifts and views as large communal acts.

Shamanistic inclinations were lonely ones; the shaman sought and fulfilled his god alone. A man or woman, seldom a child, knew by intuition that he was a mouthpiece, servant, and protege of a supernatural, and then proceeded to encourage the acquaintance in sacred ways. Individuals linked to the same international might join in a public ceremony, as an aggregate of persons paralleling activities; the relationship among them held deep rivalry, however."

Beacons are the self-appointed sentinels of society. They are the scouts that venture out into the unknown, foraging for any glimpse of precious nectar. At the end of his Las Vegas fiasco, Thompson prophetically writes:

"And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

By breaking through the barriers he did, Hunter S. Thompson exemplifies what H. H. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar means with: “Many can cross with the help of One who has crossed.”

In dreams, beacons of hope are often accessible. Usually, the words require decoding to understand. Descriptions of bewildering visions cannot be dictated literally: art is needed. As the English Poet Blake wrote:

 "The roaring of the lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man"

Willy Wonka, as played by Gene Wilder in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," gives the following glimmer:

"Shnozberry?! Who ever heard of a Shnozberry?"

Wonka: "Shh. We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."

It's not long before the voyage of madness down the chocolate river breaks their sanity that they can enjoy the bewilderment of youth.  The following drawing is a dreamworld version of a beacon, a living room sketching by MIAD student Ben Grauer:

For those who cross the threshold on the Hero's journey, writes Joseph Campbell:

"The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world, a retreat from the desperations of the wasteland to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within... the infantile subconscious. It is the realm that we enter in sleep; for such golden seeds do not die. [...] That is why the approaches and entrances to temples are flanked and defended by colossal gargoyles: dragons, lions, devil-slayers, resentful dwarfs, winged bulls. These are the threshold guardians to ward away all incapable of encountering the higher silences within."

To withstand the Blake-esque Madness of such situations, Terrence McKenna gives the guidelines that "Reality is not stranger than you suppose, it is stranger than you can suppose." Hence, a balance of delicate tolerance to Novelty is needed. Slater Brown in The Heydey of Spiritualism writes “It is rarely true that the firmly sane, the resolutely normal, make outstanding seers, poets or prophets. It is indeed probable that a slight rift in the mind, a narrow crack, is needed for divine truth to shine through. Or, as Socrates remarked, ‘Madness is a special gift from heaven and the source of the chieftest blessings among men.'"

Mark Twain remarked that "When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained." 

Finally, Lode-Stars are the Moses-like figures planting ideals through history. They are the brightest: “Transient” (Literally "Going Across") means “Not lasting, transitory; existing briefly.” Transients are those overzealous characters living life close to the edge and arousing the spirit of adventure in every person they come across. Before being destroyed by the robots he created, Dr. Tyrell in "BladeRunner" exclaims: “The candle that burns half as long burns twice as bright!"  Jack Kerouac was in constant search of other transients when hitch-hiking through America: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

Luminaries like Martin Luther King, Jr. can easily become Lode-Stars. To further his epic dream, he foresaw his early (transient) death by saying: "I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!"

 According to "Symbols and their Meaning," "Stars were a particular symbol of guards and guardianship." A Dictionary of Symbols explains: "As a light shining in the darkness, the star is a symbol of the spirit. As far back as in the days of Egyptian hieroglyphics it signified 'rising upwards toward the point of origin' and formed part of such words as 'to bring up,' to educate,' and 'to teach.'"

Lode-stars are also known as pole stars, like the North Star. "The pole star was the symbolic axis of the wheeling firmament. It was of enormous importance in navigation, and many traditions revered it as the zenith of a supernatural pole or pillar linking the terrestrial and celestial spheres." 

Jim Morrison left especially wielded great power of wild adventure and freedom. In Soft Parade, he says:

"There's only four ways to get unraveled
One is to sleep and the other is travel

One is a bandit up in the hills 

One is to love your neighbor till 
His wife gets home"

Dreamers and minstrels are not organized units like Fight Club, they're birds of a feather. Let the words of Hunter S. Thompson be heeded: "Freedom is something that dies unless it's used." 

Inside gatefold of the Doors' "Soft Parade"