Dreaming Wide Awake

Ouspensky, “The backward development of dreams means that when we awake[n], we awake[n] at the beginning of the dream and remember it as starting from this moment, that is, in the normal succession of events.”

How could this possibly have happened? Did the whole dream really happen in the flash of a second, and was the narrative actually created as Maury woke up?

At the moment that I was struck, the memory of the terrible machine, the effect of which was so reproduced by the rod of the bed’s canopy, had awakened in me all the images of that epoch of which the guillotine was the symbol.

This period of several hours of wakefulness during the night is often described as peaceful, calm, and meditative.

Russian mathematician and esotericist P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) stated that careful observations of his mental states led him to believe that people are always dreaming.4 According to Ouspensky, our waking consciousness overshadows the ever-present dreams going on in our brains, just as the sun outshines the stars in the sky during the day, but t

Both states of consciousness perceive the world, or our mental simulation of what we believe to be the world, as having less physical stability and greater responsiveness to our mental expectations and beliefs.

Western parents routinely say to their children in an attempt to get them to disregard their dreams as having any significance. This is an example of what Laughlin calls a “monophasic culture.”

Among the Mekeo people of Papua New Guinea, shamans supposedly heal other people by “traveling in their dreams to power places in search of their patient’s lost

these shamanic practitioners is lucid dreaming, which they equate with death and use as a technique for removing the influence of past traumas from the mind.