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                   Lucid dreaming is not something essentially different from waking consciousness, only we get to it from a position of being asleep.  When we start out from a position of being awake, we call it “everyday life”.  What do you suppose the horseless carriage is?   Or the radio, TV, airplane, space rocket, computer?  They are all wild, crazy dreams.  A hundred years ago that’s exactly what we would have considered them.  And that’s all they are – dreams.  Humankind just incorporated that dream material into waking consciousness.  That’s the sort of thing waking consciousness is good for:  to originate dream material of that sort.  That kind of business requires slow, patient development over generations; and the dream plane is too unstable and mutable to do that kind of stuff on.  The dream plane is too here and now.  Since dream consciousness is more timeless than waking consciousness, it doesn’t allow for the detachment that a sense of past (history) and future (planning) can give.   We need a greater sense of separatedness to be able to do things that slowly.  That’s why it is so difficult to do things like dial a phone number or read a sentence in a normal dream – these activities require a greater degree of separatedness than normal dreaming affords, to be able to bring that kind of minute detail into focus.           

                That’s the genius of waking consciousness:  we lose scope and agility, but in return we get focus and a methodical way of getting at things.  Waking consciousness is much more clearly focused and delimited than dreaming, even if we all become extremely myopic and uptight in the process. 

                  The practice of magic is about turning our everyday waking lives into lucid dreaming, cultivating a somewhat “altered state of mind” as our everyday mindset.    As we do this much of our sense of separatedness dissolves and we feel more inner peace and oneness with our world.  Spirits start talking to us, as they did to our hunter-gatherer ancestors.   Our everyday life becomes more like dreaming – i.e., more magical.  This is the road that each of us must travel as individuals; and which the human race as a whole will have to follow if it is to survive and prosper.  It is the road of entering into a state of lucid dreaming from a position which starts from being awake (instead of asleep, as usual).  This means understanding that waking consciousness is lucid dreaming; and the only reason we can’t see that is because we must keep up the pretense that what we’re doing is “real” and important.  Therefore we can’t see that it’s all just a dream. 

                At this writing there don’t seem to be too many lucid dreamers out there; but there are lots of people merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily dancing a jig on their descent into the coming nightmare.  It’s time now for everyone to wake up.   

(adapted from Thought Forms, Copyright © 2000 by Bob Makransky.  All rights reserved).

More of Bob Makransky’s articles are posted at:  www.dearbrutus.com  

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