SPIRITUAL TRAVEL.ORG Travel in the Spiritual Worlds

WAKING UP IN A  DREAM Lucid Dreaming and Spiritual Travel

A common way of initiating spiritual travel is waking up in a dream. While this may be something that occasionally occurs to many people, it has a special value for the spiritual traveler. This is because the spiritual traveler has usually developed skill at directing inner experience through meditation or visualization exercises. He or she can therefore use the lucid dream (a dream where the dreamer wakes up and realizes he is dreaming) as point of departure for a journey into various realms of expanded freedom and awareness.

In general, a spiritual travel experience which begins by waking up in a dream has an advantage over other methods of leaving the body because it is usually a gentle method of entering into the inner world. The powerful forces that one sometimes encounters in direct transitions out of the body from a waking state are avoided. It is also comfortable because the traveler avoids the formless side of spiritual travel which can be a shock to those not experienced in these areas. The traveler usually finds the dream environment familiar and non-threatening.

However, there is also a disadvantage to this method. Dream environments are usually so much like physical environments that the traveler tends to assume he or she has the same limitations in the inner world that exist in the physical world. It takes discipline and effort to break out of the dream environment and find more interesting and rewarding places to explore. The Spiritual Navigation page gives some methods that can be used to break out of dream environments so that the lucid dreamer can begin spreading his or her wings and become a true spiritual traveler.

One thing one can do in lucid dreams is "reality testing". Here, the traveler tries to distinguish the experience in the lucid dream from normal sensory experience in the physical world. The difficulty of doing this presents a serious challenge to the common worldview of materialism which pervades our culture. We explore this further on the page titled The material nature of some non-material worlds.

Some additional examples of spiritual travel in dream environments can be found in the Psychic States section of this site.