Celia Green

I was looking forward to reading this book because all the authors of lucid dream books kept referring to it, and I thought it must be good. But I was slightly disappointed with it, especially when the authors at one point questioned the validity of OBEs. They state: “ … the OBE subject may believe that he is observing the world of normal life, and fail to draw the conclusion that, however closely it resembles normal life, it is actually a hallucinatory representation of it.”

To the contrary, in Robert Monroe’s classic work “Journeys out of the body”, we are presented with numerous examples of OBEs in which the validity of the subject’s experience is confirmed (not to say that all OBEs are veracious accounts of our physical reality, since Monroe describes at least two non-physical planes he frequently visited.)

Again, as regards OBEs, it is stated that a person will only have one or two of these in a lifetime and will generally not be able to repeat them. This does not concur with information I have gathered from other books on the subject, in fact several books provide explicit techniques by which to obtain OBEs, e.g. “Astral Dynamics” by Robert Bruce and books by Robert Peterson. (Funny how many of the authors on this subject have the first name “Robert”!)

But the main content of the book deals of course not with OBEs but lucid dreams and dreaming. There are chapters relating to the comparison of lucid and non-lucid dreams, the pre-lucid state, lucid dreams and other hallucinatory experiences (the authors are excessively fond of the words “hallucination” and “hallucinatory”), false awakenings and out-of-the-body-experiences, paralysis in hallucinatory states, control of lucid dreams, etc.

The authors are very articulate, the book being written in a logical, mostly easily understood style, though clearly penned by academic persons. Unfortunately, they tend to use quite a few words I had never encountered before in such books, or anywhere for that matter, some of which they did not define, which did not make for easy comprehension. For instance, they have a penchant for use of the word “ecsomatic”, which I finally discovered was their pet word for “out-of-the-body”. Another such word was “metachoric”, which I understood was a neologism coined by the authors themselves, and which “designates experiences … in which the normal perceptual environment is entirely replaced by a hallucinatory one ..”.

I did find several chapters in the book quite interesting, particularly those containing reports of lucid dreams. There are many references to the renowned lucid dream expert, Oliver Fox, and several lucid dream accounts by the German psychologist Dr. Moers-Messmer.

Sleep paralysis is discussed but I can’t remember any explanation being given for this, such as can be found in Robert Bruce’s afore-mentioned book.

There is however a useful chapter indicating how to induce lucid dreams, e.g. getting into the habit when awake of asking “Am I dreaming?” If you do this, you will be more likely to ask the same question when actually dreaming, thus helping you achieve lucidity.

To conclude, I find this clearly written, exceedingly academic book to be of value, though I definitely did not find cause to agree with all the authors’ views.

I would thus recommend this book as an intellectual introduction to the world of lucid dreaming, though I’m sure that there must be other books out there that are more elucidating.… (mere)