I am glad so many ATS members are into dreaming. I transcribed my interview with Robert Waggoner who is the President for the International
Association for the Study of Dreams for their 55th June 2010 LDE Magazine publication. I think many of you will find it interesting.
Here is the Interview transcribed from the original source:
LDE 55 [PDF]
Lucid Dream Exchange Summer Edition Issue 55 June 2010
AN INTERVIEW WITH A LUCID DREAMER
BY ROBERT WAGGONER
RESPONSES © IAN WILSON
I first heard of Ian Wilson's lucid dreaming abilities twelve years ago, and felt truly impressed. A self-taught lucid dreaming explorer, Ian
Wilson, pushed, twisted and merged the boundaries of waking and dream realities. Read this interview and let your mind expand . . .
Ian, you have experienced numerous lucid dreams and OBEs. Which came first for you: the lucid dreams or the OBEs? How old were you?
The first wave of these experiences happened to me as a child, from the ages of two to five. I would experience many profound experiences during
sleep, like a fusion of lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences. As I grew, this conscious awareness during sleep faded, but re-awakened when I was
15 years old with amazing lucid dreams.
What do you recall of your first lucid dream's? What excited you about lucid dreaming?
My first lucid dream came about after reading an
Omni Magazine article by
Stephen LaBerge describing the reality of lucid dreams. This
article fuelled my curiosity and changed my life forever. I was thrilled at the possibility of being awake in my dreams and controlling them. To my
total satisfaction, the article proved true and I was suddenly awake in an unlimited world that appears as real as this one.
In this dream, I was working on a military base. I had to disarm a booby trap in a tank. The trap had some type of nerve gas and when I tampered with
it, it went off spraying me in the face with this deadly agent. I remember climbing out of the porthole on the top of the tank, I was gasping and fell
from the top onto the dry Earth. The nerve gas was killing me, and I started to spasm and gripped a handful of dirt. My hands clawed in the dirt and
started to quiver until I could no longer move my fingers.
When I died in this dream, I woke up into another dream. The transition between this one dream and the next dream assisted in the reasoning that
allowed me to become lucid. In the following dream, I was walking near
Okanagan Lake in
Penticton BC. There was a concession stand
(shaped like a peach) located in the park, which is the wrong location for such a building. There was no attendant at the peach stand so I decided to
help myself. I entered the stand and grabbed a bag of M&M
TM candies.
At that point a voice echoed in the dream and asked me,
“Isn't that stealing?”
I thought about it and reasoned that somehow this was a dream and by that accord, taking the M&M
TM's was in no way stealing. It was
interesting to have this profound voice just crack open the dream and ask me such a relative question. The way it triggered my reasoning seemed to
also link to the means by which I became suddenly aware that I was indeed dreaming. I remember answering back to the thought, telling it,
“This
is a dream, so I can' t be stealing.”
The voice replied,
“How do you know this is a dream?”
I thought about it. Certainly, I was somewhere in some experience and there was no questioning that a sense of reality was present. The bigger
question was, if this assumed reality was a dream, or something else?
Then I remembered the previous dream where I had died. I remembered the switch to the now current dream.
My ability to connect these dots assisted in my affirmation,
“This is a dream!”
This unknown voice in the dream then said,
“Prove it!”
How does one prove such a thing? Not really knowing how to prove it, I looked at what was right in front of me. There was a steel green lamp post
buried in concrete. I remember focusing on the lamp post and it started to rise. The concrete started to crack and break. When the lamp post
levitated, with a fairly large chunk of concrete attached to the base, I realized fully,
“I am dreaming!”
I used this telekinetic levitation of the lamppost as my proof, and the thought (voice) actually laughed,
“You are right; it is a
dream.”
There was this exhilaration that came with realizing I was dreaming. When I knew I was dreaming, I grabbed on to the lamp post and started to levitate
with it. No sooner did that happen, than I started to fly. For a first realization of lucid dreaming, it was a very incredible experience. The start
of many that would follow.
Can you describe any pivotal early lucid dreams that really blew your mind? What happened? What questions did those experiences create for
you?
I am sure each reader has had their own experiences with dreaming something and then days later, the dream actualizes and comes true. This prepared me
for the much bigger potential that was to follow -- lucid precognitive dreams.
When I was 17, I experienced my first lucid precognitive dream. The dream unfolds in a very fun but mundane way. Imagine lying in your bed, and you
start to fall asleep. The senses start to dim and the body relaxes. Suddenly you feel yourself rising upwards into this empty vast space, it almost
feels like a void, that you are the only one who is there. It feels that way until a voice asks,
“What would you like to experience?”
This is the start of my first lucid precognitive dream. The voice felt familiar and I remember this vast yet void like space with rivets of blue
energy flowing like a vast ocean, or perhaps nebula. I remember thinking to the voice,
“I want to experience people setting aside their
political, religious, and social beliefs to just enjoy each other’s company.”
The voice or being then replied,
“Very well,” and a two dimensional square window appeared before me. In this scene, I could see myself on
a beach in a setting that was familiar to me. I remember from that state projecting into the 2D square image that suddenly became a fully lucid
dream.
There are a lot of details here to cover, but what I will do is just pick out some key events that shaped the quality of such a lucid dream.
In the dream, I had my friends from high school with me. Also, there was this biker and his girlfriend who pulled up with a guitar. They began to
play a really great Pink Floyd song called, “Wish You Were Here,” that I remember singing along to. Another group appeared; they were some
traveling Christian group that was putting on plays for kids at schools. At one point in our discussions in the dream, they wanted to show me the play
and then performed their play.
You might think all of this is pretty mundane and commonplace for a dream, but what made it spectacular is that it did come true in the most exact,
perfect detail.
The lucid dream actualized into a physical event. When the dream came true down to the finest detail, I felt the same thoughts, the same emotions and
the same events unfolding as they did in the lucid dream. When the lucid dream time and space synchronized with the waking moments, it brought about
an aura of
Déjà vu unlike anything I had ever experienced. This merging of the duality of dreams and reality clearly demonstrated to
me that dreams and reality share a very intimate relationship with each other and are somehow interconnected. Moreover, waking reality itself may stem
from the process of dreaming.
This made me begin to question everything. I had to question who I was, what I was and what reality was.
About twelve years ago, you appeared on the internet with a very interesting website. On the website, you had photos and witness statements which
appeared to show that you had “marked” friends with a geometric symbol while lucid. Right? Tell me how this experiment got started.
This is something rarely seen in our dream literature. While lucid and using my intent, I changed a dream that had precognitive potential and involved
another person’s body. Later in waking reality, the dream
“materialized” or came true. Over the years, I have done this many times. I
will provide some details and a bit of theory and methodology should the reader wish to pursue this avenue of exploration.
My personal theory suggests that like the electromagnetic spectrum, dreams also exist within a spectrum composed of layers, which have their own
properties and purpose. Within the dreaming spectrum, there is a layer that I call the precognitive layer. In this specific band width of
dreaming, the dream creation then becomes the basic framework that we later experience here as waking reality.
So if a lucid dreamer could arrive at this layer of the dreaming spectrum, then he or she could perform an action that would later appear in waking
reality. When lucid during 1996-1998, I decided to test this idea through
“tagging dreams,” where I would lucidly make small marks such as
geometrical triangles, circles, squares, and even hearts, when I felt like I was in the precognitive layer. The tagging shape would be the
identifiable marker to then appear in waking reality.
You discovered after waking from these “tagging” lucid dreams, that when you re-enacted the dream scenario in waking reality, that the
mark would then appear on their skin, right? Then you often took a photo of the mark and had your friend write up his experience.
In the beginning, I had no idea that it was even possible, but my experiences with lucid precognitive dreams did allude to this as being quite
possible. All I needed to do was try.
In the dream, I remembered becoming lucid and recognized my current work place.