"I Was Working in the Lab...Late One Night" ( Early Morning Lucid Dreaming )

Knock knock knock, I heard resonating from my front door. But wait, why is the guy who helps with the yardwork knocking? I had gotten up an hour earlier, helped my son get off to school, noticed the yardwork being done, and had gone back to sleep for an hour before hitting the pavement to work for the umpteenth time. So I rose and strode into the living room, finding the front door ajar, and after opening it further, I saw that a 1960's Volkswagen van was pulled up on the porch parallel to the door just inches away. That is when the most pleasant surprise hit me. I hadn't had one of these in months: I was conscious in an early-morning dream. I was lucid, as they say. The world outside the door was my oyster. I had experienced this type of dream many times before and had always enjoyed them thoroughly, but this time, I was determined to put it to good use.

Since I am constantly "working" during my waking hours on understanding the key concept of A Course in Miracles which plainly promotes that "Your sleeping and your waking dreams merely have different forms, and that is all." Additionally, "All your time is spent in dreaming."

"Level confusion" is what makes us forget we are lying safely in our beds when we become immersed in our nocturnal dreamworlds, after all it seems so REAL! The Course promotes the theory that our waking lives are also fictional, and the "level" above us here, or, the "bed that we are sleeping in," is actually a state outside of space and time, where everything is one and perfect, the Course calls it "heaven" where we actually dwell, one level up.

So here I am, stepping out my front door, around the front of that beige Volkswagen van, and out into the "world" which I am now the master of, as I know I am lying in bed, but I am on a cool mind-trip this morning. It is difficult to keep the lucidity going, one tends to fall back into the dream and lose the lucid character of it. But since I have been working so hard on my Course work, I will use this special dream as an experiment to prove to myself the possibility that "all my time is spent in dreaming."

One thing I consciously did was fly. I always do that in lucid dreams! But this time I paid very close attention to the feeling of the wind on my feet. I was leaning back, I had my flip-flops on, and I was just cruising down the road about three feet (one yard, that is) above the road. "Yes," I said to myself, "that is exactly how the wind feels against my skin in 'real life.'" I realized that my mind was completely capable of making this feeling exactly like it feels in the "waking" time, or the "waking dream."

My next concentrated experiment was when I found myself in an Ace Hardware store. I devised this plan.....I have found the Law of Attraction falling short in practice in real life, in other words, I desire to change the outside world, the screen, if you will, but it never quite gets "remodeled" the way I would like it, other people don't always cooperate. So I experimented....I will steal this alarm clock, and I will test this "dreamworld" and see if in a real lucid dream, there is no "opposition" to my wish, maybe I can just leave with the clock. Well lo and behold, very similar to the observed waking opposition to my goals and desires I just mentioned, when I took one step outside the door of the store, there was an Ace employee there in uniform, saying "Hey you can't just take that!" I was disappointed that the path had not been 100% clear, but, I realized upon waking and reflecting on this that this demonstrated that in the dream, I am NOT 100% certainly able to craft exactly down to the last person, place or thing exactly what I may THINK I desire, but there is, like in our Constitiution, checks and balances to complete freedom and control of every last little detailed thing.

This opportune dream I was able to experience helps me toward my goal of working with the process of ho'oponopono and The Power of Now and A Course in Miracles. Two helpful features of the Course are 1) the time taken for the coursework is optional, there is no required timeframe for completion, and 2) you do not have to BELIEVE the exercises, you just need to do them.

Lucid dreaming, according to Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now, "can be interesting and fascinating, but is not liberating." I agree with him on all three points, and would add that it can also be "educational."