Learn more about Lucid Dreaming and Living Lucidly

Lucid dreaming offers you an ancient technique for spiritual awakening, development and insight, practiced by shamans and spiritual teachers for millenia. Scientifically validated since 1980, lucid dreaming allows you to enter a unique, hybrid state of consciousness, consciously aware within the depths of your dreaming mind.

Author, teacher and speaker Robert Waggoner, is past President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD).  A lucid dreamer since 1975, he has logged more than 1,000 lucid dreams. In his highly acclaimed book,  Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, Robert shares a lifetime of lucid dreaming discoveries and adventures. For the last ten years, he has been the co-editor of the online magazine, The Lucid Dream Exchange, the only ongoing publication devoted specifically to lucid dreaming.

"In this remarkable book, Robert Waggoner has brought lucid dreaming to a level that is simultaneously higher and deeper than any previous explorer has taken the topic. Both autobiographical and historical, theoretical and practical, psychodynamic and transpersonal, as well as adventurous and cautionary, Lucid Dreaming offers its readers instructions and insights that they will find nowhere else in the literature. They will learn how they can become awake and aware while asleep, and how this talent can change their lives." Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, San Francisco; coauthor of Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them.

Robert frequently speaks on lucid dreaming at national and international dream conferences, workshops and college classrooms, like Sonoma State University, Iowa State University, University of Washington and Evergreen State College.  Robert was recently interviewed by ABC News, as a lucid dream expert on the movie, Inception. Robert had a regular show on Iowa Public Radio, discussing dreams and lucid dreams.  For more information about Lucid Dreaming Presentations, Workshops, or a Course Lecture Series and other materials, please write RobWaggoner@aol.com with your request.

Excerpts from Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self:

(from Chapter 18, The Unified Self in a Connected Universe)

By attending to our dreams, we naturally attend to our inner life. Whether lucid or not, the nightly recognition of dreaming connects us to our inner psychological reality and subtly reminds us of the creativity, information, and life energy that lies deep within. Mindful of our dreams, we naturally assist in opening channels of communication between our waking self and own inner awareness.As we develop our nightly listening skills, we begin to hear more clearly the daytime whispers of intuitions and impulses. Those quiet moments, when new thoughts and insights arise, remind us of our ever-present inner connection with a greater awareness. In letting go of our concerns, we more easily access a sense of natural grace and knowing.

(from Chapter 12, Fishing for Information)

At a dream conference a few years ago, a friend commented that lucid dreaming shared a common feature with the introduction of the microscope. “How so?” I asked, never having imagined such a connection. He explained that although the microscopic world has always existed, few had a means to explore it properly until around 1668, when a Dutch businessman, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, learned to grind glass lenses more accurately. With that, van Leeuwenhoek increased the simple microscope’s magnification to more than 200x, which allowed him to observe the microscopic world of protozoa, bacteria, blood cells, nematodes, and so on. Even though van Leeuwenhoek had no university or scientific degree, his curiosity had driven him to perfect the tool that would allow deep investigation into the unknown, yet always present, microscopic world. Likewise, my friend continued, the dream realm has always existed, but until recently no one had a good tool to explore it deeply. With the scientific acceptance of lucid dreaming, science finally has a tool; lucid dreaming is a kind of psychological microscope to probe inwardly. Finally, the unknown world of dreaming can be explored, tested, and experimented with consciously to determine its true nature. Only lucid dreaming allows for experimenting with the dream in situ, in the place it happens as it is happening. But, my friend cautioned, just as in van Leeuwenhoek’s day, many people were shocked to hear of his discoveries and scarcely believed their eyes when they peered into his high-powered microscope. The dogma and belief system of the period held such sway that it took time for van Leeuwenhoek’s observations to be broadly accepted. Like van Leeuwenhoek’s high-powered microscope, lucid dreaming opens up a perplexing realm and shows it in a more accurate light. The nature of dream figures, the principles of influencing the dream environment, the various types of dream space, even the end of the dream and the emergence of a new dream can all be explored consciously. Already, lucid dreamers compare their personal notes, and most agree on basic principles and experiences regarding dream objects, settings and figures. Yet, many lucid dreamers still have not fully accepted the idea of using lucid dreaming to focus on non-apparent but potentially accessible concepts and conceptual information. By looking past appearances and posing questions to the dreaming, something unanticipated and unexpected happens; an inner awareness responds to the question. For millennia, artists, writers, and scientists have proclaimed that many of their most profound ideas and creations came to them suddenly, fully conceived, like a gift from the muse, or perhaps the unconscious. Have experienced lucid dreamers discovered a means to tap the level of unconscious information from which those concepts emerge?