Chapter 1. Realer than Real
“Dreams are more real than reality itself.” - Gao Xingjian
One of the first incongruities I came across in my early years as a lucid dreamer is detailed in the following excerpt from my dream journal from September 1998. Originally, the experience was a source of fascination to me. I shared it with various friends as a “hey, isn’t that neat?” type of experience. It was the type of experience my brain labelled as “intriguing, but doesn’t need to be solved.” Like two moons in the night sky, it was merely a curiosity. Looking at it now, it was one of the clues hidden right in front of my eyes that I had to travel the world over in order to finally see.
“I am running across a field when I suddenly become lucid. I forget what I was running from or why. I remember David H. was with me at some point, but he’s gone now. I’m on top of a grassy hill. I look at the grass and am absolutely amazed. It’s so intricate. I can see each blade of grass. There’s dew on some of them. It looks so real, realer than real. I can’t believe it’s a dream. I look out and notice trees far in the distance. They’re probably a mile away, but I can see them clearly, like they’re right in front of me. Everything is so vivid. I can see the pine needles on the trees. I can almost feel them, like I could reach out and touch them. The colors and details are amazing. It’s a perfect moment and I try to take it all in, then I wake up.”
This was a high level lucid dream. Many lucid dreamers, even beginners, experience amazing levels of lucidity. When the full comprehension that the dream reality, the hyper-real sights, sounds, and textures, is being dreamed of right then and there by the dreamer, when that truth dawns on the dreamer’s consciousness, it is truly a mystical experience. Words cannot convey the wonder it is to know that you are dreaming the universe in which you are walking, at that very moment.
Like most lucid dreamers after their first high level lucid dream, the dream reality struck me as “realer than real.” In other words, the vividness of the dream was so great that “the real world” paled in comparison upon waking. Waking reality now seemed a counterfeit. I had experienced something more real than what my mind knew to be absolutely real. Trying to share the experience was unsatisfying. Most of my friends would say something like, “That’s cool…” not knowing how else to respond to my excited ramblings. And although I didn’t pursue the gift the dream had for me in that experience, it always stuck with me. How could the dream seem more real than the real world? Why wasn’t the real world that vivid?
And so, over 15 years ago, the first outlier, the first lucid dreaming key, appeared. Here was the first clue to begin to See. This was an experience that I now find to have been reported and shared by many lucid dreamers. Dreamers all over the world report that the high level lucidity of a dream can appear to be more real than this world. So with this clue, can we begin to rotate our upside down world and see things as they really are? In the following exercise, we do just that, bringing a secret from the dream world to the waking world, and start to open the doorway that leads us directly to the undreamt of realm.
Exercise 1: Realer than real
When we pick up an object in a high level lucid dream, we are amazed by it. The texture, the detail, the smell, the feel – we are absolutely amazed by how real it seems.
In the waking world, do the same but treat the world as a high level lucid dream. Pick up an object. Look at it closely. Be amazed by it. Be amazed by how real it seems. Be amazed that you’re dreaming all this right now. After you’ve thoroughly experienced and been amazed by one object, set it down and move on to another, staying in the state of amazement and wonder. Explore objects in the world like a high level lucid dream in this manner for at least 15 minutes.
When we accept things as real, something happens. Things become “knowns.” The magic and mystery is lost because “the real world” is not a thing of mystery. It has been solved and understood. As this mental understanding grows, a veil falls before our eyes. We stop seeing what is actually there and begin to see only our mental understanding of what is there. When we do this to objects, they lose their mystery. When we do this to people, well, that probably explains a lot…
My first teacher told me a story about a group of English school children… One misty morning, the classroom instructor looked out the window and noticed that all the kids were gathered together in a circle. The kids were all young, only five years of age, so the instructor felt it was his duty to go investigate and educate their young minds. As he approached, he found all the kids huddled over something, each one was quiet and amazed. “Oh, that’s a rose, it’s a flower with thorns,” the instructor said, and as he spoke, something odd happened. Something shifted inside the kids, a spell was broken. “Oh,” the kids said. They now knew what it was and scattered off. What had once been a thing of mystery and beauty, was now understood. The mystery was gone, and a veil fell across the children’s eyes. From that point on, the kids would no longer see the thing they saw that morning. They would see something known. They would see something called a rose.
In the dream, that mental understanding is gone. We no longer mentally grasp what we’re looking at because it’s all a dream. We are seeing things for the first time, which means we are seeing things as they actually are. When we wake up, we go back to our old way of viewing things. Our “dream eyes” are exchanged for our much duller “real world eyes”. The vividness of the dream world is gone, and we’re experiencing less of the present moment. The waking reality thus pales when compared to the heightened light of consciousness we have in the dream.
It’s not that the dream world is realer than this world, it’s that we’re actually looking at it from a more enlightened place. This world can be equally as vivid as a high level lucid dream, it can be equally as exciting and wondrous, we just have to train ourselves to see with the eyes we have in the dream. Seeing through these new eyes is a skill that develops. Like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it becomes, which also means the experience of this exercise will evolve the more you practice. A full 15-minute exploration of Exercise 1 will lead to an amazing state of consciousness, but it is an ever-changing thing. As soon as you think you’ve mastered it, the world becomes “known” again. So rather than mastering this way of looking at things, we want to see how far it will take us. For some of us, by using this skill we will begin to see for the very first time. And as our new sight develops, the world becomes more and more wondrous. This is our first step into the outliers.
