Dream Wraiths

I dreamt I was walking along a city street. A large dog began barking at me and chasing me. I broke into a run, looking behind me every few strides. An elegant woman stepped out of a boutique just as I passed. When the dog reached her, she tipped it over with a folded umbrella. The dog fell over, but continued barking and making running motions. I stopped to observe the scene more closely.

The woman said, “Careful. This dog bites.”

The dog was seemingly oblivious to the fact that it had been tipped over. It continued to make running motions, barking and snapping its jaws. I knelt to examine the dog. It was some kind of robot.

I stood. The woman smiled at me as if to say, “Now do you see?”

I’m pretty sure she was a dream guide. I often receive cryptic lessons like this one.

The dreaming world is full of creatures like that dog: beings that are startled or aroused by something in the environment, but which then react according to some internal program. Once triggered, these beings do not react appropriately to the environment. It is the very definition of trigger that some previously learned reaction determines what follows a triggering event. There is little to be done with such creatures because they are running some internal program, like a robot.

Most of these creatures are humans. And this lesson was not about other humans.

Wraiths

Most people use the word wraith interchangeably with ghost, but it is a different word with a different meaning. A wraith is a likeness of a living person, not a dead one. It is said that anyone who sees his own wraith is not long for this world.

It has long occurred to me that our dreaming selves are very much wraiths. They look like us and they have our predilections, but they live in a supernatural world (dreams) and they potentially have supernatural powers. The primary difference is that they are much more emotional and reactive than we are. They are subject to being triggered, and in fact, they seem to do little else. Old traumas and unfinished relationships are their favourite past-times. They are not lucid. They are ghost-like after-images of our waking selves — delusional, self-absorbed, and wilful.

Lucidity

The fundamental problem of dreaming (and perhaps of awareness in general) is lucidity. I have written elsewhere about lucidity, so I needn’t redefine it here, but in brief, it is the ability to see the obvious. There is something or someone relevant to your situation and you can notice it.

Ironically, to be lucid means to be trapped in a bubble of lucidity. For example, we are not aware of microscopic events, nor are we aware of galactic events. The outcomes are real and they affect us, but we cannot follow their processes as they unfold. These are matters of scale. There is also the matter of context. For example, children are not aware of political norms. They see the actions and hear the words, but they are not aware of the context, and therefore, much of what goes on appears senseless to them.

Lucidity is therefore always limited by context and scale. Anything unbounded by context and scale could hardly be called awareness. To be aware of everything everywhere all the time would be overwhelming. It was be a massive incapacitating psychedelic trip of no consequence. To be lucid is to be aware of something, not everything. It is therefore the logic of awareness that leaves us trapped in a bubble of lucidity.

Much of the dreaming appears senseless at first glance, but behind the appearances is a context that brings order to what is observed. If you are willing to ignore appearances and put your attention on the theme of the current action, you are better able to see the context. I feel certain that it is the goal of our dreaming experiences to test and develop lucidity.