Customer Reviews

Dreaming While Awake: Techniques for 24-Hour Lucid Dreaming

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Arnold Mindell, Ph.D. has written more than a dozen books, and is known throughout the world for his work with dreams, bodywork, consciousness, shamanism, and conflict resolution. He's the founder of the therapy known as Process Oriented Psychology and has established training centers in 22 countries. Dr. Mindell has appeared on TV and radio and at conferences worldwide. He draws on his extensive experience and knowledge in his latest book, Dreaming While Awake: Techniques for 24-Hour Lucid Dreaming.

In it, he explains that Dreaming (always with a capital letter) is "the energy behind everything; it is the life force of all living beings, the power of trees and plants, and the power of motors, business, and financial centers." While the dreaming we do at night has an important part in all this, Dreaming occurs 24 hours a day. Dr. Mindell says that "the Dreaming is always present, like an aura shimmering around the objects and events you call everyday life."

His goal is to help readers "learn to move through and behind the world of everyday life, exploring the world of healing, divination, and immortality." He begins by defining Dreaming and discussing it in terms of religion, philosophy, and science. He then explains how it enhances personal health (mental and physical), relationships, and work situations.

Dr. Mindell provides several simple exercises that individuals can use alone or with others to train themselves in becoming aware of the subtleties of Dreaming. He says that many people have an undefinable sense of something wrong or missing in their lives and says this is because they unwittingly are only seeing half their lives and half the world--they aren't accessing Dreaming.

Dreaming While Awake is not a dream interpretation book. Instead, it guides readers on a journey of recognition. A hidden world of information exists, with clues provided by the unconscious on a continual basis. Individuals interested in learning to understand and use their Dreaming will find the help they seek in Dreaming While Awake.

This book is something of a relief after the complex difficulties of Mindell's previous book Quantum Mind (which itself is well worth working through). I think that Mindell's sense of playfulness comes through this book perhaps more clearly than through any of the others and this helped me to entertain some of the theoretical ideas with my own sense of playfulness. I don't mean that this isn't a serious book - it is thought provoking and challenging with exercises which encourage the reader to explore the ideas through practice - but that it is essentially a creative one. All the basic ideas of Process Work are here in an accessible form.

What's the key idea in the book? That we marginalise 'the deepest unformulated experiences that create [our] actions in everyday life', that is, we ignore the subtle signals from the dreaming background to our reality, those 'vague feelings and intuitions that can barely be verbalized', and that this marginalization is at the heart of our problems. Dreaming While Awake offers a way to bring this dreaming background into awareness.

As an aficionado of books about shamanism, dreaming, and quantum (meta) physics, I have been a fan of Arnold Mindell since reading Dreambody several years ago. Two of his most recent books, Quantum Mind and this one, Dreaming While Awake, are absolutely benchmarks. Arnold connects lucid dreaming, aboriginal spirituality, Buddhism, Hinduism, process psychology, group work, body work, and a host of other intriguing elements in a clear and practical way. Eminently readable and enthusiastically recommended.

Dreaming While Awake is one of the best books I've yet read on the subject of recognizing one's fullest spiritual identity. Author Arnold Mindell explains how playing with nonconsensus and consensus reality can help one attain a sense of lucid living... of recognizing the "Big You." Mindell describes how the Big You creates the world and sees through the illusory nature of consensus reality, to rise above the petty (yet often infuriatingly stressful) situations we find ourselves in. When you are not lucid, the universe can seem inexplicable. When you are lucid, you understand that you can stay present in the cloudedness of your ordinary senses, sensing information around you with highly tuned intuition. In a state of Big You lucidity, even your opponents are understood to be another part of the Big You... and you can find your way to better outcomes than you have ever imagined.

I love the way Dreaming While Awake takes the reader on an odyssey of exploring the furthest reaches of consciousness, to discover how reality itself can be a magical symbol that flirts with our awareness. I also love the way Mindell includes real-life examples of how he has felt when he became aware of his own "Big You" and dealt with difficult situations from that elevated state of mind. Dreaming While Awake is a classic book on the subject of consciousness and reality that is destined to be read and re-read and cherished forever.

I have read some Arnold Mindell books before(like Dreambody) and I thought this would be a wonderful book... but I think it sounds a little like an over-simplification of everything: physics, taoism, aboriginal thought are all "put in the same bag". Everythings sounds a little banal too. I don't appreciate academic thought, but this book sounded like some New Age magazine. Why do I still give it 3 stars? Because I like his earlier work and if you make an effort you can still find some deep and useful concepts in the book.

First let me say that Mindell has something important to add to the field of dreaming and psychology. This guy is no hack.

Having said that, this book could stand a good editing. There are references and diagrams that add nothing to the text. And he frequently must bring in the Aborigine, Buddhist, and Psychoanalytic perspectives, even when they add nothing to the discussion. On one occasion, he reprints a diagram a scant page and a half after the first occurence, because he wants us to look at it again and it would be too hard for us to just turn back a page and look at the first presentation. (It's things like that which cause me to think he's just padding to make the book longer.)

The book is good. I just feel a little patronized by the redundant way he describes simple ideas, as if they were great and important concepts.

The book looks at dreaming as the mystical source of reality and its aim is to make the dreaming roots of reality accessible so that the conscious mind will not stand in the way of this experience. It is divided in three parts: (1) Not-working on yourself, which explores Aboriginal dreaming and connections with quantum physics, psychology and Buddhism (2) Lucid healing - the implications of these connections and experiences with new methods of lucid dreaming and body work (3) Lucid Living - the implications of the practice of 24-hour lucid dreaming. I enjoyed the author's discussions of physicist Richard Feynman's theory of the behaviour of elementary particles as a pattern for time displacement that can be found in dreams and in quantum physics. These general patterns connect the psychology of altered states with the behaviour of particles and his explanation provides much food for thought. There is a lot of new agey stuff but overall this book is a valuable contribution to the exploration of the dream world. I have not tried the exercises yet so cannot report on their efficacy, but found this book with its plentiful black & white illustrations a great read.

This book is quite inspiring and helpful to our every day life. I say that because it tells us and shows us how our hidden feelings affect our life. It provides readers techniques to help to sort out problems, in which most of the problems are caused by the hidden feelings we had but being neglected for a long time. In order to notice those hidden feelings, we need to be lucid all the time, not only during dream state but also during waking state. If we achieve that, life will be easier and much more beautiful than you never have expected.

Another excellent book by Mr. Mindell
I really liked the way he merges the essence of different spiritual traditions to create a unified dynamic way of experiencing life .
I find his 24 hour lucid dreaming technique very effective in finding and understanding oneself.
A very inspiring and enjoyable book highly recomended for those who like integrating teachings of different spiritual traditions into their own spiritual path.

The author guides the reader on how to listen to and become part of one's environment. Learn how to identify "Flirts" coming from the world around you, and within you. Examples and exercises are included throughout the book.

Some of the other reviewers complained about this book being over simplified, but I really wouldn't want this book any other way. If you want to make this subject more complicated you can go to your library (or amazon) and load up on the pile of books listed in the Bibliography.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in any form of psychology or spiritual practices.