Dreaming Wide Awake: Lucid Dreaming, Shamanic Healing, and Psychedelics

by David Jay Brown

A detailed guide to mastering lucid dreaming for physical and emotional healing, enhanced creativity, and spiritual awakening

• Offers methods to improve lucid dreaming abilities and techniques for developing superpowers in the dream realm

• Explains how to enhance dreaming with supplements, herbs, and psychedelics

• Explores the ability of lucid dreamers to communicate with the waking realm and the potential for shared lucid dreaming and access to our unconscious minds

In a lucid dream, you “awaken” within your dream and realize you are dreaming. With this extraordinary sense of awakening comes a clear perception of the continuity of self between waking and sleeping and the ability to significantly influence what happens within the dream, giving you the opportunity to genuinely experience anything without physical or social consequences. In this way, lucid dreaming offers therapeutic opportunities for fantasy fulfillment, fear confrontation, and releasing the trauma of past experiences. With development and practice, lucid dreaming can provide a powerful path to greater awareness, heightened creativity, spiritual awakening, and communication with the vast interconnected web of cosmic consciousness.

In this detailed guide to mastering the practice of lucid dreaming, David Jay Brown draws from his more than 20 years’ experience using these techniques and his interactions with dozens of experts on consciousness, physics, dreaming, and entheogens, such as Stanley Krippner, Rupert Sheldrake, Stephen LaBerge, Robert Waggoner, Dean Radin, Terence McKenna, and many others. He explores the intimate relationship between lucid dreaming, shamanic journeying, visionary plants, and psychedelic drugs and how they are used for healing and spiritual development. Offering methods for improving both lucid dreaming and shamanic journeying abilities, he explains how to enhance dreaming with oneirogens, supplements, herbs, and psychedelics and offers techniques for developing superpowers in the dream realm.

Summarizing the scientific research on lucid dreaming, Brown explores the ability of lucid dreamers to communicate with people in the waking realm and the potential for dream telepathy, shared lucid dreaming, and access to the vast unconscious regions of our minds, opening up a path that takes us beyond dreaming and waking to dreaming wide awake.

Genres: Spirituality, Nonfiction, Psychology, Science, Self Help

416 pages, Paperback

Published August 27, 2016

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book with some caveats.
It's ambitious and covers a great deal of territory, incorporating lots of research and also paying tribute to other leaders in this field like Terrance mckenna and Timothy Leary plus many dream researchers, psychologists and theorists. He also experiments extensively on himself, and provides (perhaps too much) documentation of his many years of work studying dreams and psychedelics. He also includes too many accounts of lucid dreams and psychic experiments from anonymous sources via online message boards.
Overall I liked it.

[Pam Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book and interesting read about lucid dreaming for creativity, spiritual awakening and emotional/physical healing, together with techniques on how to enhance the trance state using herbs and psychedelics.

[John Rawlings · Rating 3 out of 5]

First this is a much needed book. I gave it just 3 stars because 3/4s of the book is a rehash of studies I was mostly already familiar with and talks perhaps too much at length about psychedelic experiences rather than lucid dreaming of which holds much more interest for this subjective character. The tenth chapter Conscious Dreaming as a Path to Spiritual Awakening was best for me. It was the real purpose for buying then reading this volume and in and of itself alone worth the price of the book.

[Anthony O'Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

pretty solid

Goes through all the standard material and doesn’t delve into fantasy too often.
Good coverage overall. A very extensive coverage of psychoactive drugs and their applicability. Many widely available, some illegal - of course.
Maps out the connections with shamanism and psychedelic experiences and includes some interesting details on the Tibetan Bon tradition.
Does go into connections with psychic experiences but with a reasonable degree of scepticism and open mindedness.
Inevitably parrots some of the early silly and now completely discredited interpretations of quantum physics. Quantum physics does not suggest or say in any way that minds create reality. This is just flat out wrong. The sooner this meme gets flushed out of pop culture the better.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots to unpack in this book on lucid dreaming. It's a good start to the subject as well as using psychedelics to help with lucid dreaming. I also enjoyed the discussions on quantum physics and what is reality.

[Ciara]

Juice Wrld is dead!!

[Gregor Smith]

Been reading this since I was about 18. It's followed me around for years, glad to say i've finished it.

Dreams are wild.