Waking dreams in my case very often have the character of a “return.” There is a trip in the background, a clear sense of heading home, sometimes a sense of urgency—because something needs to be done when I arrive. “Return” or “trip” are also marked by the presence of trains, trolleys, buses, roads, and the like. Very often the surroundings are pleasant but, as I proceed, they become urban, industrial, slum-like, crowded, and ever-more depressing. A sense of being lost arises as well. The landscape keeps changing. Home is “over there”—but then the expected landmark isn’t where it ought to be. And quite often as the chaos increases, some kind of very unpleasant encounters also follow. In this morning’s waking dream, for example, I found myself confronted by people trying to collect a debt I did not remember owing. After long discussions it suddenly occurred to me that if I had borrowed money, I must have signed some documents. I began demanding the documents and—unless they were immediately produced—I threatened to hire lawyers. And with that energetic thought I found myself awake—angry but awake.
The Dutch psychiatrist, Frederick van Eeden (1860-1932), the man who coined the phrase “lucid dream,” also had such dreams; he recorded some 352 of them over a period of 14 years. Toward their end, as he reports, they often morphed into ordinary dreams. And in such situations he sometimes encountered demons. Van Eeden was not asserting the reality of demons per se. They might or might not be real. But he gave an interesting definition. “I call demoniacal those [dream] phenomena which produce on us the impression of being invented or arranged by intelligent beings of a very low moral order.” For more see this paper of his—in which he also describes how to deal with such creatures.
Old van Eeden came back into my memories this morning as I reflected on that unpleasant waking dream of mine. Such dreams get one’s attention. The episode with the would-be debt collectors, within the dream, took place after I’d finally finished my trip and I was “home,” home because Brigitte lived there, but at that moment she was “out.”
It occurred to me that those “returns” might actually be genuine—the return of the soul to the body after some excursion outside of it. That return is usually from a splendid place (a plane that some, like van Eeden, experience lucidly) to the realm of matter, the coarse, the cosmic slums, as it were, the turbidity of the pools. We must return but aren’t eager. And at that lowly level might be assemblies of those “left behind” after they died and still playing their wretched games.
It was Ibn el Arabi who wrote that in some ways the experience of dreams and of the higher realms have similarities—but dreams are an inferior and distorted perception of what lies beyond them. The lucid, perhaps? Here is how van Eeden describes the human state in lucid dreams:
In these lucid dreams the reintegration of the psychic functions is so complete that the sleeper remembers day-life and his own condition, reaches a state of perfect awareness, and is able to direct his attention, and to attempt different acts of free volition. [See earlier link]
Both the ordinary and the lucid dream-worlds are symbolic, according to van Eeden. He defines symbol as follows: “A symbol is an image, or an imaginary event, standing for a real object or event whereto it has some distant resemblance. Now the invention of a symbol can only be an act of thought—the work of some intelligence.” Thus it is one—or many—minds that create environments and situations in the disembodied states we sometimes “dream.” Hence the “demonic” phenomena in waking dreams may be the projection of intelligent beings of “a very low moral order.” My own dream diaries have lots of examples; in virtually every such case, what ultimately wakes me up is the distinct feeling that “this isn’t me.”
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