Email Interview with "Dream Specialist" - Rebecca MacBride

By The Night Watchman

"PART ONE - DREAM PARTICIPATION"

Night Watchman: You have stated in your correspondence that you've been able to participate in your dreams and direct dream action. When dreaming like this, are you in a lucid state? I am able to recall, at times, to be able to control what I'm dreaming while being aware of outside surroundings, such as radio and tv background noise, people talking, etc. Is this similar to what you experience? Please describe it as best as you can.

Rebecca:  I hope I am interpreting the definition of lucid dreaming correctly. I believe that lucid dreaming generally involves maintaining an awareness or mental connection with your awake-time reality or environment while you are actually sleeping and experiencing a REM state.

I have experienced this at times when I am having what turns out to be a precognitive dream, which I have had intermittently since childhood. I have "watched" events/accidents happen and then learned later that they did actually occur while I was dreaming of them. Sometimes there is a time delay between the "dream" of the event and it actually happening - within 3-5 days.

When I say I am participating in my dreams, I mean I am consciously making an effort before I fall asleep to take my sleeping self to a particular experience or event. Sometimes I want to try to work out an issue; sometimes I want to re-experience a pleasant dream I've had before. Sometimes I want to move away from an unpleasant physical sensation I am having - such as the pain of an injury or feeling unwell. Sometimes I find myself in a recurring dream. I am aware within the dream that I have been there before. When this happens, I try to take my previous experience a step further, to hopefully deal with the situation better than I did the last time I dreamt it. If I am experiencing a dream and find I don't like how it is progressing, I can choose to take the dream in a different direction. Everything about the dream can be "fictional", not drawn from my "real" or "waking" experience, but I can still exert choice as to how the action progresses.

For example, I often dream of being in a school and everyone is going to their class, but I don't know where I am supposed to go, what grade I am in, what subject I will be studying. These dreams are always a source of great anxiety - especially wondering how much school I have missed and how I could get a good grade. The last time I found myself in this dream, I decided to go to the office and ask them for a copy of my timetable with all the subjects I was taking and room numbers, etc. When someone tried to tell me I was going to fail a course, I told them I was just visiting and wasn't there to be graded. I don't know why I didn't think of that much sooner! I felt like I had finally passed a big test when I woke up!

I learned to interact in my dreams at a very young age as a way of facing some big monsters. As I've become older, I began to see that my monsters were sometimes symbolic for issues I was avoiding in awake-time. At other times, I seemed to be reliving an event. This was particularly the case with recurring dreams that seemed to stem from a certain point in history. I started to consider that I might be reliving a moment from my own soul's history. This was fascinating to me - that I could possibly play a part in researching my own past lives.

When I began to really recall my dreams in detail, about the age of 4 or 5, I was encouraged by my mother to describe my dreams each morning during breakfast. I experienced a lot of monster dreams and was sometimes quite fearful to go to sleep. In an effort to help me deal with these monster nightmares, my mother gave me some advice. I recall very clearly my mother stroking my forehead one night and telling me to remember what had happened the night before in the monster dream. When I go to the part where the monster was chasing me, I took the advice my mother had given me before I went to bed. I stopped running. I turned around and roared at the monster the way it was roaring at me. It roared again and I then took out a dog leash and snapped it onto the monster and said, "Now you're not a monster anymore. You're a pet." My mother had said to me, "Maybe it is just a monster because no one has shown it any love. Maybe it is afraid it will never have a home. Maybe if you bring it home and tell it it can sleep under your bed at night, it will protect you from other scary dreams." My mom gave me the tools to turn my monster into an ally. When I told my monster it had my permission to live under my bed, it became very playful instead of menacing. That was the first time I was successful in directing the action of a dream from a plan formed before I had gone to sleep.

I can't say that every time I have confronted a problem in my dreams that I am immediately successful in resolving it. It's not a cake mix - follow these few steps to certain dream success. It took practice for me to have an inner dialogue in dreams. I try to prepare before closing my eyes by imagining what I would like to dream and then I begin slow breathing exercises. I try to imagine myself floating up, from my feet to my head. Before I reach my face, I have started to dream. I have read that it takes a certain amount of time to reach a REM state, but this must be different for each person because I have awakened from a very detailed dream that seemed to last for some time, and when I look at the clock, I have only been in bed not even 10 minutes.

I learned to recognize that when I found myself in a precarious situation in a dream, I could choose, while the dream was taking place, to continue and explore where the situation led me or to remove myself from the situation if it was too much for me to fact at that time. If I am not successful in revisiting a place or event or person in dream action, there is something more important for me to learn from whatever symbolism or action is taking place and I try to go with it instead of fighting it.

For example, I had a recurring dream of being in what seemed like a viking camp and the camp was raided. I was being chased by several men and I knew if I was caught I would be tortured and killed. I had this dream many times and always, at some point in the chase, I would stop running, fall to the ground and will myself to wake up. The level of fear was extreme and sometimes I was even crying when I woke up. Each time I contemplated the dream I knew I was not experiencing a realistic ending to what was happening. I felt torn away from the event.

The next time I found myself in that dream, I concentrated on allowing myself to keep going and see what would take place. I kept telling myself I was dreaming and whatever happened, it was like a movie of a life already lived and there would be no pain. I worked very hard to control my breathing. As I did this, in the dream, I ran to the edge of a cliff. When one of the men approached me and tried to tie my arms, I grabbed a leather strap he was wearing like a sash and threw my body backwards, taking us both off the cliff. I knew I would die either way and I did not want to give the men the satisfaction of catching me and I ended up having the satisfaction in the dream of taking one of them with me when I killed myself.

Now, that's an extreme example. But, I think, many people have dreams that carry an element of danger or fear (just as we might choose the horror movie over the comedy movie at the theater) and instead of deciding to turn and confront those dangers, we choose to run. Imagine if you really believed in your dream that you could turn and fight, or will yourself to fly above whatever thing is chasing you, or just see what happens. Imagine the risks you would take if you were not overwhelmed by fear. I believe there are lessons waiting for us in those dream experiences - perhaps even a deeper understanding of what is holding us back from dealing with certain situations or people in awake-time.

Before writing this response to you, I decided to check out a few websites devoted to lucid dreaming. One I thought was very detailed with very good instructions for how to approach dream direction and lucid dreaming was the following:

www.dreamviews.com

Perhaps you are already familiar with it. I thought their site was very interesting, very well organized and helpful on this topic. If you haven't visited, I hope you will have a look.

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